{"id":6932,"date":"2014-06-09T18:44:54","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T22:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6932"},"modified":"2014-08-06T19:05:02","modified_gmt":"2014-08-06T23:05:02","slug":"evidence-in-the-natural-sciences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6932","title":{"rendered":"Evidence in the Natural Sciences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently spent a day at the Simons Foundation in midtown, attending a symposium on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/mathematics-and-physical-science\/conferences-and-symposia\/mps-conferences\/symposium-on-evidence-in-the-natural-sciences\/\">Evidence in the Natural Sciences<\/a>.  Of the scientific program talks, I got the most out of the one by Thomas Hales on the question of checking the proof of the Kepler conjecture.  For the latest on the project to produce a formal, computer checkable version of the proof, see the <a href=\"https:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/flyspeck\/\">Flyspeck Project page<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The program ended with a discussion\/debate featuring Brian Greene, Peter Galison and Jim Baggott, with the contentious issue basically &#8220;has physics gone too far?&#8221; in a speculative direction, unable to get back to a point where connection can be made to experiment.  Baggott gives a summary of what he had to say at <a href=\"http:\/\/scientiasalon.wordpress.com\/2014\/06\/09\/the-evidence-crisis\/\">Scientia Salon<\/a>, which would be a good place to discuss these issues (so I&#8217;m leaving comments off on this posting).  Both Greene and Galison were much more taking the position that things haven&#8217;t gone off the rails, that one needs to trust the leaders of the field and the physics community to do the best they can.  This blog&#8217;s readers shouldn&#8217;t have much trouble guessing which side of this I&#8217;m more sympathetic to.  I didn&#8217;t notice the event being recorded, perhaps it was.<\/p>\n<p>The symposium was co-sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, with no theology or religion in sight.  I think they&#8217;re mostly these days keeping the physics\/math and theology apart, with this symposium and FQXI two good examples, and I&#8217;m happy to see that.  My other main complaint about Templeton was always that they were pushing multiverse research since that fit into their agenda.  These days I don&#8217;t see them doing so much of that, with multiverse mania being driven by much more dangerously influential sources.  But maybe I&#8217;m less critical of them because they invited me to a very nice dinner after the talks&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: Videos of the talks are now available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/mathematics-and-physical-science\/conferences-and-symposia\/mps-conferences\/symposium-on-evidence-in-the-natural-sciences\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently spent a day at the Simons Foundation in midtown, attending a symposium on Evidence in the Natural Sciences. Of the scientific program talks, I got the most out of the one by Thomas Hales on the question of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6932\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6932","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\/6932","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=6932"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7073,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932\/revisions\/7073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}