Any interesting experimental results are interesting precisely because they do not conform to the existing theories.
Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness
Good science has often proceeded from 'weird' observations, leading to experiments trying to isolate the weirdness. The weird is necessarily outside the zone of existing theory, and requires experimentation to recreate the effect reliably and quantifiably. Once that's done, you can iterate on conjectures and experiments to try to get to the bottom of what's going on.
In reality, I suspect that the divide between theorists and experimentalists is really only a fundamental physics thing. And physics has been more-or-less at an impasse for the last thirty years, so that there are relatively few experiments worth running, and the bulk of the theorists are just (making stuff/rebranding as mathematicians) up because they don't know what else to do.
In other areas, there's so much weird still untouched that you don't get the same division of labor. Take a look at CRISPR - there was a lot of bench work and curiosity-driven exploration involved, simply because there was no theory describing what they were discovering... Or machine learning - the theory is still quite tenuous and mainly follows the experimental results.
Additionally, all observations require baked in theories about the observation being accurate.
Btw, I didn’t appreciate your insulting first sentence.
Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness
CRISPR is again a good example - the initial 'weirdness' was an observation of lots of long-ish palindromic subsequences in bacterial DNA. To my knowledge, there was no pre-existing theory on the preponderance of palindromic subsequences in DNA.
Now, we could say that these researchers were proceeding from a theory that there's no easily discernable combinatorial macroscopic structure in DNA sequences, but I think that this would stretch the idea of 'theory' beyond common usage or even usefulness: There's no theorem or axioms of DNA sequencing being violated here.
In fact, I would expect that weirdness is a good sign of missing theory - a repeatable observation which is unsupported by existing theory. For perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, we see an explicit violation of Newtonian mechanics, but in many other cases (like CRISPR and palindromic subsequences) we have observations of structure in areas where theory simply does not yet exist.
(Apologies for the harsh first sentence; FWIW, your comment seemed belittling of the work of a large fraction of important scientists.)
We are in a world where exponentially growing amounts of energy are needed to confirm/deny an increasingly small slice of the standard model. We still don't know what dark matter or energy is (almost literal holes in theory), we haven't figured out how to scale up quantum computers, and we don't have scalable fusion reactors. The cost of progress is growing and the rewards are diminishing; I call that an impasse.
(Arguably we could call the ongoing advances in materials science cases of applied quantum mechanics, with some blurry line with fundamental physics.)
You are right that I'm not a physicist - I'm trained as a mathematician, and these days work in the intersection of machine learning, acoustics, and ecology. Having looked around a lot with impact-colored glasses, I don't see the argument for fundamental physics, but am happy to be wrong.
We had the first theory on how they operate in 1920s. Eventually we got transistors from that theory in 1950s.
I used to think this way but it’s significantly more liberating and true to see theory as plausible explanations. Theories are very often afterthoughts, where the utility is prediction of new events, or narrowing the search space of experiments. A theory explaining past events only is not really a theory at all. But you can narrow search space in many ways without elaborate theories. For instance, you may assume that since birds can fly, if we make a machine that looks similar, we might be able to fly as well. Terribly simplistic theory, but nevertheless a good starting point.
“The magician will pull a rabbit from the hat” might reliably predict what happens, and be testable, but it is not a good scientific explanation because it doesn’t help anyone understand how the trick works.
"Theory comes first" is particularly unfortunate wording because it seems to imply the naive point of view that people first come up with a thorough mathematical model of some phenomenon before testing and validating it with experiments. That's obviously not how science has worked throughout history.
Saying "all observations/measurements imply an underlying theory" would have been maybe more accurate.
> Why not spend the rest of his life checking different properties of the one sample?
The material in question is called LK-99 because it was first produced in 1999. Why not, indeed :) ?
New technology; Large set of samples; Quantify x<1> … x<n> mRNAs, proteins, lipids, metabolites; Estimate how units stick together (statistically or literally); Develop a “theory” of what units and groups of units interact to account for and predict higher order phenotypes (risk of neurodegeneration; lifespan).
Data take precedence. Mini-theories of molecular and cellular causality are assembled with some basic brain power and yes—-a dollop of theory and priors—-on the back of a massive pool of well structured data.
Exploratory biology of this type is/was insulted using the terms “fishing” or “mere description” but with current high throughput and high content technologies should be considered research “trawling” and factory-level science; not a cottage industry of small labs. This new style of science can be highly effective in biology and in astronomy as we are learning from Webb.
But it bugs the hell out of some classically trained reductionists who demand that clear hypotheses should drive science forward.
Much of the progress in modern biology falls into this alternative almost hypothesis-free style. I would say “story-free” style of science. Too damn many story-tellers.
- Many brute-force combinations of these specific organic molecules will yield interesting results (this is the main hypothesis of the experiment)
- We don't need to include the molecules that we haven't included
- We have good criteria for determining what results are interesting
- Our instruments/methods of phenotype prediction are well-understood and working as expected
Once the experiment is run, the observations are meaningless unless interpreted in the context of whatever prevailing theories the scientists have in mind.
Let’s say you measure a particle going c*2. Without theory you wouldn’t even notice this.
Is that your point?
You cannot even make an observation without theories baked in:
- Normally these things do X
- My senses or instruments are detecting reality accurately
- This thing I’m measuring will result in something interesting etc
It's not true for Discovery in general. New phenomenon can be created and observed without any theory for why they occur, either before or after observation
- I need to observe here and not anywhere else
- I can reliably interpret my senses/the instrumentation is working correctly
- Objects of this type normally behave in X way, because of Y
- etc
Think of it a different way. You can come up with a theory without any observation whatsoever. Black holes, for example, were conjectured well before they were observed.
Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory.
OK I'll bite. What is it then?
Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together.
Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works.
It might be a theory that a scale display a value when I put things on top of it, but that is a different topic, and not what I'm testing.
This Theory doesn't tell me how the world works and if the expected value is 0 lb, 3 lb, or 1 million pounds.
I could go into the lab with no operating Theory or hypothesis on what the value of two masses should be when added together and collect data.
I can collect data with no expectation of correlation, and after measuring the combination of many weights, deduce that there is a relation between the combined weights and the total mass, and in fact it is a simple sum.
> Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works.
The relevant theoretical background here is hidden in the "weigh them together" step: that there is such a thing as weight, it's described by a single real number, you can measure it in such and such a way, and so on.
You don't notice these considerations when it comes to weight and speed and size because they're hardwired into our brains by evolution. We're not so lucky when it comes to, for instance, the quark mixing angles - we can't even conceive of them without a background theory, let alone start measuring them.
If you want to count distant theories like "I exist" or "The world exists", then sure, every action starts with theory. But like I said, that is every different than a specific theory about what outcome an experiment has, and the underlying physics that make it so.
If you think nobody can discover anything without a theory for what could be discovered, you are flat out wrong.
Are you suggesting this was only possible because they had a "theory" that bread is not sweet?
Seeing the apple fall told Newton “some unseen force is acting on the apple.”
Incidentally, this was wrong. There is no “force”, only a warping of space time.