Spooked: What do we learn about science from a controversy in physics?

Scientists very rarely use the end-all-be-all language of the news reports. I still hear people saying that the accelerating universe (a nobel prize discovery) is 'quite probable' not 'didn't you know, we solved that, stop thinking about it.'

There are whole branches devoted to disproving big bang cosmology. Are they right? Probably not, but their presence and arguments are extremely valuable. Disagreement is the founding, basic principle of science! It's what separates scientific faith from religious faith. Seeing scientists argue and debate each other in a public forum is the best possible evidence that the process is in fact working properly.

Hardly a surprise that human activity, even one as exalted as real science, reflects human nature which is a subset of all nature. What science has taught and made us so much more aware of, is how much uncertainty is a central, inescapable feature of the human condition, yet it is the fact of life we resist most strongly.

So it's unsurprising scientists (and the progress of science) have often stumbled on the merely human side of things, we are social creatures, and such attributes are not removed just because we are "doing science", much less when individuals become celebrities on account of it.

Seems to me the essence of the scientific approach is the willingness to say "I don't know" when we don't know, and to own up to mistakes or wrong conclusions when conclusions turn out to be incomplete or misguided. Well maybe it would be better not to be so firm about conclusions anyway, as the article points out, history has shown that whatever we regard as "facts" at a particular time are at best temporary rest stops on the path of increasing knowledge.

》One way or another, science really happens. The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think. Samuel Johnson said that a performer riding on three horses may not accomplish anything, but he increases our respect for the faculties of man. The scientists who show that nature rides three horses at once—or even two horses, on opposite sides of the universe—also widen our respect for what we are capable of imagining, and it is this action, at its own spooky distance, that really entangles our minds.

What in the world does this even mean? Science is revered as much as it is today simply because it has proven over and over again that it is the only field and/or industry and/or intellectual pursuit that is capable of producing truth that is independent of race, religion, or socioeconomic status. THAT is the true utility of science: demonstrating that there is a frame of reference that the vast majority of human beings can participate in and get the exact same results as anyone else. Riding three horses at once is pointless but providing a common language for the epistemology of human civilization isnt just for the warm fuzzies.

I think I have very much misunderstood the author and am butchering his argument for the sake of a straw man, but I can't help but feel that every other paragraph has yet another assertion that is too vague to be wrong but too specific to be right, all without a central premise other than "science works" and "fallible humans do science so science is fallible."

Ugh, that "many historians or philosophers of science" comes off as the "informed sources" that conspiracy theorists claim have evidence of chemtrails or the reptilian brotherhood. Who exactly are these people and what is precisely their argument? In my opinion, this is the single greatest thing that distinguishes science from other fields, it is inductive reasoning[0] taken to an extreme. Therefore, if anyone has reason to doubt Popper's criterion, then that should be of heavy focus in the article. The author is almost guilty of "argument by inaccessible literature"[1] for what I would think is the most important part of his argument.

However, he does make an important point. Science is a human endeavour, and given that, it has issues that human institutions have. However, assuming uniformity of cognitive biases across both scientists and magicians[2], this just puts them on equal footing, while scientists have their experimental criterion, which then puts them ahead of magicians anyway.

With regards to the entanglement saga, I think the reason no one heard about it is much more mundane...there simply was no way to test it until Bell's inequality, so scientists didn't think about it. So yes, "just ignore it" was the solution because without a testable hypothesis, and may be some interesting math, scientists just don't pursue it. In that way, science might suffer due it being performed by human scientists who do have moods, but once experiment entered the picture, boy did the field blow up! I don't think it had much to do with changing attitudes as much as it came with the ability to test Bell's inequality. The same could be said about GR, with the current advances in numeric GR in the last decade spurring interest in it. It is because our moods change, but I think it has a lot more to do with the feasibility of advancement in a field that it does with external influences like the internet or cultural changes.

There are many other interesting problems with established physics, like Godel's metric[3], but, as you guessed it, you don't hear about it because there is no experimental evidence of it, so physicists look elsewhere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning

[1] http://staffhome.ecm.uwa.edu.au/~00043886/humour/invalid.pro...

[2] (which is a scientifically testable hypothesis! but I am unqualified to give evidence for it either way

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel_metric