Originally shared by Ethan Siegel
"It is a pressing and timely question. As physics has matured, experimental test of new, more fundamental theories have become increasingly difficult. Many existing theories are so difficult to test that they are widely believed to be untestable in the foreseeable future. The methods from the past are not working any more. “We are in a different era of science,” says Nobel Laureate David Gross."
One of the most damning, albeit accurate, condemnations of String Theory that has been leveled at it is that it’s untestable, non-empirical, and offers no concrete predictions or methods of falsification. Yet some have attempted to address this failing not by coming up with concrete predictions or falsifiable tests, but by redefining what is meant by theory confirmation. Many physicists and philosophers have jumped into this debate, and a recently completed workshop has produced no agreements, but lots of interesting perspectives, opinions, and a few notable fights and quips.
Sabine Hossenfelder recounts her experience at the Munich workshop, only on Forbes!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2015/12/10/why-trust-a-theory-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-scientific-method/
Which is why I'm sticking with observational astronomy. :) Ain't no-one gonna question the observed facts unless they is a moron. Nice and simple.
ReplyDeleteWas Giordano Bruno not doing science when he claimed that the stars were in fact suns, despite having no conceivable way of measuring such a claim for hundreds of years?
ReplyDeleteChris Greene Probably not :
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2014/03/10/cosmos-pick-wrong-hero/#.VmvKUvkrKhc
However, that article states that the charges against Bruno are known, whereas a 2009 book states that the list didn't survive. It also says that Bruno wasn't even a brilliant mathematician, but a plagiarist :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2014/07/review-gods-philosophers.html
So, there is still some controversy over Bruno.
One could also ask if Kekulé was doing science when he dreamt about a snake and came up with the molecular structure of benzene :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#The_ouroboros_dream
I don't know. Interesting question though.
Oh, a closely related personal example comes to mind, which I must relate.
ReplyDeleteDuring my PhD, a friend of mine was working on a particularly tricky problem. Something involving galactic dust extinction, I think. Being prone to bouts of obsessiveness, he was working on this problem rather a lot. One night he had a dream in which we were both in a dingy Cardiff nightclub. Over the noise I was shouting to him the answers to the equations he'd been working on. When he woke up, he wrote them down and found that they worked. He cited this in his thesis as, "Rhys Taylor, private communication."
I guess my take would be that it's possible to do science by irrational means. Sheer blind luck is sometimes very important. But, Bruno was both using irrational methods and coming up with untestable conclusions. And that's definitely not science, because God knows how many other people at that time were doing the same thing. The fact that he got something right is somewhat incidental, because almost everyone else who does things in this way gets it wrong.
Which also reminds me of Wegener's Law :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2013/02/i-wanna-be-pseudoscientist.html