The Scientific Method is the Radio Edit of Great Science
I often make this joke that the scientific method is the radio edit of great science. Great science doesn't look much like the story you've been told about people diligently trying to falsify things and, you know, all sorts of statistical significance.
Great science looks like breaking into graveyards and digging up bodies when you know you shouldnât, or trusting your aesthetic sense when the data tells you otherwise.
I've always loved this aspect of Science, that you may want to tame this thing, and it won't be tamed. It will always be the case that the leaders of the field are the misfits in the back throwing spitballs, rather than the good kids who are always there on time raising their hands.
-Eric Weinstein on The Tim Ferriss Show
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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.
Iâm sorry but whatâs 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 didnât believe. But that seems to be a mouthful to say. Hence this silliness.
The bottomline is that the scientific method doesnât work on ideas. It only works on instantiations of ideas & executions of experiments. That is why I call the Scientific Method the âRadio Edit of Great Scienceâ. Itâs scienceâs Golden Calf. It isnât how top science works at all.
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.
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...