> First of all a theory is the hypothesis with the most proof. It doesn’t mean it’s proven.

This is a bit of a bugbear of mine. A theory is not what a hypothesis graduates into when it collects enough evidence. Theories are broad explanatory frameworks. They incorporate and generate many hypotheses/predictions. Some are highly backed up by evidence (Darwinian evolutionary theory, general relativity, etc.) and some are discredited (lamarckian evolutionary theory, etc.), and still others are currently speculative and not yet decisively confirmed nor disconfirmed.

I think if there was a comic background radiation the world would be a much better place.

Basically, there's a difference between "Can't be tested" and "Can't be tested yet, but we can tell you how a test should work when we can do that."

> Theories have always out paced experimental advancements.

No, e.g., blackbody radiation, atomic spectra, and countless other examples.

> There's always been a cycle of conjuring a theory that needs to wait for experimental advancements to catch up. And I would agrue that this strongly propels science forward. If we name these theories as "bad science," then how would we ever advance?

There's a problem, though, isn't there, with a hypothesis that can be tested in theory but not in practice until some unknown point in the future? Especially if there's a risk of the theory being tweaked if the evidence doesn't come up - "ok, we didn't find what we were looking for with this particle collider, but if we build a bigger one we will..." (I think in Lakatos' terms that would be an "auxiliary hypothesis" created protect the core hypothesis.)

As the article points out this is a problem for Lakatos' ideas, as sometimes "degenerating" science does produce good results. Maybe that theory scientists have been pushing for a half a century without being empirically tested will turn out to be correct when the technology (or funding) is there. Or maybe you'll have wasted 50 years.

Thus this kind of science is risky. More risky than science which can be tested straight away, or in the near future. The article argues for honesty about this risk and a clear assessment of it when funding or supporting science.

To pick up on /u/ShalmaneserIII's comment, there's a difference between "can be tested now" and "can't be tested yet, but we can tell you how it should be done" and "can't be tested". The middle category falls somewhere between the ideal of the first and the junk of the last.

“Theories have always put paced experimental advancements.”

No. Take the CMB for example. It was discovered when not looking for it. Total accidental Nobel prize.

String theory is an interesting discussion, because it is more closely woven to what is serendipitous(especially in the extraction of dynamics), the nature of a substrate, and the nature of operational distinguishability, with a very simple rule set. Like Newton, it is a special use of general relativity, that requires a displacement. Newtons theory is not really a new paradigm, it is just a subset of Einstein, Kuhn is wrong in this regard. He is right in the expanse of a conceptual understanding.

Displacement is the core of the Calabi-Yau manifold, how to approximate distances. Nonlocality is the core assumptions, that degenerate into separable fermionic and bosonic interactions. DM comes into play because of how the Lagrangian drives the modern theory, the jig is not up that the anomalous magnetic dipole moment(or amplitude a electron absorbs and emits a photon) is slightly off from the Dirac delta function. There is a means of correction with coupling constants to a vast array of conformal field theories. This is what it means for a field to be renormalized, which some interpret as a means of rescaling, others a means of quantization. The constant of constants. Either way the electron mass must be measured and plugged into the theory, past the standard model. The standard model represents the core of the fracturing of symmetry and shows the use of symmetry to conserve features independent of dimensionality.

You talk about safely ignoring the ratio of between an electrical force and a gravitational one, but AdS is a all about the translational invariance in holography. The unification of fundamental forces implies a conservation.

Did nature cause decoherence for the fracturing of unitarity groups within the early universe? Was such a fracturing timeless, or “all at once” across all of time and space. Or is gravity a thermal emergence that occurs, and is conserved in DM and DE, hence what the fracturing of symmetry must have happened “all at once”? There are models for both of these, and very real philosophical interpretations to the Nature of truth we ought expect. And yet why would unitarity choose one over the other? The self referential problem, is these principles seem to imply multiple decompositions we must take on the road to reality, conditional on how we define an action, and what features we find ‘anomalous’ to reality. Parity, charge, and time all seem like very real things, but classical theory does not allow us to use all of them without including a degree of freedom, and yet we will never have all three. This is where Popperian thought collapses, what is the null hypothesis of handedness? Dimensionless features, not a problem to project some density functions. Yet there is no architecture, no experiment, to such a thing. We require the mapping of to a degree of freedom(or the implications of 1/2 for that matter).

Lakatos is wrong because the philosophy of science begins on the degenerative. Should we use classical or conditional probability? We should use both. The program is not degenerative because some aspect of subjectivity maybe intractable for causal conditional probabilities, we simply switch to classical probability. Because classical special relativity is timeless we ought be neurotic? Well good thing we are. But the classics can continue if we but assume one hidden layer(of course anymore, forget it) and work with what covariance affords, a context.

Aberration addiction is a problem of philosophy. It is a shortcut of the mind useful to an extent, a distortion we can recognize, perhaps something we can ever deload to some topological defect, or always make excuses for in Platonicism where formalism fails. Heck even intuitionism, where such lazy eliminativism is disallowed, fails.

What is so interesting, is that within poetic naturalism, we can recognize the “mob psychology” and its need for a change, but also human limitations to pierce reality. A healthy psychology has the slightly new. Maybe we just need more conditional probability, as Bayesian can commensurate the scientific method, yet Feyerbend will always be a great insurance policy. Some part of the pathos will keep the ensemble eloquent. Some part of the reduction will assume the collectively exhaustive. Some part of orthonormality will continue to be observable in the bell test. The use of capital T truth and lowercase t truth, does not make model based realism or the surrealism any less interesting. David Deutsch has good take, where we should work toward what things are “possible”.

That being said, I welcome what any imagination can bring to the absurdity of unitarity and yet the seeming rigidity of isometrics. There is a mystery that will continue in the debatable ambiguity as coverage, or the rationale hiding within the indistinguishable operationally equivalent. Our evolution finitistic as eon is defined, an extension of ourselves so familiar, yet alien. As auxiliary as is multiple realized, metastable claims are not sane, they are ahead in their thinking and behind for our kinesthetic senses. We can assume past the intractable, but we cannot state a reality wholly deterministic or ceramic. We are blessed with opportunity and knowledge, broken as a walk in three dimensions that seeks coverage.

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This is the hilarious thing about this sub. I don't understand or even study QM so I won't comment on whether the commentors are right, but it does seem that every time some philosophy article comes out referring to QM hordes of people are quick to point out how utterly clueless the author is.

Some think of science like the original, Latin root scientia, which generally means knowledge. The modern common use is that it means physics, chemistry, and biology, with some suspicion about what mathematicians are up to! General knowledge, rather than a discipline, emphasizes methodology, which anyone in any discipline can use. Scientific method, therefore, underlies the precepts, pay attention, be intelligent, and responsibly act. In other words, collect data, interpret meaning, verify (or falsify!) fact or knowledge in judgment. In that regard, we can avoid some confusion if we begin by saying what we mean when we use the term science.

Yes and no. Classes are one of many ways to learn.

I really despise how undergrad classes can’t be easily avoided by taking a large test or writing a large thesis. It’s a lot easier to avoid classes at every other level of education. It genuinely find it authoritarian.

Just spending at least 100-200 hours familiarizing with the materials of a field can be enough if time to find a genuine hole in scientific understanding. Naive discovery does happen. There were a lot of individuals that mused on continental drift before hard evidence was found. You could describe those early papers as more philosophical than scientific. https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/step2012/participant/PlateTectonicHistory-1.pptx

You don’t need deep geological understanding to sort out that the continents kind of look like puzzle pieces.

That said, almost all philosophy of quantum science papers I have read have been utter bullshit.

The author is a not a philosopher of science. His website claims that he is a pop-science writer with a PhD in chemical physics: http://www.jimbaggott.com/.

> so many wannabe philosophers of science

Example?

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I'm a big fan of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics. I love Lakatos and read a bit of Feyerabend too. Definitely a better choice of philosopher to read when learning the history of math and science.