{"id":11747,"date":"2020-05-05T14:14:10","date_gmt":"2020-05-05T18:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11747"},"modified":"2020-05-05T15:50:06","modified_gmt":"2020-05-05T19:50:06","slug":"some-philosophy-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11747","title":{"rendered":"Some Philosophy of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Defenders of certain failed speculative theories like to accuse those who point to their failure of being <a href=\"https:\/\/www.philosophersmag.com\/footnotes-to-plato\/77-string-theory-vs-the-popperazzi\">&#8220;Popperazzi&#8221;<\/a>, relying on mistaken and naive notions about predictions and falsifiability due to Karl Popper.  That&#8217;s never been the actual argument for failure, and two excellent pieces have just appeared that explain some of the real issues.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sabine Hossenfelder&#8217;s latest blog entry is <a href=\"http:\/\/backreaction.blogspot.com\/2020\/05\/predictions-are-overrated.html\">Predictions are overrated<\/a>,  a critique of the naive view that you can evaluate a physical theory simply by the criterion &#8220;Does it make predictions?&#8221;.  She goes over several important aspects of the underlying issues here, making clear this is a complex subject that resists people&#8217;s desire for a simple, easy to use criterion for evaluating a scientific theory. <\/li>\n<li>Over at Aeon, Jim Baggott writes about this under the headline <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/imre-lakatos-and-the-philosophy-of-bad-science\">How science fails<\/a>, focusing on the life and work of philosopher of science Imre Lakatos.  I wish I had been aware of the ideas of Lakatos when I wrote a chapter about the complexities of evaluating scientific success or failure in my book <em>Not Even Wrong<\/em>, since he was concerned with exactly the sorts of issues I was grappling with there.\n<p>One of the main ideas of Lakatos is that you should conceptualize the problem in terms of characterizing a research program as &#8220;progressive&#8221; or &#8220;degenerating&#8221;.  As relevant new experimental and theoretical results come in, is the research program showing progress towards greater explanatory power or is it instead losing explanatory power, for instance by adding new complex features purely to avoid conflict with experiment? One way I like to think of this is that it&#8217;s hard to come up with an absolute measure of success of a research program, but you can more easily evaluate the derivative: is some new development positive or negative for the program?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s any question but that supersymmetry, GUTs, and string theory are classic examples of degenerating research programs.  In 1984-5 there was great hope for a certain idea about how to get a unified theory out of string theory (compactification on Calabi-Yaus), but everything we have learned since then has made this hypothesis one with less and less explanatory power.<\/p>\n<p>The Lakatos framework has the feature that there is no absolute notion of failure.  It always remains possible that the derivative will change: for instance the LHC will find superpartners,  or a simple compactification scheme that looks just like the real world will be found.  The not so easy question to answer is when to give up on a degenerating research program.  I think right now prominent string theorists are taking the attitude that it&#8217;s past time to give up work on the idea of string theory unification (and they already have), but not yet time to admit failure publicly (since, you never know, a miracle may happen&#8230;).\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>And now, for something completely different:<\/strong> If you want something more entertaining to read about particle physics, I highly recommend Tommaso Dorigo&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldscientific.com\/worldscibooks\/10.1142\/q0032\">Anomaly!<\/a> (see review <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8983\">here<\/a>).  The one problem with that book was that it stopped in the middle of the story (end of Tevatron Run 1).  He now is making available some chapters (see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science20.com\/tommaso_dorigo\/anomaly_the_lost_chapters_part_1-247679\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science20.com\/tommaso_dorigo\/anomaly_the_lost_chapters_part_2-247723\">here<\/a>) he wrote that cover the later, Run 2, part of the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Defenders of certain failed speculative theories like to accuse those who point to their failure of being &#8220;Popperazzi&#8221;, relying on mistaken and naive notions about predictions and falsifiability due to Karl Popper. That&#8217;s never been the actual argument for failure, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11747\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11747"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11755,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11747\/revisions\/11755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}