I don't really understand the argument here. It starts to explain a difference between "falsifiable" and "empirical", but then it goes off on an example that I don't understand at all.
Imagining an unobservable multiverse might be a useful way to think about a problem, and it might lead to an elegant way to make predictions, but all we can conclude from that scientifically is "the universe behaves as if there were a multiverse". There's no need to assert that such a multiverse actually exists, and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor.
If the article wants to argue that sometimes describing observable behaviour in terms of unobservable entities is neater than the alternative, that's entirely reasonable. But it seems to me that it's trying to argue that the existence of a multiverse is something unfalsifiable that's still scientific, and I don't agree with that at all.
But maybe I'm just misunderstanding something, I don't know that much about theoretical physics after all.
"and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor."
That depends on your particular formulation of Occam's Razor. If you're looking at "amount of stuff", it's hard to beat "my experience behaves as if there were a universe".
Comments
Falsifiability is so last century (http://edge.org/response-detail/25322) =)
I don't really understand the argument here. It starts to explain a difference between "falsifiable" and "empirical", but then it goes off on an example that I don't understand at all.
Imagining an unobservable multiverse might be a useful way to think about a problem, and it might lead to an elegant way to make predictions, but all we can conclude from that scientifically is "the universe behaves as if there were a multiverse". There's no need to assert that such a multiverse actually exists, and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor.
If the article wants to argue that sometimes describing observable behaviour in terms of unobservable entities is neater than the alternative, that's entirely reasonable. But it seems to me that it's trying to argue that the existence of a multiverse is something unfalsifiable that's still scientific, and I don't agree with that at all.
But maybe I'm just misunderstanding something, I don't know that much about theoretical physics after all.
"and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor."
That depends on your particular formulation of Occam's Razor. If you're looking at "amount of stuff", it's hard to beat "my experience behaves as if there were a universe".
I don't think any knowledge of theoretical physics is required to understand that an unfalsifiable theory cannot be tested.
Ick. Thanks for the link.