{"id":9778,"date":"2014-12-19T09:24:25","date_gmt":"2014-12-19T14:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9778"},"modified":"2014-12-19T09:24:25","modified_gmt":"2014-12-19T14:24:25","slug":"method-and-its-discontents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/12\/19\/method-and-its-discontents\/","title":{"rendered":"Method and Its Discontents"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given that I am relentlessly flogging a book about the universality of the scientific process<\/a> (Available wherever books are sold! They make excellent winter solstice holiday gifts!), I feel like I ought to try to say something about the latest kerfuffle about the scientific method. This takes the form of an editorial in Nature<\/a> complaining that Richard Dawid<\/a> and Sean Carroll<\/a> among others are calling for discarding traditional ideas about how to test theories. Which is cast as an attempt to overthrow The Scientific Method.<\/p>\n

Which, you know, on the one hand is a kind of impossible claim. There being no singular Scientific Method, but more a loose assortment of general practices that get used or ignored as needed to make progress. It’s all well and good to cite Karl Popper, but it’s not like philosophy of science stopped once he published the idea of falsifiability as the key criterion– “Pack it up, folks, we’re all done here!” There’s been a ton of activity post-Popper, and if you’re going to take up the defense of SCIENCE against some new generation of barbarians, you need to at least attempt to engage with it(*).<\/p>\n

At the same time, though, I have a lot of sympathy for the defenders of method, because the calls to scrap falsifiability are mostly in service of the multiverse variants of string theory. And I find that particular argument kind of silly and pointless. The multiverse idea is ostensibly a solution to the problem of fine-tuning of the parameters of the universe, but I’m sort of at a loss as to why “There are an infinite number of universes out there and one of them was bound to have the parameters we observe” is supposed to be better than “Well, these just happen to be the values we ended up with, whatcha gonna do?” I mean, I guess you get to go one step further before throw up your hands and say “go figure,” but it’s not a terribly useful<\/em> step, as far as I can see.<\/p>\n

I’m probably most sympathetic with the view expressed by Sabine Hossenfelder in her post at Starts With a Bang<\/a>. After noting that the quest for quantum gravity seems to have gotten stuck, she writes:<\/p>\n

\nTo me the reason this has happened is obvious: We haven\u2019t paid enough attention to experimentally testing quantum gravity. One cannot develop a scientific theory without experimental input. It\u2019s never happened before and it will never happen. Without data, a theory isn\u2019t science. Without experimental test, quantum gravity isn\u2019t physics.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It is beyond me that funding agencies invest money into developing a theory of quantum gravity, but not into its experimental test. Yes, experimental tests of quantum gravity are farfetched. But if you think that you can\u2019t test it, you shouldn\u2019t put money into the theory either.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m very much an experimentalist by both training and inclination, though, so of course I find that view very congenial.<\/p>\n

I suspect, on some level, this mostly comes down to psychology and the past successes of particle physics. All through the 1960’s and 1970’s, progress at accelerators was rapid and went hand in hand with theory. So people got fixated on accelerators as the<\/em> solution to every problem. And there’s always been the tantalizing possibility that with just a little<\/em> more energy, everything will fall into place. And if that’s your expectation, well, then there’s no reason to put all that much effort into phenomenology for experiments other than the next new accelerator.<\/p>\n

(There’s also the faintly toxic notion that phenomenology is for second-raters<\/a> (paraphrasing Dyson paraphrasing Oppenheimer). Which is another of the many pathologies afflicting academic physics…)<\/p>\n

In a weird way, I think a loss of momentum for next generation colliders might end up being a good thing for fundamental physics. If the price point for pushing the well-trodden path a few TeV higher is more than we can afford, that will force people to become a little more clever about how they approach problems, and explore a greater diversity of approaches. Because many of the other things you can think about doing to probe exotic physics can be funded from the rounding error in the LHC construction budget.<\/p>\n

So, I guess I would say that it’s a little early yet to give up on falsifiability and other traditional methodology. I just don’t really believe we’ve exhausted all<\/em> the options for testing theories, just because one particular approach has hit a bit of a dry spell. There are almost certainly other paths to getting the information we want, if people put a bit more effort into looking for them. <\/p>\n

————<\/p>\n

That’s one set of reasons why I’ve been a little reluctant to weigh in on this particular argument. About equally important, though, is that this amounts to a game that I’m not all that interested in playing.<\/p>\n

In writing Eureka<\/a>, I tried to avoid using the phrase “the scientific method,” or giving too much detail about how to define science. The four-step process I bang on endlessly about– Looking, Thinking, Testing, and Telling– is very deliberately a cartoonish sort of outline. There’s definitely an element of Popperian falsifiability in the way I talk about Testing, because I am an experimentalist, but the way I use it is vague enough to accommodate some of the alternatives people throw out.<\/p>\n

I did that deliberately, because I’m really not interested in exploring the boundary between science and not-science. I’m interested in the stuff in the middle, the broad expanse of stuff well away from the edges, that absolutely everyone will agree is science. I’m more interested in celebrating accomplishment than calling out transgressions. I’d like people to turn their backs on the bickering over the precise location of the boundary, and take a moment to appreciate the awesome spectacle of what’s there in the middle, where the great successes of the past few hundred thousand years sit.<\/p>\n

From that standpoint, whether multiverse theories are properly scientific or not is stunningly unimportant. The number of people who will ever deal with questions for which direct experimental tests are so difficult that they might require an alternative standard is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who directly benefit from mundane empirical testing every single day. That, to me, is an idea that’s vastly more deserving of public attention than what standard you use to judge the status of multiverse models.<\/p>\n

Which is, of course, why I wrote the book I wrote<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given that I am relentlessly flogging a book about the universality of the scientific process (Available wherever books are sold! They make excellent winter solstice holiday gifts!), I feel like I ought to try to say something about the latest kerfuffle about the scientific method. This takes the form of an editorial in Nature complaining… Continue reading Method and Its Discontents<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,18,680,19,104,7,37,11,52,14,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book_writing","category-books","category-eureka","category-experiment","category-humanities","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-science_books","category-string_theory","category-theory","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}