{X} "constitutes a falsification of" {Y} - (good) science?

[DrRocket]

... Even science itself is not immune-- witness the well-known quote by Hardy that "A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life." This dovetails with Warren Platts' confusion of science with ethics issues, but it is not the science that can be unethical, it is the choices of people empowered by science. ...

Science need not be immune to criticism any more than any other endeavor. But, and I am a mathematician by education, Hardy is not a particularly good source for objective criticism of science. While many mathematicians are not concerned with applications of mathematics, they are not particularly averse to them either. Hardy, on the other hand, reveled in inapplicability of mathematics, particularly his own mathematics. He was a first rate mathematician, but he was also basically a jerk. He probably had a greater leaning towards philosophy than most, and that propensity seemed to be used to bolster his pursuit of mathematics "only as a creative art" (quote from A Mathematicians Apology). His philosophical musings however, have not influenced the progress of research mathematics and do not appear to have directly contributed to his own research.


The evolution of this thread appears to me to be strikingly similar to other threads that I have seen that deal with Intelligent Design or the Electric Universe:

1. The thread starts on some relatively clear and narrow topic but quickly morphs into general disagreement between two camps.
2. The two camps that emerge that have virtually no common ground.
3. The discussion tends to become centered more on words than on concepts, though at least one party fails to recognize this. Posts become extremely long, parsing previous posts ad nauseum.
4. Zero meaningful communication occurs between the two camps.
5. The heart of the matter seems to be that mainstream science pays insufficient attention to a non-mainstream discipline. But no objective reason is presented for why such attention ought to be paid or what benefit to the progress of science might come of it.
6. The real issue appears to be recognition rather than a contribution to an increase in understanding of nature.
7. No conclusions are reached and no opinions are changed.

[Disinfo Agent]

"Your question is meaningless" is the reply of the intellectually lazy.

Of course that would be your position.

And, of course, that would be your reply -- to attack me instead of my arguments.

But what else should I expect from someone who thinks that logic is arbitrary?

[Neverfly]

And, of course, that would be your reply -- to attack me instead of my arguments.

But what else should I expect from someone who thinks that logic is arbitrary?

Disinfo Agent, this reply itself is an attack on a persons character.

"Your question is meaningless" is the reply of the intellectually lazy.

Truth told, you haven't much room to complain after saying that.

Why bother talking to people that don't listen anyway?
It can be better to drop the liner and let them look up why they are wrong for themselves. Either way is probably a waste of time.
You notice I don't usually bother with talking it all out unless I'm passionate about the subject enough to bother bouncing off a Wall.

So am I lazy too?

[Ken G]

And, of course, that would be your reply -- to attack me instead of my arguments.

If that is what you think is the basis of my argument, what have you been reading? I guess I've been wasting my time making actual logical arguments with examples and evidence, as you plan to simply arbitrarily label the whole affair. I won't bother in the future, you may be assured.

But what else should I expect from someone who thinks that logic is arbitrary?

I don't think you have any idea what the meaning of the word "arbitrary" is that makes that sentence true. For the meaning you are using, it is false, and I never said otherwise, simply because I am not a fool-- I use a more sophisticated meaning of the word "arbitrary", as I explained at great length in the other thread you refer to (and obviously ignored). But as I said, I have no intention of bothering to explain this again, as the evidence here says it would be futile.

[Disinfo Agent]

The evolution of this thread appears to me to be strikingly similar to other threads that I have seen that deal with Intelligent Design or the Electric Universe:

1. The thread starts on some relatively clear and narrow topic but quickly morphs into general disagreement between two camps.
2. The two camps that emerge that have virtually no common ground.
3. The discussion tends to become centered more on words than on concepts, though at least one party fails to recognize this. Posts become extremely long, parsing previous posts ad nauseum.
4. Zero meaningful communication occurs between the two camps.
5. The heart of the matter seems to be that mainstream science pays insufficient attention to a non-mainstream discipline. But no objective reason is presented for why such attention ought to be paid or what benefit to the progress of science might come of it.
6. The real issue appears to be recognition rather than a contribution to an increase in understanding of nature.
7. No conclusions are reached and no opinions are changed.

That's not at all what happened in this thread so far. I guess you never read Nereid's original post.

dgruss23 introduced falsification in this Q&A thread, post #32:

[...]

I'm curious about what BAUT members think of the role of falsification in modern science, particularly those parts of science directly relevant to the scope of BAUT (astronomy, cosmology, planetary sciences, astrobiology, ....).

This is not philosophy? Please!

Now I do NOT want to discuss the case for or against MOND, or collisionless CDM, or ... (although they may be used as examples); I am curious to know what others think of the relevance of falsification in modern science.

Straw man much, DrRocket?

[Warren Platts]

Nereid's questions also demonstrate that at least some scientists agonize about what to do at the coalface on Monday mornings and that they are willing to at least listen to what philosophy might have to say in order to come up with a practical plan of scientific action.

[Disinfo Agent]

But what else should I expect from someone who thinks that logic is arbitrary?

Disinfo Agent, this reply itself is an attack on a persons character.

"Your question is meaningless" is the reply of the intellectually lazy.

Truth told, you haven't much room to complain after saying that.

Well, I sincerely do not see it that way. I admit that my remark was provocative, and perhaps more acidic than it should have been. However, my point was that refusing to understand what your oponent is saying in a debate, and simply labelling it "meaningless" with no good reason, is not a productive behaviour. It's not an honest way to debate.

Ken G said that my question does not have a straight answer. I admit that some questions do not have a straight answer, but the one I asked him is so simple that I don't see how he can put it in the "meaningless" category. His explanation of why my question supposedly does not have a straight answer I wasn't even able to connect with the question I had asked. Perhaps I just did not try hard enough. But then again he didn't try very hard to understand where I was coming from either, in my opinion.

[Neverfly]

Well, I sincerely do not see it that way. I admit that my remark was provocative, and perhaps more acidic than it should have been. However, my point was that refusing to understand what your oponent is saying in a debate, and simply labelling it "meaningless" with no good reason, is not a productive behaviour. It's not an honest way to debate.

Ken G said that my question does not have a straight answer. I admit that some questions do not have a straight answer, but the one I asked him is so simple that I don't see how he can put it in the "meaningless" category. His explanation of why my question supposedly does not have a straight answer I wasn't even able to connect with the question I had asked. Perhaps I just did not try hard enough. But then again he didn't try very hard to understand where I was coming from either, in my opinion.

Believe it or not, I thought of all this too.

But I kinda had to give it from the other side. It seems it made you think too

[Warren Platts]

1. The thread starts on some relatively clear and narrow topic but quickly morphs into general disagreement between two camps.
2. The two camps that emerge that have virtually no common ground.
3. The discussion tends to become centered more on words than on concepts, though at least one party fails to recognize this. Posts become extremely long, parsing previous posts ad nauseum.
4. Zero meaningful communication occurs between the two camps.

True enough.

5. The heart of the matter seems to be that mainstream science pays insufficient attention to a non-mainstream discipline. But no objective reason is presented for why such attention ought to be paid or what benefit to the progress of science might come of it.
6. The real issue appears to be recognition rather than a contribution to an increase in understanding of nature.

There you go. You just equated the philosophy of science as "non-mainstream". And you say that no objective reason is presented for why science ought to pay attention to the philosophy of science. And then you suggest that philosophers of science aren't committed to an increase in the understanding of nature.



Well, what about your so-called evidence that science (and mathematics) have never ever before now ever benefited from philosophy? You say that in the mysterious mathematics department you were affiliated with that you won't show in your profile, no one ever discussed philosophy. I'm afraid that that says more about your department than it does about the utility of philosophy to either science or mathematics.

And you say that no scientific discoveries were ever obtained because of philosophical influences. But even Ken G says that Einstein was influenced by Mach. Moreover, Popper himself was crucially influenced by a lecture where he witnessed Einstein present his theory of special relativity! I call that a feedback loop. Science gets informed by philosophy, and then philosophy gets informed by science (and the same thing goes for mathematics, as well, my friend). It goes round and round, and it's all mixed up, and there's no clear demarcation criterion between science and philosophy (at least).

Do you really think that Einstein would have come up with the same theories if he had never paid attention to philosophy?

Because the fact is, he did (pay attention to philosophy).

You've got a tough row to hoe. You have to herd cats and show that philosophy has never made a useful impact on science in order to maintain the truth of your thesis.

I, on the other hand, merely have to provide one counterexample to falsify your theory on the relation of science and philosophy.

Or will you tell me that it's the exception that proves the rule?

And since you're a mathematician, what about the dramatic history of mathematics in the late 19th century and early 20th century, where you've got Frege (mathematician) who formalizes arithmetic, then there's Russell & Whitehead's (philosophers) Principia Mathematica that puts the axioms and rules of mathematics together in exhaustive detail, which then prompts Godel (mathematician) to come up with his incompleteness theorem that prompts the work of Turing, Church, and Post (mathematicians and philosophers), all of whom we can collectively thank for forming the logical basis for the computer you are reading this off of.

I'll ask you the same question I asked Ken G: have you actually bothered to read a philosophy of science book that was published in the last twenty years?

[Nereid]

That's not at all what happened in this thread so far. I guess you never read Nereid's original post.

This is not philosophy? Please!

Straw man much, DrRocket?

Just briefly:

* we clarified the distinction between "falsifiable" (which all hypotheses must be, if they are to be science) and "falsified" (which plays at best a minor role in science)

* I then tried to focus on what, to me, is the most interesting next aspect: to what extent is it possible to distinguish between hypotheses, theories, models, laws, etc? Specifically, how useful is "X has been ruled out, at the n sigma level, by {experimental/observational results Y}"? and to what extent does the answer depend on the class of thing X is (hypothesis, theory, model, etc)?

* In terms of a specific example (the law of conservation of energy, neutrinos, beta decay, ~1930 to 1957), how does this (above) work?

* to what extent can this specific example be generalised? and what does this say about "neutrinos" today (such as CDM and MOND)?

I'm a little behind in responding to some good posts, but I hope this clarifies what thread within this thread I myself am interested in.

[Ken G]

Apologies to anyone who wants to continue the discussion of science and philosophy, for my own part I've pretty much said everything I have to say about why it is not only possible but essential to separate them. Nevertheless, I never maintained that philosophy does not affect our thinking in important ways that are not always easy to trace. Even religion may do that-- could we have accepted the "Big Bang" story as readily if we had never heard a creation myth and had never even been exposed to the concept of an origin of the universe? But none of this is really directly relevant to the thread at hand, which is simply, what does science need to accomplish for us to say it is succeeding at its goals, versus at what point do we decide we are on the "wrong track" somehow?

To that, I would say the crucial point is that science does not have to "approximate reality" according to some established absolute standard, because "approximate" is an ambiguous word (10 approximates a million, if one is talking about bullet wounds, but not if one is talking about dollars), and "reality" is never known well enough to know whether you've approximated it. What it has to do is take objectively repeatable reality (i.e., that which we interface with when we do objectively repeatable experiments and observations) and give us some kind of a useful way of looking at it, of organizing and unifying it. That's all, the rest is purely up to the goals of any particular endeavor.

Ironically, the fact that science has been so vastly successful, even at a level of extreme quantitative precision, in various important but idealized situations, often gives us an inflated sense of what the purpose of the exercise was to begin with. For example, when a toddler makes a model and uses it to get a new diaper, the hypothesis is something like "if I cry it increases the chances of getting a new diaper." They don't need to precisely constrain how much the chances increase, that comes later with more sophisticated models. But the sophistication and the precision merely evolve with the goals, there's never a fundamental new thing between what a child is doing and what a professional scientist is doing. We are not all opera singers, but we do sing in the shower-- the difference is one of degree, that's all. What we need more is a way to know what singing is-- and what science is.

So "model", and "hypothesis", and "theory" are all just the tricks of the trade, like falsetto and vibratto for an opera singer. It doesn't matter what we call these things, it matters how we use them, what we accomplish with them. So getting back to CDM and MOND, the issue is not which is being "falsified" by some observation, it is which is reaping rewards and which is edging closer to being dead weight.

In other words, when we examine observations, the template we hold to it is not the theory by itself, it is what objectives we laid out for the theory (or model, or hypothesis, the name doesn't matter, the objectives do). For some theories, like relativity, we already had a pretty accurate and simple theory, so the bar was high-- no new theory would have given any advantages unless it was ultra accurate and widely unifying. For CDM, clearly we are not in that same boat, we are not attempting to replace any successful theories at all.

So the question is more simply, what was the mission we intended for CDM and MOND, and are they living up to that mission, with each new dataset? Does the mission evolve when we find that certain "targets" are not achievable, and we choose different targets? In that sense, it is more like using dive bombers and torpedo planes to sink ships. We have have preconceived notions about how that will work, about how many ships one squadron can sink, but if we don't sink that many we don't say "dive bombers have been falsified", we say either "dive bombers are the best approach we have" or "torpedo bombers are" or "we're losing the war, we need a new kind of plane". This is exactly what we do in wartime-- and science is essentially no different.

[Nereid]

Before this thread wanders off to become yet another interminable debate about philosophy and science, I hereby declare that I am going to try to drag it back to the general topic that I am interested in.

. . .

Do none of you reading this have anything on this that you want to share?

It seems to me to be pretty darn important!

Take neutrinos and the law of conservation of energy and the period 1930s to 1957. I'm sure you all agree (don't you? if not, say so!) that the relevant beta decays most certainly showed, in any number of repeated experiments, that energy was not being conserved (nor was momentum), and nothing has changed since - if you do the experiments today, in your own labs, energy appears to be not conserved (nor does momentum). Yet few, if any, working physicists seriously regarded the law of conservation of energy as not universally true/applicable/valid/{insert your own word here}.

But why?

The way naive falsification is supposed to work is the logically valid argument form also known as "modus tollens". If it's the case that hypothesis H theoretically entails that a certain predicted observation O will be observed in a particular experiment, then if O is not observed, that is supposed to logically entail that H must be false.

H --->O
~O
----------
:. ~H

Thus falsification was thought to be privileged over mere confirmation because getting the observation that the theory predicts does not entail that the hypothesis must be true, because other, alternative hypotheses could have predicted the same observation. To reason thusly:

H --->O
O
-------
:. H

is technically to commit a logical fallacy: the fallacy of affirming the antecedent.

The only problem is that in the real world, more than just a particular hypothesis is being tested. There are also other auxiliary assumptions A_i in play. So what is really falsified by not getting the predicted observation is the conjunction of the hypothesis and the auxiliary assumptions (H ^ A_i).

So to return to the first example, the schematic of the argument really should be:

(H ^ A₁) ---> O
~O
-----------
:. ~(H ^ A₁)
:. ~H v ~A₁

Of course if one knows ahead of time that A₁ is true, then one might possibly be assured that H is therefore false:

~H v ~A₁
A₁
----------
:. ~H

Only problem with that is there could still be yet other auxiliary assumptions that are not being taken into account.

So to return to your concrete example, Nereid, the beta decay experiments seemingly violated the conservation of energy principle. So you're tempted to say that conservation of energy was falsified. But obviously, with 20-20 hindsight, we know that at least one other auxiliary assumption was in play: namely that the list of exotic particles was complete. So what was really falsified by the beta decay experiments was the dual conjunction of {(conservation of energy) AND (list of exotic particles is complete)}. And since the principle of conservation of energy is one of those basic ideas that rank right up there with logic and math themselves and is therefore not to be given up lightly, then the correct thing to do was to reject the auxiliary assumption that the list of exotic particles was complete, and thus posit the existence of a new particle, the neutrino.

And so to answer your other question, the principle of conservation of energy was never falsified, and even if to this day neutrinos had not been detected, the correct stance would be to continue to believe that there exist neutrinos while maintaining the truth of conservation of energy.

The above description is also known as the Quine-Duhem thesis (both philosophers BTW--ignore them at your own peril!)

Thanks for this.

It's rather nice actually, a logically sound reason why a theory (?!) cannot be falsified ... a little bit like why science does not deal with "proof".

And if this is all there is, in astrophysics and cosmology, then may I conclude that falsification (as in "falsified", not "falsifiable") is essentially irrelevant?

And if no reader has anything significant to add, to this narrow scope of the OP, can we all agree that this thread has reached its end (insofar as that narrow scope is concerned)?

============

I know there are other posts in this thread after this one of WP's that I'm quoting, posts that are directly relevant to the OP and my directly expressed interest; I shall respond to them later ...

[Nereid]

Shameless use of this post, in this thread, to keep track of what I feel is relevant (to me, and the OP, as I developed it), in terms of posts subsequent to the one of WP that I just replied to ...

Ken G: direct response re neutrinos; the opportunity to explore the new aspects (crudely, how do hypotheses, theories, etc differ, and what do scientists do when a generation (or more) goes by with little 'progress'?)

dgruss: long, meaty post that contains much of direct relevance; this one will take the longest to respond to

DrR: meta-comment, some interesting insights (and some things I disagree with)

WP: need to set the record straight

Ken G: some concluding remarks, circling back to the topic.

[DrRocket]

Responding to Warren Platts:

You have just proved my point by finely parsing my post and attempting to apply the absolutes and rigid constructions of formal logic to the discussion. In this setting we are not dealing with the precision of mathematics in which a single example is enough invalidate a theorem or a concept. I will address a few of your points but do not really want to continue in a pointless war of words. I have had quite enough of sophistry here of late.

Let's start with Einstein. Here are his words with regard to the utility of philosophers. "Philosophers had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori."


To quickly dispense with a couple of your other examples on a practical basis I will simply note that Russel and Turing are recognized at least as widely as mathematicians as philosophers and probably more so. Certainly their more widely used and recognized work is in mathematics.

Whistle all you like, it will not produce a single meaningful scientific theory. In any case this debate has become silly. And it is silly because as is usual among "philosophers" the object has become the debate itself.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

I would prefer to return to the questions of interest to Nereid. And I will do so. I think I am finished with "philosophy" for the moment.

I am not sure that I agree that "falsified" theories have played such a minor role in science. That is probably true of modern science, but I can think of some previously held notions that have been falsified and the falsification of which represents significant steps forward in science:

1. The falsification of notion of the electromagnetic aether
2. The falsification of the phlogiston theory of combustion
3. The falsification of the miasma theory of disease

I think that perhaps the falsification of such notions in the past is one reason for the rigor that we find in science today.

With regard to the question of the utility of ruling out X, I think the question is difficult to address in the abstract, and the answer depends rather strongly on the specific nature of X. I have seen situations arise in mathematics in which one want to prove that A=B, where A and B are somewhat complex and equality is far from obvious. The proof can go by showing that A is less than or equal to B (negating that A is greater than B) and then showing that A is greater than or equal to B (negating that A is less than B). One then concludes the equality. This is not a common occurrence, but it does happen.

More common, and perhaps useful, examples are in engineering applications. In failure investigations a very common procedure involves what is called a failure tree. Basically the failure is analyzed and broken down into potential failure modes and contributing causes. If one has perfect knowledge of the physical processes, or if one is sufficiently lucky, the actual failure mode then lies somewhere in this failure tree. One then methodically evaluates all of the modes that have been listed, and by a process of elimination arrives at the cause of the failure. As you no doubt recognize, this is an imperfect process. The practical result is the identification of a "most probable" cause of the failure, and further work based on that most probable cause is usually undertaken to duplicate the failure under controlled conditions. This is basically the process that was used to determine that foam impact was the cause of the Columbia disaster.

In physics I suspect that the situation is much less clear. There one does not have the luxury of mathematics in being able to identify a set of exhaustive and mutually exclusive possibilities. Neither does one have the ability to settle for a "most probable" cause. But perhaps in the realm of partial results that provide guidance but not final answers such considerations would be of value.

[Nereid]

You have just proved my point by finely parsing my post and attempting to apply the absolutes and rigid constructions of formal logic to the discussion. [...]

(bold added).

May I ask who the "you" is?

[Ken G]

The above description is also known as the Quine-Duhem thesis (both philosophers BTW--ignore them at your own peril!)

Fancy name-- but is this any different from the point hhEb09'1 made earlier, and I echoed, neither one of us ever having heard of Quine or Duhem? It's perfectly obvious that falsification requires choice of what auxiliary assumption is being falsified. I often use the Greek choice of a stationary Earth over distant stars when explaining the absence of stellar parallax as the example I give my students of the need for "choosing one's poison" in science. I don't see how simply noticing what science does qualifies as a need to include philosophy in science, but I do not discount the possible input philosophers may have into that discussion-- just not the scientific discovery itself. Indeed, as I've said, I think the "take home lesson" here is we should never "put to bed" various ways of looking at things, any more than we would throw away our hammer when facing a screw. We never know when we might need it again. (Has there ever been a better example of that than the cosmological constant, another issue relevant to this thread?)

[Ken G]

May I ask who the "you" is?

I can assure you he meant Warren Platts, not the "you" you.

[DrRocket]

(bold added).

May I ask who the "you" is?

Ken G is correct. The "you" was Warren Platts. I literally drew a line when I switched over and tried to address your points. Sorry for the confusion. Profuse apologies to Nereid.

[hhEb09'1]

Fancy name-- but is this any different from the point hhEb09'1 made earlier, and I echoed, neither one of us ever having heard of Quine or Duhem?

Quining was mentioned in Gödel, Escher, Bach I'm pretty sure.

But you're right, one doesn't have to read Quine to have come up with that observation.

[Warren Platts]

Thanks for this.

It's rather nice actually, [..]

You're quite welcome, and thank you!

[Michael Noonan]

The problem I have with "{X} "constitutes a falsification of" {Y} - (good) science?" is simple:-

If we have a single fourth dimension expansion how was it able to add space during initial inflation through to the end of the dark epoch and again from first quasars to the five billion year mark and then remove space from there to to the eight billion year mark and then add it again to the present and now start the whole universe in an accelerating expansion?

That is not something a simple one extra dimension has the capability of doing, maybe a planar two dimension membrane but then it requires a ripple structure which then invokes a third extra dimension.

So far the mathematics indicated that the universe was about 18 to 20 billion years old some thirty years ago. Then about 15 to 18 billion years old some twenty years ago on the same numbers and then 13.7 to 14.5 billion years old within the last ten years. Then to avoid saying the universe is getting millions of years younger each year so as not to look like complete idiots the simple explanation of accelerating expansion is used to say why we are actually younger now in the universe than the light being received by the most distant observations.

Sure I may not be a genius (if I was I would know who to talk to with some sense of understanding that things are getting pretty screwy right about now) but someone out there must be starting to get a clue that we do not have a flippin clue about what is going on out there !!!

[Warren Platts]

Materialism must be false! What we need are a few good immaterial entities and processes--that will fix things right up!

[Warren Platts]

Is there some testable theory for assessing the likelihood of any particular untested hypothesis being correct?

That would be Bayes' theorem.

[Warren Platts]

Let's start with Einstein. Here are his words with regard to the utility of philosophers. "Philosophers had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori."

If you like Einstein, you'll love Quine, the philosopher, who famously removed logic and mathematics from the intangible heights of the a priori, back down to the tangible lowlands of the a posteriori--where they belong!

[Ken G]

That would be Bayes' theorem.

No, that's not correct. The very name shows the flaw in your thinking there-- you refer to a "theorem". Funny thing about theorems-- they are untestable. Instead, they are mathematical connections between axioms and examples. But of course, all they are is a more subtle restating of the axiomatic choices. In short, any conclusion from "Bayes theorem" is only as good as the assumptions that go into it, and it is always the latter that is the problem, not the former. Witness your TBSP "correlation coefficient" for a perfect example of when mathematics and assumptions don't gel.

[Nereid]

Ken G is correct. The "you" was Warren Platts. I literally drew a line when I switched over and tried to address your points. Sorry for the confusion. Profuse apologies to Nereid.

No worries!

I was pretty sure you hadn't intended the first part of your post to be addressed to me, but wasn't sure whether it was WP or not.

And in any case, even if I were certain (one way or the other), there are lots of other readers of this thread, and for some the "you" may have been ambiguous ...

[Nereid]

Nereid's questions also demonstrate that at least some scientists agonize about what to do at the coalface on Monday mornings and that they are willing to at least listen to what philosophy might have to say in order to come up with a practical plan of scientific action.

I can't comment on the general validity, or applicability, of this statement, obviously!

However I can say that from my own direct experience I am not aware of any scientists who "at least listen to what philosophy might have to say in order to come up with a practical plan of scientific action". From books I've read, I learned that this may be true for some, and certainly was true in the past for others. Further, who can tell what the contribution of each and every one of your life's experiences makes to practical plans (of any kind)?

But just how useful is it?

As to agony on Monday mornings (or agonising): I have seen, and experienced myself, quite a bit of Monday morning agonising ... some of which was not personal (relationships etc), financial (how much did you lose in the dotcom bust?), etc, etc, etc. But enough getting sidetracked ... I used the question as a means of trying to get the focus of this thread back onto what I am interested in. In that particular case it has to do with the practical ("Monday morning") decisions one takes at one particular turning point in a research effort (crudely, a hypothesis has been ruled out by some good observations/experimental results). I suspect that, in a great many instances, the path forward is pretty clear (if only in general terms) - the next set of hypotheses to be tested can (usually) pretty readily be drafted ...

[Nereid]

... Even science itself is not immune-- witness the well-known quote by Hardy that "A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life." This dovetails with Warren Platts' confusion of science with ethics issues, but it is not the science that can be unethical, it is the choices of people empowered by science. ...

Science need not be immune to criticism any more than any other endeavor. But, and I am a mathematician by education, Hardy is not a particularly good source for objective criticism of science. While many mathematicians are not concerned with applications of mathematics, they are not particularly averse to them either. Hardy, on the other hand, reveled in inapplicability of mathematics, particularly his own mathematics. He was a first rate mathematician, but he was also basically a jerk. He probably had a greater leaning towards philosophy than most, and that propensity seemed to be used to bolster his pursuit of mathematics "only as a creative art" (quote from A Mathematicians Apology). His philosophical musings however, have not influenced the progress of research mathematics and do not appear to have directly contributed to his own research.


The evolution of this thread appears to me to be strikingly similar to other threads that I have seen that deal with Intelligent Design or the Electric Universe:

1. The thread starts on some relatively clear and narrow topic but quickly morphs into general disagreement between two camps.
2. The two camps that emerge that have virtually no common ground.
3. The discussion tends to become centered more on words than on concepts, though at least one party fails to recognize this. Posts become extremely long, parsing previous posts ad nauseum.
4. Zero meaningful communication occurs between the two camps.
5. The heart of the matter seems to be that mainstream science pays insufficient attention to a non-mainstream discipline. But no objective reason is presented for why such attention ought to be paid or what benefit to the progress of science might come of it.
6. The real issue appears to be recognition rather than a contribution to an increase in understanding of nature.
7. No conclusions are reached and no opinions are changed.

I said there was one part at least that I disagreed with, and one such is 7.

Quite early on we did (I think) reach a nearly unanimous conclusion that to be useful (and part of science), hypotheses must be falsifiable (at least in principle) - capable of being ruled out (at the n sigma level).

Somewhat less unanimously, I think there's a consensus that even "falsified" is not terribly useful in modern science (at least physics etc), in general. There are several reasons for this conclusion, and various contributors to this thread have given different reasons (or emphasised some over others).

Somewhat hidden in this second, not quite unanimous, conclusion is the seeds of a potentially very interesting new thread - what makes for "useful" in modern physics (astronomy, astrophysics, etc)? It's a topic that's been touched on, danced around, etc quite a bit, but focus has been lacking (IMHO).

[Ken G]

I think DrRocket's bulleted points refer not to the main thrust of the thread, but rather to the "sidebar" that has more and more pitted science "against" philosophy on recent pages in this thread. Personally, I see validity in his objections to viewing philosophy as integral to science (scientists sometimes quote poetry, for example, does that make poetry integral to science too?), but I also see validity in Warren Platts' points that it is hard to track exactly all the way philosophy may affect or inform the progress of science (that very poetry may have opened an eye to a new possibility, for example).

In terms of that sidebar, all I ever held was that science needs to be and is clearly distinguishable from philosophy, and the former did not start to make its greatest strides until it had made that distinction (a point that holds just as well for Einstein, for he was always constrained by observations moreso than pure reason). The "pure reason" is just the mode we choose to organize and unify the observational data, not so much into what the observations are "telling us", but rather, into what we are choosing to "get" from the observations.

In other words, I think DrRocket was merely saying that the "camp" that sees philosophy as extraneous to science is not about to change their minds in this thread, nor are those who champion philosophy's role. I wouldn't say that makes the dialog pointless, for people can learn and be affected without realizing it, but it is a good argument that perhaps we should stick to the tighter focus of the "core thread" that Nereid is steadfastly managing to maintain, on the possibly exaggerated role of falsification as the central tool in the arsenal of science.

[Warren Platts]

I must say that I've learned at least one thing from this thread: now I know how Ken G must feel when kooky ATMers who have never taken a single physics class or picked up a physics book who nevertheless glibly assert that the edifice of modern physics that was built by decades and decades of hard work by brilliant men and women can be cast into the oven to be replaced by a "new physics" of their own, fertile imaginations. It must almost feel disrespectful when such persons trivialize not only the hard work done by others, but also the years and thousands of dollars spent, and the bookshelves of books and footlockers filled with xeroxed papers that were read by oneself that were required in order to get to the cutting edge of physics.