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Glad I didn’t spend the last ten years on that problem! As my CERN advisor suggested :)
All Alumni know that the best discoveries happen after hours of reflection on R1 tables during Summertime. :)
9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science.

The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.

Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)

But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.

Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.

I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.

The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric.

On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying.

Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.

Humans can detect single photons with their eyes! https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172
In the 1500s, it might just as well be impossible to fly a spaceship to the outer edge of the solar system to confirm heliocentrism without doubt as it is right now to build a solar system sized detector to look for the graviton.
Geocentric coordinates are easily observable; just look at the sunrise and sunset. And if you zoom out even more and look at the galaxy, heliocentric coordinates become unreasonable.
> Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact.

It isn't. You can easily define a coordinate system for the universe in which the earth is the center.

Heliocentrism just makes some approximate computations easier because the sun is so heavy. Thus in heliocentrism, the orbits of the planets are approximately ellipses (near-circles) around the sun, while in a geocentric model, the orbits have more complicated shapes.

Nevertheless (to explicare "approximate" even in the Newtonian gravity model (i.e. not Einsteinian gravity)) be aware that even in the heliocentric coordinate system the earth (and the other planets) don't move along an elliptical (near-circular) orbit around the sun, but both the sun and the planet move around a common center which is near to the sun.

> There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. [...] Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric.

Modern physics really is about that there is no preferred coordinate system: this manifests itself in the fact that conserved quantities can be derived via Noether's theorem from such symmetries in the natural laws. There is just a choice of a coordinate system which in our solar system makes computations easier.

> The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun.

Or you can put the satellite in the back of a truck and back the truck out of your garage and see the sun orbiting the earth. Yet it remains sane to put anywhere in the center depending on your context.

> Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.

Those two sentences contradict each other. If something unobservable implies some observable, i.e. predictable, consequences, then falsifying these predictions would also falsify the unobservable antecedents.

We can't even see an electron. But we can see the effect of a beam of electrons on a low-pressure gas quite easily.

We can't even see a table. We can only see the nerve impulses resulting from the photons resulting from the sunlight bouncing off the table.

A computer can't play sound either, it can only send bits to a DAC.

From what I've read, a problem with the Copernican model was that it assumed circular orbits. Galileo insisted on this as well. It doesn't matter what orbits what, if you've got the shape of the orbits wrong.

Oddly enough the Catholic astronomers were willing to accept a model that had the sun going around the earth, and the planets around the sun. What settled matters for them was Newtonian physics, which provided a way to detect whether the earth was rotating or not. That was what caused them to eventually lift their ban on Copernicus. Newtonian physics also eliminated the question of whether anything in the solar system is justifiably the center of the cosmos.

Relevant concerning your point:

> What is the most misunderstood historical event?

> The Galileo Affair

> https://tidbits.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-his...

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions.

This statement itself predicades on a Platonic realist metaphysics! Indeed, what is the ideal against which things are judge right and wrong? I think the psychological roots of Enlightenment rationality run deep in the West, making it brutally hard to usurp.

That said, I think we can go a long way in this one case by just throwing out the "wrong" judement and laser focusing on the particulars of utility that science provides. One zoomed-out facet sees it as a collaborative effort as squeezing out repeatable processes, a la Popper et al.

How do you feel about Aristotelian realism? Makes more sense to me than nominalism/conceptualism ever has.
> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions

I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

I think it is similar to the 'All models are wrong but some are useful' adage.

There is reality and there is the math at which we point at it with. The pointing will never be reality but that doesn't mean it is useless.

In the same way you cannot blow the wind with the word 'Fan'. But the concept of a fan is very useful.

I bet you that old results still add up in the parallel universe in which the muon mystery has not yet been solved!
I was thinking someone must have fixed a bug in the simulation (in which we live) between when the old results were generated and now.

Only 1/2 :-)

Reality is probabilistic, not branching. Before measurement, multiple outcomes are possible; after collapse, only one becomes real.
If old results do not add up then I can see two immediate reasons:

- The new results are wrong. That's why there is a difference.

- The old results were wrong. In this case all involved scientists should be very much ashamed to have helpfully participated in worshipping wrongness and fakery.

A third option could be partial wrongness, but I group this into the second case. In the modern era I no longer buy into honesty of scientists at all times. Case in point: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258 - bacterium growing via arsenic. Totally fabricated, hence lateron "retracted" (originally published in 2010).

There is a fourth option, something has changed in between the old and new expirements.

This has happened before in other settings, disappearing polymorphs are a real thing.

I bet on a loose cable as explanation for the difference.

See

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/loose-cable-blamed-speed...

Worst Feynman diagrams ever.
That's the best part about science.
I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled, not suicidal!
It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
I am a bit sick of this narrative. That science can make mistakes is in no shape or form, one of its strengths. It is a weakness of the process.

The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.

The framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results.

Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?

You would probably be very surprised about just how much work is put in to characterizing these things. My graduate work was on another experiment (though our postdoc worked on one of the earlier g−2 experiments mentioned here!), but we literally had man-years of work sunk into measuring one thing about the experiment, one number, as accurately as possible and with valid error bars.

That was not the only thing about the apparatus, just one of the most important, but the point is: we cared, we cared a lot, and we cared a lot about a lot of things.

My gut reaction is that the probable cause of the discrepancy is ultimately "someone calculated something wrong." It's not like particle physics experiments actually generate something directly measurable like the muon's magnetic moment; you instead get an indirect result that you have to calculate to the value you're trying to measure. And half of the constants in that calculation are themselves from reported results in other experiments, which similarly returned indirect results that are dependent on correct results from other experiments... and it's not hard to imagine that the result of "value X is A" depends on an assumption that "value X is B" somewhere in the calculation tree.
This “data driven” science approach sure looks like empiricism from a distance. What am I missing?
Out of my depth really, but I believe the "data driven" approach probably refers to some sort of renormalization.

What renormalization does is your theory produces all sort of infinities but you know there is mechanism that eliminates them but your theory is not able to calculate how that happens and the exact degree so you go out look at real numbers and then tweak your model to predict the correct values .

I may be glossing over misrepresenting stuff but that is the gist of it I think. As far as I understand physists don't love this, Feynman and company had reservations (not objections mid you), but it works and allows you to do additional useful work.

I think it describes the methods needed to obtain and process a large amount of data in a field where getting a small amount of data is expensive and requires incredible hardware.
The beauty of untestable abstractions upon abstractions? That even stay around when refuted -
I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.

It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.

You dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.
> I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.

Someone who writes a sentence like that is in no position to comment on writing style.

Yeah, Quanta articles are way too long. They could get to the point in one quarter of the length.
Yep. This would backfire spectacularly for people just want to know what's going on. They would just dump the article in the llm and ask, 'what problem is this article about'
Is Sabine H. on the case?
Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence.

In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.

If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.

> Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them

There are several books from Greg Egan with this idea in mind: Permutation City and Distress. The latter one is exactly about this idea.

I love how the closer we get to “the edge of the Reality”, the more it sounds like the ramblings of someone that got their hands on some of that GOOD stuff
You might want to read Dan Simmons' Ilium and if you can stomach some weird post-9/11 shit, Olympos. One of the overarching themes is what you describe... or similar.