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Comment by acyou | Hacker News Reader

Though the title is copied from the article, the title is needlessly inflammatory. Given the replication, practical application and self-admitted quantum physics vs. standard model crisis/failures of modern particle physics, astronomy, and cosmic theory, declaring victory around the Big Bang Theory is, and may always be premature, despite the surrounding dogma.

Would anyone who knew him personally agree that he claimed to have "confirmed the big bang theory", and that he would want to be remembered in that way?

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While "confirmed" is a very strong term, CMBR is an obscenely good piece of evidence that something that is pretty much 99%+ similar to modern theories of the big bang, and it ruled out most other theories.

> Would anyone who knew him personally agree that he claimed to have "confirmed the big bang theory", and that he would want to be remembered in that way?

Almost certainly not, at least not the scientists who knew him. The scientific method does not involve proving (or "confirming") theories; it only involves falsifiable theories and attempts to falsify them.

> it *only* involves falsifiable theories and attempts to falsify them.

Your view is needlessly narrow. Coming up with new theories, collecting new data, verifying how theories fit that data is also part of the process even if it doesn't falsify them. To quote wikipedia it's on going process:

"The process in the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypothetical explanations), deriving predictions from the hypotheses as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions."

The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories. The process does allow refining theories to fit new evidence, for sure, but a refined theory is a new theory, with the old one disproven, but this only works when theories are falsifiable. Therefore we never speak of "proven" or "confirmed" theories.

> The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories.

What is your source? Wikipedia disagrees with you.

Think some context here would help. Karl Popper established the limits of “truth” as much as Gödel and his incompleteness theorems did…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

TL;DR: If a theory isn’t falsifiable—if it doesn’t make any predictions which can be proved or disproved—then it’s more philosophy than science. By this standard, for example, string theory fails.

> The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories

This is definitely not true. One obvious example is that important scientific work is done turning unfalsifiable theories into falsifiable ones. After gravitational waves were predicted by general relativity there was some argument about whether they were a real observable thing or just an artifact of the maths. Those guys were undoubtedly doing "real science" while discussing something that some of them thought was undetectable (and therefore unfalsifiable).

Another example is that a lot of science is exploratory without any particular theory you're trying to falsify.

Science is more interesting and broad than your dogma about what it should be.

scientists only speak this formally in rare occasionally, like when they are trying to discredit a competitor.

The vast majority of the time, when a working scientists says "proved" they understand the epistemic limitations of the terminology.

What theory were the people observing the 1769 transit of Venus trying to falsify? If they weren't doing science, what were they doing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1769_transit_of_Venus_observed...

They were collecting data. The theory had already been worked out at that point, but it required data to be put to use. I think this does broadly fit within the framework of Popperian falsification that OP is describing. But I'd also agree that classification and data gathering, as well as hypthothesis generation are of course all vital parts of the scientific process. It is worth noting though that a surprisingly large number of scientists have issues grokking or putting into action the concept of 'falsifying the null hypothesis'.

Science only involves falsifiable theories != science doesn't involve first gathering data. It means that unfalsifiable theories aren't science.

In a 2005 autobiography, he described some of his work as having "provided strong support for the “Big Bang” interpretation of our earlier discovery". - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1978/penzias/biogr...

Strong support is obviously not the same as confirmation, so I think you're right that he might have disagreed with this word choice.

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