{"id":11649,"date":"2014-01-14T08:16:38","date_gmt":"2014-01-14T16:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=11649"},"modified":"2014-01-14T08:33:46","modified_gmt":"2014-01-14T16:33:46","slug":"what-scientific-ideas-are-ready-for-retirement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/14\/what-scientific-ideas-are-ready-for-retirement\/","title":{"rendered":"What Scientific Ideas Are Ready for Retirement?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every year we look forward to the Edge<\/em> Annual Question<\/a>, and as usual it’s a provocative one: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” Part of me agrees with Ian McEwan’s answer<\/a>, which is to unask the question, and argue that nothing should be retired. Unasking is almost always<\/a> the right response to questions that beg other questions, but there’s also an argument to be made in favor of playing along, so that’s what I did.<\/p>\n

My answer was “Falsifiability<\/a>.” More of a philosophical idea than a scientific one, but an idea that is bandied about by lazy scientists far more than it is invoked by careful philosophers. Thinking sensibly about the demarcation problem between science and non-science, especially these days, requires a bit more nuance than that.<\/p>\n

Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best. String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity involve phenomena that are likely to manifest themselves only at energies enormously higher than anything we have access to here on Earth. The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms that are impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on Popper, have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they are not falsifiable.<\/p>\n

The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a priori<\/em> principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m also partial to Alan Guth’s answer<\/a>: “The universe began in a low-entropy state.” Of course we all know that our observable universe had a relatively low entropy at the Big Bang; Alan is making the point that the observable universe might not be the whole thing, and the Big Bang might not have been the beginning, so it’s completely possible that the universe as a whole was never in what one might call a “low-entropy” state. Instead, starting from a generic state, entropy could increase in both directions, leading to a two-sided arrow of time<\/a>. This has been one of my favorite ideas for a while now, and Alan and I are writing a paper with Chien-Yao Tseng that examines toy models with such behavior.<\/p>\n

Here are some other interesting\/provocative answers, picked unsystematically out of over 100,000 words overall. Remember that the titles are what the person wants to retire, not something they’re in favor of.<\/p>\n