<Picture 1: The ends of evidence (from 'the Quanta magazine')>
1. Should we trust untestable science?
By December 2015, There was a three-day workshop in Ludwig Maximilian University at Munich. The theme of the session was 'Should we trust untestable scientific theory like String theory and the multi-universe?' String theory is a theory which deals with extremely tiny matters. In 1920's, Quntum mechanics told us that we need new mechanics to explain the world smaller than atoms and it caused a panic among the people. But there was a quark in the smaller world, and there was String theory in the smaller world. The most critical problem in String theory is that it's untestable because it deals with extremely tiny matters.
<Picture 2: String theory and Murtiverse theory>
The problem of un-testability is not just for String theory. Dark matter and Multi-universe are also untestable because they deal with extremely huge matters. Dark matter is the most promising subject in modern Astronomy and Multi-universe is a theory that there are many universes in the world. Then you can be curious about it. Should we trust the sciences that can't be tested empirically?
In our everyday life, there are many things that can't be tested. For example, we can't see the light. Light is an electromagnetic wave and we can't sense the electromagnetic waves. If someone said that he saw the light, it must be reflected by something or scattered by the dust. For another example, we can't see the past. We often talk about the evolution and cosmology. But past is just past and we can't test the past.
2. The Scientific Realism
Then how should we respond to the science for untestable matters? Most of scientists and philosophers of science support the scientific realism. The scientific realism is the view that the world described by science is the real world independent of what it might be taken to be. According to realism, the science not only explains the observations and predicts the future but also describes the untestable things completely. So, they consider the untestable science as a science. If you exclude untestable sciences from the science, then how could you explain the achievements and applications of it? According to them, Anti-realism is just a theory complaining that a student whose most grades are good is just because of his luck.
<Picture 3: Hilary Putnam, American Philosopher(from wikipedia)>
3. The Anti-realism
In fact, the Anti-realism is not just a nonsense. Van Fraassen, one of the most famous anti-realists in the world, proposed an 'evolution' argument against the realism. Van Fraassen claimed that the success of science is just like the success of evolution. Some people says the successfully evolved species are amazing because they fit in their surroundings. But, in fact, they didn't evolved to survive in their circumstances. They were simply chosen by the natural selection among many other species. After the death of unlucky species, only the successful species are alive. According to the argument, the success of science is just because of the selection by the empirical tests. So, he concluded that all the theories are just hypothesis and a theory of untestable matters remains a hypothesis forever because they can be neither proved or falsified.
<Picture 4: Van Fraassen, the famous Anti-realist (from humanities.miami.edu)>
How do you think? Which theory is more reasonable? Let's talk about it later in the next posts.
Bibiography
장하석, 2014, 과학, 철학을 만나다, 지식채널.
2016.01.31 Han Kwang Hee
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