paul davies taking science on faith

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Paul Davies: Taking science on faith

Update: a list of wrong assumptions about science was added at the

end of this essay. The article written on 11/25 was moved to the

top as the most discussed recent text.

As far as I can say, The New York Times remain by far the best source

of science news and opinions among the English-speaking newspapers.

Paul Davies' op-ed

meditates about the controversial question concerning the difference

between science and religion. I agree with most things he writes. He

starts with the idealized picture that many people believe to be true

- namely a picture in which science and religion are sharply

separated. Skepticism belongs to science while blind belief belongs to

religion.

He instantly adds his main thesis that this picture is an

oversimplification because science has its belief system, too. The

first thing that a typical scientist - and especially a theoretical

physicist - believes is that the questions he is trying to answer have

coherent, understandable, and universally valid explanation.

Needless to say, this belief is a fact in the case of approximate laws

that describe classes of physical phenomena that have already been

understood and whose theories have already been verified. But whether

the "next step" is going to be comparably rational, mechanical,

satisfactory, deterministic, unique, or otherwise similar to the

previous theories is always a matter of extrapolation. It is really a

matter of belief.

Geocentrism

I primarily want to discuss this issue in the case of the anthropic

principle but let me mention a few episodes from the past. How was

science and religion separated during the debates about heliocentrism?

Well, not too sharply. Of course, there were priests who were

dismissing the champions of heliocentrism on religious grounds. But

there were also many people paid as scientists who were frantically

attacking heliocentrism as a bad science that contradicted insights of

giants of science such as Aristotle or Ptolemaios and the basic

pillars of the scientific method as understood at that time.

Some people like to forget about these things but geocentrism was not

invented by the Catholic Church. It was constructed by Aristotle who

lived 3 centuries before Christ and Ptolemy who lived 1 century after

Christ. Aristotle was a philosopher and a scientist but Ptolemy was

primarily a scientist. The belief in geocentrism was being defended by

scientifically sounding propaganda, too. It couldn't prevent the

theory from being incorrect.

Determinism

The second example I want to mention is the interpretation of quantum

mechanics. For centuries, people believed that the Universe was a

deterministic system where every event has precise reasons why it

occurs in one way and not another way. Many people believed that at

least in physics, determinism was a universal requirement that a

scientific theory had to satisfy. Well, they were proved wrong, too.

Today we have fully rational and scientific evidence that all the work

on "hidden variables" and similar attempts to return to the era of

determinism was incorrect. The best theories that explain virtually

everything we observe inevitably imply that it is only the

probabilities of different outcomes that can be scientifically

calculated. The basic principles of quantum mechanics have been

settled for decades and they show that the world is different than

what the people have thought to be necessary for science as recently

as a century ago.

In both cases, and many other cases in science (not so much in

religion), these beliefs sold as "principles of science" emerge as a

result of extrapolation of successes of a certain kind of scientific

approach in the past. Such extrapolations can turn out to be wrong and

they often do. Nature doesn't care how many times someone screams "it

is essential for science!" when he or she tries to defend a wrong

statement. If a statement is incorrect, it doesn't help to call it

"scientific" as opposed to "religious". As we will discuss below, if

someone screams "everyone must respect the holy principle that there

is only one vacuum", it is equally religious and equally dumb a

statement as the statement that "everyone in the world must worship

the same God".

Of course that the "idealized scientists" are more likely to avoid

irrational approaches and unjustified dogmas. But there is no

universal and eternal definition of an "ideal scientist", partly

because the beliefs of such an ideal scientist depend on scientific

questions that have not been fully answered. A scientist must be

honest, bright, hard-working but whether he should believe these

philosophical principles or others must be left to himself: it is a

dynamical question whose answer may be influenced and should be

influenced by the scientific research itself.

In real science, opinions are being shifted by evaluating evidence

rather than by frantically parroting philosophical dogmas. The same

thing holds in many other situations in science, including the

question about the multiverse.

The multiverse

For many centuries, people were working on theories that assumed that

all parts of the world must be visible with the help of ordinary light

and they have universal properties such as the spectrum of particles

and their interactions. Virtually everything we have learned is

compatible with this assumption. One is therefore often tempted to

extrapolate. It must be true, otherwise it is not science, is it? If

must be true, otherwise our belief system collapses, doesn't it?

Well, it may be true and it may be false. Some people who consider

themselves "scientific" seem completely incapable to grasp the concept

that their assumption may be wrong. Because the inability to

understand that an assumption could be wrong is a defining feature of

religious zeal, these people are living proofs of the fuzzy boundary

between faith and reason. They apparently think that if they repeat

1,000 times in their books and their blogs that their assumptions are

necessary for science, the assumption suddenly becomes true. But if it

is wrong, if will remain wrong. By their frantic repeating of a

hypothesis 1,000 times, they just reveal something about themselves,

not about the Universe. They reveal that they are the same kind of

zealots as those who have opposed heliocentrism.

Paul Davies correctly writes that the anthropic principle is becoming

increasingly acceptable in the science circles. Of course, in this

context, both of us are talking about real scientists - meaning people

like Weinberg, Hawking, Susskind, Wilczek etc. and not Sarfatti, Woit,

Hossenfelder, Smolin, and similar jokes who have almost nothing to do

with the contemporary research in physics but who are extraordinarily

capable to jam the Internet and the newspapers with garbage and to

push the laymen's opinions exactly in the opposite direction than the

direction indicated by the scientific research. Why is it becoming

increasingly acceptable?

Well, simply because the alternative explanations keep on failing. As

a person who finds the anthropic principle inconvenient, I would like

to tell you something else but I won't do it because it wouldn't be

true and I happen to prefer the truth over wishful thinking. The

details of possible non-anthropic explanations simply don't seem to

work so far.

It is pretty clear that if a truly viable - and correct ;-) -

non-anthropic explanation of the tiny cosmological constant and other

constants emerged, it would be abruptly accepted. The anthropic

explanation seems far less attractive, far less accurate, and far less

convincing which is why it cannot be accepted too quickly but that

doesn't mean that its validity would cause the end of science. It

doesn't mean that science would cease being scientific. It doesn't

mean that this answer can't be the correct one.

As we are excluding non-anthropic scenarios by seeing that their

details don't work, the likelihood that the unattractive anthropic

explanation is correct is inevitably increasing whether someone likes

it or not. It is increasing in the same way and for the same reason as

the likelihood that the probabilistic approach to quantum mechanics

was correct. That likelihood was also increasing when new problems

with various "hidden variable theories" were being discovered.

The analogy between the probabilitistic interpretation of quantum

mechanics and the multiverse could turn out to be very accurate - but

it could also be wrong. We just don't know for sure. It is a matter of

belief. If the analogy turns out to be correct, people in the future

will emphasize that we should have known it from the beginning: in

both cases, one can talk about "parallel universes" - something that

shouldn't exist according to the widespread prejudices but something

that is a possible interpretation of the newer and correct scientific

answer.

Strategies to find the answers

Physicists should sensibly divide their capacity to different

approaches that can turn out to be right. They should also rationally

divide their energy between all the approaches to the vacuum selection

problem on one side and other problems where progress is more likely

on the other side. But the worst thing that could happen to science

would be if some intellectually inferior zealots such as those who

gather at Peter Woit's blog were intimidating scientists and if they

were preventing them from reaching a certain kind of "inconvenient"

results.

I am not sure whether the ultimate explanation of the Universe

completely avoids the anthropic principle but I am certain about many

other things, especially the fact that science has much greater chance

if it is pursued by intelligent and hard-working people who don't have

to be afraid of the reactions of the laymen. One should expect much

expect comparably bad results if the scientists are afraid to

communicate the conclusions of their work because they could be

attacked by Peter Woit or similar aggressive zealots.

And that's the memo.

Bonus: a list of incorrect "essentials of science"

Finally, I want to end up with a slightly more extensive list of

seventeen wrong beliefs that were once considered to be essential

components of any scientific explanation of the world. I am confident

that this list instantly falsifies the naive viewpoint of many shallow

thinkers, such as those at edge.org, who deny that science itself

requires a sort of belief system that is often unprovable and that can

turn out to be incorrect.

They deny that scientism is not the same thing as science and they

deny that a person who uses the magic word "science" (or

"falsifiability") in every other sentence may still be wrong (and

easily "falsified"). Here is my list:

1. Isaac Newton believed that his impressive physical explanation of

the world required everything to be composed of particles. In his

opinion, they were necessary for a scientific description of the

real world. This principle was applied to light - that had to be

explained as a flow of particles - and even more seriously, to

heat. Newton thought that the heat had to be carried by a special

kind of material substance.

2. It was believed by Maxwell et al. in the 19th century that every

wave requires, much like sound, a material substance to propagate;

they believed that the existence of the aether was a crucial and

inevitable component of any scientific or "materialistic"

explanation of electromagnetic waves. Lorentz's and Einstein's

liquidation of the luminiferous aether was one of the essential

steps in the development of relativity.

3. Marxists were selling themselves as the champions of a

"scientific" world view. Everyone knows that virtually all of

their beliefs about the society were incorrect but that doesn't

mean that their beliefs about natural sciences were always right.

For example, Lenin believed that the electron was as inexhaustible

as the atom: he thought that it had to be composed of many other

particles that were also composites and this hierarchy continued

indefinitely. We know that the substructure certainly stops at the

Planck scale and probably earlier and Lenin's belief was in no way

important for the essence of science.

4. It was believed by Lord Kelvin that a scientific description of

the Sun implied that the Sun couldn't be older than 30 million

years or so, because of an upper limit on the amount of energy

that the Sun could have emitted. The severe lord viewed the

alternative assertion of Charles Darwin, involving a much longer

and much more accurate life expectancy, to be associated with an

inferior scientific approach.

5. Lord Kelvin offers us a lot of examples like that. But instead,

let us look at Auguste Comte who argued in 1835 that the chemical

composition of the stars would remain outside the realm of natural

sciences forever because it was impossible to travel there and

take a sample. The hypothesis about the hydrogen over there was

untestable and not even wrong. It only took seven years for

spectroscopy to be discovered and Comte's prophecy to be shown

profoundly incorrect.

6. It was once believed that a scientific description of reality

requires us to think about the world as events that occur on the

background of a Euclidean geometry. It was first realized by

mathematicians that other geometries can be defined and analyzed.

Later, it was understood by general relativity that a

non-Euclidean geometry is actually essential to describe the

gravitational force.

7. In mathematics, it was believed by many people that every

assertion can either be proved or disproved. Kurt G�del has

demonstrated that every sufficiently powerful system of axioms

allows one to construct a statement that can be neither proved nor

disproved. Moreover, the consistency of such a system of axioms

cannot be proven within the system. There have been many shocks in

mathematics - for example when Bertrand Russell proved that the

old set theory was inconsistent.

8. A century ago, physicists believed that the Universe had to exist

from minus infinity to plus infinity. It couldn't have had a

beginning because such a "Big Bang" would be resembling the

creation according to many religious systems. It wasn't just a

wrong belief but it had also led to some wrong research. For

example, Einstein designed his model of a static Universe and

introduced the cosmological constant for a wrong reason. The Big

Bang remains deeply controversial among the Marxists.

Contradictions between the Big Bang and Lenin's guesses about

infinities play against the theory; on the other hand, Eric

Lerner, an anti-Big-Bang theorist, argues that the Big Bang is bad

according to Karl Popper. Because Popper is viewed as an

anti-Marxist, this argument supports the commies' belief in the

Big Bang. Amazing way of thinking, isn't it?

9. As I have already mentioned, it was believed that determinism was

a key component of a physical description of the real world. Many

well-known scientists were thus led to reject the postulates of

quantum mechanics and/or construct theories of hidden variables

that were later falsified.

10. Thirty years ago, it was believed that causality can never be

violated, not even in the presence of black holes and not even

infinitesimally. Such an assumption implies that the information

is being lost during the evaporation of black holes. As we know

today, the information is preserved and the reason why the old

argument was incorrect is an exponentially small violation of

causality and locality inside black holes, a kind of "tunelling of

information".

11. It was believed by some people that only particles that can be

observed in isolation exist in the scientific sense. Today, quarks

are known to exist. They are also known to be confined and they

can never be observed in isolation.

12. It was believed that the equations that describe the properties of

elementary particles and forces had to have a unique solution. Now

we know that there exist discretely many vacua of quantum gravity.

Whatever are the rules that determine the correct vacuum, it is

clear that the assumption that solutions must be unique has been

turned into an irrational prejudice. This fact has also killed the

original bootstrap program that assumed that consistency was

sufficient to find the unique laws of quantum field theory.

13. It was believed that continents were so huge that they simply

couldn't spontaneously move. The motion of such a huge object

sounded ludicrous or perhaps religious: God could perhaps move

them but the laws of mechanics couldn't. It took several decades

before continental drift became acceptable. Anti-religious

sentiments may partially be blamed for this slow process.

14. It was believed that non-white races had to be phased out for the

human species to survive in a decent form: such a belief was

argued to be an inevitable consequence of Darwin's scientific

theory about the origin of species. Most of us no longer believe

these things. But these beliefs were not confined to the Nazi

Germany: they had many advocates in the U.S. and elsewhere, too.

15. On the other hand, people believed - and some people still believe

in 2007 - that there can't be any innate differences between

groups of people because such distinctions are artifacts of

religious hierarchies and science respects symmetry and creates

all people equal. Or you should look what their exact wording is:

they certainly defend a patently false scientific assertion by the

jargon of scientism.

16. The Soviet officials thought that conventional genetics was a

burgeois pseudoscience. It was banned in the Soviet Union for

quite some time. Instead, they were supporting "real progressive"

scientific approaches such as Lysenkoism that led to food

shortages in the Soviet Union and famines in China instead of

substantial improvements in agriculture.

17. In the first decade of the 21st century, it was believed by many

people that a radical reorganization of the functioning of the

society was needed to save the Earth from a global warming

apocalypse. This profoundly religious viewpoint was advocated as

the most important insight of science and those who disagreed were

labeled as unscientific.

Once again, if there were an ideal scientist who would know the right

answers not only to these old questions but also all questions that

will be answered in the future and who could therefore choose the

correct assumptions and avoid wrong assumptions 100% of the time

(these decisions must be constantly made when someone actually applies

the "scientific method" in practice), he could define a sharp boundary

between science and religion.

But because the only being capable to do these things is God, assuming

that He exists, the boundary between faith and reason remains

inevitably blurred. There are no ideal scientists in the real world.

And someone's quasi-religious focus on some dogmas of scientism simply

cannot prevent him from believing deeply incorrect things about the

reality. The more often the anti-religious jargon of scientism is

being used to defend wrong beliefs, the more similar "real religion"

and "real science" become.

Mechanical work may be defined easily but creative work and real