> Sean Carroll, a highly respected and philosophically astute physicist, takes a different approach from Dawid. For Carroll, it is the concept of falsifiability, which was central to Karl Popper's famous philosophy of science, that is too limited for the playing fields we now find ourselves working on.
>> "Whether or not we can observe [extra dimensions or other universes] directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a priori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets."
> Thus for Carroll, even if a theory predicts entities which can't be directly observed, if there are indirect consequences of their existence we can confirm, then that those theories (and those entities) must be included in our considerations.
Sounds convincing to me. But, are there indirect consequences? That's the key, in my opinion.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 11.3 ms ] thread>> "Whether or not we can observe [extra dimensions or other universes] directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a priori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets."
> Thus for Carroll, even if a theory predicts entities which can't be directly observed, if there are indirect consequences of their existence we can confirm, then that those theories (and those entities) must be included in our considerations.
Sounds convincing to me. But, are there indirect consequences? That's the key, in my opinion.