NPR says that science has a faith problem

November 2, 2014 • 11:18 am

Yep, it’s National Public Radio again, and again the cosmos & culture blog, where Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth, has taken it upon himself to tell us that a). science can go “too far”, and b). it does so when scientists cling to beliefs that are either largely refuted or a bit shaky, a recalcitrance he sees as a form of “faith.”

Unfortunately, his article, “Can scientific belief go too far?“, fails to make a strong case that science does go too far.  In fact, he cites only two examples (of course there are more) where scientists have been resistant to accepting a new paradigm, or cling to an old one when the data are equivocal.

The first is simply some physicists’ refusal in past decades to accept the quantum-mechanics conclusion that nature is fundamentally indeterminate:

In the classical world, the one we see around us, nature made sense — events following a nice chain of cause and effect — what we call determinism. In the quantum world, this certainty had to be placed aside: The properties of matter, of electrons in atoms, for example, had to be described by probabilities. However, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger and other great scientists involved in developing the theory refused to accept its apparent randomness as final. They believed that, deep down, nature had to follow simple causal rules, that determinism would triumph in the end.

This kind of posture, when there is a persistent holding on to a belief that is continually contradicted by facts, can only be called faith. In the quantum case, it’s faith in an ordered, rational nature, even if it reveals itself through random behavior. “God doesn’t play dice,” wrote Einstein to his colleague Max Born. His conviction led him and others to look for theories that could explain the quantum probabilities as manifestations of a deeper order. And they failed. (And we now know that this randomness will not go away, being the very essence of quantum phenomena.)

Well, I’m not sure this qualifies as any kind of faith, much less the religious sort. Until much later, with Bell’s Theorem and its proof, doubt still remained whether nature was truly, provably indeterminate. Einstein et al. (I’m not sure whether Schrödinger and Planck ever came around to indeterminacy) were simply slow to accept a new paradigm that went against everything that every physicist believed about nature. Is that “slowness” a kind of “faith” when there was still the possible of determinism behind the indeterminism? And, at any rate, nearly all physicists now accept indeterminacy, so what’s the point of saying that “scientific belief” went too far? Einstein’s belief was recalcitrant, but he was but one physicist among many.

The point, I think—though Gleiser is a scientist—is to point out that science, like religion, is imbued with a kind of faith. Why else would he write such a piece.

Gleiser’s second example of “faith” in science is even less convincing: the modern idea of “supersymmetry” in physics, which posits that every particle has a symmetric partner. This would in effect double the number of fundamental particles we know.  It’s a contentious theory, and, according to Gleiser, has divided physicists:

Proposed in the early 1970s, so far no supersymmetric particle has been found. Hopes were high when the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland was turned on a few years back. They found the Higgs boson, but so far no signs of supersymmetry. We wrote about this in April, inspired by an article by physicists Joseph Lykken, from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Maria Spiropulu, from the California Institute of Technology.

Some practitioners are disheartened, but others are confident that this will change next year, when the collider will run with twice the energy. If supersymmetric particles are found then, great: We will enter a new epoch of high-energy physics. But what if they aren’t? My prediction is that there will be a split in the community. While some will abandon the theory for lack of experimental support, others will hold on to it, readjusting the parameters so that supersymmetry becomes viable at energies well beyond our reach. The theory will then be untestable for the foreseeable future, maybe indefinitely. Belief in supersymmetry will then be an article of faith.

But really, can the hunches of these two schools be characterized as “faith”? Faith is strong conviction without strong evidence, but these physicists are simply evincing a tentative conviction in the face of inconclusive evidence. I doubt that any of them would proclaim either supersymmetry or its absence with the strong conviction that William Lane Craig professes the existence of the Christian God.

Now to be sure, Gleiser does add a caveat in about how scientific “faith” differs from religious faith:

There is, however, an essential difference between religious faith and scientific faith: dogma. In science, dogma is untenable. Sooner or later, even the deepest ingrained ideas — if proven wrong — must collapse under the weight of evidence. A scientist who holds on to an incorrect theory or hypothesis makes for a sad figure. In religion, given that evidence is either elusive or irrelevant, faith is always viable.

With this he both undercuts his main point and makes a probably unintended criticism of religion. For if Einstein is a “sad figure” (I refuse to use that characterization about those who take sides on supersymmetry), and we all recognize it, then what’s the damn problem? Why is Gleiser writing this in the first place? What is the sweating professor trying to say? As Gleiser said, when scientists go too far in hanging on to refuted ideas, they’re marginalized.

Second, if Einstein is a sad figure because he maintained belief in determinism against the evidence, then surely religious people who have beliefs supported by no evidence are even sadder figures. But of course Gleiser wouldn’t say that on NPR.

Again, I wonder what prompted the guy to write this piece. It’s almost sensationalistic in its title, but its contents don’t support that title. I see the piece as a mild form of science-dissing, trying to show that science can sometimes be as bad as religion. But Gleiser undercuts even that. Given his caveat, it appears as if Dr. Gleiser has taken up NPR’s blog space saying nothing new, but pretending to make a big point, and, finally, placing himself in the Jonah Lehrer School of Science Can Be Wrong.

Is NPR short on good science journalists? With this piece following close on the heels of the Lombrozo piece that I mentioned yesterday, that seems entirely possible.

62 thoughts on “NPR says that science has a faith problem”

  2. “Evincing a tentative conviction” is exactly right. The NPR bozos need to be straightened out: faith has nothing to do with this.

  4. Even if these examples were true, they would only show that scientists are flawed but science seems perfectly fine because these issues were worked out. I don’t like it when people conflate scientists (who are human like everyone else) with science as a method to know the truth.

  6. Could he be subversively bashing religious belief by showing a couple of mild cases from the scientific world that are really no comparison and then clinching the bash by saying, hey this is about as bad as it gets in science and that’s without the pernicious influence of dogma? In this way he counters those religious apologists who claim science is another kind of faith by showing just how (in)significant scientific “faith” actually is.

    1. I do not see that NPR would ever do that. I listen to NPR pretty often since they are pretty interesting and entertaining in general, but when they start to get into stuff about matters of faith it all turns into pink unicorns and rainbow moonbeams. It makes me wanna vomit when they get into religion.
      Jerry is right, I think, to say as he did earlier that NPR is probably all nicey-nice about religion because elements from the political far right wants to cut their public funding. To that I would add that a big chunk of their listeners are liberals that are spiritually inclined. I say that only because a lot of liberals are like that.

    2. As I remember it (but I stopped reading NPR long ago), Gleiser is a philosophy fan and an accommodationist.

      1. Yes, Gleiser is a massive philosophy fanboy, as are the rest of his team. At various times, in various places, they have casually dismissed brain-centered psychology (applying god of the gaps to psychology to come up with the need for a special energy to explain consciousness), a material universe constructed of matter and energy (Gleiser himself, iirc, frequently condemns materialism and even asserts that we can’t trust our senses) and, in relation to the last point, asserted that observation is useless because our senses can, under some conditions, give us erroneous information. Supposedly a physicist, and he wants to throw out empiricism entirely! I suppose in his mind only the theoretical physicists should remain, and maybe bring in a few priests to mediate?

  7. Hunches about what lies on the other side of today’s horizon…as “faith”!?

    I’m unaware of any theoretical physicists whose error bars are insufficiently wide on these subjects. Every one I know of has pet and favorite theories, and they’re generally excited if not even passionate about them.

    But…ever single one of them spends as much time talking about what would be most likely to shoot down the theory, to kill their pet. And that ususally gets them going on tangents about the competing theories.

    That sort of Darwinian competition of ideas is the exact opposite of faith. You will never, ever, hear a theologian propose an experiment whose outcome would have the potential to invalidate his life’s work, but that’s the passionate yeaning of of every scientist.

    b&

    1. In addition to the falsifiable nature of scientific “faith,” the secular analogy lacks a very critical component of religious faith: the smug, pseudo-humble assumption that the choice to believe is not, in the long run, a matter for the head, but one for the heart. No, scientists keep their hopes and dreams firmly grounded in the intellect. You will not find proponents of a hypothesis in danger telling personal little stories about how this hypothesis made them a better person (compounded of course by the often unspoken implication that those who promote the other theory are somehow less emotionally sensitive and open than THEY are — not that they would ever judge.)

      Really, without the moral component the sometimes too close an attachment to an explanation pales in comparison. Who the hell do they think they’re kidding with this?

      (hint: themselves. First, they fool themselves.)

      1. That’s a big component. The flip side of that particular coin, of course, is the confidence scam that the “spiritual leaders” sincerely or otherwise use to manipulate those very emotions.

        b&

  8. The NPR article seems to be quite pointless. All Gleiser is really saying is that some scientists sometimes find it difficult to admit they were wrong. I would have thought that was a perfectly human response. However, despite the fact that some scientists do that, science itself always moves on. Those who don’t move with it are, as you say, sidelined.

    This is not a faith problem. A faith problem would be all or most scientists refusing to accept new evidence and continuing to act as if disproven hypotheses were true.

    And that is the problem with faith. As Hitchens put it, “it’s called faith because it’s not real.” In religion, it’s adherents continue to believe that which is proven false, whatever the evidence. This strength of faith is seen as a virtue and results in a person being admired rather than sidelined. Worse, those who don’t retain faith in that which is proven wrong or untrue are the ones vilified and sometimes even killed (such as in Islam for apostasy).

    1. Yes, exactly. Scientists are human, and some will resist change when its in the air. I have seen it happen to scientists, and some of them never came around to some new paradigms in my old field. As you say, the field simply moves on without them, and they retire eventually.
      I had experienced this myself (for a while) when my dissertation research was showing results that I did not want it to show. It took a while for me to ‘see the light’.

    2. Yeah that’s what I think I was trying to say on #4 but less eloquently (my excuse is I was lined up at the pharmacy complaining with other people in the line & fantasizing about applying Lean to the pharmacy’s processes).
      😀

        1. NZ being a day ahead is how I got early Xmas presents. I’d ask my mom, “Can we open Nanny’s presents because it’s her Xmas today”. Score!

  9. This brings up a problem I have with the seeming interchangeability of the terms ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. I don’t have all my thoughts together on this, but my feeling is that belief and faith are distinct from each other. In my view, belief is the process that causes problems. I’m not sure about faith. I need to look into that more. I see how and why they are used interchangeably but I wish they weren’t. Maybe I’m splitting hairs or being persnickety about terms, but I have this wish for clarity about them and think it would be helpful. I would love to know what others think. Thank you for your blog. I enjoy it very much.

    1. The terms are confusing because they are broad and used in different contexts.
      I think the following rules have helped me: ‘Belief’ is something that people think is either true, or think might be true. Some beliefs are true (as best as we can tell). A ‘justified belief’ is a belief that is considered likely true because of good evidence, or because of testimony by a vetted expert.
      Other beliefs are likely not true, and that includes the many supernatural avenues of religious belief. But these are still beliefs.
      You can scroll down to see a useful ‘Euler diagram’ from Wikipedia.

    2. That’s because of the several ways of defining those two words. One can “believe” or “have faith” based on experience and one can “believe” or “have faith” without substantiation. I once said, “My doctor doesn’t believe in over-prescribing.*” which got the reply, “Your doctor’s beliefs won’t cure you.” In that context, “belief” meant “philosophy of practice”; my challenger was just quibbling. Whatever the case, the ambiguity surrounding words like that is one of the main sources of difficulty, just as the religious-minded can’t comprehend the nuances of the word “theory”.

      *When I started with my current doctor, I was taking a dozen pills a day – now I’m down to two and my health is much better.

      1. Because of that, I try avoid these terms in discussions where their different meanings could (or clearly do) matter. I then prefer “conviction” over “belief” and “scientific theory” over of just “theory”.

        If some words or terms are too vague to get your point across, feel free to use others.

  10. Gregory Chaitin, Francisco Doria and Newton da Costa, in their recent wonderful study on Kurt Gödel, have convincingly shown that g-d does play with dice!

    1. Yes, seems it wasn’t enough that quantum mechanics is stochastic, the mathematics that describes algorithms (which is likely as close to physics math can come) has that property too.

      Notably Chaitin’s constant, which describes algorithmic convergence IIRC, and can only be known in the stochastic sense when our resources to find out its value runs out. (E.g. one can as well decide the next bit after the known bits in its binary expansion with a simple coin flip.)

      I’m not surprised if Gödel’s math, which does s similar study on mathematics ability at large, would have similar properties!

  11. Stubbornly hanging on to refuted ideas isn’t going too far; it’s not going far enough.

    As for Einstein, I think a case could be made that he contributed greatly to our present understanding of quantum physics by opposing the “shut up and calculate” Copenhagen mentality and forcing people to think deeply about what the theory actually means. The fact that he was rooting for the wrong side with regard to Bell’s Theorem is incidental.

    1. I very much agree. Furthermore, as far as I know, none of the physicists who were on ‘wrong side’ ever suggested that their views should prevail on any basis other than the results of experiments. This is the opposite of how faith works in practice.

  12. Bell’s Theorem only rules out local hidden variables (where “local” means “information not travelling faster than light”).

    Locality is a big assumption to carry all the way down.

    So no, indeterminacy is not a settled matter.

    1. On the other hand, the Bohmian folks have been trying for years to get a theory that works. Nothing rules it out, yet, but it does look forlorn. (Bunge for example gave up sometime in the 1970s, I think.)

    1. That, and not that long ago there were some nifty videos circulating about macro-scale oil drop experiments that mimic the “pilot wave” theory, and produce all the same “spooky” quantum-scale results we all know and love: single-particle diffraction, self-interference, entanglement — the works.

      I’d link to it if I could remember some good search terms….

      b&

  15. He could have thrown in the theory of plate tectonics, which was resisted by some geologists clear up into the eighties; the theory that a comet or asteroid collision “did in” the dinosaurs, and the kerfluffles that pop up when a tiny piece of evidence seems to show that maybe white people DIDN’T come from Africa, after all.

    To say that scientists operate on a kind of “faith” is not entirely false- they’re human beings, after all: I remember, upon hearing that new findings had shown that we all have some Neanderthal DNA, feeling a sort of mild “let-down”- the previous theory that homo sapiens and homo neaderthalis had not interbred successfully had seemed so “neat and tidy”. No scientist is a Dr. Spock; devoid of anything except pure logic- once a theory is seen as particularly attractive, our brains will tend to link it to pleasure: the human desires for recognition, prestige, and funding can pop up and exert their insidious effects, as well, and can influence in various ways the paths of inquiry pursued. I feel that the scientists who can engage in such pursuits without getting at least a little bit emotionally attached are few and far between; part of the discipline of BEING a scientist is to recognize and ignore this innate tendency towards cognitive bias in the search for the truth, whatever it may end up being.

    However, the scientific method itself has no “room” for faith and, as Gleiser admits, any theories not based entirely on facts from observation and experimentation are bound to collapse. I wonder, as Jerry does, just what the hell Gleiser was trying to say in this piece of NPR “fluff”. Real science has no “faith-problem”; that’s what makes it science!

  16. Sad thing is, those in the audience who want to hear “science requires faith, too!” will do so, without noticing the important differences in meaning that Gleiser eventually points out.

  17. “I see the piece as a mild form of science-dissing, trying to show that science can sometimes be as bad as religion.”
    It strikes me in the same way. After all what would Gleiser prefer? That scientist instantly and in unison adopt the position of every new idea coming down the pipeline? He makes no sense.

  18. NPR-listening hippies will eat this up. It’s one thing to find the hicks of Lake Woebegone quaint. It’s another to denigrate the people who made modern life possible.

  19. Embarrassing to see someone consider that faith is connected to any physical theory of the universe.

  20. Gotta comment on this one re: quantum indeterminancy.

    There is no reason to accept the “apparent randomness” of quantum mechanics “as final”. Not then. Not now. Just as there was never a reason hold tightly to strict determinism. The notion that any particular mathematical description of physical laws is fundamental or final is insupportable. There is no way to know whether the equations that describe current data will not eventually be superceded (and derivable from) even more fundamental principles.

    We can never be sure how deep the rabbit hole goes.

    Bell’s theorem does not help here in the slightest. Bell’s theorem (and subsequent experiements) tell us that we must give up assumptions of either “locality” or “free will” (but not both). If the former it simply means that *some* information can travel instantaneously, or is by nature “global” — which follows directly from the fact the quantum wave functin lives in the Hilbert space of classical fields. The giving up “free will” option refers to choice of what is measured at each of two space-like separated locations. Giving up either of these assumption allows strict determinism to remain unscathed.

    Of course there is no evidence for strict determinism as a fundamental principle, either, as we have no idea what the fundamental principles are or whether we are even close to reaching them.

    The rabbit hole of ever deeper principles from which currently known priciples are a derived special case may, for all we know, be infinitely deep. And what the hell would that mean for any concept of randomness or determinancy?

    Determinism is a pragmatic assumption for everything we so far experience in the macroscopic world — biology being a particularly important case. Nondeterminism is the pragmatic assumption at the quantum scale.

    There is zero evidence for or against either of these assumptions being “final” or “fundamental”. There is not even a coherent argument for regarding either as a default hypothesis.

    1. I see that Gerard ‘t Hooft is proposing a “classical” foundation for quantum theory. One interesting idea is that current theories don’t properly take account of the fact that everything in the Universe is entangled since the Big Bang, which restricts what experimenters can do.

      /@

      1. “current theories don’t properly take account of the fact that everything in the Universe is entangled since the Big Bang”

        This is one of the “outs” from Bell’s Theorem… and it is tied to the “free will” component. On the other hand we have no idea whether everything actually was entangled at the start. Then again we do not have to go back all the way to the big bang to note that the measurement decisions have overlapping light cones and therefore common causes.

        Another “out” from Bell’s theorem is to note that the results of the space-like separated measurements of entangled particles cannot be compared until the information comes together in the same place. In this case we can imagine that that wave-function does not collapse until the two sets of measurements are compared. This gets into schroedinger’s cat-like territory with the macroscopic experimental equipment & even the minds of the experimenters being in a superposition of many states representing all possible combinations of results.

        In the end these things are pure speculation and even if known would tell us nothing about determinism vs. nondeterminism at any sort of “fundamental” or “final” level.

          1. I wasn’t so much disagreeing as supplementing. Hooft’s hypothesis is fine, but that is all it is. “Many worlds” also a hypothesis. “Non-local hidden variables” hypothesis. String theo– er… hypothesis. Strict determinism, hypothesis (wholly unsupportable). Strict non-determininism, hypothesis (wholly unsupportable. And so on.

      1. * It doesn’t need to be a “conscious” observer or anything else that might get Deepak Chopra excited *

        Excellent!

        I’m an advocate of MWI/EQM, too, following David Deutsch. Sean is just the icing on the cake.

        /@

      2. As I said, quantum scale non-determinism is the pragmatic assumption (given today’s available experimental evidence). But really experiementalists need not assume anything. Just report the data, no? Obviously the best we can do in describing (or predicting) the results of quantum experiements is statisticatl in nature.

        My point is about making statements of what is the final word on such things as determinism vs. non-determinism.

        Saying many worlds is “most likely” is absurd. Most likely based on what statistics of past experiments? There is no experimental test of multiple worlds, so there is not basis for saying anything about whether it is “likely”. None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. We have ZERO idea whether quantum field theory extrapolates to macroscopic scales, let alone the universe as a whole.

        Claiming many worlds as “most likely” is like someone in Newton’s time claiming classical mechanics would “most likely” extrapolate to velocities of unbounded magnitude or that Newton’s law of gravity would remain accurate for any density of matter. And they may well have said or thought just that, if they ever contemplated extreme velocities.

        1. * statisticatl *

          The Aztec god of data analysis?

          * Saying many worlds is “most likely” is absurd. *

          “probably the best game in town″/“probably correct” NE “most likely”

          Sean – like David Deutsch in _The Fabric of Reality_ – makes persuasive arguments here. Really, they’re both considering the general rules for preferring one hypothesis over another, including parsimony, explanatory power and so on. Sure, the data might prove otherwise, but that’s a different thing. For me, having done a Ph.D. in theoretical partial physics, Deutsch’s articulation of MWI was the first sensible *explanation* of quantum theory. And it should be incontrovertible that MWI is better than Copenhagen, which is the quantum equivalent of that famous Sydney Harris cartoon cafehayek.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/miracle_cartoon.jpg

          * There is no experimental test of multiple worlds *

          There is! Although not one we can perform yet. See The Everett FAQ, Q36 http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#unique

          /@

          1. Do you know Statisticatl? She’s a fickle goddess but can save you from the bleak death of absolute certainty.

            Hmmm… I think “probably correct” is pretty much saying the same thing as “most likely” as in “most likely correct”. One does not usually use the phrase “probably correct” if one thinks something else is even more probably correct.

            I read Deutsch long ago & was not convinced. His “as if” argument applies just as well to the “wave breaking on the shore, disappearing, and a frog jumps out.” In other words, reality as we have experienced it so far behaves “as if” the wave function occasionally “collapses” — although what we really mean from a QFT point of view is that the wave function sometimes appears to make instantaneous transitions not described by its equation of motion.

            I see hands waving wildly when that experiment gets to “The machine now reverses the entire x-axis measurement…including reversibly erasing its memory of the second measurement.” 🙂

          3. There is! Although not one we can perform yet. See The Everett FAQ, Q36http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#unique

            Alas, that test not only assumes that consciousness is a dualistic phenomenon, it presupposes that it’s a dualistic phenomenon that can be implemented in a robot. If that test could be performed with a computer, it could just as easily be performed with an human — or, for that matter, a pocket calculator. The author who proposed the test didn’t realize that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the hardware and cannot possibly exist independently of the very switches the test is supposed to independently fiddle.

            Considering that one of the most important consequences of the demonstration of the completeness of the Standard Model is the validity of Church-Turing over the same domain, this is somewhat ironic….

            b&

          4. If that test could be performed with a computer, it could just as easily be performed with an human

            No, it couldn’t, for reasons spelled out in the FAQ. The test requires thermodynamically reversible computation, so that the machine mind can be rolled back to an earlier state without dumping entropy into the environment. The action of human neurons is not reversible in that sense.

            The author who proposed the test didn’t realize that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the hardware

            I have no idea where you got that impression. I see no suggestion of dualism in the text; on the contrary, the feasibility of rolling back the machine mind by reversing the computation depends on the mind being identical with a physical state of the hardware.

            If you’re objecting to the claim that “the conscious observer (the machine) caused the collapse of the electron’s wavefunction”, that’s standard Copenhagen orthodoxy. Whether Copenhagen adherents would recognize a machine mind as a conscious observer is a good question, but if they don’t, then they (not the FAQ’s author) are the ones vulnerable to charges of dualism.

          5. The test requires thermodynamically reversible computation

            Maybe I’m dense, but isn’t “thermodynamically reversible” a synonym for “time travel” and / or “perpetual motion”?

            so that the machine mind can be rolled back to an earlier state without dumping entropy into the environment.

            With clever arrangement, such a feature would allow you to do all sorts of nifty tricks that would give you infinite computational abilities, which in turn would let you build a perpetual motion machine (and / or require one to actually implement).

            And, honestly, so many explanations of MWI and its consequences seem to lead in similar directions that I just can’t get excited about it being the best explanation. Maybe it’s the minimum explanation necessary to fit a certain set of observations to date; Sean Carroll certainly seems to think so. But it still feels to me very much like the Luminiferous Aether and epicycles: neat, defensible, and useful (in limited domains) ideas that, in the final analysis, turn out to be missing some important pieces. Considering we still don’t have a firm grasp on gravity and cosmogenesis, I especially think high confidence in MWI is unwarranted.

            But, as they say, I ain’t no rocket surgeon….

            b&

          6. isn’t “thermodynamically reversible” a synonym for “time travel” and / or “perpetual motion”?

            No.

          7. Again, unless I’m missing something, all the examples of how you’d actually implement such a device are either of “good enough” approximations for some uses but that wouldn’t actually qualify for the proposed experiment, or are of phenomena that actually haven’t ever been observed. In other words, it’s in the same class as wormholes, antigravity, closed timelike curves, and all those other science fiction favorites that aren’t ruled out by current equations and make for great plot twists but are otherwise indistinguishable from magic unicorn wands — and, again, perpetual motion machines.

            I’m still most highly skeptical. If you’d like to convince me otherwise, point me at a peer-reviewed experiment that actually implements an actual adiabatic circuit and not simply a “good enough” approximation of one.

            Cheers,

            b&

  21. Is there empirical (and unequivocal) evidence for quantum indeterminacy? I know it’s an integral part of models that so far have been shown to be accurate, though that’s not quite the same thing.

    1. Depends on what you mean by “unequivocal.” All scientific conclusions are tentative and subject to revision, so if you mean something like “deductively proven,” or “evidence that could not possibly have any other explanation,” then no, its not unequivocal. No empirical observation and no scientific theory is unequivocal in that way.

      But if you’re using “unequivocal” to just mean “evidence that supports indeterminancy far far better than any other currently available, competing hypothesis,” then yes I think there is lots of evidence for that. Even simple things like radioactive decay are very consistent and supportive of the hypothesis of indeterminancy, and there is no competitive deterministic theory than can predict decays will result in the pattern that they do. Could there be some hidden underlying mechanics? Well see the Bell’s Theorem discussion others have made, but philosophically yes. Does this theoretical possibility mean we should withold judgment about whether its a determinant or indeterminant system? No.

      1. It’s also very much worth noting that the deterministic proposals are all chaotic (in the mathematical sense). Just as you’re never going to predict where a Kleenex you drop on a windy day will be a day later, you’re never going to predict when a particular radioactive nucleus is going to decay, even if you had impossible-to-acquire perfect initial information. Although, of course, in both cases, if you had bigger-than-the-universe computational resources, making such predictions would be trivial.

        b&

  22. Max Planck said:

    “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

    Fortunately, there are many scientists who adopt new ideas and conclusions well before the rise of their successors. 🙂

  24. Gee, if the authors really wanted to find an example of scientists clinging to hypotheses that fly in the face of massive quantities of data with an almost religious fervor, they should’ve looked at the few remaining paleobiologists that don’t accept that birds evolved from within the theropod dinosaur lineage. That position requires a LOT of “faith!”

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