Mystery 101 by Richard H. Jones

Author:Richard H. Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

What Is the Nature of Science Today?

The general lack of testability and observational support in multiverse and string theories has generated a dispute among physicists about the nature of science itself. Some physicists such as Sean Carroll claim that “empirical checking” is now an outdated notion (at least for these Big Questions in physics and cosmology). They want to change the rules of science: in “post-empirical science,” what matters is elegance, consistency, and the mathematics of a model. As Helge Kragh puts it, this would be an “epistemic shift,” a redefinition of science, not by philosophers but by a minority of active scientists. Leonard Susskind labels advocates of Karl Popper’s falsification requirement “the Popperazi” for trying to impose unrealistic and irrelevant methodological restrictions on science.

Disparagers of this view respond that this redefinition spells the end of science in these fields: when we abandon checking, what we have is no more than speculative metaphysics, not scientific theories at all. (Of course, experimental physicists, as opposed to theoretical physicists, have always had a great disdain for philosophizing.) If a theory makes no checkable predictions, it is worse than useless from a scientific point of view—it leads to just concocting fairy tales. Such speculation reflects the age-old human need to have creation stories, but ideas that predict nothing produce no testable claims and no fruitful research—they are not science but no different than theology or astrology. Advocates of the standard view readily admit that all theories begin with speculation, but they see no reason to end the demand that at some point observable consequences are required for a theory to be science—the speculation must become empirically useful at some point down the road. For them, to drop the need for some empirically confirmable or refutable claims would be the end of science. As Einstein said in the first half of the twentieth century, “Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally by pure thought without any empirical foundations—in short, by metaphysics.” He added (and Kant would agree): “Concepts are simply empty when they stop being firmly linked to experience.”

Advocates of the new view of science point out that problems with these theories have persisted for decades with little progress: competing theories interpreting quantum physics have remained intact since the 1930s; the Standard Model has only gotten more and more complex since the 1970s; and theories such as cosmic inflation and superstrings have been around since the 1970s with little or no advancement. This stagnation is sufficient, they argue, to redefine science: the new theories may be one step beyond empirical science, but they are not unbridled speculation or groundless fairy tales, as critics assert—it is not “anything goes.” Mathematics develops along with science, and perhaps developments in math can take the lead here. (That we do not know the nature of math adds to the problem. Advocates of the new physics would have to be Platonists: math must structure

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