Abstract: Philosopher Karl Popper put out in 1934 a nonsensical theory of what science was. Unfortunately, that nonsense has ruled science ever since. And it shows!
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Truth is contained in what’s left after the rest has been proven false.
Human beings think with theories, which are digital depictions or even chains of emotions, of an underlying neuronal reality.
It is better for the elite in power to have a much less understandable vision of the world posing as ultimate wisdom. Enter Karl Popper, an establishment philosopher.
Popper: “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
How does Popper falsify reality? By being God? Did Popper believe he was God? Is a lion non falsifiable? Does lack of falsiability make a lion’s claw unreal? With a philosophy of relity like that, one can’t do anything, and that suits the establishement just fine.
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder in How Popper killed Particle Physics rightly explodes the Popper falsification obsession:
“Popper is dead. Has been dead since 1994 to be precise. But also his philosophy, that a scientific idea needs to be falsifiable, is dead.
And luckily so, because it was utterly impractical. In practice, scientists can’t falsify theories. That’s because any theory can be amended in hindsight so that it fits new data. Don’t roll your eyes – updating your knowledge in response to new information is scientifically entirely sound procedure.
So, no, you can’t falsify theories. Never could.”
In 1934, Popper said that science is what can be shown to be potentially false. This.has impressed physicists, ever since.Let me disintegrate Popper falsification a bit further from the logical viewpoint.
After proposing the heliocentric theory, using his concept of inertia, circa 1350 CE, Buridan observed that the heliocentric theory could not be experimentally distinguished (yet) from the geocentric theory, and thus, one may as well believe the latter, as “Scripture” said so.
It was definitively proven that Venus turned around the Sun (Sol) more than three centuries after Buridan wrote, when telescopes became powerful enough to observe the phases of Venus (how the Sun illuminated Venus). So the question of falsifiability is not new.
Even earlier, 14 centuries ago, the ancient Greeks demonstrated the atomic theory by observing perpetual motion of small particles (what we call now according to an Englishman, Brownian motion, because nearly everything was discovered by Englishmen say the English).
Popper believed that a scientific theory should be “falsifiable”. As he wrote: “A theory is falsifiable, as we saw in section 23, if there exists at least one non-empty class of homotypic basic statements which are forbidden by it; that is, if the class of its potential falsifiers is not empty.”
Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 95
Pure mumbo-jumbo. (Popper’s mumbo-jumbo would make the epicycles theory “scientific”… as it was false in some computational consequences, as Tycho found; epicycles partisans could have fixed that with more cycles…)
Popper’s mumbo-jumbo enabled Popper to speak of science, while avoiding the concept of truth. Under the cover of sounding scientific (thus honorable). If science itself was not about truth, nor induction, neither was society in need to be about truth… or induction (so no revolution). That could only please an establishment put in place by the history of privilege. So Popper became Sir Karl, got plenty of honors, and part of the elite. That was good for Sir Karl. After all, if there is no truth, there is still the Queen.
On the face of it, believing, as Popper affected to, that one should be able to prove that a theory could be false, to make it true enable us to make zombies “scientific” (they could be false!) To be true something just has to potentially be false.
God is not falsifiable, because God can’t “conceivably” be false (at least to the believer in said God). Thus, if God exists, that makes God true, yet unfalsifiable. So we would have the problem of a God which is true, yet non-scientific.
The more general problem is that, how could something which is true be falsifiable?
Popper was a good physicist: he corresponded as early as 1934 about nonlocality with Einstein. Out of it came what’s known as the Popper nonlocality experiment. Although he himself said his early nonlocal ideas were not correct, it’s highly likely that he put Einstein on the track of the EPR nonlocal paper of 1935. However, on science, his own theory is self-contradictory ( and for the “Open Society” Popper is famous for, the basic ideas come straight from the philosophers behind Pericles).
Popper himself threw the science as falsifiability theory under the bus in his later years: “Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.” The Open Universe : An Argument for Indeterminism (1992), p. 44
“Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.” Ch. 1 “Science : Conjectures and Refutations”, Section VII
Physicist Lisa Randall made a profitable scientific discovery, and proved it experimentally: she found that Dark Matter sells book. According to Lisa, her nonsensical theory, that Dark Matter annihilated dinosaurs, makes sense, because it can be proven to be false. I should sell her a bridge on Mars, or a zombie for a lover.
In truth, the dinosaurs were in bad trouble for millions of years (the fossil record about the number of species shows), because the Dekkan Traps hyper-volcanism had been acting up for millions of years, smothering the planet, perniciously heating from CO2, between brutal bursts of cooling, from sulfate aerosols, while acidifying the oceans with all that volcanic CO2 (and having all those pesky mammals and birds around didn’t help!) Warm blooded animals and those who burrow survived. Such hyper-volcanism cools the planet’s radioactive core, and happens every 200 million years or so.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/trapped-by-super-traps/
Popper’s insane view of reality has long dominated. Thus physics headed the wrong way. And biology too (as the fanatical attacks against Lamarck, and thus epigenetics, showed; an English (of course!) professor, Medawar, was even given in the 1950s the Nobel for proving Lamarck wrong, as if a single experiment on rats could disqualify all of epigenetics, now a gigantic field steering genetics itself, as Lamarck guessed cogently) .
That was the good news. The bad news about Popper? His adversaries fostered a depiction of reality which was even more insane! So I used to be popperian, before I realized that poppy Popper was all poppycock…
Patrice Ayme’