I love this guy's blog, and he's been against String Theory for awhile (he's an inflation-theory proponent). Now he's saying that String Theory isn't a scientific theory. Is he right?
"Although there was an entire conference on it earlier this month, spurred by a controversial opinion piece written a year ago by George Ellis and Joe Silk, the answer is very clear: no, string theory is not a scientific theory. The way people are trying to turn it into science is — as Sabine Hossenfelder and Davide Castelvecchi report — by redefining what “science” is.
...
If you want to rise to the level of a scientific theory, you have to make a testable — and hence, falsifiable or validatable — predictions. Even a physical state that arises as a consequence of an established theory, such as the multiverse, isn’t a scientific theory until we have a way to confirm or refute it; it’s only a hypothesis, even if it’s a good hypothesis. What’s interesting about string theory is that when it was first proposed, it was called the string hypothesis, as it was recognized this idea hadn’t yet risen to the status of a full-fledged theory."
http://ift.tt/1Olr0El
Siegel seems to be taking a middle-road approach: String Theory could become a scientific theory, but at the moment, it's too much of a stretch to give it the title "theory".
"Although there was an entire conference on it earlier this month, spurred by a controversial opinion piece written a year ago by George Ellis and Joe Silk, the answer is very clear: no, string theory is not a scientific theory. The way people are trying to turn it into science is — as Sabine Hossenfelder and Davide Castelvecchi report — by redefining what “science” is.
...
If you want to rise to the level of a scientific theory, you have to make a testable — and hence, falsifiable or validatable — predictions. Even a physical state that arises as a consequence of an established theory, such as the multiverse, isn’t a scientific theory until we have a way to confirm or refute it; it’s only a hypothesis, even if it’s a good hypothesis. What’s interesting about string theory is that when it was first proposed, it was called the string hypothesis, as it was recognized this idea hadn’t yet risen to the status of a full-fledged theory."
http://ift.tt/1Olr0El
Siegel seems to be taking a middle-road approach: String Theory could become a scientific theory, but at the moment, it's too much of a stretch to give it the title "theory".
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1kumOWB
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