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This is the very core of our scientific method (critical rationalism, Karl Popper [1]), theoretical models can only be used in science when they can be falsifie

This is the very core of our scientific method (critical rationalism, Karl Popper [1]), theoretical models can only be used in science when they can be falsified. That is why we call them hypothesis (from the Greek word for assumption [2]). Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive. For example, we can observe a thousand white swans in the world, and hypothesize that all swans are white. That is until we encounter that one black swan, and our hypothesis has been falsified. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis

meaty 14y ago
Elegantly described!
DougWebb 14y ago
No, the black swan is a figment of your imagination. It wasn't a swan. You didn't know what you were looking at. You made it up. I don't care that lots of people saw it, you're all delusional. You're crackpots. The problem with the scientific method is that scientists become very attached to their hypotheses, and the longer a hypothesis stands the more attached scientists get. This causes them to reject contradictory evidence, often going to ridiculous lengths to do so. A change of the hypotheses, a scientific revolution, only happens on the fringes of science when a maverick persists in examining evidence that most scientists reject.
- meaty 14y ago
  Prime example: climate change. We have precisely fuck all idea what is going on regardless of the models. Proof of this can be found by examining all the climate change news articles based on scientific papers going back to the impending ice age in 1972 (people have a short memory for climatology theories).
  - luser001 14y ago
    Relevant Asimov's classic article: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm YMMV.
  - robotresearcher 14y ago
    News articles can not be relied on to present science and the views of scientists accurately. Controversy is news, consensus is not. Very few publications care enough to get their science reporting right, and it's expensive to have people on staff who are capable of doing it.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    "Proof of this can be found by examining all the climate change news articles based on scientific papers going back to the impending ice age in 1972 (people have a short memory for climatology theories)." While it makes a good talking point, it was not the case. http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s...
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Thank you, you explained better an beyond the usual repetition There's so much of this it's not even funny. The last part of my post is in this gist. But in physics this is easier to work around. In other areas not so much Also, the scientific method and Popper's ideas are a philosophical construct. One has to think: who watches the watchman?
  - akiselev 14y ago
    The scientific method's own error correcting mechanisms also operate on itself. Our understanding of epistemology, repeatability, and falsifiability have evolved alongside and as a result of the scientific method as we have journeyed through mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical physics, and quantum mechanics and relativity. Popper's own seminal work was due to what we have learned from applying the scientific method and on a meta level substantially changed what "science" codified for many of its practitioners. However, even the need for falsifiability is sometimes suspended (although not lightly and with much criticism) when there is something interesting to pursue like in string theory, where we are operating on energy levels we may never be able to experimentally reach.
    - raverbashing 14y ago
      Yes, there are some self correcting mechanisms. And of course, sometimes the problem is not in the scientific method but in the people working with it. This discussion can go on and on, but I'd like to point out the scientific method is not applicable to several things. String theory like you pointed and other things still in the realm of speculation are one thing (even though their foundation is scientific work) Getting the best page for 'Cat pictures' on Google is another thing. Or translating a phrase to Japanese. The success of the scientific method in Physics is due in a big part to the issues I pointed out, physics is constant. The LHC repeats collision experiments thousands of times, so you can get a result with as little variance as possible. However, it is not possible to test a new drug in millions of people and see what happens, not to mention the results are going to be different for each person, so the best you can have is a statistical answer.
- akiselev 14y ago
  I would recommend reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn. Scientific revolutions are far more widespread and involve many more scientists than you may think. Even during the earliest stages of the Copernican revolution there were many scientists who ascribed to the ideals. You may only hear about Copernicus, Darwin, Maxwell, and a few other notable scientists but the revolutions included many many people. Some of these people may have irrationally stuck to their previous hypotheses at each of these transitions but that is GOOD. Skepticism in science is critical to its function. If the skepticism is not entirely misplaced or competing theories still have merit for exploration, it will not die out (It's more complicated than this, but for the most part holds true). As for the climate change in reply to this posts' parent: go on scholar.google.com and find real peer reviewed papers on climate change or go find the high impact environmental journals and often cited papers. Then find the papers that cite those papers that contain actual data! Scientists have gathered a massive amount of data on melting ice, carbon dioxide concentrations, and world wide pollution. The jury is still out on whether or not humans are a major contributor to carbon dioxide emissions but it is irrelevant when atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures are increasing. This may simply be a natural cycle but it is wise to err on the side of caution until we know more about the equilibrium conditions of the system. The more troubling problem is pollution and deforestation that reduces the number of oxygen producing organisms. Even after ice ages and mass extinction events, the most important organisms for oxygen production in our atmosphere have been phytoplankton, which currently account for probably about half of all of the oxygen produced by plants. Already there is evidence pollution is drastically reducing these populations [1][2]. If this is proven to be true, there is unlikely to be some other mechanism on Earth to replace the phytoplankton in oxygen production (unless we force the evolution of a phytoplankton species immune to industrial pollution...) Edit: [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/nature09268.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/nature0... [2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/full/nature05317.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/full/nature0... I apologize that these papers are behind a paywall, but no news article for the public can do them justice. When you jump into the data for both papers you see science in action: a complex web of variables and events that we are trying to understand.
  - Evbn 14y ago

meaty 14y ago

Elegantly described!

DougWebb 14y ago

No, the black swan is a figment of your imagination. It wasn't a swan. You didn't know what you were looking at. You made it up. I don't care that lots of people saw it, you're all delusional. You're crackpots. The problem with the scientific method is that scientists become very attached to their hypotheses, and the longer a hypothesis stands the more attached scientists get. This causes them to reject contradictory evidence, often going to ridiculous lengths to do so. A change of the hypotheses, a scientific revolution, only happens on the fringes of science when a maverick persists in examining evidence that most scientists reject.

meaty 14y ago
Prime example: climate change. We have precisely fuck all idea what is going on regardless of the models. Proof of this can be found by examining all the climate change news articles based on scientific papers going back to the impending ice age in 1972 (people have a short memory for climatology theories).
- luser001 14y ago
  Relevant Asimov's classic article: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm YMMV.
- robotresearcher 14y ago
  News articles can not be relied on to present science and the views of scientists accurately. Controversy is news, consensus is not. Very few publications care enough to get their science reporting right, and it's expensive to have people on staff who are capable of doing it.
- illuminate 14y ago
  "Proof of this can be found by examining all the climate change news articles based on scientific papers going back to the impending ice age in 1972 (people have a short memory for climatology theories)." While it makes a good talking point, it was not the case. http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s...
raverbashing 14y ago
Thank you, you explained better an beyond the usual repetition There's so much of this it's not even funny. The last part of my post is in this gist. But in physics this is easier to work around. In other areas not so much Also, the scientific method and Popper's ideas are a philosophical construct. One has to think: who watches the watchman?
- akiselev 14y ago
  The scientific method's own error correcting mechanisms also operate on itself. Our understanding of epistemology, repeatability, and falsifiability have evolved alongside and as a result of the scientific method as we have journeyed through mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical physics, and quantum mechanics and relativity. Popper's own seminal work was due to what we have learned from applying the scientific method and on a meta level substantially changed what "science" codified for many of its practitioners. However, even the need for falsifiability is sometimes suspended (although not lightly and with much criticism) when there is something interesting to pursue like in string theory, where we are operating on energy levels we may never be able to experimentally reach.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    Yes, there are some self correcting mechanisms. And of course, sometimes the problem is not in the scientific method but in the people working with it. This discussion can go on and on, but I'd like to point out the scientific method is not applicable to several things. String theory like you pointed and other things still in the realm of speculation are one thing (even though their foundation is scientific work) Getting the best page for 'Cat pictures' on Google is another thing. Or translating a phrase to Japanese. The success of the scientific method in Physics is due in a big part to the issues I pointed out, physics is constant. The LHC repeats collision experiments thousands of times, so you can get a result with as little variance as possible. However, it is not possible to test a new drug in millions of people and see what happens, not to mention the results are going to be different for each person, so the best you can have is a statistical answer.
akiselev 14y ago
I would recommend reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn. Scientific revolutions are far more widespread and involve many more scientists than you may think. Even during the earliest stages of the Copernican revolution there were many scientists who ascribed to the ideals. You may only hear about Copernicus, Darwin, Maxwell, and a few other notable scientists but the revolutions included many many people. Some of these people may have irrationally stuck to their previous hypotheses at each of these transitions but that is GOOD. Skepticism in science is critical to its function. If the skepticism is not entirely misplaced or competing theories still have merit for exploration, it will not die out (It's more complicated than this, but for the most part holds true). As for the climate change in reply to this posts' parent: go on scholar.google.com and find real peer reviewed papers on climate change or go find the high impact environmental journals and often cited papers. Then find the papers that cite those papers that contain actual data! Scientists have gathered a massive amount of data on melting ice, carbon dioxide concentrations, and world wide pollution. The jury is still out on whether or not humans are a major contributor to carbon dioxide emissions but it is irrelevant when atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures are increasing. This may simply be a natural cycle but it is wise to err on the side of caution until we know more about the equilibrium conditions of the system. The more troubling problem is pollution and deforestation that reduces the number of oxygen producing organisms. Even after ice ages and mass extinction events, the most important organisms for oxygen production in our atmosphere have been phytoplankton, which currently account for probably about half of all of the oxygen produced by plants. Already there is evidence pollution is drastically reducing these populations [1][2]. If this is proven to be true, there is unlikely to be some other mechanism on Earth to replace the phytoplankton in oxygen production (unless we force the evolution of a phytoplankton species immune to industrial pollution...) Edit: [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/nature09268.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/nature0... [2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/full/nature05317.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/full/nature0... I apologize that these papers are behind a paywall, but no news article for the public can do them justice. When you jump into the data for both papers you see science in action: a complex web of variables and events that we are trying to understand.
- Evbn 14y ago