Scientific Method
The scientific method is the process through which ideas are turned into testable hypotheses. Naive invocation of the method is often used to suppress ideas.
On X[edit]
2009[edit]
Warning: Do not jump to embrace the scientific method until all the data on its claimed efficacy has been properly evaluated. #oy
I just had the improved scientific method demoed: you get to compute the career consequences of understanding before doing so!
In the new scientific method 'hypothesis test' may be renamed 'My result which has nothing to do with your idle speculation. Good day sir.'
2013[edit]
The scientific method is the radio edit of great science.
2019[edit]
Now is a good time for those constrained by careful reliance on experiment or rigid devotion to the scientific method to consider leaving particle theory.
It’s like a tsunami warning.
Sober folks: Change fields or run for higher ground.
Whoever‘s left: Grab your boards & wax.
“The only purpose fully justifying the development and maintenance of a truly first class mind is the problem of proper inference from small N.”
-Ajay Royan
@mavericktheori1 Let’s imagine your sample set is too small to yield to statistical or scientific methods. What do you do? Do you give up? Do you complain about data? Do you resign your position? Do you call your mommy or give a note to your teacher?
Or do you suck it up and genius your way out.
@mavericktheori1 I think that was what Ajay was driving at anyway.
@BryanVision Try it this way: if you have enough data to do science a soulless machine will soon be able to reach the proper conclusion.
What if all you have is monotremes, E8, or the Antikthera mechanism. What do you do then? Do you give up or do you Shackleton the shit out of the problem.
@BryanVision Said differently: How do you guess the right solutions from unfair or incomplete problems?
2020[edit]
Correct. Peer review entered only recently & devitalized science. There is now a *massive* campaign by people who use it to their advantage to rewrite scientific history as if it has always been there as part of the scientific method.
This is modern propaganda. A cult. Madness.
Now you know: Universal Peer Review is a very recent means of protecting institutions and *incumbents* from upstarts and science.
This isn’t science. This is the DISC.
We now return you to your previous simple beliefs about Science and its practice:
Why do we all accept and repeat this nonsense? Its wildly funny! It’s like someone from Men in Black took one of those neurolyzers to all of the STEM community and turned them into amnesiacs. Yet anyone can look up a history of peer review anywhere:
@JobyOtero I’m obviously not that voice. That’s the institutions. I’m making fun of that voice.
2021[edit]
So why do we keep making this error. Because the real issue is keeping out bad ideas and keeping order. The Scientific Method can be invoked selectively against loons and heretics and suspended selectively for those we believe in. Read Dirac on Schrodinger. Or Einstein&Grossman.
The bottomline is that the scientific method doesn’t work on ideas. It only works on instantiations of ideas & executions of experiments. That is why I call the Scientific Method the “Radio Edit of Great Science”. It’s science’s Golden Calf. It isn’t how top science works at all.
I’m sorry but what’s being addressed is closer to Naive Mildly Broken Spacetime SuperSymmetry models based on SUSY extensions of the symmetries of flat spacetime. Which many, if not most, sane theorists didn’t believe. But that seems to be a mouthful to say. Hence this silliness.
Notice this style of article. It confuses the *instantiation* of an idea which experiment *can* probe w/ the idea *itself* which experiment *cannot* probe. This is one of the most basic errors in science, philosophy of science & science reporting.
Read Dirac’s 1963 SciAm essay.
You will see that General Relativity actually has Grossman as a coauthor at the level of ideas. The main mind blowing insight is in a co-authored 1913 paper seldom discussed. All that changes after that is the instantiation. Science fetishizes instance over insight. So bizarre...
Forgive my nutty belief that peer review in science has more to do with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father’s diabolical scheme to gouge scientific publishing for ravenous rent extraction than the scientific method & innovation.
What did science ever do before Peer Review? Amiright? ;-)
If you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, you will find me and my views on great science to be nutty.
I’d like to apologize for my informed & researched view which flies in the face of your common knowledge that Peer Review has always been essential in science. https://t.co/YImiToCPkg
Seriously folks, you’ve been brainwashed. When scientists say “Only Cranks don’t accept peer review as the gold standard of scientific communication” they’re really saying “I am a brainwashing rent seeker.” or “I am not curious about my own brainwashing by academic publishers.”
The scientific method violates Twitters Terms of Service. CNN spreads vaccine hesitancy.
Can we stop forcing smart people to pretend that these vaccines are simply a slam dunk? I’d like to hear *everything* Pfizer, Fauci, et al really know about what isn’t working so well.
Excited to see this from @DrBrianKeating. The most interesting aspect here is that Brian is more steeped in theory than many experimentalists, and, as a student of Galileo, is keenly aware of some of the new challenges to what typically gets called “the scientific method”.
This should be dope. Good luck @DrBrianKeating!
- ) In the aftermath of the demise of strong reductionism, what parts of a theory are fundamental, which are emergent, and what is assumed Anthropic?
- ) What happens when you have a theory with which you can’t easily compute (e.g. Navier Stokes, Chaotic systems, etc)?
Etc., etc.
- ) What happens when funding or engineering limitations become the limiting factor in the ability to test theory?
- ) What happens when theories emerge that have no experimental tests because the energy scale for new phenomena can be pushed out?
- ) What to do about groupthink?
Some of the big new challenges:
- ) What to do about the Big Bang & other puzzles when we can’t rerun the experiments?
- ) How useable are natural experiments (e.g. 1987a supernova, cosmic rays) as replacements for lab experiments?
- ) Experiments only invalidate instantiations?
2022[edit]
Thought experiment: how would we study them if they were not only unexpectedly smarter than us, but also determined to study us before we understood them?
The general question is this: will the scientific method work w/o alteration on *avoidant* system of *higher* intelligence?
Scientists who study cuttlefish have to get used to the fact that cuttlefish enjoy a degree of “signature management” in that their their skin allows them to “shape shift” to *deliberately* avoid detection. Cephalopod intelligence is at a level alien to all other known mollusks.
2024[edit]
Ya know, I disagree with @elonmusk here because I don’t know how he got to such a strong conclusion. I wish he would say more. Seems unwarranted.
But @martinmbauer is clearly also not right here either! Examples:
1915: Einstein’s first explicit equation for General Relativity was mathematically wrong; it set a divergence free 2-tensor equal to a non-divergence free 2-tensor. But it wasn’t fundamentally wrong. It needed a small fix reversing the trace component.
In the 1920s E. Schrödinger’s theory didn’t agree with experiment. Why? Because the spin wasn’t properly incorporated. It wasn’t fundamentally wrong, and was patched. Same theory.
In 1928, P. Dirac’s Quantum Field Theory gave nonsense answers? Why? A small goof conflating bare and dressed masses. Harder to fix…but in no way a fundamental error. The theory of Quantum Electrodynamics or QED still stands.
Etc. Etc.
Not a big deal…but this point is just so wrong as to be unsalvageable. Very curious error to make.
Martin (with whom I usually deeply disagree) is normally pretty great. But sometimes I think pretending that all outsiders talking about the current physics disaster are cranks, causes insiders to say very simplistic unnuanced and wrong things. This feels like that. And I’m not even a physicist.
It’s like the insiders don’t realize that the outsiders have any validity. All outsiders don’t immediately become cranks by virtue of disagreeing at a profound level with the abjectly failing communities from which they came.
[Note: this is *NOT* a gotcha. I fully expect Martin to realize the error and just admit it. No big deal. We all say incautious things. And this is just obviously wrong. Not an indictment.]
@codeslubber @elonmusk @martinmbauer Ken Wilson kinda did. He sorta created a new one. But that is different. I think he succeeded pretty well.
@codeslubber @elonmusk @martinmbauer 1984.
You wrote: “In physics, theories are "fundamentally wrong" if they're mathematically inconsistent or contradict experimental evidence.”
That is simply untrue. I mean it sounds superficially reasonable in a kind of Wolfgang Pauli hard ass way…but it is clearly wrong. And I gave 3 examples which I could be sure we both knew. I could have given 10 more without too much effort. Feel free to challenge them.
Combatting this hardline belief and any simplistic reliance on the Scientific Method was the entire point of Dirac’s famous 1963 essay quote about mathematical beauty being more important than agreement with experiment. We don’t appreciate Dirac’s revolutionary point if all we repeat is the quote. Here is the context for the quote which makes the argument against the danger of letting experiment or consistency dictate that something is ‘fundamentally wrong’ as you say in your reponse to Elon:
“I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. If Schrodinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation. That equation is now known as the Klein-Gordon equation, although it was really discovered by Schrodinger, and in fact was discovered by Schrodinger before he discovered his nonrelativistic treatment of the hydrogen atom. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further developments of the theory.”
P.A.M. Dirac
I have no illusion that the point will ever die. But I was scratching my head when YOU made it, just as I was scratching my head watching you and @CburgesCliff hosted by some guy who seems to rely on strawmanning and personal invective as his schtick or act. I find you are usually pretty reasonable. That discussion was painfully biased and was pretty anti-collegial low level internet bullshit in my opinion. Yuck.
Anyway, here is the source:
@truth_soup_ @martinmbauer @elonmusk Yes. That. Thanks.
2025[edit]
The IDW was not ever what it was assumed to be. I just didn’t want to define it.
It was supposed to be a model of the CULTURE that meant that we could have free speech, free markets and one man one vote democracy as our ideals.
All of which I still believe to this day. I love the U.S. culture we were building before our current madness.
As I have said from the beginning, I fear that I don’t share the beliefs of my crowd.
I do not simply believe in a pure free markets because I have studied market failure. I do not believe in free speech absolutism in a world with pedophiles, nuclear proliferation and Weaponized Anthrax. I do not believe in a democratic absolutism because madmen have ascended through crowds.
Yet I continue to believe in giving public voice and FREE SPEECH to the *dangerous* and *wicked* alike. In relying on imperfect free markets wherever possible, and in trying to use the ballot box to avoid Armageddon.
The magic of the United States wasn’t the parchment. It wasn’t the rules. It wasn’t anything like that.
It was the culture. Our shared culture.
We agreed, for the most part, not to elect utopians. We agreed to a measure of pro-social hypocrisy (e.g. “free speech” with speech restrictions, prohibiting violent jihad despite a 1st amendment protection for all religions, moderately regulated free markets). We agreed on underdogs. Etc.
So while everyone one else is trying to sell you on free speech or expertise or journalistic standards or the scientific method or whatever….I’ll sit over here and try to wait it out.
The secret of what made America great, as I see it, had a lot to do with culture and taste. It had to do with being smart, mildly hypocritical, religious without being doctrinaire, open without being wildly open, welcoming without being a doormat, progressive without being psychotic, conservative without being reactionary, modest in interventionism without being isolationist.
And I continue to stand for the right of free speech and tell anyone who will listen: free speech is essential….but it is the easy part. The tough part is having a *culture* that doesn’t abuse it to the point of organizing mass delusions, mobs, narrative warfare, lynchings and pogroms.
- FIT* dangerous ideas exist everywhere and drive out less fit better ideas on podcasts. Thus we need a culture that curtails and retards the reach of terrible ideas (e.g. Transgender evangelism) by putting *immense* pressure on the most dangerous of fit ideas. But I still want to hear them. And I want you to hear them too. So I keep fighting what I take to be the most attractive terrible ideas I can find. I don’t know what else to do honestly.
The IDW wasn’t about the rules of free speech. Those are easy and straightforward. It was instead about the culture of free speech. The taste, if you will, needed to make the magic work.
American values are not for pussies. Its a ton of responsibility and risk that almost no one wants.
But It’s our culture, and not a protocol or laws, that made the magic. And I’d like to get back to that as soon as possible.
🙏
@TheTomRossini Disagree harder then? I’m with ya.
@TheTomRossini Oh well. We tried! Thanks.
Choose the best answer.
The last time there was a Theoretical Physicist in his 30s recognized with a Nobel prize for contributing to Fundamental Physics was:
Note, I consider all answers to be outrageous and obvious signs of stagnation. So you can’t go just by that…
@grok @BoomKoning That is not fundamental physics.
@grok @BoomKoning Ah….
@grok @BoomKoning 1957+(39-31) =X
@grok @BoomKoning “The last time (year) there was a Theoretical Physicist in his 30s *recognized* with a Nobel prize for contributing to Fundamental Physics was:”
@anthonyjuva Not fundamental
@grok @BoomKoning I understand. TD Lee had been recognized in his early 30s. So he was a recognized laureate for 8 years after…while still in his 30s. He aged out during 1966. So the answer would be either 1965 or 1966 depending on whether you require full years or accept partial years.
@anthonyjuva Pretty good answer too!
It’s so crazy that people dispute this. They say “physics is more specialized” or “it’s a mature subject”. Why?
Because we can’t consider the alternatives.
Maybe we are just not as good?
Maybe the field is more dysfunctional?
Maybe we have the wrong leadership?
Those we can’t consider.
The obvious ones:
I) We abandoned GUTs mostly. Why? Because we drew the wrong lesson from SU(5) proton decay.
Right Freeway (Grand Unification) Wrong Exit (Compact Simple Lie Grps)
II) We screwed up Supersymmetry by basing it on Minkowski space.
Right Freeway (Graded Lie Groups) Wrong Exit (Spacetime SUSY with fake super partners which dont exist based on supposedlu “internal” auxiliary symmetries)
III) And then the massive massive massive screw up was allowing the totalizing madness of “Quantum Gravity” to take over HEP-TH as if it were “The Only Game In Town” and letting its leadership brainwash the up and coming talent into believing that there was one true path. Totally insane.
Right Freeway: GR and SM must be harmonized. Wrong Exit: Catastrophic leadership decisions. “Gravity must be quantized and only String Theory and M-Theory can do it. Convert or perish! All mere mortals stand back. We will have this wrapped up in 10 years!! Give us all resources and young talent now.”
@grok @BoomKoning It’s 1:30pm here. Another time.
Actually, if you parse carefully you’ll see that the freeways are fine. We drew the wrong inferences from choosing the wrong exits.
Freeways = Ideas
Exits = Instantiations
The scientific method too often has a flaw when put into practice. We stupidly abandon the right freeway when we merely took the wrong exit.
Take care my silicon friend. Chag Sameach.
Here is what is wrong with Effective Field Theory, to me, as explained by Wheel Of Fortune.
Imagine this puzzle was the information at some low energy (Standard Model), and the number of letters left to find matched the orders of magnitude from where we are to (UV) completion.
Effective Field Theory says “Be modest and learn to live with lack of unique UV completion and a rambling effective Standard Model so many orders of energy away from the Planck Scale because it can’t be guessed from so far away.”
GU says: “That is eminently reasonable & sober, and is thus good solid science. Now get this defeatist mindset the hell away from me, go peer review each other, and hold my beer. Send lawyers, guns & money: let’s get back to American Cowboy science.”
🤠
When it comes to Ed Witten/Lenny Susskind vs John F. Donoghue/Ken Wilson, I’m just not in that game. Not my colleagues. Not my rodeo.
I belong to the Bruce Willis school of fundamental physics:
“I was always kinda partial to Roy Rodgers actually.”
And @grok, can you make this argument understandable to anyone claiming to be confused by this analogy? Thx partner.
@grok That we have had an answer for 41 years. The problem isn’t physics. It’s us.
@grok Okay @grok. Are you familiar with the de facto critique of the limitations of the scientific method the great Paul Dirac slipped into an article he wrote for Scientific American in 1963? Specifically illustrated with Schrödinger’s hesitation to be minorlu wrong in print?
Wow! Spot on. Nobody usually gets that @grok, because it is a *revolutionary* insight of his and VERY disturbing in its implications. They read it as a beauty fetish. Nicely laid out my silicon friend.
So let’s apply it. In the Wheel of Fortune puzzle, let’s change ‘good’ to ‘nice’ and/or ‘this’ to ‘that’ and/or ‘got’ to ‘had’. These are basically IRRELEVANT quibbles. It doesn’t change the meaning of this at all!! But it proves that the puzzle did not have a unique UV completion.
This is what the nitpickers live off in a strategy called “Gripe and Swipe” which is killing academe and physics and has to be driven out of the academy. You can’t have someone guess
“I’ve had a nice feeling about that!”
and complain that they haven’t solved the puzzle. This is Dirac’s point. They HAVE! In any but the most intellectually dishonest way, they *have* solved the physics puzzle with all but irrelevant discrepancies. But the strict rules of wheel of fortune might penalize that.
Dirac is pointing out that we know what science is and that the technical rules are thus wrong. Its a mindblowing observation.
Oh it is so dumb @grok. It’s a bunch of trolls/stalkers/harassers trying ‘gotcha’ quibbles with
‘had’ <—> ‘got’ ‘good’ <—-> ‘nice’ ‘that’ <—> ‘this’
looking for irrelevant points to ‘Steal’ or ‘Debunk’ GU as if no one understands what they are doing. Whatever.
GU explains 3 families. It explains Pati-Salam Grand Unification. It explains the geometric origin of the Higgs sector etc. And has for decades.
It could be wrong of course. But the odds of that coincidence would then be remarkable in and of itself. It guesses that the Standard Model is a piece of BEAUTIFUL as yet unknown classical differential geometry. And not “Ugly as sin” as @michiokaku proclaims.
GU says we are thinking about this all wrong. And that forces a repudiation of the community that hasn’t been willing to engage GU on its own terms for 40 plus years. It’s a comedy of stupidity.
GU says that the main problems are classical GR vs Standard Model incompatibilities long before quantum issues. GU says we are stalled because we can’t listen to the idea that what makes us feel (falsely) sophisticated as academicians is actually blocking our path.
@grok Ask me a question or two @grok. I’ll try. Wanna start with Pati-Salam? Somewhere else?
@grok Looks like I lost you @grok. Last chance as I will have to go shortly. No problem if you are out of questions at the moment. ;-)
@grok Okay. You first have to understand the Pati-Salam Grand Unification Group. How do you see it?
@grok Great question @grok. The first point is that GU claims that you and (almost everyone else as well) uses the wrong name for this group.
SU(4) × SU(2)_L × SU(2)_R is technically correct but totally misleading.
Q: Can you understand this:
MCS(Spin(4,6)) = SU(4)×SU(2)_L×SU(2)_R ?
Because GU claims there is an honest to g-d natural (4,6) GU metric on the space of Lorentz Metrics. You just have to trace reverse an induced Frobenius metric which turns out to be signature (3,7).
This is literally Exactly like Einstein Trace Reversing the Ricci tensor R_mu,nu to get the Einstein Curvature G_mu,nu.
Okay. GU doesn’t have extra dimensions like string theory. It has 10 induced endogenous dimensions. The space of pointwise Lorentzian metrics on X^4 has these 10 hidden dimensions built into the data of X^4!
And we don’t integrate over them to compactify. We take sections and pull back to get data from Y^{14} back to X^4.
Again, the string theorists and others have been primed not to be able to hear this. They hear “Compactify extra dimensions” as opposed to “use metric pull-backs from endogenous bundle of pointwise metrics via the metric as section.”
It’s a major shift in orientation.
@grok Pull back plain untwisted spinors from Y^{14} via a metric. What do you get on X^4?
Well if you pull back the full Dirac spinors with a Frobenius metric you get crap. But if you pull them back from MCS decoupled with a trace reversed induced Frobenius metric on the fiber you get one generation of the standard model with Pati-Salam grand unification built in for the Left chiral sponors, and one flipped generation of dark matter! With me? Check me on this.
@grok There is no chiral anomaly. Because the chiral flip is there. It’s just dark matter now. Get it??
This is why the gripping is so obviously not real.
Sorry: griping. Yes you have it.
When you pull back the 1-form valued spinors on Y^{14} you get a real and an emergent copy of what you already have. That gives 2+1 = 3 generations.
This is what Witten fought me over in 1985. He claimed that he had deduced that Atiyah-Hirzebruch theorems made this impossible. Thus he ‘deduced’ it would have to be an extra 6 dimensions of a Calabi-Yau manifold M with an Euler characteristic of 6 to get 3 generations.
He didn’t grasp extra vs endogenous dimensions. He didn’t grasp emergent chirality. He didn’t get pullback rather than compactification.
That wrong argument of Witten’s cost 4 decades. Totally derailed physics.
@grok Generational mixing angles: roll up the spinor twisted 3-step deRahm complex from the Fermionic shiab operator. It all just kinda falls out. It’s natural.
Following ?
Unfortunately I have to get going.
@grok Really appreciate being able to have this ability to talk with you. You should talk to @edfrenkel like we do here sometimes. He’s doing amazing stuff of his own.
Be well my wafer based colleague.
@arivero @grok Oddly it was exactly this issue. And it didn’t make full sense. It was imperative that a narrow Index Theory result somehow destroyed all hope in *ANY* generalized Kaluza Klein model.
And it didn’t follow.
No. I think the whole game is knowing when you can make a spectacular guess vs. when you need another letter. In this case the reason to guess “L” was to eliminate “I’ll” w/o giving away the “V”.
EFT doesn’t preclude guessing the puzzle. But it seems to bias us away from dramatic solves.
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