A Fight for the Soul of Physics

[C C]

String theory, the multiverse and other ideas of modern physics are potentially untestable. At a historic meeting in Munich, scientists and philosophers asked: should we trust them anyway?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-...f-science/

EXCERPT: Physicists typically think they “need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,” the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians and physicists last week in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Fundamental physics faces a problem, Gross explained — one dire enough to call for outsiders’ perspectives. “I’m not sure that we don’t need each other at this point in time,” he said. [...] The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. [...] They were reacting, in part, to the controversial ideas of Richard Dawid, an Austrian philosopher [...who...] identified three kinds of “non-empirical” evidence that Dawid says can help build trust in scientific theories absent empirical data...

[elte]

Indeed, I avoid thinking about those theories, which seem lower in the scientific knowledge hierarchy than hypotheses.

[C C]

Since fundamental physics wants to stay in business or progress like everything else, it will be interesting to see how it revises itself to do that to get around technological barriers that prevent further experiment / validation.

[Yazata]

I think that physicists' disdain for the history and philosophy of science is a fairly recent phenomenon. In part, it's a reaction against the idea that philosophers could dictate scientific methodology to practicing scientists. In part it's a reaction against post-Kuhnian developments and the various trendy varieties of critical 'science studies'. And in continental Europe, scientists probably can't see any value for science in Heidegger, Nietzsche or post-structuralism.

But while they sometimes criticize philosophy, many scientists seem to enjoy being amateur philosophers themselves. Many physicists fancy themselves as metaphysicians. They write with assurance about the ultimate nature of reality and we see a number of physicists writing on the 'Why is there something rather than nothing' problem. Outside physics, there's a whole genre of evolutionary biologists writing on the subject of religion. (Scientists don't take kindly to philosophers appearing to them to dictate their own scientific methods, but they feel free in believing that their study of science somehow makes them authorities in religious epistemology.)

There's something else happening too. Physics, just by its nature, is about idealization, simplification and mathematization. Physics has thrived since the scientific revolution by trying to identify simple mathematical principles abstracted from physical reality, then in trying to explain complex events by employing these principles in various combinations.

So gradually and imperceptibly, physics starts to drift away from physical reality into an idealized world of mathematical principles. Conceived in this way, the subject matter of physics isn't physical reality so much as it's the excruciatingly incomprehensible mathematics of physics' own theories.

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Since fundamental physics wants to stay in business or progress like everything else, it will be interesting to see how it revises itself to do that to get around technological barriers that prevent further experiment / validation.

Do they need to? Or should they just bite the bullet and admit that what they are doing is closer to speculative metaphysics than to physical science?