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Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser write in the NYT that two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, recently published a controversial piece called "Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics" that criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today's most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are "sufficiently elegant and explanatory." Whether or not you agree with them, Ellis and Silk have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given physics its credibility:
Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts. These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.
Richard Dawid argues that physics, or at least parts of it, are about to enter an era of post-empirical science. "How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally?" ask Frank and Gleiser. "Are superstrings and the multiverse, painstakingly theorized by hundreds of brilliant scientists, anything more than modern-day epicycles?"
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Disagree) by tibman on Sunday June 07 2015, @12:35AM
I don't remember Einstein proving his theories with experiments.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @01:02AM
Uhhhhh, the atomic bomb wasn't enough of a experiment for you?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Sunday June 07 2015, @01:13AM
Just because you are ignorant doesn't change reality. Einstein made specific predictions based on his theory to explain observed oddities in the orbit of Mercury. An expedition was mounted, more careful measurements taken and he was proven correct; this was seen as a major confirmation of the theory. There are other examples, but why should I have all the fun with you.
More to the point, unlike these proposals where they admit there is no possible test they can imagine that could falsify the theory, Relativity is now proven daily. Things you use every day, such as the GPS in your phone, rely on the Theory of Relativity to return the correct results. It may not be the final answer but it has to be fairly close, much like Newton's Laws were pretty close to the truth. And in reality we flew to the Moon purely on Newton's laws, they work very well until you get moving at a fair fraction of C.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:30PM
You didn't even read my post! It directly relates to the article saying that some scientists don't create experiments to prove their theories. Einstein didn't do anything you talked about in your post.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @01:53AM
And I now know you are science-illiterate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @10:28AM
He is jmorris! You are like the buzzing of flies to him! Bow before his climate-denying greatness, all you who think the science is settled and won't listen to his great and glorious refutation of the AGW!
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:05PM
Wat? jmorris refuted GGP's assertation.
Disclaimer: I do disagree with his position on AGW, although I haven't done enough research on the latest “Hay guise! There was no warming pause!” to be able to go along with that. It turns out there is some good reasoning behind adjusting measurements (i.e. whoops, we moved the instrument under a shade tree due to construction in the lab but didn't tell you and just kept sending the numbers), but I do find it a bit odd that there's a preponderance of marine buoys that were calibrated incorrectly. Like I said, I need to do more research into the matter before reaching a conclusion, but I am tempted to trust the experts. If it's false, other experts will chime in. This is how we do science.
That being said, I think the consequences of AGW have been overstated. A sea level rise of a few feet isn't going to wipe out coastal cities. Even if New York flooded, I would think that taxis would just be replaced by gondolas. IANAStructural Engineer, but Waterworld simply isn't happening. Over here in flyover country, I'm about 500 feet above sea level, so I probably won't even notice.
Men come and go, but Earth abides; the only concern is whether this species can get through the great filter [wikipedia.org] or not.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 07 2015, @05:22AM
He explicitly devised experiments to test his theory.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:29PM
He didn't.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:24AM
Yeah, well he sort of won his Nobel doing that. And if you don't know what he won his Nobel for, then you don't know how close he worked to experiment.
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Sunday June 07 2015, @05:35PM
Einstein didn't get a Nobel for general relativity. He got a Nobel for the photoelectric effect, and for contributions to theoretical physics. He never explicitly received a Nobel for relativity. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/ [nobelprize.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @02:06AM
Exactly my point. His Nobel was intimately tied to experiment. And don't forget his Brownian motion paper which essentially experimentally demonstrated that stuff was made of atoms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @02:29PM
He didn't do the experiments himself, no, but his theories were proven by the experiments of others. His theories made specific predictions, including many that he didn't like or agree with, and none of those predictions have been shown wrong yet.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:31PM
But this is exactly what the article is talking about. Einstein was exactly the person describe here who created theories but did not experimentally prove them.
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