Doesn't this apply to all of science?
I mean we don't actually know why anything really works, but we have some models which fit the observations at the moment. This is just a very shallow model i.e. "we poked it and it worked".
I mean we don't actually know why anything really works, but we have some models which fit the observations at the moment. This is just a very shallow model i.e. "we poked it and it worked".
We know very little. The same goes for the atomic model and a lot of other things.
Electrons, protons, quarks? That's our model. We know the equations, we know how to predict a lot of stuff.
This guarantees nothing. Maybe tomorrow someone comes up with a different theory that explains things better but doesn't say anything about waves or particles. Who knows.
Quick example: what's a magnetic field? It is a measurable quantity, there are theories about how forces are exchanged between charged particles, but essentially it is more a mathematical aid than anything else.
And physics is the most 'hard' science. Easily reproducible, the same everywhere in the universe (as far as we know), experiments can be reproduced as many times as you want without interference.
Now if you go to more specific sciences (biology, medicine, etc) it gets worse. They are only valid on planet Earth for a short period of time, for a start. Test subjects all have differences and experimenting on them affects the results.
This guarantees nothing.
We know very little.
To move on to some philosophical background behind your assertion: the idea that there is some 'real', 'objective', 'true' reality that is modeled by these models, is a pre-Kantian point of view. A post-Kantian point of view is that these models of how the universe works are our reality. They are the only thing we can possibly have knowledge of: the models we use to categorize and structure our observations.
Most of them only exist in our brains. They got there by nature and nurture, without us usually spelling them out. They govern our daily behavior. We've tried to formalize the more complex ones in language that is independent of individual humans.
Sometimes observations are not consistent with a model, so we revise the model. Still we only know the new version of the model, which describes what we expect to observe.
These are the results that are verified. The math
What we don't know about is if our model (and not the math or the results) has anything to do with "reality" (and that may not even be possible)
Take the particle/wave duality for example. We're talking about an electron being 'a particle' but sometimes 'a wave'. Of course, we can predict things about the behaviour of this electron, but the story behind it, of particles, waves, may not be accurate, and this may be replaced by something that completely does away with electrons (difficult to imagine since electrons have mass) but comes with similar predictions.
Edit: hnhg: You're right, rephrased properly :)
Personally, I hate this view. There are actual facts, how things work, and there are our best educated guesses about what we're observing. One of these things is what I would call a scientific fact, the other is our best educated guess (and I don't mean that as negative as it sounds; we can do no better and may never be able to).
I'm fine with saying "this is the best we can do so we have to go with it". I'm not fine with saying "this is the best we can do so this is simply the fact itself" as this leads to ridiculous situations like saying "X is a fact" when in reality there are more questions than answers about X.
For example, we can observe a thousand white swans in the world, and hypothesize that all swans are white. That is until we encounter that one black swan, and our hypothesis has been falsified.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
The problem with the scientific method is that scientists become very attached to their hypotheses, and the longer a hypothesis stands the more attached scientists get. This causes them to reject contradictory evidence, often going to ridiculous lengths to do so. A change of the hypotheses, a scientific revolution, only happens on the fringes of science when a maverick persists in examining evidence that most scientists reject.
Scientific revolutions are far more widespread and involve many more scientists than you may think. Even during the earliest stages of the Copernican revolution there were many scientists who ascribed to the ideals. You may only hear about Copernicus, Darwin, Maxwell, and a few other notable scientists but the revolutions included many many people. Some of these people may have irrationally stuck to their previous hypotheses at each of these transitions but that is GOOD. Skepticism in science is critical to its function. If the skepticism is not entirely misplaced or competing theories still have merit for exploration, it will not die out (It's more complicated than this, but for the most part holds true).
As for the climate change in reply to this posts' parent: go on scholar.google.com and find real peer reviewed papers on climate change or go find the high impact environmental journals and often cited papers. Then find the papers that cite those papers that contain actual data!
Scientists have gathered a massive amount of data on melting ice, carbon dioxide concentrations, and world wide pollution. The jury is still out on whether or not humans are a major contributor to carbon dioxide emissions but it is irrelevant when atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures are increasing. This may simply be a natural cycle but it is wise to err on the side of caution until we know more about the equilibrium conditions of the system.
The more troubling problem is pollution and deforestation that reduces the number of oxygen producing organisms. Even after ice ages and mass extinction events, the most important organisms for oxygen production in our atmosphere have been phytoplankton, which currently account for probably about half of all of the oxygen produced by plants. Already there is evidence pollution is drastically reducing these populations [1][2]. If this is proven to be true, there is unlikely to be some other mechanism on Earth to replace the phytoplankton in oxygen production (unless we force the evolution of a phytoplankton species immune to industrial pollution...)
Edit: [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/nature0...
[2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/full/nature0...
I apologize that these papers are behind a paywall, but no news article for the public can do them justice. When you jump into the data for both papers you see science in action: a complex web of variables and events that we are trying to understand.
We have precisely fuck all idea what is going on regardless of the models.
Proof of this can be found by examining all the climate change news articles based on scientific papers going back to the impending ice age in 1972 (people have a short memory for climatology theories).
While it makes a good talking point, it was not the case.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s...
YMMV.
There's so much of this it's not even funny. The last part of my post is in this gist.
But in physics this is easier to work around. In other areas not so much
Also, the scientific method and Popper's ideas are a philosophical construct. One has to think: who watches the watchman?
However, even the need for falsifiability is sometimes suspended (although not lightly and with much criticism) when there is something interesting to pursue like in string theory, where we are operating on energy levels we may never be able to experimentally reach.
This discussion can go on and on, but I'd like to point out the scientific method is not applicable to several things.
String theory like you pointed and other things still in the realm of speculation are one thing (even though their foundation is scientific work)
Getting the best page for 'Cat pictures' on Google is another thing. Or translating a phrase to Japanese.
The success of the scientific method in Physics is due in a big part to the issues I pointed out, physics is constant. The LHC repeats collision experiments thousands of times, so you can get a result with as little variance as possible.
However, it is not possible to test a new drug in millions of people and see what happens, not to mention the results are going to be different for each person, so the best you can have is a statistical answer.
The scientific method does work for string theory just like it worked for relativity and other 20th century theories that took a while for experimental confirmation. String theory got a lot of people very excited a few decades ago and so it stuck, just like an artistic or fashion style sticks to a generation or civilization. It is still in the very primal stages, like Newton in the time after the apple metaphorically hit his head, as he was using Kepler's laws to derive classical gravity. This time the math is way more complicated and will take way more time (and likely classical/quantum computational resources) to turn into a theory ready for experimental falsification. Whether or not it truly holds promise or is just a "fad" is irrelevant; the only vector for the evolution science is purely human.
"Best page" is purely subjective. If you draw the analogy between recommendation algorithms and scientific theories, then the person would be the equipment. If you calibrate properly, you should be able to switch out equivalent pieces of equipment and get the same experimental conclusion based on the scientific theory. You can't "calibrate" a person so the primary feedback loop on a recommendation algorithm changes with every user. Until you get down to human psychology and neuroscience, there is really no basis for this problem in what we know of as "science."
As for translation, I'm sure our research of the common threads of language have contributed to translation algorithms (although I have not researched this topic).
Your last point about physics and medicine is moot. Our very basis for "fact" in science is the statistical results of a vast number of experiments. You say that statistics is "the best you can have" as though there is some golden standard to which you are comparing the scientific method to. There is no better golden standard than the statistics naturally built into the science. For all of its imperfections, it is the absolute best method we have for knowing (approximate) truth in a nontrivial way (aka, truth not as we see it in our mind but truth that can be experienced and repeated by the vast majority of humanity given the tools).
Not long ago, we didn't even have a concept of molecules that would act as drugs to impact our health, let alone simulate them in live and computational models (which is growing more and more commonplace) to know exactly how a person's unique biochemistry will react. We will probably always have statistical answers, unless there is some mechanism for nature to reveal "truth" to us. The whole point of science is that those models get more and more accurate over time.
There's this paranoid viewpoint that Science is this exclusive club shrouded in secrecy, a little like the Masons. They hold on to their established views despite conflicting evidence from the fringes, thus continuing their tenures, fat paychecks, international fame and ultimately control over the world.
There is no watchman. There are scientists. Scientists watch each other with a tenacity that could almost be seen as dogmatic, but really it's because errors help no-one. To become a scientist you do science. If you have a concern about a particular field of science, study up so that you're as knowledgable as those in that field and discourse. That's it!
Most of the time this is a very good thing as it prevent limited resources from being wasted, but bureaucracies can suffer from groupthink and senior scientists are often reluctant to undermine their career's work. However, the system we have is probably among the best possible. We cannot avoid the problem of the purse strings.
Also, I have to nit pick, science is by no means an expensive human endeavor. The net global societal benefit per dollar spent, even with all of the added bureaucracy and other overhead, far outweighs other spending, maybe even spending on education. The problem is that science is long term, something few seem to have the stomach for.
True, but their work is still subject to external scrutiny and you don't need tenure to do that.
"External scrutiny" usually means "publish N papers per year and don't get into trouble". Hence the most conservative projects get funding (also because they're more likely to be successful - or better said, easier to do)
And by the way, the majority of the work is done by the graduate/PhD students, and of course their advisor's name is on every paper they publish.
Sure some interesting stuff is overlooked, but any research is progress. If your university chooses to be conservative, that just means less risk on their side, but also less chance of a major breakthrough, press, status and patent rights. It's the road they've chosen but not the only road.
And everyone knows that the grad students are doing the actual grunt work. Outside of academia there are also bosses whose function seems to be solely to grab credit of those doing the actual work (but more often this is just a myopic view of what their actual job entails).
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine"
J. B. S. Haldane
It is important to have a critical mind when it comes to science and understand that faith doesn't just reside in religion- atheists and those that claim that science have the answer to everything often truly believe that science is a constant or that it "evolves" as some sort of mystical truth that will lead us to enlightenment, but, practically speaking, science is always incorrect. We don't have all of the answers and we never will. Don't get me wrong- science has made huge advancements in our civilization and almost everything we interact with has been produced in part or has been affected by science, often in a good way but not always. However, science is not and never should be a religion. You can use scientific principles and "facts", but if you call it science, do not be beholden to those "facts".
This does not mean that we should give up exploration or research at all. But by accepting the wonder that is everything we don't and will never completely understand, we are all scientists.
Almost every person, scientist or no, has personal beliefs in addition to understanding of some of the scientific models we use. The two shouldn't be conflated though.
Using unhelpful skepticism as a reason for hiding the fallibility of science will produce more generations of people that believe whatever the scientists tell them, which at times will be wrong and yet accepted by almost everyone as truth.
I think the primary problem is the inability for most people to self reflect on what they know, and most importantly, whether they even know it at all, to critically evaluate their assumptions about the universe and the extra meta level of how they came to those assumptions. It is painful to mercilessly question yourself and your entire belief system and in today's world it is probably harder than ever to build a coherent picture of reality due to increasing noise and complexity of ideas.
I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting a de-emphasis on framing it as a matter of "science" and leaving folk wisdom and all other assumptions of perspective and "trusted sources" untouched.
We know how almost everything we use works -- in that we can connect the initial "shallow" models to more fundamental models of physics. Apparently this one has eluded us so far.