DailyDirt: Science With (And Without) Verification
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The scientific method has undoubtedly advanced the growth of knowledge, but with the enormous amount of data that can be collected now, it can be difficult to turn all that information into reliable and understandable facts. On the other hand, science is also pushing the boundaries of what can possibly be measured -- but can we still call it science if we're proposing unknowable multiverses and spatial dimensions that can never be explored? Almost anyone can publish their crazy ideas -- and sometimes those sketchy papers submitted to arxiv.org lead to successful work proving an infinite number of twin primes. Do the crackpots outnumber the "real" scientists? Does it matter?- Advances in cosmology are pulling away from experimental verification. Some theorists argue that their theories to explain the universe may not be verifiable by observations -- and that it doesn't matter. They assert we're in a "post-empirical" period for understanding fundamental physics. [url]
- Verification of experimental results is a fundamental aspect of science, right? Providing more funding for researchers to perform replication experiments may be increasingly necessary to ensure our scientific knowledge isn't merely based on anecdotes (or bad experiments or biased analysis). [url]
- Will traditional scholarly journals have a future? There's a growing movement to decentralize the peer review and publication process that doesn't require a for-profit scholarly journal. Yay? [url]
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Filed Under: arxiv, cosmology, crackpots, experiments, journals, knowledge, multiverses, peer review, physics, prime numbers, replication, science, scientific method, verification
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Speculation is not science.
Simply stating a hypothesis without any corroborating data gleaned from experimentation is just speculation.
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Getting into the realm of philosophy
And that is where we astronomical observationalists laugh at them because their "advanced models", while getting quite a bit right, fail so horribly in other respects to describe what is seen and it just gets waved away.
However, I did go to a talk at this years American Astronomical Society meeting by Max Tegmark, a leader in the multiverse theories, and he explained several things we CAN observe to at least rule out some of the multiverse theories. There are some proposed observations that, if observed, would narrow it down to one kind of multiverse. I wish for the life of my I could remember what kind of observations he was talking about, but I only work in nearby galaxies so it wasn't something I would add too.
In the end, unless we figure out SOMETHING to observe, the theories are a bit meaningless because they just play with ideas and don't effect the rest of the science. They turn into really mathematical philosophers. Still, string theory would be so cool if it turns out to be correct.
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Re: Getting into the realm of philosophy
Without the ability to test hypotheses there is no science. It pretty much becomes little more than faith-based belief at that point.
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governments NEED pseudo- science
global cooling/ global warming/ climate change/ vaccination
laws
how could they do tax farming without them?
mass- Human- farming is not easy these days...
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Re: governments NEED pseudo- science
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Seeing how long it takes for response to make it through holdup
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Thanks to the Techdirt team for fixing this problem
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Re: Seeing how long it takes for response to make it through holdup
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Let's be more exact in our use of scientific terminology
And the article: " Some theorists argue that their theories to explain the universe may not be verifiable by observations"
The post has it correct. The article should have said:" Some theorists argue that their hypotheses to explain the universe may not be verifiable by observations"
The word theory, unfortunately, does not have a single meaning. On one hand there is the usage of a proven scientific body of facts like "Number Theory" This is not to say that the body of facts explains every thing. Then there is the meaning equivalent in many respect to the word "philosophy" examples: "Marxist Theory". So, the theory of multiverses or dark matter or dark energy are hypotheses that attempt to explain observations or failings of a current theory. These maybe consistent with our current understanding, but are unproven. Unfortunately, some of these hypotheses must be agrees to, or you will not be able to get any funding for your research, try to get funding for work that attempts to disprove "string Theory".
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Re: Let's be more exact in our use of scientific terminology
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