"I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses" - Michael Crichton
Consensus is not science. Computer Models are not science. Elegant equations are not science. Science is science. Science is testable, repeatable, falsifiable.
Science is not as simple as that. We have to use the experiments we can a actually perform, and those are usually less rigorous than we'd like. Disregarding anything that doesn't fulfill some arbitrary standard of rigor as non-science is foolish. We have to keep the limits of our experiments in mind, but that doesn't mean that anything shirt of a perfect experiment is useless.
Computer Models are also testable, repeatable and falsifiable. They are certainly science, you just have to always keep the limitations and goals of a specific model in mind and avoid over-interpretation.
Follow the link and you'll see Crichton is not talking about those sorts of models; from near the end:
To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world -- increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease....
I'd add that I read the TAPPS paper when it came out (back before I gave up on the AAAS) and followed the debate closely: one of the many reasons that paper was fatally flawed was that it used a one dimensional model of the atmosphere and planet, i.e. particles could go up and down, but there were no winds, no oceans, etc. People in the field said such models were notorious for being easily overbalanced by inappropriate inputs, which were of course another problem with the paper, one I could personally confirm (having been a nuclear war survivalist since 2nd grade in 1969).
When LLNL did 3D modelling, their results said, yeah, maybe a nuclear fall, but that's it. Which comports with the observed effects of volcanic eruptions, which we have a lot of data on. I.e. the bottom line in simplest terms is "earth big, humans small".
ADDED: just remembered that Feynman was there at the dawn of computerized scientific models, back when "computers" were the operators of calculators. Some of the necessary scientific inputs into creating the bomb could not be solved, only approximated, and they used a bunch of computers as they were called then and the current state of the art electro-mechanical calculator. He helped organize the operation so it would run well. This no doubt helps explain his much much later involvement in the development of the Connection Machine, and one can imagine his horror as cheaper and cheaper computing was abused. [Insert a Cargo Cult Science observation here.]
So virology is not science? The belief that HIV causes AIDS is based on consensus. (Not everybody agrees even today, but the scientific community has moved on.)
Protein folding is not science? Its modern study is based on computational simulations.
Not all sciences are like physics. It's strange that the author of Jurassic Park would speak up against consensus and models when they're so fundamental to paleontology, for instance. Should we not believe that dinosaurs existed because evidence of their existence is not a falsifiable theory?
You can't smear protein folding because of a modern method of study. Are you arguing that you think it's possible that proteins don't fold or that some specific example of a protein might be folded differently than certain simulation experiments postulate?
You can't smear the fossil record because people put feathers on different species all the time. Fossils exist and organisms existed which created them.
There is science in each area. testable, repeatable, falsifiable. In theoretical physics, the argument is far more salient. There is a wack wing doing something that's not science (per the 3 tests definition) and that wing is trying to argue that the 3 tests shouldn't apply so they can continue to get funding.
Most physics in and/or past high school will gladly tell you that the Bohr model for atoms is a klunky model that gets the uninitiated into grasping a modestly functional model.
Stringnuts seem to be raising their klunky model up and trying to say it gets to be a theory in a way which makes science and scientists (3 tests style) seem no better than charlatans and preachers. Part of me thinks this is because most of what seemed should be evident from ST is not panning out and they know that they are too far down a path. If ST gets funding cuts, their CVs atomize and blow away with the wind. They get to teach basic physics for kids meeting core requirements and polish mirrors in someone else's lab.
When they are getting to close to the corner they backed themselves into, they try to argue that Bayesian analysis says it is highly unlikely that the corner exists.
The HIV consensus is because we're too wimpy to try Koch's postulates on condemned prisoners. And that's not an issue with science. Also because money and politics.
Protein folding research still produces testable results, last time I checked (granted, in 1990).
Dinosaurs are too cool to require applying this level of rigor to research into them ^_^.
It says something truly ugly about science as it's practiced today that the authors' call for requiring fallibility in this grand unified theory domain is motivated in part by pointing out that the reverse will call into question the grand unfalsifiable climate change consensus (or as I uncharitably add, gravy train, $4 billion a year for climate "science" as of the Climategate release; BTW, seems like they're lying about ocean acidification as well by ignoring 70+ years of inconvenient facts: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/23/touchy-feely-science-o... (the plus comes from mention that recordings, evidently not systematized NOAA ones, started in 1850).
ADDED: when I went back to the article I noticed they explicitly used the phrase "climate change", meaning they also have bought into (at least for the purposes of publishing an item in the world's #1 journal of science) the unfalsifiability of climate "science" as it's now practiced.
Rather than e.g. noting that the lack of required falsifiability in climate "science" could well be infecting physics, and for that matter, why stop there, as long as it's important (where, as I note, "important" starts with getting grants from the usual suspects).
Consensus is not science. Computer Models are not science. Elegant equations are not science. Science is science. Science is testable, repeatable, falsifiable.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122603134258207975