If you believe in science you're doing it wrong
worldofweirdthings.com
worldofweirdthings.com
"Physics is done!" reads the abstract. "We can all go home now."
At the conference where this is all presented, some lone undergrad student standing in the back asks "Why this equation? Why does this combination of terms describe the universe, and so many others don't?"
You can try to address this question with religion, or "belief", or Dawkins-esque philosophy, or you can choose not to address it at all. But you can't answer it with science. Science has a clear and definite end, and that end does not give us the "why" of the universe, only the "how". You can say "There is no why", but that is still an answer to a question that science does not answer.
Speaking purely subjectively, I don't view the "why" (or its absence) as unimportant simply because it can't be addressed purely on scientific terms.
2) It is a misconception that physics can trace the whole history of the universe, or even any part of it. The Holy Grail Unified Theory is not a full descriptor of our universe, it is a full descriptor of the _forces_ of our universe.
3) There's something in your language that makes me feel like you're not really tackling the question completely. "Speaking purely subjectively" might be part of it--as if one can speak purely objectively.
Maybe it's just that _no_ system could ever adequately answer that question. Why anything? Why doesn't the universe not exist? The question itself is temptingly meaningful, but ultimately empty, since it itself is part of the universe. I don't even know how to begin constructing the universe's not existing in my mind.
So it's not a fault of science that it does not answer that question. It at least has the wisdom not to try.
Similarly, it's not the question's fault that science cannot answer it.
I say "subjectively" because it is not an objective fact that the question has value or is meaningful. Clearly, you and many others view it as "empty". I don't. In that sense the value or utility of the question is subjective.
It's like asking about the nature of hobbits. (Actually, this does have practical provenance in certain circles, but let's try to overlook that for a bit.) Hobbit qualities can be essentially whatever we want them to be, so their precise nature only matters insofar as they reflect our desires. We desire to hold true to Tolkien's vision, so we accept his details as truth and might extrapolate a bit here and there.
That doesn't mean the question has any bearing on reality.
Similarly, I could ask, why isn't there a force that could destroy our reality retroactively, eating through space and time a la the Nothing of the Never-Ending Story?
And the answer is more or less, if it happened, we would know (or rather, not know anymore) by now. The question assumes that there could be such a thing.
I suppose I view "Why doesn't the universe not exist?" in the same light.
To explain further: You are saying that everything observable is understood. So, this means that the only evidence for "why" is the equations themselves.
"Why" is the cause or intention underlying something. However, there are infinite explanations how any piece of evidence arose. If all that we have is the evidence, without knowing the laws governing the universe it was produced in, then there is no way of deriving intention, i.e. "why" the evidence exists.
I'd think most follow epistemologies that allow for the value of data: things you see, touch, taste, measure, or otherwise experience have an informative effect upon you and are (so far in human history, I hope and, in absence of omniscience, believe) consistent.
Science is not data though. It goes one step further and seeks to compress observation via generation of models. Or to take the other side of the debate, it seeks to unearth the generating rules of our universe. It thus is a process of turning informative data into — well — something not too different from belief. In any case, it seems strongly motivated (to our pattern seeking minds anyway) by that aforementioned consistency: something seems to be afoot. Here's how we can find what that is. Then the question is "what does it mean?".
Though, by Popperian philosophy you're safe right here, right? So long as your models provide verisimilitude to your experience (ie. accurately predict it) then they have value — lets not take it any further, now. The question is avoided by taking an interpretation where it doesn't even exist.
When someone says they believe in science, they're probably coming from a a certain class of interpretation. They may believe that science is a viable process to generate verisimilitudinous statements. They may believe that science is capable of fully divulging the rules which, axiomatically, created our reality. They may believe that science is the careful interpretation of the will of Some Kind of Divinity.
And, who knows, perhaps all three of those interpretations are equally valid, deeply identical, or too blurred by our imprecise understanding and language (Wittgenstein stood here, I think). I feel a great deal of desire to side with this philosophical point of view; and so I'm spending the most energy being skeptical with it.
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Anyway, a lot of really smart people have spent a lot of energy trying to settle their minds with this question if not answer it. I hardly think you can do science without somehow coming to peace with that. The author doesn't seem to want to go there though, and that's fair when battling someone who's really disagreeing all the way back on the consistency of the world bit. Without that, you can't even have the reductionism that science depends on.
I'm curious to pore through Popper, Hoffstaedter, Gauss (Jaynes too I suppose), Wittgenstein, and Peirce hoping to see what they all thought about it, though.
Think about it: how would you prove that "science" itself is correct? My answer is "it accurately predicts (and optionally explains) what effect certain actions will have on the future". But this answer is question-begging; it assumes that prediction is useful, which is a scientific belief. To a magical thinker, it seems just as silly as "reciting a paragraph from this book will protect me from illness" does to us.
Magical thinking is fundamentally based on a distrust of prediction. Homeopathy has never cured any condition (excluding dehydration), yet magical thinkers try it because they think it'll work for them. Nobody has ever survived fasting for over a year, yet every few months there's another story in the news about somebody who starved to death after deciding to live on sunshine.
I think the modern world, in which we regularly live to 100 and have literally walked on the moon, is a result of science -- but I can't prove that. After all, the concept of "proof" is itself scientific, so it can't be used to argue against magic.
Statements in our minds can sometimes be accepted axiomatically--that is, what you believe to be true about reality. We need a way to comment on reality's qualities.
In this sense, "belief in science" can roughly be translated as, "belief that whatever science reveals is true re: our reality."
(It's actually all statistics, which means that we're only _excluding_ things from admittance into what we accept as true about our reality. Belief in science, then, is belief that only that which is detectable exists.)
So the article misses the point anyway; science doesn't _grant_ proof, it grants a process for disproof and allows us to believe in what's left over.
Feynman on The Relation of Science and Religion.
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and don't even talk about the same issues (most of the time). There is a certain amount of faith people have when doing science, for example answering the "meta" question: Do the rules of the Universe stay constant? Science has no way of answering that question, nor should it. It assumes the answer is yes, and takes it from there. Gravity could stop working tomorrow, and it wouldn't invalidate all of the science that had gone on.
And yet, he has yet to realize the nature of science is not to know - because our senses ARE faulty - but as a practical TOOL to make our lives a little easier. Seeing a blue sky and then thinking there is a blue sky IS belief, no matter how many people agree with you, and independent of that belief's utility.
>When we step down from their mental ivory towers and really think about it, the assertion that science is just a belief or another way of creating dogmas is monstrously stupid.
ie, if you can't "know" anything (solipsism), you can only believe in science. In which case, You're Doing It Wrong™.
It's not that you can't know anything, and so you can put anything you want in there. It's that 1) some things are beyond knowing, and 2) all science is provisional. These two things mean that creatively explaining the unknown has a rich and critical part in our existence.
He's presenting a false dichotomy. Yes, some folks will use religion to tell you why the sun comes up, but that doesn't mean all religious belief systems are invalid.
Religious beliefs are simply shared creative responses to the unknown. In this sense, they are about as close to the theory-formation part of science as anything can be. The difference is that theory-formation in science occurs inside a highly structured system of other theories and rules and observations, while religious explanations can just be made up by anybody.
I get tired of this "post-modernists think there is nothing solid" nonsense. Yes, some of them got the title but missed the subtext. But the point of understanding the provisional nature of science isn't to somehow discredit it, it's to keep in mind how much more there is to discover. You can be highly-critical of the political nature of how science is conducted, as I am, and still be a huge supporter of the practice and continuation of theory and research. Knowing the difference between the philosophy of science, the politics of the practice of science, the epistemological nature of science, and the pattern of scientific revolution? In my opinion, this is when you first start having a clue about what all these debates about science mean.
We've come a long way since Descartes and his brain in a jar. The conversation isn't at that point any more.