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FALSIES

                                             January 22, 2014

The practice of Science has always been            FEYNMAN_ON_PHILOSOPHY
ad hoc, a gradual groping for a way of
proceeding that seems reasonable--          A recurrent syndrome: a hunger for
"falsifiability" is just one attempt at     certainty, a groping for the one
firming this up, and it's funny that        true truth... the idea of
you sometimes see people treat it as        "falsification" is supposed to be
though it's some sort of primary            an evasion of this need for a
revealed doctrine.                          positive Truth, but for many it's
                                            turned into just another one.
Falsifiability itself isn't a scientific
idea, it's an idea *about* science.  You                          FALSE_KARL
might call it a philosophic principle.
                                                 (Though you might imagine a
So if falsification strikes you as a             meta-science that examines
critically important idea, you've already        what happens if science is
conceeded that there are things outside of       conducted in different ways
science that matter.                             and compares the two-- then
                                                 you could put 'falsification'
If you're a true believer in falsifiability,     itself on a scientific basis.)
an idea like "string theory" might not be
precisely "scientific" (or at least not yet)            SCIENTIFIC_METHODS
but in that case you could just put string
theory in another category ("proto-science"?).
String theory need not be abandoned as Unclean.



                                      It would be interesting to know the
                                      set of things that are falsifiable,
                                      and the set of things that are
                                      scientific, and for that matter, the
                                      set of things that are interesting
                                      and useful, but there's no reason to
                                      presume that the boundaries of all
                                      these sets will line up perfectly.

                                             (Got that? Verbal venn
                                             diagrams have their problems.)
           LEONARD_SUSSKIND 

  Leonard Susskind-- one of the original
  string theory physicists-- has an              [link]
  argument up at edge.org, which he
  expanded on in his book "The Cosmic
  Connection"-- where he makes the point                       (Jan 23, 2014)
  that there are a large number of            A number of Leonard Susskind's
  accepted scientific ideas that were         class lectures-- he teaches at
  originally attacked as "unfalsifiable".     Stanford-- have been put out
                                              online.  He discusses the
  Just to pick one: Ernst Mach argued         history of the idea of string
  that the existence of atoms was             theory making some funny asides
  unfalsifiable.                              like "... and this is why a lot
                                              of us found String Theory so
  "Throughout my long experience              promising-- and it just keeps
  as a scientist I have heard                 promising and promising--"
  un-falsifiability hurled at so
  many important ideas that I am
  inclined to think that no idea
  can have great merit unless it        (Susskind calls the
  has drawn this criticism."            "unfalsifiable!" gang
                                        "Popperazzis".)

  "What people usually mean when
  they make the accusation of
  un-falsifiability is that they,                             
  themselves, don't have the                
  imagination to figure out how to
  test the idea."




  From edge.org:

  "Good scientific methodology is not an abstract set of rules
  dictated by philosophers. It is conditioned by, and determined
  by, the science itself and the scientists who create the
  science. What may have constituted scientific proof for a
  particle physicist of the 1960's-- namely the detection of an
  isolated particle-- is inappropriate for a modern quark physicist
  who can never hope to remove and isolate a quark."






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