Quote of the Day - Theories

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. – Richard Feynman

Science is supposed to be about following the facts as revealed by experimentation. If the facts revealed something contrary to your expectations and beliefs, you went with the facts. In 1911 Ernest Rutherford conducted an experiment firing alpha particles through gold foil. It was a test of the Thompson model of atomic structure.

Rutherford expected to see some small-angle dispersions of the particles after they passed through the foil. The results were unexpected. Some particles bounced almost straight back. In Rutherford's words, it was "as if you fired a 15-inch shell into a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you." Rutherford went with the observational results, abandoning the theory behind the Thompson model and discovering the atomic nucleus.

That is not the approach commonly used today. Most science today is funded by governments. They expect experiments to produce results. If the experiment proves a negative - this theory does not work - the project will get defunded. Moreover, projects that get results desired by the government get more heavily funded. Those whose results contradict the cherished beliefs of the politician paymaster tend to lose funding or get defunded entirely.

This is not new. Based on personal experience it has been going on since at least the 1980s. I was involved in an effort to create a model of uncaptured Shuttle Orbiter accelerations. After a dozen missions it became clear that our model was an exercise in curve fitting with no predictive ability. When I pointed this out, the lead told me, "That may be true, but this is what we are being paid to study, so we will continue studying it until we get results that work."

I was transferred off the study (at my request). It never delivered meaningful results, despite a series of predictive models that always failed on the next mission. The study team received a NASA award for excellence in research.

If anything it has gotten worse over the last 40 years. There is a flood of fake science washing through research. Two-thirds of researchers cannot reproduce results on studies done by their colleagues. Scientific journals helped China censor Covid's origins. AI is injecting nonsense into papers depending on faked research. Scientific publisher Wiley is closing 19 research journals due to the flood of bogus research. (Sorry, the last is behind a paywall.)

The need for funding accounts for most of this. Desperate to get funding, researchers publish anything, even if faulty or faked, to publish and keep from perishing. This is simple careerism, the desire to keep your job. It is worse in fields where those funding the research desire a specific result or where ideology infects research. In those cases science has been replaced by science!®, a faith-based substitute for Feynman's and Rutherford's world of theory proved through experimentation.

Science!®, like all false religions, will eventually collapse under its own contradictions. It will do immeasurable damage before it does.