Does anybody believe in Physics?

[Bodhi]

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It does not explain cute little philosophical chewing gum exercises, because they lack proveability

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Get with the times. Physicists and philosophers are actively debating the epistemological issues of theoretical physics as we speak.

[Jordan Olsommer]

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It does not explain cute little philosophical chewing gum exercises, because they lack proveability

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Get with the times. Physicists and philosophers are actively debating the epistemological issues of theoretical physics as we speak.

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Not on research-grant time they aren't! Like I said, those are subjects that lack proveability, and anything that lacks proveability is essentially worthless to science.

And oh yeah, more to the point: philosophers aren't exactly scientists. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Bodhi]

You take yourself to be the spokesman for science and you use "proveability" as a criterion for it? I can't take you seriously. I'm sorry.

[Jordan Olsommer]

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You take yourself to be the spokesman for science

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No I don't.

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...and you use "proveability" as a criterion for it? I can't take you seriously. I'm sorry.

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Hey it's alright - someday I'll realize that all "real" scientists don't consider proveability as a requisite criterion for what they study. I guess all those scientific papers titled "Does God Exist?" must have been kept under wraps by The Man. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] (and no, philosophical missives about the nature of the universe don't qualify as "scientific papers").

Proveability is the first thing you need when you're talking about something in a scientific manner. If a hypothesis cannot be proven or disproved, then it's simply unfit for scientific inquiry (again, these are questions like "Is there a God?" or "are we in the Matrix?" Since these both involve assumptions that there's no way we could see/touch/in any way test God and/or "the matrix", they aren't proveable or disproveable, and having a "scientific" discussion about them is worthless).

I, personally, can't take the opinions of someone who insists that something does not have to be able to be proven or disproven to be a scientifically valid issue seriously. I'm sorry. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Edit: in case you still don't believe me on this matter, here's a bit from a cute little webpage designed to introduce children to science: "A hypothesis must be stated in a way that can be tested by the scientific method." Hey, what do you know? They teach the idea of proveability to kids! [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

Double-edit: Or better yet, maybe you could just show me one hypothesis that lacks proveability yet is scientifically valid instead of just saying you can't take me seriously? [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Bodhi]

You're really misunderstanding the issues at hand here. This isn't about some guy sitting in his favorite armchair and spinning off philosophical theories to say that science is wrong or whatever. There are very real dilemmas in deciding what degree of belief we wish to grant the theories of science. Just take this one example, and if it doesn't click for you then I give up.

If two theories make the same predictions, and stipulate the same number of entities, how are you to choose between them when both are equally confirmed by your experiments?

[Little Fishy]

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They do not want us to know because animal rights hippies would go mad.

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animal rights hippies are already mad (in the crazy kinda way).

[PairTheBoard]

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Ok, you still didn't quite understand my explanation of the NMA, but you stated it perfectly here:

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Consider this thought experiment. Suppose we are all part of a Matrix like in the movie. All world history occurs just as we have experienced it. We develop science which does a great job "mapping out" how things are working. All the time we think we are living in 3 dimensions, gravity attracts the planets, there's such a thing as light which experiments show has a constant speed, Einstein develops his theories which work pretty good, etc. Our "reality" in the Matrix has been "explained" by science. Yet in actual reality, all the scientific theories have absolutely nothing to do with what's really going on.

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Exactly, so it would be a MIRACLE if science were completely wrong but still making the great predictions it does.

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I guess I still don't get the miracles thing. As I said earlier in that post, science can't help but find theories that make accurate predictions. They just throw out all the ones that don't and keep the ones that get lucky and do. My matrix scenario was meant to show how science can be describing HOW natural laws are working yet show us nothing about what's really behind them. Maybe future science will show us more about what's behind the natural laws it's describing. And maybe there's infinite depth to what's behind them and science will never do more than scratch the surface.

PairTheBoard

[jason1990]

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If two theories make the same predictions, and stipulate the same number of entities, how are you to choose between them when both are equally confirmed by your experiments?

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Do you have a specific example? The only example of this that springs to my mind is Bohmian mechanics. Does anyone know to what degree Bohmian mechanics is taken seriously in the physics community?

[Jordan Olsommer]

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If two theories make the same predictions, and stipulate the same number of entities, how are you to choose between them when both are equally confirmed by your experiments?

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Occam's Razor - until further evidence comes in, you prefer the theory which requires the fewer assumptions. And of course you do further experiments to help differentiate between the two. But what you don't do is sit around flapping your gums over how meaningless it all is because these two theories seem to describe the same thing equally well.

And you still didn't give me an example of a question that lacks proveability yet is a valid scientific hypothesis, but at least you gave me an example. Of some sort. (this question you gave me doesn't have proveability and it's therefore not a scientific question - the scientific questions are the hypotheses which arise from the 'competing theories' your question describes).

Also aside from the fact that I have never heard of anything remotely resembling such a situation in science where two different theories are precisely equal at describing the same phenomena and yet it's a huge debate over which one is correct. Usually it's just a matter of a bit more experimentation to see which one is more accurate (and in the case of something like relativity and quantum mechanics where the task is to reconcile them, the theories very obviously do not explain things in exactly the same way [they explain some things in exactly the same way, but not all - thats kinda why physicists are working to reconcile them]). And if this incredibly unlikely scenario isn't a matter of a bit more experimentation, then it's much more likely that one or both of the theories that are in contention with each other are incapable of being proven or disproved, and thus not scientific to begin with.

So yeah, to conclude for the umpteenth time, philosophical mental chewing-gum questions aren't science. They aren't able to be proven or disproven (which is kinda sorta why people debate about them endlessly - people usually don't have intense coffeeshop discussions over whether a ball is going to fall to the floor when they release it from their hand).

I wish I could please you by telling you you're correct, but you're not. I guess you'll just have to "give up on me" (pretty clever rhetorical tactic for pretending to take the 'high road', btw)

[Bodhi]

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Occam's Razor - until further evidence comes in, you prefer the theory which requires the fewer assumptions.

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You beg the question.

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And you still didn't give me an example of a question that lacks proveability yet is a valid scientific hypothesis

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That's because I never said there was such a thing, nor do I believe that there is. The questions I pose about science have to do with being a rational believer, not experimentation.