Falsifiability; necessary (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, February 16, 2015, 17:45 (3358 days ago) @ GateKeeper

It means proving the theory, reproducing results. What is wrong with proof? The problem is the science of cosmology has reached a huge theoretical fence, string theory and its twins. Some science folks want to forget proving it. Beauty and elegance are enough.-http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/02/falsifiability/-"“It would be completely non-scientific to ignore that possibility just because it doesn't conform with some preexisting philosophical prejudices,” says Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech, who called for the “retirement” of the falsifiability principle in a controversial essay for Edge last year. Falsifiability is “just a simple motto that non-philosophically-trained scientists have latched onto,” argues Carroll. He also bristles at the notion that this viewpoint can be summed up as “elegance will suffice,” as Ellis put it in a stinging Nature comment written with cosmologist Joe Silk. -"“Elegance can help us invent new theories, but does not count as empirical evidence in their favor,” says Carroll. “The criteria we use for judging theories are how good they are at accounting for the data, not how pretty or seductive or intuitive they are.”-"But Ellis and Silk worry that if physicists abandon falsifiability, they could damage the public's trust in science and scientists at a time when that trust is critical to policymaking. “This battle for the heart and soul of physics is opening up at a time when scientific results—in topics from climate change to the theory of evolution—are being questioned by some politicians and religious fundamentalists,” Ellis and Silk wrote in Nature."-If not provable, what use is it? Mental fun and games. Maybe we have reached the limit of what we can know about cosmology.