18AR23-22

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )

AR 23:22 - What is the 'criterion' of physical reality?

In this issue:

SCIENCE - explaining supposedly observable phenomena without necessarily having to tell a true story?

+ 'an insightful, delightfully pugnacious polemic about the leading controversy in science today'

Apologia Report 23:22 (1,388)

July 5, 2018

SCIENCE

"Questioning Truth, Reality, and the Role of Scientific Progress" -- Philip Ball interviews Michela Massimi (a recent recipient of the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal, an award given annually by the UK's Royal Society) regarding her prize lecture in which she "defended both science and the philosophy of science from accusations of irrelevance. She argues that neither enterprise should be judged in purely utilitarian terms, and asserts that they should be allies in making the case for the social and intellectual value of the open-ended exploration of the physical world. ...

"Her work asks whether the process of science approaches a singular, true conception of the world, or whether it is content with simply describing physical phenomena, ignoring any sense of whether the stories it tells about the world are true."

Ball asks: "What use, then, is philosophy of science if not for scientists themselves?" Massimi replies, in part, that "The philosopher of science who explores Bayesian [statistical] methods in cosmology, or who scrutinizes assumptions behind simplified models in high-energy physics, is no different from the archaeologist, the historian or the anthropologist in producing knowledge that is useful for us as humankind. ...

"Physicists these days do not necessarily read other subjects at university or get trained in a broad range of topics at school. Large scientific collaborations enforce a more granular level of scientific expertise. More to the point, the whole ethos of scientific research - reflected in institutional practices of how scientific research is incentivized, evaluated, and research funding distributed - has changed. Today, science has to be of use to a well-identified group, or it is deemed to be of no use at all.

"But just as with philosophy, we need fundamental research in science (and in the humanities) because it is part of our cultural heritage and scientific history. It is part of who we are. ...

"The received view up to the 1960s was that scientific progress was to be understood in terms of producing theories that were more and more likely to be true, in the sense of being better and better approximations to an ideal limit of scientific inquiry - for example, to some kind of theory of everything, if one exists. With the historical work of Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, this view was in part replaced by an alternative that sees our ability to solve more and more problems and puzzles as the measure of our scientific success, regardless of whether or not there is an ideal limit of scientific inquiry to which we are all converging.

"Philosophy of science has contributed to ... debates about the nature of scientific success and progress, and as a result we have a more nuanced and historically sensitive view today.

"But also the reverse is true: Science has offered to philosophers of science new questions to ponder. ...

Ball: "You say there has been a debate between realist and anti-realist views of science. Can you explain this?

Massimi: "The debate has a long history, and it is fundamentally about philosophical stances on science. What is the overarching aim of science? Does science aim to provide us with an approximately true story about nature, as realism would have it? Or does science instead aim to save the observable phenomena without necessarily having to tell us a true story, as some antirealists would contend instead? ...

Ball: "You have argued for a new position, called perspectival realism. What is that?

Massimi: "I see perspectival realism as a realist position, because it claims (at least in my own version of it) that truth does matter in science. We cannot be content with just saving the observable phenomena and producing theories that account for the available evidence. Yet it acknowledges that scientists don't have a God's-eye view of nature: Our conceptual resources, theoretical approaches, methodologies and technological infrastructures are historically and culturally situated. ...

Ball: "You have written about the role of evidence in science. This has become a hot topic because of the efforts in some parts of physics to push into realms for which there is scant evidence that might be used to test theories. Do you think true science can be done even where empiricism is not (at this point) an option?

Massimi: "This is an important question because, as I mentioned, the answer to the question of how to be a realist despite the perspectival nature of our knowledge depends also on how we go about collecting, analyzing and interpreting evidence for hypothetical new entities (which might or might not be real). Not only is such evidence very difficult to gather in areas like cosmology or particle physics, but also the tools we have for interpreting the evidence are very often a matter of perspective. ...

"From a philosophical point of view, what has dramatically changed is not simply old ideas about the interplay between theory and evidence, but, more importantly, our ideas of progress in science and realism. ...

"I personally believe that a realist viewpoint can include our ability to carve out the space of what might be objectively possible in nature, rather than in terms of mapping onto some actual states of affairs. This is what perspectival realism is driving at. ...

Ball: "How did you start thinking about all of this?

Massimi: "... I bumped into the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper of 1935 ['Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete,' the first paper to point to the phenomenon now called quantum entanglement]. I was struck by the 'criterion of physical reality' that featured on their first page - if without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity. I wondered why a physics article would start by asserting a seemingly very philosophical claim about 'physical reality.' Anyway, I thought, what is a 'criterion' of physical reality? And is this one justified? I remember then reading Niels Bohr's response to that EPR paper, which chimed in my mind with more modest, knowledge-based claims about how we come to know about what there is in the world." WIRED, Jun 2 '18, <www.bit.ly/2yK4oxL>

See <www.bit.ly/2yIcirC> for more on quantum controversy and its abuse.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder [1] -- the promo concludes: "Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth." To arrive at this, it begins: "Most physicists think of beauty as the royal road to discovery; a leading critic shows it is instead the road to nowhere whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these 'too good to not be true' theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods."

Kirkus (Apr 15 '18) explains: "In her first book for a popular audience, a 'story of how aesthetic judgment drives contemporary research,' Hossenfelder ... a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, expresses despair that the golden age of physics ended with her parents' generation. By the 1970s, a torrent of Nobel Prizes went to physicists who unified a confusing melange of subatomic particles into the elegant standard model and did the same for three out of four fundamental forces. While a brilliant achievement, the standard model failed to answer basic questions such as the nature of dark matter and energy, matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the impossibility of quantizing gravity. The author maintains that fashionable new theories addressing these issues are preoccupied with beauty and naturalness to the neglect of actual observation. Thus, supersymmetry solves several problems by predicting dozens of new subatomic particles that the most powerful accelerators have failed to find. String theory seems to explain almost everything, but its basis is pure mathematics, and its postulates are untestable by any conceivable technology. 'I can't believe what this once-venerable profession has become,' writes Hossenfelder. 'Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed. And they're not even good at that.... But there are so many ways not to explain something.' A take-no-prisoners interviewer, the author asks pointed questions of the giants of physics and is not shy about arguing with them. Even educated readers will struggle to understand the elements of modern physics, but they will have no trouble enjoying this insightful, delightfully pugnacious polemic about its leading controversy." The conclusion observes that the book is "an entertaining attack on her profession, arguing that it has fallen in love with theories that bear little relation to reality."

Consider Hossenfelder's observation that string theory seems to be used to explain almost everything. In his effusively optimistic and often uncritical book, The Future of Humanity [2], science media celebrity Michio Kaku <www.bit.ly/2lNfusF> reveals how some scientists now believe that "all of 20th-century physics might have been discovered" by using just string theory alone - without Einstein or particle accelerators (p280). The thinking here is getting very bizarre. String theory allows for "an infinite number of other equally valid alien universes" - and the presence of 10 dimensions (p281). Defending the theory, Kaku adds that "There is nothing special about three or four dimensions." Why should there be? "Mathematicians have no problem with string theory" (p282). If ever there was license for having science say anything you want it to, we now seem to have acquired the magic formula. Consequently, Kaku concludes that humanity may evolve enough to control the Big Bang expansion of the entire universe (p299). How much secular faith in science does THAT require? Hmm?

-------

SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, by Sabine Hossenfelder (Basic, 2018, hardcover, 304 pages) <www.amzn.to/2Kmel60>

2 - The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth, by Michio Kaku (Doubleday, 2018, hardcover, 368 pages) <www.amzn.to/2KAi5nQ>

------

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )