When science fails...

...redefine science....

Because sometimes "science just doesn't work, B*tch!"

//This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.

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Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts.

These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.//

Actually, it looks like physics is due for a paradigm shift.

Paradigm Shifts and Big Bang Deniers.

This is a statement from various scientists seeking to have a re-allocation of resources into an investigation of the validity of the presuppositions of the Big Bang theory, rather than spending all money on research that assumes that theory. According the statement sponsors, all is not serene in science-land:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

Interesting.

Science describes nature, but that doesn't mean it understands nature.

Tony Rothman points out some conundrums of science:

Each February, I begin the introductory electricity and magnetism course at Princeton University by telling my students that the material we will cover during the semester provides the basis for modern civilization.


Who could quibble with such an innocent statement? Without the discoveries of nineteenth-century physicists and their successors, we could hardly imagine today’s world: no electrical power grid, no televisions, no satellites, no iPads.

Physicists are justly proud of the many ways that their achievements have benefited humankind. But building a light bulb or a telephone doesn’t mean that you understand its basic principles (Thomas Edison and Alexander Bell certainly didn’t). Unfortunately, many of my colleagues – particularly those who write textbooks – present physics as a towering, seamless basilica, ignoring the gaps in our hodge-podge of skewed models. In fact, what is presented as a shimmering cathedral often more closely resembles a hastily erected shantytown.

For example, one needs only first-semester equations to describe reasonably well the behavior of a gyroscope; engineers can then go off and build gyrocompasses that guide aircraft or missiles to their destinations. But if you merely ask, “At what, exactly, is the gyroscope pointed?” you are plunged headlong into one of physics’ deepest questions, one that led Einstein to develop his general theory of relativity – and that, even today, has no definitive answer. I know of no undergraduate textbook that acknowledges the question.

On a more blatant, if less exalted, level, the force of friction makes its appearance in the first days of any first-year course. We declare, as if there can be no doubt, that friction impedes the motion between two bodies, and we invoke sophisticated microscopic models that show how the soles of running shoes bind to a track.

Yet friction produces heat and thus an increase in entropy – which measures the amount of energy that cannot be used to perform work – and it therefore distinguishes past from future. The increase in entropy – the second law of thermodynamics – is the only law of nature that makes this fundamental distinction.

If Newtonian mechanics is at the bottom of everything, then one should be able to derive the second law of thermodynamics from Newtonian physics. But this has never been accomplished satisfactorily: the incompatibility of the second law with the other fundamental laws is perhaps the greatest paradox in all of physics.

Still, we brazenly drop this enigma into the first days of a first-year course without batting an eye. We write down equations that show how friction slows the motion of sliding objects or dampens the vibrations in springs, but, ultimately, the math merely reproduces our observations while disguising our ignorance of what underlies them.

After decades – indeed, centuries – of employing such tricks, physicists have forgotten that they are modeling phenomena, not necessarily uncovering Divine Truth. For instance, we can easily write down the equations for a ball on a swinging spring, but if we stretch the spring enough and swing the ball hard enough, we can’t solve those equations. The motion becomes chaotic, making an exact mathematical solution impossible.

Nowadays, with computers, we can approximate the trajectory as closely as we want. But that is the point: most physicists and students have lost sight of the distinction between the approximate and the exact. We can certainly learn something about chaotic systems without actually solving the equations, but if an old-fashioned mathematician demanded that a student predict where that ball was heading, the student would inevitably fail.

Even something as fundamental as Newton’s law of gravity is ultimately an approximation. Textbook authors dutifully write down the famous law without remarking that it results in infinite forces when the two attracting objects get infinitely close together. Never mind that infinite forces are a sure sign that your theory has gone up in smoke: in the current crop of textbooks sitting on my desk, not one mentions the obvious pathology.

Our Princeton text compounds the oversight by declaring that, “strictly speaking” Newton’s law of gravity is valid only for particles. Well, particles are exactly where Newton goes awry – and not just in first-semester physics. The basic equation of electricity is “Coulomb’s law,” which governs the electrical attraction or repulsion between charged particles and looks exactly like Newton’s law of gravity. Now, we always tell students to imagine electrons as point particles, in which case they really do need to worry about those infinite forces.

The problems that arise from modeling particles as vanishingly small points infect all advanced areas of physics. Central to any quantum mechanics course is the concept of electron “spin,” but what, exactly, is spinning is never made clear. Wolfgang Pauli, one of the concept’s originators, at first rejected the idea, because if the electron has a finite radius, then the surface would be spinning faster than the speed of light. On the other hand, if you view the electron as a point particle, how are you to imagine something without a radius spinning?

To cure the point-particle pathologies, physicists invented modern field theories, with impressive names such as quantum electrodynamics. But these theories turned out to be as riddled with infinities as their grandparents, and elaborate ad hoc schemes were invented to deal with the new problems encountered.

And so, despite headline-grabbing advances such as string theory, it goes to this very day. One can hardly challenge the predictive success of modern physics, but one should remember that one is describing nature, and not always understanding it.

The Problem with Science.

The New Yorker has an interesting article on a fairly open secret, but one which would blow the faith of most people, invested as they are in a "scientistic faith."

The problem is that the fact that replicability of experimental results - one of the key principles of science - is a pretty hit or miss deal:

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.


Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

The phenomenon can be chased to publication bias, "significance chasing," sheer randomness and the overwhelming influence of the accepted paradigm:

This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.


Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦

The problem with science is that it involves people.