Comment by ibuildthings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ibuildthings | Hacker News Reader

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> As i see, the current science is more rigorous because people are producing lot of crap

Good, grief. No!!! It is a way of managing uncertainty and saying something with a precision that is available at a given point of time.

> How many discoveries are being overridden by new discoveries coming from future ?

This is beauty/and USP of science. Every scientific proof is always open for scrutiny and revision in light of new data or discovery ( tenants of falsifiability kick in here). That is, it tries hard NOT to be dogmatic by being provisional. For example, science says that we are confident Higgs Boson exists "accounting for one-in-a-million chance on the contrary" ( 5-sigma).

Let me flip your argument on the converse; success rate at which we could make ground breaking theories [ like evolution, theory of relativity , uncertainty principle ] ( which is standing the test of time for extended period of time) using the scientific method is sheer staggering and amazing. The methodology has accelerated our progress and understanding by leaps and bounds which no alternate system has managed to do so, so far!

> The amount of data accessible to the people in the past is a lot more when compared to current.

I lost you completely here. Can you please elaborate and the rest of the paragraph. ( My belief: If you take 20 random guesses; one of them turned out to be true; it is more likely to be a coincidence than a mystical insight. If on the contrary, the Monte Carlo filter I routinely simulate might just be the most insightfully entity I have encountered ).

> The division between religion/science is very small

Epistemologically they are apples and oranges! Falsifiability is not applicable to religion nor is it is provisional and routinely advocates absolute (and imho dogmatic) reasoning!

> science says that we are confident Higgs Boson exists ( 5-sigma).

Agreed, Science comes from our experience/understanding of things around us by our senses. Try to explain the above Higgs Boson to a blind person who has never seen anything in their life. As long as science explains stuff that can be experienced by the senses, everybody else with similar senses get them.

> Epistemologically they are apples and oranges!

Its all in our thought process. Everything came from our thinking/undertsanding of things around us. It just happened to be that we are closer to prove somethings easily vs others.

> ... using the scientific method is sheer staggering and amazing > The amount of data accessible to the people in the past is a lot more when compared to current.

Appreciated the hardwork done by all these determined people. How did only few people have access to such knowledge ? In order to find the truth we should not be biased. The reason why people in the older generations might not have shared such knowledge is to prevent mis-use of it, for better of mankind. While we take pride in such innovations.

It vastly depends on the actual science which standard of proof is accepted.

For maths, with a 5-sigma result you can maybe get a mention in the "curiosa" section if it's weird enough. It is certainly not considered a valid mathematical result.

For biology, a 1 sigma result is considered pretty good. And due to experimental restrictions, this is actually more strict than medicine requires.

Many science disciplines work with known-wrong theories. Civil engineering for example, works with pre-Newtonian mechanics (not even "turtle mechanics" : in the best simulations a building stands on ground, which stands on a plate which is magically suspended in a "downward" gravity field, not on a planet).

The idea of "this is the standard of proof for 'science'" is a nice one, but it doesn't exist in any reasonable sense. Only the utilitarian definition sticks : we have 100 standards of proof, and if the theory works (or gets enough money if your cynical) we'll find the standard of proof that allows us to call it science.

Furthermore, there are several inconsistencies in the science underpinning, for example, the Higgs boson discovery. We do not actually have rigorous proofs for constructing even natural numbers by the standards of first-order logic. And second order logic has paradoxes that stand unresolved (there is a lot of research to find something "more flexible" than first-order logic, but stricter than second-order that works, but this research has been going on for more than a century and there are no really good candidates, only really bad ones like the famous failure of the Choice axiom)

The standard model doesn't even contain gravity, so if you're being pedantic you could drop a pen from your desk and claim, correctly, that you've just falsified the entire standard model, or at least proven it's incompleteness.

Less pedantically in the physics itself there is the massive open question. The Higgs field only causes inertia, not gravity. Yet the measure of interaction with the Higgs field of any object we've ever measured matches exactly the value we've got for that same object's gravitic interactions. Does anyone believe this to be a coincidence ? Major open hole there.

Falsification and Incompleteness are two different things. Since we reason about physicals system using the language of mathematics/logic; it has be based on certain axiom which cannot be proved or disproved ( Godel's incompleteness theorem ). Though this renders certain statements inside physical theorem non-provable ; it certainly does translate to every claim made by a proposed theory. Further many aspects of physicals systems can be disproven experimentally. ( It is still in active debate if Mathematics should treated as science per se : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Mathematics_as_scie... )

While the pen falling from a desk do point out to the incompleteness ( non-Godel sense) of the standard model, which is widely accepted ( http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/standard-model : last paragraph ), it does not falsify it. Science is full of open holes, and no one knows ( my bet is against) that it will be completely patched up; but it is the best form of reasoning we have in understanding things, and its ongoing goal is to seek explanations that with the least amount of uncertainty possible.

I think we're largely making the same point : that science is largely based on a utilitarian definition of truth. A somewhat more direct way to state that is that scientific truth is simply

"What works for me"

And nothing more.

I do disagree on one point though. The standard model doesn't just "lack" gravity. It describes a world without gravity. Therefore that gravity exists must mean that the standard model is wrong. It describes a universe that is most certainly not the one we live in. I therefore find it hard to describe that theory as true. It is more akin to "currently the best-known least-wrong theory". Even best-known has to be in there since, for example, relativity theory was known long before Einstein got his ball rolling, and Newton's equation was known before the apple fell. So we do likely know about better theories than the standard model, we just currently have no way to distinguish them from either the standard model, or (more likely) the better theories are just failing to get enough attention from well-publicized physicists. Of course, when you don't know exactly which theories are in fact better, their existence doesn't matter.

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