Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

This article also made me think of Rand, and I wish they had some awareness of Rand's epistemology. They do mention Bayesianism, which is a useful framework, but still has limitations. (Recently I've been reading through classic papers on probability theory (Bayes, Bernoulli, E. T Jaynes) to see if it can be combined with Rand's neo-Aristotelian view of concepts).

Sure they can. Build a particle accelerator with one million times the power of LHC. Not knowing and not having the technology are two different things.

Fifty years ago nobody knew how to test the Higgs boson theory either. That didn’t stop them from moving on and when the technology permitted it run the tests and solidify the hypothesis. String theory didn’t just popped out of the heads of physicists who had nothing better to do with their time. Parts of string theory are already tested, the discovery of the new particle that was semi announced last week at LHC was predicted by a model of string theory. That’s how science progresses, with little steps. So don’t get pessimistic, scientists have done huge progress in the last hundred years or so.

Lastly, let’s not forget how little funding science gets these days and how many different areas they have to cover. It’s not just physics, you have cosmology, space exploration, biology, energy, just to name a few.

It’s not science’s job to answer philosophical questions. If for example philosophers feel powerless because of the multiverse theory we should stop theorizing it? If it turns out that life and everything we know is just the result of a mere stroke of luck, one universe with the proper conditions popping out from a variety of trillions, what should science do about it?

All those smart people hate to face the fact that what they're doing may be total bullshit.

It’s funny saying something like that in Hacker News. Everything each and every one of us does has the potential to turn out as total bullshit. Every single day we write code that turns to be total garbage. And yet we’re doing it. You should watch the “Particle Fever” documentary. There you’ll see the reactions of physicists who favor supersymmetry in the possibility that it proves wrong. Everyone is devastated but they accept it. It’s part of the job. You make it sound like these guys are disillusioned. Scientists know perfectly well the consequences of following a wrong path in their career but they do it either way and we should be grateful to them, not despise them for it.

A separate link leads from Kant to Frege, Russell and modern analytic philosophy. Which is hardly on the level of Marxism, and it still respects reason and reality, but it led to the idea of logic as meaningless symbol games, rather than a vital tool to understand the world.

Rand didn't found her whole philosophy on 'A is A' - this is a common misconception. She isn't trying to create a philosophy based on geometry, where everything is deduced from a few axioms. The law of identity is fundamental, but it's not sufficient - you need observation of reality too.

Can you describe?

My memory of high school genetics involved experiments with Drosophila eye color, etc. which were really about the passing of genes and, sometimes, mutation. However these experiments didn't prove that natural selection or seemingly random mutation were necessarily what drove species to change over time to create new species based on their environment. I had to accept that. I also accept that people tell me human and chimp DNA is similar.

Theoretical physicists also attempt to explain things that they cannot see or experience, and if people believe it, they believe it.

Science, in part, requires faith.

Think of everything you think you understand about science and about our world. How much of it did you really prove with your hands, and how much instead did you just read or hear and understand to be true because others wrote or said it was true?

You can put your faith in theories, and that has proved practical for many physicists and biologists, just to name a few. A god or gods could also be driving those evolutionary processes in part, or could have set things in motion. Accepting religion and scientific facts both require faith, and that's ok.