Of course, but if it's falsifiable then once it's falsified <i>it will go away</i>. If it's not falsifiable then it's "not even wrong" and it's impossible to convince people to stop repeating it as if it's fact (or worse, an 'undeniable possibility').
He is arguing against building the larger particle collider.<p>There are too little theory support of such collider can find anything new under the standard model.<p>IMO, it is not the matter of "science". This is economics.
I can understand the argument, but what other methods do we have to test particle physics other than building larger and more powerful colliders? Are there some new designs that would make it cheaper?<p>Otherwise I don't mind spending money just for the sake of exploration, maybe that money could be "more well spent", but that's true for a lot of things. Who knows maybe it will find something interesting. It's not even a total waste anyway as it will probably spur jobs / research / interest.
Tangent: I find it interesting that futurists often claim technology is accelerating such that a "Singularity" of technological development may occur. To my eyes, however, the opposite seems true--each technological advancement seems exponentially more expensive, as if we've picked all the low hanging fruit. And now we're building $24bn particle accelerators to test really obscure things that may or may not have any impact on the next breakthrough.
It is impossible to ever prove or disprove a theory, so falisfiability is a red herring.<p>For a theory <i>T</i> and observations <i>O</i>, you can have 4 possible scenarios. Where "!" indicates "not":<p>Starting from theory<p><pre><code> Modus Ponens : T therefore O
Denying the Antecedant : !T therefore !O
</code></pre>
Starting from observation<p><pre><code> Affirming the Consequent: O therefore T
Modus Tollens : !O therefore !T
</code></pre>
Denying the antecedent and affirming the consequent are both invalid if other theories may be consistent with the same observations (which is always the case), leaving us with Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens as valid forms of reasoning.<p>What this means is that we can deduce:<p><pre><code> 1. what we should observe if our theory is really true (Modus Ponens)
2. a theory is not true if we fail to observe what it predicts (Modus Tollens)
</code></pre>
Modus Ponens reasoning is used to derive testable predictions from a theory, and then Modus Tollens reasoning is used when checking if the theory predicts the correct observations.<p>However, the relationship between theory and prediction <i>P</i> is not so simple. It is always the case that other assumptions <i>A</i> must be made along with the theory. These assumptions can be as simple as "the equipment is functioning properly", but can get much more complicated.[1] I.e.:<p><pre><code> (T AND A) entails P
</code></pre>
If we fail to observe the prediction <i>P</i>, then the entire left side gets negated:<p><pre><code> !P entails !(T AND A)
</code></pre>
This is equivalent to saying <i>either</i> T or A is incorrect:<p><pre><code> !P entails !T OR !A
</code></pre>
So even in the best case scenario, you can never know if it is your theory that is wrong or some other assumption you making is wrong.<p>This should tell us the real value of science lies somewhere else besides falsifiability, e.g. in making <i>useful</i> or <i>otherwise surprising</i> predictions.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis</a>
tl;dr- They're arguing that there's little point to building a new, larger particle collider to succeed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) because, while there are hypotheses that such a new collider could falsify, those hypotheses aren't sufficiently motivated to be worth falsifying.
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. - Einstein<p>Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion. - Feynmann
Good article. So many armchair "physicists" in the comments it's hilarious.<p>I'm rather confused by how many got thrown by her comment about dark matter & assuming an unspecified "fluid", somehow they didn't realize she was just making a reference to the formulation of the original definition of "dark matter".