Jun 23, 2018 06:53 PM
https://www.weeklystandard.com/daniel-sa...ed-to-know
EXCERPT: What separates science from other intellectual activities? The search for a distinctive logical structure of scientific inquiry and for the essence of scientific truth goes back at least to David Hume’s concerns with the limits of inductive inference (does the fact that the sun rose yesterday mean that it must rise tomorrow?) and has been pursued along a variety of philosophical lines. Perhaps best-known among such efforts is the falsifiability criterion devised by the Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper, according to which science should be recognized not by the evidence it garners on behalf of one proposition or another (supporting evidence can be found for pretty much any proposition) but by the types of questions it asks—questions that can be empirically contradicted.
In Lost in Math, however, Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist who is funny and writes with that slightly oblique flair sometimes found in totally fluent nonnative English writers, learns at a scientific conference that:
What, then, joins Hossenfelder’s field of theoretical physics to ecology, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, biochemistry, macroeconomics, computer science, and geology? Why do they all get to be called science? Certainly it is not similarity of method. The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact with actual facts, while other fields now considered outside of science, such as history and textual analysis, are inherently empirical.
Philosophers have pretty much given up on resolving what they call the “demarcation problem,” the search for definitive criteria to separate science from nonscience; maybe the best that can be hoped for is what John Dupré, invoking Wittgenstein, has called a “family resemblance” among fields we consider scientific. But scientists themselves haven’t given up on assuming that there is a single thing called “science” that the rest of the world should recognize as such.
The demarcation problem matters because the separation of science from nonscience is also a separation of those who are granted legitimacy to make claims about what is true in the world from the rest of us Philistines, pundits, provocateurs, and just plain folks. In a time when expertise and science are supposedly under attack, some convincing way to make this distinction would seem to be of value. Yet Hossenfelder’s jaunt through the world of theoretical physics explicitly raises the question of whether the activities of thousands of physicists should actually count as “science.” And if not, then what in tarnation are they doing?
What’s worrying Hossenfelder is that theory-making in fundamental physics is being driven not by experimental confirmation of key hypotheses but by subjective criteria of aesthetics. Physicists use words like “beauty,” “simplicity,” “naturalness,” and “elegance” to describe the ineffable sense that the mathematics explaining a theory just feels right, and they believe that such aesthetically satisfying theories are more likely to describe reality than those that feel ad hoc or contrived.
[...] Surprisingly, an important marker of the divergence between theory and experiment that concerns Hossenfelder is the most famous experimental discovery of recent decades, the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson by scientists using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. [...] As Hossenfelder explains, however, if the experimental confirmation of the Higgs prediction was a spectacular validation of the standard model, it was accompanied by a failure to make discoveries necessary to support another fundamental theory of physics, known as supersymmetry, or “susy.”
[...] If susy is correct, then evidence for superpartners should have shown up in the Large Hadron Collider. It hasn’t. This can mean one of two things. Most of the physicists Hossenfelder talks to in her book think it means that supersymmetry theory needs to be tweaked a bit to explain why the expected particles remain undiscovered—that perhaps susy is not so “natural” after all. As physicist Keith Olive tells Hossenfelder, “It’s certainly true that we expected susy at lower energy. It’s a big problem. There’s something in me that tells me that supersymmetry should be part of nature, though, as you say, there’s no evidence for it.”
The other possibility is that the theory is wrong. Hossenfelder jets around the world talking to physicists about the challenges facing the field, but few seem willing to seriously entertain this option. “It’s either me who’s the idiot,” writes Hossenfelder, “or a thousand people with their prizes and awards.”
And there’s a time-honored way for those thousand scientists to avoid coming to grips with the second possibility: Do more research. Build another, bigger, more expensive collider to look for even heavier particles to rescue beautiful susy. “I’m not sure which I find worse,” Hossenfelder writes, “scientists who believe in arguments from beauty or scientists who deliberately mislead the public about prospects of costly experiments.” She has similar tales to tell about string theory and the quest to detect dark matter particles—which she hilariously summarizes in a list of 40 or so failed experiments with names like EDELWEISS, ROSEBUD, and PICASSO [...]
“Someone needs to talk me out of my growing suspicion that theoretical physicists are collectively delusional, unable or unwilling to recognize their unscientific procedures.” If their procedures are “unscientific,” are they doing science? [...]
MORE: https://www.weeklystandard.com/daniel-sa...ed-to-know
EXCERPT: What separates science from other intellectual activities? The search for a distinctive logical structure of scientific inquiry and for the essence of scientific truth goes back at least to David Hume’s concerns with the limits of inductive inference (does the fact that the sun rose yesterday mean that it must rise tomorrow?) and has been pursued along a variety of philosophical lines. Perhaps best-known among such efforts is the falsifiability criterion devised by the Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper, according to which science should be recognized not by the evidence it garners on behalf of one proposition or another (supporting evidence can be found for pretty much any proposition) but by the types of questions it asks—questions that can be empirically contradicted.
In Lost in Math, however, Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist who is funny and writes with that slightly oblique flair sometimes found in totally fluent nonnative English writers, learns at a scientific conference that:
Popper’s idea that scientific theories must be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it’s a philosophy that nobody in science ever could have used . . . since ideas can always be modified or extended to match incoming evidence.
Exactly.What, then, joins Hossenfelder’s field of theoretical physics to ecology, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, biochemistry, macroeconomics, computer science, and geology? Why do they all get to be called science? Certainly it is not similarity of method. The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact with actual facts, while other fields now considered outside of science, such as history and textual analysis, are inherently empirical.
Philosophers have pretty much given up on resolving what they call the “demarcation problem,” the search for definitive criteria to separate science from nonscience; maybe the best that can be hoped for is what John Dupré, invoking Wittgenstein, has called a “family resemblance” among fields we consider scientific. But scientists themselves haven’t given up on assuming that there is a single thing called “science” that the rest of the world should recognize as such.
The demarcation problem matters because the separation of science from nonscience is also a separation of those who are granted legitimacy to make claims about what is true in the world from the rest of us Philistines, pundits, provocateurs, and just plain folks. In a time when expertise and science are supposedly under attack, some convincing way to make this distinction would seem to be of value. Yet Hossenfelder’s jaunt through the world of theoretical physics explicitly raises the question of whether the activities of thousands of physicists should actually count as “science.” And if not, then what in tarnation are they doing?
What’s worrying Hossenfelder is that theory-making in fundamental physics is being driven not by experimental confirmation of key hypotheses but by subjective criteria of aesthetics. Physicists use words like “beauty,” “simplicity,” “naturalness,” and “elegance” to describe the ineffable sense that the mathematics explaining a theory just feels right, and they believe that such aesthetically satisfying theories are more likely to describe reality than those that feel ad hoc or contrived.
[...] Surprisingly, an important marker of the divergence between theory and experiment that concerns Hossenfelder is the most famous experimental discovery of recent decades, the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson by scientists using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. [...] As Hossenfelder explains, however, if the experimental confirmation of the Higgs prediction was a spectacular validation of the standard model, it was accompanied by a failure to make discoveries necessary to support another fundamental theory of physics, known as supersymmetry, or “susy.”
[...] If susy is correct, then evidence for superpartners should have shown up in the Large Hadron Collider. It hasn’t. This can mean one of two things. Most of the physicists Hossenfelder talks to in her book think it means that supersymmetry theory needs to be tweaked a bit to explain why the expected particles remain undiscovered—that perhaps susy is not so “natural” after all. As physicist Keith Olive tells Hossenfelder, “It’s certainly true that we expected susy at lower energy. It’s a big problem. There’s something in me that tells me that supersymmetry should be part of nature, though, as you say, there’s no evidence for it.”
The other possibility is that the theory is wrong. Hossenfelder jets around the world talking to physicists about the challenges facing the field, but few seem willing to seriously entertain this option. “It’s either me who’s the idiot,” writes Hossenfelder, “or a thousand people with their prizes and awards.”
And there’s a time-honored way for those thousand scientists to avoid coming to grips with the second possibility: Do more research. Build another, bigger, more expensive collider to look for even heavier particles to rescue beautiful susy. “I’m not sure which I find worse,” Hossenfelder writes, “scientists who believe in arguments from beauty or scientists who deliberately mislead the public about prospects of costly experiments.” She has similar tales to tell about string theory and the quest to detect dark matter particles—which she hilariously summarizes in a list of 40 or so failed experiments with names like EDELWEISS, ROSEBUD, and PICASSO [...]
“Someone needs to talk me out of my growing suspicion that theoretical physicists are collectively delusional, unable or unwilling to recognize their unscientific procedures.” If their procedures are “unscientific,” are they doing science? [...]
MORE: https://www.weeklystandard.com/daniel-sa...ed-to-know
