Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by joshuamorton 2907 days ago
Scientifically speaking, no. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, and to be falsifiable it must be testable. I guess in some sense you could claim that there are hypothesis that are testable, but which we do not have the capacity to test. But then, is the claim that "one day in the future, we will be able to test this other claim" itself falsifiable? I'd argue not (it's a recognizable, not decidable claim, in the computational sense, and I think that for a claim to be falsifiable, it must be decidable).
1 comments
kybernetikos 2907 days ago
> A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable

This is certainly one understanding about what science should be (although not a scientific one interestingly enough). Personally I prefer Thomas Kuhn's demarcation, which by my understanding concentrates more on whether a scientific program is producing interesting predictions which turn out to be true.

link
joshuamorton 2907 days ago
I'm not speaking about science as a whole or a scientific program, but a scientific claim. CERN is certainly not falsifiable, but it produces predictions which (often) turn out to be true. It does so by devising falsifiable claims and then testing those claims.

In other words, the method to create interesting predictions which turn out to be true is to create interesting predictions, then test those predictions, and update your understanding of the world based on them. Once your world-model is good enough, your predictions will often be true. And, perhaps, eventually your predictions will be so often true that they become uninteresting, so you must move on to other questions.

link
kybernetikos 2907 days ago
Fair enough, I think Kuhn was referring to things like the world-models and you're referring to finding out if the predictions of the model matches reality.

The heliocentric model of the solar system made less accurate predictions than the geocentric model for years, because the geocentric model was mature and had had lots of tweaks applied to it. In that time, you could have asked the heliocentric model to make a prediction, and shown that it was wrong compared to the geocentric model. You would have been wrong to conclude that heliocentrism was wrong though, it just hadn't matured as a theory enough yet.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

link