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posted by CoolHand on Saturday June 06 2015, @10:18PM   Printer-friendly

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?"


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  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday June 07 2015, @12:46AM

    by Gravis (4596) on Sunday June 07 2015, @12:46AM (#193056)

    it seems like the LHC has exposed that reality that do not align with any of our theories which results in extravagant offshoot theories. at the risk being lambasted, i think the currently accepted theory of Quantum Mechanics is flawed when it claims that the quantum world is probabilistic and thus cannot be known for a certainty. this seems like just saying it's magic and we'll never know how it works when in reality there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for what we accept as uncertainty. it seems far more probable that when we find the right solution, it will be surprisingly simple and it will scale, exposing us as fools in the process. by accepting current dogma as truth, we run the risk of stagnating which could set hold physics back a century or more.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @02:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @02:03AM (#193098)

    QM is not a dogma - the math works out (mostly) and it is repeatedly verified experimentally (in the scale where it works).

    Einstein didn't like that QM only gave probability distribution so he spent the latter part of his life chasing alternative theory in vain. That doesn't mean we won't find a better theory that does better than QM someday.

    We are not "fools" for knowing only that we know. We would be fool if we pretend to know what we don't know.

    • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday June 07 2015, @07:17PM

      by Gravis (4596) on Sunday June 07 2015, @07:17PM (#193325)

      Einstein didn't like that QM only gave probability distribution so he spent the latter part of his life chasing alternative theory in vain

      well at least i'm in good company. :)

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday June 07 2015, @12:12PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 07 2015, @12:12PM (#193236)

    the currently accepted theory of Quantum Mechanics is flawed when it claims that the quantum world is probabilistic and thus cannot be known for a certainty.

    The phrase you're describing in a very long non-technical manner is a variant of "Hidden Variable Theory". If you google for it you'll find tons of technical stuff on that topic over the last eighty or so years when it was first "invented" such as:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory [wikipedia.org]

    The really bad news is after thinking it over for about thirty years, the physicists came up with some elegant experiments that would prove if it exists indirectly without knowing the details of how they work but merely if they exist at all. And the results from those experiments started about half a century ago are no, there are no hidden variables in any form we currently know how to measure.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem [wikipedia.org]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments [wikipedia.org]

    Its possible there is a loophole in a way we haven't figured out how to measure for half a century, although its increasingly unlikely over time and endless papers have been written over the decades each making the area of possible loopholes smaller over time.

    A really bad SN automotive analogy for hidden variable theory would be if you had no idea what a car was, or a parking lot, and you didn't even have very good tools to F around with cars, none the less, if you planted a microphone in the only car in the world which happened to be in a parking lot and randomly pushed buttons and turned levers and pushed pedals eventually you'd hear things that would result in certain conclusions about the existence of other automobiles. If there were "hidden variable cars" you'd inevitably eventually hear other car engines or crash into them or hear echos of exhaust noise bouncing off hidden cars or "something". But it seems theres just nothing out there no matter what they try.

    It has VERY unfortunate analogies with things like christian creation science vs evolution. Well there could have been a miracle between that known species from 200Myr and that known species from 150 Myr ago. A decade later someone digs up something 175Myr old that fits evolutionary theory, and the evolutionists assume the creationists will finally go away, meanwhile the creationists are having a celebration party because they've just gone from one opportunity between 200 and 150 years for sweet baby jesus to perform a miracle to two opportunities from 200 to 175 and from 175 to 150, which means they are twice as likely to be proven true now, at least in their minds, at least until some dude digs up bones at 190 and 160 years at which time they'll have four reasons to celebrate. I'm not sure the hidden variable followers are quite that bad so the comparison is somewhat unfair, yet there are disturbing analogies in behavior over many decades.