Saturday, July 24, 2021
Can Physics Be Too Speculative?
/ Posted by Sabine Hossenfelder /
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Imagination . . .
Multiverses, dark matter, string theory, fifth forces, . . .
Have physicists gone too far in their speculations?
. . . where to draw the line between science and pseudoscience.
. . . . Dark matter is an example of a research program that used to be progressive but has become degenerative.
. . . guessing a specific particle from rather unspecific observations of its gravitational pull has an infinitesimal chance of working.
Theories for the early universe or fifth forces suffer from a similar problem. They do not explain any existing observations.
Instead, they make the existing – very well working – theories more complicated without solving any problem.
Multiverse research concerns itself with postulating the existence of entities that are unobservable in principle.
This isn’t scientific and should have no place in physics. The origin of the problem seems to be that
many physicists are Platonists – they believe that their math is real, rather than just a description of reality.
But Platonism is a philosophy and shouldn’t be mistaken for science.
/ Posted by Sabine Hossenfelder /
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http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/07/can-physics-be-too-speculative.html
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Can Physics Be Too Speculative?
/ Posted by Sabine Hossenfelder /
------------
Imagination . . .
Multiverses, dark matter, string theory, fifth forces, . . .
Have physicists gone too far in their speculations?
. . . where to draw the line between science and pseudoscience.
. . . . Dark matter is an example of a research program that used to be progressive but has become degenerative.
. . . guessing a specific particle from rather unspecific observations of its gravitational pull has an infinitesimal chance of working.
Theories for the early universe or fifth forces suffer from a similar problem. They do not explain any existing observations.
Instead, they make the existing – very well working – theories more complicated without solving any problem.
Multiverse research concerns itself with postulating the existence of entities that are unobservable in principle.
This isn’t scientific and should have no place in physics. The origin of the problem seems to be that
many physicists are Platonists – they believe that their math is real, rather than just a description of reality.
But Platonism is a philosophy and shouldn’t be mistaken for science.
/ Posted by Sabine Hossenfelder /
------------
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/07/can-physics-be-too-speculative.html
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