The limitations of the scientific method and scientism

"science" is basically taking what you know to understand what the unknown is before you.
i think that pretty well sums it up.

 

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Quantum Quack

How illustrative of your near complete misunderstanding of what science is, what it says and what it can and cannot do. Red shift is happening today, it happened in the past and it will continue to happen in the future. The Universe continues to expand and that red shift is direct evidence of it. Every observation we make continues to show a direct relationship between distance outside the local, gravity bound group and the amount of red shift. In fact, our observations show that the expansion is accelerating. And red shift didn't happen in the past only, every photon we get(again, excepting those from the local, gravity bound group)has a measured red shift TODAY, and if photons from the same source are measured tomorrow they will have a higher red shift. This is true of EVERY photon not from our local group of galaxies. Red shift is an effect imposed on light by the increased distance between objects in spacetime as that spacetime expands, it doesn't change the speed of that light(that's measured to be invariant)it only stretches it out, lowers it's frequency. All light from outside the local group has red shift in proportion to it's distance. Therefore spacetime is expanding to this very day.

It is occurring right now, though most of the expansion we are now measuring is the result of the Universe's expansion in the past. It's like looking at the continued expansion of the cloud of smoke from an explosion that occurred while you were in the basement. You didn't see the explosion, nor were you there to see most of the expansion of the cloud, but when you are watching it right now you see that it is still expanding and with a little scientific thought you could probably determine where and when the explosion began. Observing the Universe today is examining the cloud of "smoke" that started expanding in the Big Bang. Working backward it is possible to determine this expansion began 13.7 billion years ago. It is also possible to measure the rate of expansion in all eras between then and now(the further away something is, the further in the past the light left that source, all the way back to just after the BB). The where is everywhere. Every point in this Universe was once directly and exactly at the center of the Big Bang. Or, from our perspective, we are exactly in the center of the Universe(give or take a few thousand light years)because the distance in time(years)and space(light years)of the Cosmic Background Radiation is exactly the same in all directions. This means the observed size of the Universe is about 27.4 billion light years, but factoring in observed expansion rates allows us to estimate the present day size(rough estimates are between 45 and 80 billion light years, the more we learn the more accurate those estimates will be). But even that is misleading because we think in 3 dimensions, space IS 3 dimensions, and the topology that contains itself is really hard to think on and is as counter-intuitive as Relativity is.

kwhilborn

But ACCEPTING alternatives without evidence is not scientific. My favorite example is Faster than Light travel. Sure would be nice, but probably will never occur for any man-made craft with people on board. Science is very clear that all knowledge is provisional(ie subject to change given new evidence or new understanding), that's what falsification is all about. But some things(such as FTL travel)ARE precluded, given our current understanding and ALL the available evidence. Nowhere in this Universe have we seen anything with mass travel faster than light. The fastest masses in the Universe(gamma rays)generated by the largest, most energetic explosions this side of the Big Bang(Hypernovas, neutron star mergers, Black Hole mergers, etc.) STILL do not exceed the speed of light. Nothing man could conceivably build is likely to come within orders of magnitude(many oom)of those energy levels. Interdimensional travel MAY be possible in the quantum, but not in the macro it seems.

Grumpy

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Fair enough.

I've sometimes wondered about how science would address one-off events. By that I mean events that are unique and absolutely one-of-a-kind, that aren't simply instances of more general physical laws, (The big-bang may or may not be the biggest and most obvious of these one-offs, that's arguable I guess.)

Maybe one-offs are kind of a worst-case example of the larger problem of induction. Suppose we have lots of examples of a phenomenon, and that all of the examples precisely fit some formal predictive pattern, description by a differential equation perhaps. Ok, so what justifies our confidence that our next observation will conform to the same pattern? And more problematically, what justifies the stronger faith that all instances of this particular class must invariably and necessarily conform to the pattern? In other words, where does the assumed necessity of physical law come from? What justifies our belief in it? Physical necessity and the universality of physical law still seem to be articles of faith among scientists at this point. So far, it seems to be working (though perhaps not so well on the quantum scale, where things may be more probabilistic).

Yes. That's why I'm skeptical about the whole idea of there being "social sciences".

The underlying physics and chemistry of human brain functioning do seem to lawlike. But I don't see any evidence that laws of psychology, sociology or history exist that are in any way analogous to the laws of physics. The idea that such laws must exist, and that the world can be transformed into a rationalist's paradise provided only that medieval obscurantism is swept aside and the success of Newtonian physics extended to the discovery of the laws of human life (and to social engineering based on those laws), was a widespread doctrine of 18'th and 19'th century "progressive" faith that hasn't exactly panned out since then and is far less prevalent now. (But despite that, there probably have never been as many "social scientists" as there are today.)

Perhaps someday neuroscience might be able to explain the functioning of the human nervous system well enough that the enlightenment dream can finally be realized. Maybe laws of human behavior, individually and in groups, can somehow be mathematically derived from the underlying principles of brain functioning.

But I'm skeptical that will ever happen. I suspect that the dynamics of a system as complex as the human brain is always going to be complex and chaotic in the scientific sense. I'd expect butterfly effects and stuff, and expect that science's predictions of human behavior will never come close to being as accurate as today's predictions of the weather, where similar nonlinear dynamics occur in far simpler form.

 

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According to belief and faith in continuity of historical trends. yes? Not science but faith and belief....

Science can not truly use the scientific method to determine what is happening now if the observed and measured information is 1+ million years old [for example]. The closer in history the event recorded the better the probability. And that can only be presumed if we assume that we know all the variables that may impact on that prediction about the universe today [which we certainly do Not know]. There is no way you can confirm or validate scientifcally those prediction due to the absence of real time [now] information of distant events such a s red shift observed 1M ly away.

how do you know this?

It may have stopped expanding and settled down and started contracting millions of years ago...

but only if we presume that the red shit data is in any way relevant to events millions of years in to it's future...

yet that data is ancient history....

Let me ask you this if I can in general terms with out exact details being required:

• What would happen if the universe started to contract instead of expand later this afternoon?
  
  and critically to show my point:
  
• When would we find out about it?

The example of cosmic expansion is only an example....used in an attempt to explore the limitations of the scientific method.
Science is predicting cosmic expansion based on data that is ancient. It can not support that prediction due to it's reliance on light data that has an inherent delay factor [ according to the various photon models]
Even if the data was 1 week old it still means that the prediction for today is merely a prediction as there is no way to verify the claim today.
The scientific method is about hypothesis [ In this instance re: Hubble] and prediction of evidence to support that hypothesis.
The prediction of evidence that confirms the hypothesis [cosmic expansion] is impossible to fulfill due to the delay in light information.
In other words Hubble's Hypothesis of cosmic expansion has yet to be proved as valid except for events of ancient history.

 

Background to this issue:
This problem specifically came about when I started to write a short Scfi story [fiction]
about a culture that was developing "hyper space drive" or warp drive as per the Trek-ian fantasy. No big deal. So many amateur writers have done similar.
The logical problem of where are we going comes up and what will be there when we get there.
The ship wishes to "jump" 1000 Light years distance [not time travel ...please!!!!] but has no way of finding out what it is jumping into as light delay of information prohibits any knowledge of the actual environment the ship wished to go to other than information that was 1000 years old.
So the only solution if one assumes light speed info delays, is to acquire this information using the hyper drive technology [where distance=0] instead so that the destination information is relevant to the ships current location, safety and purpose.

 

Quantum Quack

It failed in that purpose, but it beautifully illustrated your complete lack of understanding about what observing actual events and conditions of spacetime as they were billions of years ago means to our understanding of the rules by which the Universe functions. It is not possible for the Universe to contract tomorrow. In fact, it probably never will, according to the direct evidence in those observations. This we know by observing the actual Universe. It's like seeing an asteroid in several positions in the past few years allowed us to predict it's close passage would miss by 17,000 miles. The Universe follows rules, and we can work out what those rules are by observing the Universe. There has never been an instance shown where the Universe violates those rules. If you're betting against science, you will lose.

Nonsense, we know the Universe follows the rules, we've never seen it do otherwise. We have great confidence it will continue to do so, and we will be confident until evidence that our confidence is misplaced is found. No faith required. Belief is acceptance without evidence, we have the evidence and don't need belief, we have knowledge.

Grumpy

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Your examples to try to defend this statement show a much more fundamental problem with the nature of fact that you must learn before you even begin to tackle the scientific method.

Facts are things that are known because they have been observed.

Conversely, if something hasn't been observed, it is not a fact. But don't confuse not being a fact with not being a fact yet. Above, you said "can not possibly examine" then gave examples of things that can be examined. They just might be:
1. Difficult to examine because someone is purposely trying to hide the information.
2. Difficult to examine because we'll have to wait and watch time pass before they happen.

Neither of these problems put the information contained permanently outside the realm of "fact". They only cause a delay between searching for the fact and finding the fact.

Now, there are certain things that can't be known. For example, by definition, something that happens inside a black hole, outside the horizon of the observable universe or in another universe are all unobservable, even in principle -- at least as far as our current theories understand/predict.

Imagine you had a billion copies of the same movie and randomly selected a single frame from each copy, then tried to assemble them into the full movie. It's rather like that.

....er, except that's not the scientific method, that's just the assembly of facts.

 

#Facepalm.
1. In our frame of reference, events "happen" when we observe them. [points to the sky] There's a red-shifted object, there's another one, there's another one. Those observations just happened.
2. Seeing whether red shifting is still happening just requires going outside and observing the same events again.
3. Red shift is cumulative. Even in a hypothetical timeless frame of reference (that can see the whole universe at once) it is wrong to say it "happened" millions of years ago: it is continuously happening to any photon as it travels across the galaxy.
4. "Red shift happens" is also a statement of theory.

Every piece of data has an error margin that then must be built into the theory. I don't know how many "millions" of years you are talking about, but if you want to get that fine, the universe is not expanding at distances of a few million light years because objects that close are gravitationally bound. So "still happening" is equivalent to saying (roughly) "within the past hundred million years". That might be a long time to you, but in the age of the universe, it is a very short time. Still...

Yes, we can't say for sure the universe didn't break with theory and recently start contracting. But:
1. We have no evidence to support that.
2. It contradicts theory.

So what?

I can't imagine why that would trouble you. Do you wake up every morning in fear that when you get out of bed, you'll crash into your ceiling because gravity reversed itself overnight? No, science does not ever absolutely prove everything, but one of the few founding assumptions of science is that the universe obeys laws that don't change or don't change much over very long periods of time. That enables predictions to have value and statistical probability to be a good guide for accepting what is reality and what isn't.

The knowledge of the mountain of previous data from years of wake-ups coupled with the assumption that the pattern will hold prevents you from freaking out every time you get out of bed. The same logic holds for red shift and the BBT.

 

I would argue that you have never "seen" the universe of today to determine much of anything about it....using the scientific method.

I am deliberately wanting to deal with the issue of the difference between qualified speculation [ hypothesis ] and as Russel has just mentioned "fact"

The issue of cosmic expansion today is only qualified speculation premised ancient data acquired.

Is the above a true statement of not?

 

Those observations are about photons arriving only and not about the object that was their source. The object of their source is unable to be determined as even still existing.

Look up at a star and ask:

Does that star exist today?


Qualify it using the scientific method and what answer do you come up with other than "We can not possibly know this as fact"?

example:
look for the Orion Nebula:
Note that it is 1344 +-(20) light years away.
Note that we only know that it existed by photons traveling to us.
Note that at any given time those photons carry information 1344 years old.

Can we declare today that the source of those photons exists today using the scientific method?

The point is:
We know intuitively that the Nebula [to use my example above] exists today however the scientific method can not be used to support it as fact.

 

What prevents you from making predictions about the future using present-day knowledge? If we had hyperdrive technology (that didn't have midcourse correction capability), we would have no problem adjusting for the known motion of a 1000 ly distant object and warping fairly close to it.

 

So far, this thread would more accurately be titled "The Misunderstandings of the Scientific Method", but lets try for some actual limitations:

We're in the psuedoscience forum, so we should be able to examine complaints of pseudoscience advocates. Some I've heard:

1. The scientific process demands repeat-ability in experiments.
2. The scientific process can't easily prove a negative.
3. Theories are restrictive. They cause close-mindedness and stop people from investigating things not contained in current theory.

The questions then become: Are these correct? Are they really limitations?

Cold fusion advocates complain that cold fusion isn't getting enough attention from mainstream science and if cold fusion ends up being real, it could point to a limitation in the scientific method. If any pseudoscientific or crackpot idea ever turns out to be real, but was ignored by the mainstream because it didn't fit with the scientific process when it was being developed, that could point to a limitation. But even if these things did happen, science has been right an awful lot and crackpottery almost never if not never. The trade-off of a missed opportunity of ignoring a crackpot is probably worth it.

 

agrees, however we are now talking about data that is virtually real time and current and not historical to the tune of let us say 1344 years old.

I am not trying to criticize the scientific method. I am merely pointing out that it needs to be applied consistently if it is to be of much use. That includes realizing and acknowledging the limitations of our scientific knowledge regarding the universe.
To claim that the universe IS undergoing cosmic metric expansion today is essentially crack-pottery wrapped up as science. Therefore the claim deserves to be treated as pseudo science unless it is qualified accordingly.

 

not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.
-albert einstein (paraphrased).

i find it odd that particles in the universe do not follow normal ballistic curves.
the energy source required to hurl these objects billions of light years.
the "singularity"??
it's a strange place for sure, i believe it to be truly infinite in scope and direction.

 

Quantum Quack

With what we know about stellar evolution, it is likely stable stars are still there, 1300 years is the blink of an eye to a star. Now if we were talking about Eta Carina, it is much less likely that it is still there, the signs say it is on the verge of a supernova explosion.

But this prejudice you have with information only reaching us from the past is kind of selective, ALL information is from the past, no matter it's source. You seem to think that the length of that time delay degrades the information somehow. If you see a stroke of lightning hit a mile from you, the light reaches you 1/186,000 of a second later, the sound about 7 seconds later. The information you get from your immediate vicinity is delayed in time and everything you see is already non-existent in that condition by the time you see it. Stars and galaxies are seen in exactly the same way, with every bit of the confidence we would have of your lightning strike observation, the only difference between them is that the light is just delayed a bit more, there is no difference in the quality of the evidence. Everything we sense about our Universe is witnessing it some time after the event, IE we see everything as it was some time in the past, the closer it is, the less that time delay is. But it is a difference of degree, not of kind.

Grumpy

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Nonsense. The spectrum is measured in real time.

• 
  Yes.
  
  
  I'm not offering a theory. I'm stating a fact. You mean WAS the scientific method employed in discovering red shift? And the answer is : yes, may I suggest you read Hubble.
  
  
  No, you simply have no idea what you're talking about.
  
  
  That's why you're in the pseudoscience forum.
  
  
  Which is mainly why you're in the pseudoscience forum. You're pretending to excercise science, but have not yet offered any.
  
  
  So far you're the only one one offering it. It has nothing to do with nature. As long as you keep avoiding nature, you're hopelessly lost to science.

 

Uh, yeah you are. That's what looking for limitations means. Worse, you're doing a really really bad job of it which then makes it look like you have a bias against the scientific method: an emotional chip on your shoulder about something which you don't understand.

Nonsense. You are blindly attacking. Trying to discredit theories you don't like based on a process you don't understand.

Nonsense. It is no more pseudoscience than to claim that when you roll out of bed you won't hit your ceiling.

All of the available evidence says that as close to "now" as we can discern, the universe is undergoing expansion. Anyone who understands the scientific method would understand the concept of an error bar being applied to any claim without the need to explicitly state it.

 

Hey, Grumpy, a good example of your affinity for teaching. If he understood how profound that is - to the cosmologist looking back in time, correlating parallax with spectral shift, seeing continuity in the laws of nature throughout all time - maybe he'd humble himself and actually try to learn something. Science does not confine itself to real-time data (although in redshift measurement, that's exactly the case!) . . . and if he'd bothered to take geometry he'd have learned about other devices in the toolbox of the scientific method . . . inductive reasoning comes to mind. . . but somehow it all seems so irrelevant here as long as he continues to insist on posing absurdities as his objections to organized thinking! Heh heh sometimes I feel compelled to agree with him.

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Has the scientific method then come to grips with the reality of Cosmic Plasmas ?

 

Great minds think alike. We came upon this same word withing minutes of each other. 'Nuff said . . . Hey: y'all can turn out the lights now, the show's over . .

Among other things, he's tripping on the concept of relative time. Worse, he has no clue what astronomers are looking at. Besides, a red shift is measured at the detector (or even later), so of course it's a real-time measurement, yet spanning all of history. Geez. Even with the red carpet rolled out for him, he's complaining that it can't be proved red. And that disproves all of the craft of carpet weaving. Yet here's the carpet under his feet. (Even while he wants to pull it out from under you.) I could go on but I'll spare you . . .

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