[mahranch]

What this article fails to take into account is the underlying politics at play here. You might think of all places, that science would be "politics free" but it's not. Far, far from it.

For example, people working on string theory and people working on say, quantum loop gravity are somewhat at odds with one another. String theory may not see the QLG people as a direct threat but the QLG people certainly sees string theory as competition. Now you may wonder, "In competition for what?" and the answer to that is a bit more obvious: Funding (money for research and their very own paychecks) and attention from their peers/media/press/etc. These people's very livelihoods are at stake.

If QLG was proven wrong tomorrow, it's not like the people who were doing that for the last 15 years can just jump into another field. There's plenty of incentive for "hostile science" as I like to call it. There have been some well-known physicists who have written entire books bashing their competition for this purpose (See: Peter Woit's "Not Even Wrong", which incidentally, is chuck full of so many inaccuracies someone else wrote a book disputing his book...)

So when I see articles like these, I like to check out who the author is. Do they have a reason to write this piece? In this case, it's Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser. Both are coincidentally astrophysicists at very respected universities. I wonder what they're working on?

It appears Marcelo Gleiser, one of the authors, just published an anti-String theory book which claims that "We don't need a Theory of Everything".

[DennisP]

Yes, but it's possible that the points they raised were the reason they took that side of the debate. I don't think it's really useful to question people's motives, rather than just considering their arguments.

[protomyth]

"I don't think it's really useful to question people's motives, rather than just considering their arguments."

In an ideal world the argument should stand alone, but I find people's motives to be worth considering. Not for the usual you'll find in the media like looking for the corrupt or using those motives to dismiss their arguments. I find how people come to their beliefs to be really interesting. I can learn from the path they took even if I find the result to be broken. The danger is admiring the path and supporting the broken argument.

As to the politics. Two people interacting means that you will have politics. Humans have conflicts from the battlefield to the soapbox to the pulpit to the lecture hall.

[Retra]

You can easily hide bias behind good arguments. Attention to motive is how you discover this bias. Humans are notoriously awful at dealing with bias, and you're suggesting that people remove one of the only tools they have against it?

[DennisP]

It's often very difficult to determine another person's actual motives are. In this particular case, there's no way to know whether someone takes a side because of their bias, or has a bias because their honest opinion led them to invest a personal stake in it.

If the arguments are actually good, it doesn't matter what motivated a person to make them. Casting aspersions on motive is just a cheap way people avoid dealing with good arguments they don't like, perhaps because of subtle biases of their own.

[e40]

What you describe ("hostile science" ... nice phrase) is human nature. Why would we believe this wouldn't happen among scientists?

Also, it's "chock-full" not "chuck full" (I had to look it up and I had another wrong answer for the correct spelling, so I thought it worth mentioning.)

[craftsman]

I do understand your point here. But, as the article points out, the very thing in question here is: are we going to determine science funding solely by politics, or are there measurable, objective ways of determining where to allocate funding? If the underlying science is not testable, falsifiable, then we really are in the realm of politics and taste. One might almost say, religion.

[jordanpg]

I'll speak up for one "religious" viewpoint: it is plausible that a breakthrough in theoretical physics could lead to a technological revolution in ways we can't even imagine. Warp drives, teleporters, etc.

If we accept this premise and consider this a sensible card to play, in the spectrum of physics resource allocation (say <5%), then these theorists need to start somewhere. Physics beyond the standard model is fertile ground, as is dark matter and friends. (not-so?) Friendly competition for these marginal portions of physics funding might be a good thing.

Aside: It borders on the surreal to me that these ideas need to be taken to the public to secure funding. The amount of abstraction between popular accounts of modern physics and the math itself is profound. The language used to talk about these theories begins to sound like fairy tales.

[treenyc]

So the difference between QLG and String Theory is that QLG seems can be proven wrong in the near future, where String Theory seems to be the kind of theory that is not experimentally provable (at least in the near future)?

Sounds like string theory people really knows how to play this game.