Posted by An emailer sends in a link to a comment on The White Coat Underground. It’s in the context of naturopathy, the idea that medical problems ought to be treated with natural means. Some of it’s a good idea – eating right, exercising, that sort of thing. Those sort of things aren’t going to cure much, but they’re good things to do. Other aspects of naturopathy pretty much go off the deep end, as ably discussed by any number of medical bloggers on ScienceBlogs and elsewhere. The point argued by this particular commenter went as follows:
Speaking of pseudoscience, what do you all think of Physics? Because, by all accounts and definitions of “pseudoscience”, much of what Physics teaches us about the world is purely based on currently untestable theory. Dark matter? It’s just a guess. String Theory? An obsession of many, yet unproven. Everything past the event horizon? Theories, but we can’t test it yet. Haha…and PalMD…I’d like to point out that we don’t entirely “know” how the universe works, as large chunks of our understanding are based on theory and “pseudoscience”.
Point is, don’t close your mind off to something just because we can’t quite test it yet. The more open-minded we are (to all scientific fields), the better the progression of science and the human race.
I blame the book publishers. For some reason most of the press physics gets is related to string theory. People have this idea that we all sit around and chew the ends of our pencils and thing of ways that strings might do their stringy thing. Actual physics resembles this not in the slightest.
In the physical sciences and physics especially, science follows an infinite loop procedure. I’ll label them 1 and 2, though it’s really a chicken-and-egg thing. This is the way physics works, simplified:
1. The experimental results produce data which suggest ways old theories could be refined, replaced, or strengthened.
2. The new theoretical descriptions and predictions suggest new experiments to test the accuracy of those theories. Go back to step 1.
And recursively the theories become better and better approximations to reality. Some theories like QED and general relativity are literally perfect as far as we can tell, though most physicists expect that (say) general relativity will eventually require changes at very high energy. With this as groundwork, let’s go through the comment.
Because, by all accounts and definitions of “pseudoscience”, much of what Physics teaches us about the world is purely based on currently untestable theory.
Bzzt. The majority of work in physics is is disciplines like solid state physics, atomic/molecular/optical physics, nuclear physics, and related disciplines. In these the 1,2 loop is very fast and the theories are exceptionally accurate and well-confirmed. In short, almost all physics that happens from the nuclear to the solar-system scales is very well understood and experimentally tested. There’s lots of work left to be done for more and more complicated and interlocking ways of manipulating the processes we’ve discovered. But with a few gaps, the basic principles are tested unbelievably well and their applications and connections are constantly being further tested in tens of thousands of physics labs all over the world.
Dark matter? It’s just a guess.
Not at all. We know how mass creates gravity, and how gravity manipulates mass. So when see galaxies being manipulated by gravity without there being sufficient mass around, we can pretty well expect that in fact there is sufficient mass, which happens to be hard to see. But because you can’t make a galaxy in the lab, the experiments are necessarily quite difficult and the 1,2 loop is slow. Nonetheless we’ve already been able to eliminate many possibilities and numerous new experiments are in the works to further test the possibilities. And of course there’s other theories that are generally considered long shots (like MOND) which are being worked on and tested in the loop as well. Maybe it will turn out to be right, and dark matter won’t exist after all. The point is that the loop turns and has been turning just like in the more earthbound branches of physics, and experimental tests are ongoing as we speak.
String Theory? An obsession of many, yet unproven.
I’ll certainly agree that string theory doesn’t have a lot going for it experimentally. The construction of the LHC may change this to an extent, or it may not. However, is it entirely wrong to think that string theory in any way fits the description of “large chunks of our understanding are based on theory and “pseudoscience”.” Quite the opposite. It’s entirely speculative and effectively none of our understanding of physics relies on string theory being true. It could be shown to be entirely false tomorrow and pretty much nothing would change except the research focus of string theorists. The theory is simply a good idea that’s being explored because good ideas in “beyond the Standard Model” physics are in short supply. It may turn out to be an accurate description of reality or it may not, but at the moment it’s simply an idea in the very first stage of loop iteration. It’s not anything that would damage our current understanding if it turned out to be wrong.
Everything past the event horizon? Theories, but we can’t test it yet.
This isn’t right. It’s not even wrong. It’s like asking “What is the exact position and momentum of this electron?” The question even make sense. Presuming general relativity is an accurate description of the universe, we can’t observe what’s inside the event horizon. At least not if we wish to report our findings to the outside world. For our own curiosity we can use GR to predict what a person would see falling into a black hole, but that’s just a purely intellectual exercise. The question as such is simply not a scientific one because its answer is not observable, testable, and repeatable.
I’d like to point out that we don’t entirely “know” how the universe works, as large chunks of our understanding are based on theory and “pseudoscience”.
We don’t know anything about the universe without testing. String theory and many cosmological speculations are just that – speculations. None of what we understand and use is predicated on those speculations being true, and it won’t (and can’t) be until those speculations can be fitted into an experimental framework.
Point is, don’t close your mind off to something just because we can’t quite test it yet. The more open-minded we are (to all scientific fields), the better the progression of science and the human race.
In fact I agree with this. But it’s true in the other direction as well. An open-minded physicist is willing to believe any wild theory – once it’s been shown to work. Until then he’s going to focus on that “we can’t quite test it yet” and will not start ignoring prior tested knowledge in favor of the untested idea.
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