The scientific method is supposedly this clean process for “acquiring knowledge that has been referred to while doing science since at least the 17th century.“
Way back in my junior year of college I took an elective class entitled "The History of Natural Science" taught by Professor Mark Graubard (yes, he had a gray beard!). On the first day of class he made the bold statement that many significant scientific discoveries waited for hundreds of years before being made until a baby was born to make the discovery. He said the course would be dedicated to proving this thesis with many examples. I found it remarkable that Dr. Graubard showed many cases where all the evidence was in plain sight, but not recognized until that special
person was born with clear eyes to see it. Such is the history of science. It takes a lot of courage to break the mold of current thinking with what almost always begins as a "crackpot" theory. Power to that future baby who sees what is in plain sight and gives it to the world!
Love this. Pretty much the optimistic version of Planck's principle "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
But I would argue that it's not necessarily a genetic thing but also societal/cultural factors do play a role. I.e. many people that could make the discovery don't make it because of the glasses society makes them wear.
E.g. Peer review kills ideas in people’s minds before they’re even born. Knowing that your ideas won’t count for anything unless peer reviewers like them will train you mind to not waste any time on weird ideas.
The author writes: Also, you can falsify Galileo’s theory simply by jumping into the air.
You can toss a ball up while sitting on a moving care and it will return to your hand, despite the fact that during the time the ball was in the air your hand moved a foot or so away from where it was when it launched the ball up. Your falsification method would not convince anyone making a serious inquiry.
My understanding of the motivations for Einsteins theory were very much anomalies. The idea that the apparent velocity of an object depends on you frame of reference, *except* for light. And the crazy coincidence that gravitational mass and inertial mass were the same. Neither of these things made any sense.
Then the Rutherford atom made no sense. The Bohr atom only worked in a single example and was arbitrary. And finally there was the weirdness of the photoelectric effect. Took a long time to create a package that sewed all that together and then there were new anomalies. Right down to this day we have new crazy stuff that makes no sense like Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
Will it ever make sense. I suspect not. In any case if it does happen, it won't be in my lifetime.
Do you some ideas about how to unify the four forces of the Nature, i.e. the electromagnetic, strong, electroweak, and gravity forces into the TOE? How to consider the dark matter and dark energy? Could we quantize the graviton to combine it to other forces in Quantum Gravity?
Thinking about a TOE is a waste of time right now imo.
Better to take a step back and make sure we're understanding General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics properly we try to merge some. (And yes, I would argue we don't.)
I understand your thought. We have already understood both GRT and QM very well since more than one hundred years.
General Relative Theory (GRT) is based on the Classical Mechanics; Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Quantum Field Theory QFT (= QM + SRT) are quantized mechanics and relativistic particle physics. The latter strongly depends on the Standard Model (SM), which is quite not suitable for TOE (= QFT + GRT).
Even the Higgs boson was not directly and correctly found in LHC. How about the antiparticles of dark matters are not yet taken into account in the SM? To find the very small and extremely light particles or antiparticles, a very huge LHC is unconditionally necessary to check our theoretical hypotheses. However, such LHC will be never built in far future due to financial issue and possible capacity of the mankind.
That is the reality of TOE right now and in far future. However, the research should be go on! But keep in mind that theoretical results must be checked with the Nature; otherwise, they are worthless.
The Standard Model is not quite ‚wrong’. However, it is only incomplete, i.e. it can‘t be proved true or false according to the Second Gödel‘s Incompleteness Theorem.
Hello Jakob,
Way back in my junior year of college I took an elective class entitled "The History of Natural Science" taught by Professor Mark Graubard (yes, he had a gray beard!). On the first day of class he made the bold statement that many significant scientific discoveries waited for hundreds of years before being made until a baby was born to make the discovery. He said the course would be dedicated to proving this thesis with many examples. I found it remarkable that Dr. Graubard showed many cases where all the evidence was in plain sight, but not recognized until that special
person was born with clear eyes to see it. Such is the history of science. It takes a lot of courage to break the mold of current thinking with what almost always begins as a "crackpot" theory. Power to that future baby who sees what is in plain sight and gives it to the world!
Love this. Pretty much the optimistic version of Planck's principle "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
But I would argue that it's not necessarily a genetic thing but also societal/cultural factors do play a role. I.e. many people that could make the discovery don't make it because of the glasses society makes them wear.
E.g. Peer review kills ideas in people’s minds before they’re even born. Knowing that your ideas won’t count for anything unless peer reviewers like them will train you mind to not waste any time on weird ideas.
Thanks for sharing!
The author writes: Also, you can falsify Galileo’s theory simply by jumping into the air.
You can toss a ball up while sitting on a moving care and it will return to your hand, despite the fact that during the time the ball was in the air your hand moved a foot or so away from where it was when it launched the ball up. Your falsification method would not convince anyone making a serious inquiry.
My understanding of the motivations for Einsteins theory were very much anomalies. The idea that the apparent velocity of an object depends on you frame of reference, *except* for light. And the crazy coincidence that gravitational mass and inertial mass were the same. Neither of these things made any sense.
Then the Rutherford atom made no sense. The Bohr atom only worked in a single example and was arbitrary. And finally there was the weirdness of the photoelectric effect. Took a long time to create a package that sewed all that together and then there were new anomalies. Right down to this day we have new crazy stuff that makes no sense like Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
Will it ever make sense. I suspect not. In any case if it does happen, it won't be in my lifetime.
You do realize that you are parroting Kuhn?
I truly can't see a single thing in your account that differs from early Kuhn.
"Popper’s and Kuhn’s ideas were a lot more nuanced. What I’m describing here is the caricature version existing in many researchers minds.'
You think!?
This is such a misrepresentation of both I am left speechless
Oh, here's an example of one of those babies, Christian Doppler, on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo5P54s--qU
Hi Jakob,
Very interesting to follow your thoughts. I also studied at KIT like you, but 40+ years ago.
s. http://linkedin.com/in/hung-nguyen-schäfer-6113a45b
Do you some ideas about how to unify the four forces of the Nature, i.e. the electromagnetic, strong, electroweak, and gravity forces into the TOE? How to consider the dark matter and dark energy? Could we quantize the graviton to combine it to other forces in Quantum Gravity?
Look forward to hearing from you.
Hung
Thinking about a TOE is a waste of time right now imo.
Better to take a step back and make sure we're understanding General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics properly we try to merge some. (And yes, I would argue we don't.)
I understand your thought. We have already understood both GRT and QM very well since more than one hundred years.
General Relative Theory (GRT) is based on the Classical Mechanics; Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Quantum Field Theory QFT (= QM + SRT) are quantized mechanics and relativistic particle physics. The latter strongly depends on the Standard Model (SM), which is quite not suitable for TOE (= QFT + GRT).
Even the Higgs boson was not directly and correctly found in LHC. How about the antiparticles of dark matters are not yet taken into account in the SM? To find the very small and extremely light particles or antiparticles, a very huge LHC is unconditionally necessary to check our theoretical hypotheses. However, such LHC will be never built in far future due to financial issue and possible capacity of the mankind.
That is the reality of TOE right now and in far future. However, the research should be go on! But keep in mind that theoretical results must be checked with the Nature; otherwise, they are worthless.
The Standard Model is not quite ‚wrong’. However, it is only incomplete, i.e. it can‘t be proved true or false according to the Second Gödel‘s Incompleteness Theorem.
This has nothing to do with Godel's work.