In Nielsen-Ninomiya and the arXiv, archetype Peter Woit is waging war against all those crackpots. Well, not quite. He always shows respect for Sean Carroll.
Not that I’m calling Sean a crackpot. I don’t call anyone a crackpot. I’m thinking about Woit’s inconsistencies. With Woit, with the right credentials and right status, typically of more combined weight than his, you’re safe from the crackpot label. Woit writes,
Because of the New York Times article discussed here, four recent papers by Nielsen and Ninomiya have been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Pretty much all of it has been unremittingly hostile, when not convinced that these papers must be some sort of joke (except for this from Sean Carroll).
I assume Peter plays it safe with labeling people because he places great value on his outsider-insider status. He’s not willing to risk being excommunicated by all the other prophets of the past, thus becoming an outsider-outsider.
To attack the root of the problem, Woit would have to start making the argument that non-speculative science requires a fairly strict form of observation. But that would be arguing that evolution (the unobserved type, as opposed to the fruit-fly-to-fruit-fly type) would have to be relegated to speculative science, the big bang also. I can’t see that Columbia would want him around if he did that, even in the math department. Most mathematicians of the assertive and vocal type are just as fanatical about evolution as establishment scientists.
Actually, I’m probably giving Peter too much credit. As a prophet of the past, it’ probably not that he’s afraid to lose his status and position, even if he’s financially secure enough to do so, and he has said that he’s financially secure, it’s probably that he’s more like them than not like them.
And that’s why Woit types will never win. All they can to is shift the problem. Types like him seem to have succeeded in damaging the status of string theory, but I would guess the result is that instead of graduate students becoming string theorists, many of them become, say, cosmologists. The fatal flaw with string theory is that there’s the expectation of present or future experiment to verify claims. [If there's any substance to string theory, it's only fatal for a person who wants the fame and glory now.] If your claims deal with the past, there are no such expectations. Logic is sufficient, because obviously, events in the long past cannot be observed.
Woit will never win against operators like Sean Carrol. For one thing, given that all scientists can use a standard set of assumptions that have never been observed to have happened, Sean’s argument is superior to Woit’s. In the article linked to above, Sean writes,
[There's no] real justification [by Nielsen and Ninomiya for pulling an absolutely speculative idea out of their hats] — or if there is, it’s sufficiently lost in the mists that I can’t discern it from the recent papers. That’s okay; it’s just the traditional hypothesis-testing that has served science well for a few centuries now. Propose an idea, see where it leads, toss it out if it conflicts with the data, build on it if it seems promising. We don’t know all the laws of physics, so there’s no reason to stand pat.
Once you compromise on a foundational idea, it’s a slippery slope.
…the specific choice of action contemplated by NN seems rather contrived. But I’m happy to argue that it’s the good kind of crazy. The authors start with a speculative but well-defined idea, and carry it through to its logical conclusions. That’s what scientists are supposed to do.
And because the observational requirement of Galileo-type science was compromised, compromised to allow prophets of the past to make their prophecies, and to present those prophecies as science to be able to “explain everything by natural means,” it’s a slippery slope.
Sean writes,
There is another reasonable question, which is whether an essay (not a news story, note) like this in a major media outlet contributes to the erosion of trust in scientists on the part of the general public. …It’s always important to distinguish as clearly as possible between what is crazy-sounding but well-established as true — quantum mechanics, relativity, natural selection — and what is crazy-sounding and speculative, even if it’s respectable speculation — inflation, string theory, exobiology. But if that distinction is made…
The distinction is supposedly made, and among those claims distinguished as non-speculative science are those that are only logically true, logically based on a hypothesis that certain rates are “well-established” for all time; the theory of relativity confirmed in the present is given no more status than detailed descriptions of the physics driving the cosmos (supposed but not observed) billions of light years away from the Earth, detailed descriptions assuming a particular rate for all time, and assuming light has always only had one way to get from point A to point B.
But if that distinction is made, I’ve always found it pretty paternalistic and condescending to claim that we should shield the public from speculative science until it’s been established one way or the other.
Sean’s logic is solid, and that’s why the Sean types will succeed as long everyone is allowed to use an unobserved set of assumptions.
[I'm talking about Sean's overall logic of people being justified in throwing out science claims, and then letting the claims be vetted by everyone else. Really, on saying that Sean's logic is solid about this, I've decided I might be guilty of "assert yourself like a true blowhard whether you know for sure that you're right." But the standard is not very high these days for claims to earn the label of science, not when "in principle" experiment takes the place of experiment. Getting respect for a claim is more of a process, where the most assertive and aggressive people win respect for their theories. That's the way I see it. ]
If the leading scientists have given us permission to treat certain logic claims as science, it only makes sense that when consensus permits, more will be periodically added to the set. In the current setting, science isn’t clearly delineated knowledge, it’s a continuum from the first time that a speculative claim is made to when the claim is completely accepted, acceptance not necessarily a result of people having observed what is claimed to be true.
Certain assumptions result in specific logical consequences. If the criteria for distinction between speculative science and science is not near-present experimental observation, always, then logic trumps experiment when actual experiment is impossible or impractical.
Because the observational requirement for science has been compromised, it only makes sense that debate rather than experiment has become a primary means by which people establish their ideas as science.
Any fool can debate. However, it takes combined billions of dollars (euros) from multiple nations to do advanced experiment.
Filed under: Logically extended science, Science
