From: (No Email available)

Date: 2004-07-20 22:07:17

Comment:

This is the author who posted the original criticism of this film ("it really is a rabbit hole..."). It's amazing how much people think they know about you based on an opinion or two. Or maybe it's just easier to dismiss someone as "Mr. epistemologist", a cynic, or just plain "unhappy" and unworthy of consuming resources (that's a pretty tough sentence - death for unhappiness!). Let me just say that these folks aren't describing me, but rather the way they would personify the mean, evil person who would deign to question their conception of reality. But enough about them and me...

The substance of my argument was essentially this - that the film isn't scientific, in that it doesn't rely on evidence to justify its claims. The beauty of the scientific process is that all ideas, hypotheses, theories, etc. ultimately have to be compatible with available experimental evidence. That filter ultimately sorts through the ridiculous, the hopeful, and the well-meaning but wrong to produce the body of theory that explains what we know about the world better than all the other available theories. When a new theory comes along, it replaces old ones if it better predicts the reality we observe in experiment. Ultimately, all science answers to the data, and ideas that don't work are eventually jettisoned (not that this always happens right away).

So you can see why a scientist like me would be a bit miffed when someone passes off a bunch of pretty speculative ideas off as "proven by science" when there have been few if any experimental tests of those ideas. If you are a scientist, you know that this stuff ain't science, but if you are not a scientist, you might come away thinking that speculation alone  is where science comes from. In a world where fine experimental work is under attack as "junk science" and real data are dismissed under political pressure, this really matters. And, for the record, if some of the speculations in this film turn out to be well-suported by experimental evidence, I'll be happy to accept them as science, given the caveat that "extraordianry claims require extraordinary evidence".

Maybe I could close with a much more everyday example of how amazingly single-minded we humans are once we get an idea in our heads (stuff like the placebo effect). We've all seen the various gizmos that promise to increase gas mileage in a car, along with all the testimonials that go with them. Now few  (if any) of these devices ever shows an increase in mileage in the lab under controlled conditions and proper experimental protocols. Yet they still sell, and lots of people swear by them. Why? Because the drivers start thinking about all the increases in mileage they will get when they put the device in their car. They "think efficiency", and unconsciously start accelerating more modestly from stops, let off the gas earlier before red lights, etc., all behaviors that will increase fuel economy a bit. Then they check their odometers and gas bills and Wow! they improved their mileage! What a miracle! Our minds are very good at fitting the world into the patterns we expect. That's why we need to test our ideas against reality in situations that remove our bias. That's why we need science. (thanks to the Car Talk guys for that example...)

By the way, another poster referred to "The Elegant Universe" as a good place to learn about string theory. The produces of those programs make it clear that string theory actually doesn't have any experimental backing per se; nobody knows how to build the particle accelerator big enough to test the predictions of string theory. So you have to say that string theory is right now just scientifically plausible speculation that is consistent with the experimental data we do have (and very elegant mathematically). But nobody yet knows if string theory will pass a real experimental test (or if anybody will be able to test it at all).