FYI, I have a whole series of unpublished chapters about the (very messy) history of science. I decided to take this different approach because I thought it would be a more effective way of reaching my target audience.
> Science as a human enterprise has flourished best without anyone putting boxes on what does and what doesn't consitute science.
That's not true. There is one box you cannot get out of without destroying the process: any hypothesis that is inconsistent with experiment must be rejected (and as a corollary to that, unfalsifiable hypotheses must be rejected). But yeah, beyond that pretty much anything goes.
Regarding your second statement, out of curiosity, I wonder how you would characterize the 1989 series of experiments done by Fleischmann and Pons.
You can find them here:
Note that they are quite drafty. That was the result of a previous effort to tackle this project of writing about the scientific method for a general audience that I ultimately abandoned in favor of this current approach. The history part starts in chapter 5.
These were based on a series of lectures I gave a few years ago. I can dig up those links too if you're interested.
> I wonder how you would characterize the 1989 series of experiments done by Fleischmann and Pons.
I'm not sure what you expect me to say. The results have not been reproduced, so whatever happened in 1989 it was almost certainly not cold fusion.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
An older quote, addressing this case more directly would be (Eddington):
"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — *well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes.* But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
Also, I cover the Sagan quote in the previous installment:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/the-scientific-method-pa...
His performance in a philosophy thread a while back was extraordinary, explaining the truth and true value of various philosophy and philosophers, despite not having read it.
This is the power of The Science, nothing is more powerful, and nothing can be more powerful.
Life does a pretty good job of evading it, locally, for lifetimes. Civilizations overcome it for longer, perhaps indefinitely, as long as there are stars/blackholes in the sky, or uranium/hydrogen nuclear fuel to be scavenged.
Wolfram recently tried to explain the 2nd Law, as a consequence of time-coherent computationally-bounded observers. As always with him, it is fascinating and infuriatingly in equal measure:
https://www.wolfram-media.com/products/the-second-law-resolv...
Those subsystems that evade it (life) also need explanation. Friston, Levin, Lane, England and others are starting to give plausible models and explanations.
There are many other reports more or less with the same proviso. 'Not yet publishable'. Many will wonder about the 'yet' but that's usually the case with potentially new areas of science.
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0153487 Li–Pd–Rh-D2O electrochemistry experiments at elevated voltage
You need to read the third installment in my series:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/three-myths-about-scient...
and in particular Myth #3.
The scientific method assumes naturalism/materialism/atheism... This is false. The scientific method contains no assumptions whatsoever. The scientific method is simply that: a method.
I don't think that's a good way to put it. There is an assumption that this method is a valid, useful, good thing to do. A souffle recipe presupposes that you want a souffle, or you wouldn't be reading it.
The scientific method hints ambiguously at epistemological commitments, and that ambiguity is not a point in its favor. Different people make those assumptions tacitly and don't realize that they disagree with each other, and don't even apply them consistently to themselves.
I also happen to agree that the scientific method has some kind of epistemic benefit, especially as compared to the potential alternatives. But those benefits prove maddeningly difficult to nail down. The epistemic commitments always turn out to be too loose (admitting pseudosciences) or too strict (rejecting sciences that resist the kinds of experiments you'd like to do).
No, that is not an assumption. That is an observation. The scientific method produces theories with predictive power, and it does this better than any other known method. That is an empirical fact, not an assumption. This is the reason science is a thing.
You're applying the scientific method to itself, making a large-scale inference from limited data. This is precisely the grounds on which the Logical Positivists realized that they couldn't achieve their ends of putting science on a sound scientific footing.
Yes, that's true. So?
> You're applying the scientific method to itself
Yes, that's true too.
> This is precisely the grounds on which the Logical Positivists realized that they couldn't achieve their ends of putting science on a sound scientific footing.
Maybe, but I'm not making any claims about knowledge. The only claim I'm making is about effectiveness and that's an empirical claim. not a philosophical one. One can go on to hypothesize that science is effective because it is "true" (whatever that means). That seems plausible to me (for some reasonable definition of "true") but it's still just another hypothesis.
For example, maybe vague observations of Mercury were consistent with Newton. But eventually, telescopes improved, duration of accurate records extended, many good instruments were deployed around the world. Then it became a Problem. Also note that Einstein fitted GR to Mercury, so he could not predict it as independent confirmation. It took the Eddington observation of light bending near the sun, during a solar eclipse, to provide the first evidence (even that was weak, and fixed, but the fix was on the right side of history :)
You could. It says "First, science never proves anything; instead it produces explanations of observations." but science doesn't have to explain an observation. There are tons of times when science tells us what we'll observe under certain conditions while never giving us an explanation for how/why it works out that way. An explanation is the ideal, but all science needs is to give us something we can reasonably predict to be useful.
Not really, this is a conclusion that is drawn only by looking at the big names and highlights throughout the scientific history. In practice the experiments in themselves is flawed, so if the hypothesis is not confirmed through experiments the experiment design need to be fixed. Other times they are confirmed where the experiments also was flawed.
Also there are a lot of hypothesis we cannot reject, but we still build scientific work upon them.
Yes, of course. Experimental error is always a possibilities, but that is just another hypothesis that needs to be considered along with all the other possibilities.
> Also there are a lot of hypothesis we cannot reject, but we still build scientific work upon them.
Like what?
A repeatedly failed experiment sounds just as bad as it should.
That is an oxymoron. A repeatedly "failed" experiment is a valid scientific result. There is even a classic example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...