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Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#61

Post by dozzie »

VeilEm wrote: post #57
noobermin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is arguing whether science is over, they are arguing whether modern theoretical physics is science. Another thing somewhat impacted by this issue that people don't think about is that we might not be able to keep up this pace in research for things like string theory for non-scientific reasons: specifically, science funding has flat-lined while the number of students entering the fundamental research fields is…

> science funding has flat-lined while the number of students entering the fundamental research fields is increasing This is probably not true. All kinds of money is being poured into physics research to create better batteries for example. It may be indirect, but there's a ton of money going into physics research.

It's not science research, it's technology research. And it's not fundamental thing, it's just bells and whistles to be developed. Better batteries are not critical to our understanding of the universe.

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#62

Post by soheil »

xamuel wrote: post #56
soheil wrote: post #51

"Astrology, for instance, is falsifiable — indeed, it has been falsified ad nauseam — and yet it isn’t science." -Pigliucci Mind blown! Wat? If it's falsified then it's just wrong, i.e. it had the potential to be science before it was proven to be wrong and now it isn't. He seems to be confused about the chronology of theories. If I make up a theory based on complete bs and it just happens to be falsifiable and then…

I'd actually argue against astrology being falsifiable. It mostly consists of making generic "predictions" that could apply to anyone, it's the very definition of unfalsifiability. It would be falsifiable if it made predictions like "soheil will spend exactly 35 minutes on Hacker News today", but it doesn't, instead it makes predictions like "You have a deeper side to you that people don't know about", total bs but n…

I also agree, as a whole, Astrology isn't falsifiable. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#63

Post by pheroden »

VeilEm wrote: post #57
noobermin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is arguing whether science is over, they are arguing whether modern theoretical physics is science. Another thing somewhat impacted by this issue that people don't think about is that we might not be able to keep up this pace in research for things like string theory for non-scientific reasons: specifically, science funding has flat-lined while the number of students entering the fundamental research fields is…

> science funding has flat-lined while the number of students entering the fundamental research fields is increasing This is probably not true. All kinds of money is being poured into physics research to create better batteries for example. It may be indirect, but there's a ton of money going into physics research.

So science 2.0 will be encumbered by patents... Great.

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#64

Post by guscost »

dietrichepp wrote: post #23
weinzierl wrote: post #16

Nowadays, as several philosophers at the workshop said, Popperian falsificationism has been supplanted by Bayesian confirmation theory, or Bayesianism, a modern framework based on the 18th-century probability theory of the English statistician and minister Thomas Bayes. Bayesianism allows for the fact that modern scientific theories typically make claims far beyond what can be directly observed — no one has ever seen…

Yes, this is real and it can be done rigorously. The big problem is, "How do we come up with reasonable priors?" It is still a minority position.

> The big problem is, "How do we come up with reasonable priors?"

Predictably, as a hardcore supporter of Popper's version, I don't think this problem will be solved.

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#65

Post by andy_ppp »

I often think about theoretical physics without really knowing enough about it. For example, dark matter, as far as I can tell, is invented to make gravity match how our universe behaves (there appears to be lots more mass than we are expecting).

And I also hear that no one understands how shortly after the big bang why our universe (a tiny ball of energy) was quite so uniform.

My theory instead of dark matter and string theory (mine is probably wrong) is that the universe consists of every single quantum event that ever happened or could happen and that gravity operates as a blurred field operating through many of these close quantum "universes".

The reason could then be that the set of events that happened after the big bang, every quantum state was explored and we are living in one of the universes that happened to be smooth.

It should also explain why gravity is so "weak" compared to the other forces.

Anyway, I'm sure people smarter than me have thought of this and dismissed it for whatever reason!

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#66

Post by justifier »

hodwik wrote: post #34

We had a rush of scientific breakthroughs 100 years ago. I believe we will have more. That experimentation in physics has slowed down to 18th century levels doesn't mean science is over, it just means the low-hanging fruit is over and we will have to continue slogging through theory before we discover new experiments. Science has always relied on philosophy for its underlying direction, it's just obvious again. It to…

by answer zeno's paradoxes do you mean the solution that the paradox is simply ill stated and requires more information to bound the problem finitely for a finite answer?

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#67

Post by dinkumthinkum »

Animats wrote: post #15

Physics used to be "hard science" - if it wasn't testable, it wasn't meaningful. Physicists used to look down on other sciences for that reason. This article shows how much worse things have become. Nobody can figure out a way to test string theory. In cosmology, you can only observe, not experiment. As the article points out, the big questions are out of reach for scaling reasons. Trying to fix the problem through w…

I don't think that is very charitable. I don't think physics looked down on things per se.

There are things that arise out of the mathematics and it seems like you think the answer is just ignore it since we do not have perfect tests right now. I agree that some claims are very grand without sufficient experimentation but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bath water.

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#68

Post by tim333 »

hodwik wrote: post #34

We had a rush of scientific breakthroughs 100 years ago. I believe we will have more. That experimentation in physics has slowed down to 18th century levels doesn't mean science is over, it just means the low-hanging fruit is over and we will have to continue slogging through theory before we discover new experiments. Science has always relied on philosophy for its underlying direction, it's just obvious again. It to…

I've got a hunch there will be some breakthroughs when AI can visualise some of the theoretical stuff that human brains struggle with. I've tried to read and understand some of the literature as to how you get gravity from a spin 2 quantum field and why it's hard to renormalize and my it's hard to get your head around. And I think that's not just for me but also real physicists. It seems quite possible to me that there's a real breakthrough waiting there but human brains are not quite up to it.

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#69

Post by noobermin »

VeilEm wrote: post #57
noobermin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is arguing whether science is over, they are arguing whether modern theoretical physics is science. Another thing somewhat impacted by this issue that people don't think about is that we might not be able to keep up this pace in research for things like string theory for non-scientific reasons: specifically, science funding has flat-lined while the number of students entering the fundamental research fields is…

> science funding has flat-lined while the number of students entering the fundamental research fields is increasing This is probably not true. All kinds of money is being poured into physics research to create better batteries for example. It may be indirect, but there's a ton of money going into physics research.

I might be restricting it to government funding, so this might be true. Considering this in the context of the rest of my post, I'd think this kind of money is restricted to practical, applied fields, not quantum gravity. I do suppose once in a blue moon, a wealthy benefactor might want to support a grad student doing string theory. Still, the exceedingly small number of rich people willing to pay out for esoteric physics guarantees it will go to researchers working in those finger-enumerable universities as I said. For the larger pool of physicists across the country that mainly would be paid by NSF grants and the like? They lose out to the condensed matter physicists making leaps and bounds in material science.

On second reading of your post, you may be implying it isn't zero sum due to more money going to the applied physicists, leaving some for the stringy guys. It might be true, my impression is that it isn't enough[0], but I could be wrong.

[0] This is somewhat out of my ass, but it is tempered by colloquia at my university I've attended where this comes up from time to time.

Re: Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

#70

Post by VeilEm »

pheroden wrote: post #63
VeilEm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> science funding has flat-lined while the number of students entering the fundamental research fields is increasing This is probably not true. All kinds of money is being poured into physics research to create better batteries for example. It may be indirect, but there's a ton of money going into physics research.

So science 2.0 will be encumbered by patents... Great.

Educational research at universities often leads to patents. Universities like Standford own patents or have helped research performed at a University lead to patents. Government funding for research in the U.S at least has never been hostile to commercialization.
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