Bremsstrahlung

I just ran across this quote in a cartoon:

How can you possibly come to any conclusions of truth if you can only think scientifically? There's more out there than what you can prove in a lab.

(Emphasis not added.)

Now, this claim was made by a character in the cartoon, and may not reflect any notion that the author seriously entertains. i hope not. I object to this because statements like these express a fundamental misunderstanding of science. Science is a system of structuring thought and investigation, not a set of specific beliefs.

There are many results which have been derived via scientific means, such as the theories of special and general relativity, evolution, electrodynamics, and quantum mechanics, to name only a few. These are not themselves science, they are results. Science is the system of forming and testing hypotheses in order to reach valid conclusions. The nature of the hypotheses and the test are not set, and must depend on the investigate one intends to make. So many things that most people view as icons of science like meter sticks, microscopes, particle accelerators, and the labs they're kept in are just tools utilized in testing certain sorts of hypotheses. Likewise the math, E=mc^2 ¹ and all that sort of thing is formalism useful for expressing certain types of hypotheses.

Let's sum it up this way: I hypothesize that there is no real phenomenon which cannot be understood in some significant degree through the process of devising and testing hypotheses. If this hypothesis is correct, then there is no problem which will not yield to the scientific method. I will agree readily that this hypothesis is essentially impossible to test completely, but then neither can I prove that all objects, when dropped, will move according to gravity, air resistance, and other known relevant forces. I haven't tested every object in the universe yet, but I and many others have tested a heck of a lot of them without a single failure yet. I'd say that's pretty good reason to be confident, and likewise while not every problem has yet been solved using the scientific method of thought, this is little impediment to my hypothesis. After all, we have a great record so far of successes, and no failures, only works still in progress.

There are some really tough questions, of course, like, "Is there a god?" However, many questions like these seem to need to be approached like m hypothesis above. We don't seem to have any good way of proving once and for all if there is a god or not, but if we have never yet seen good evidence of goddish² activity, then we can begin to be pretty confident of our hypothesis. There aren't enough time or resources to be utterly skeptical of all things; at some point you just have to decide that you're reasonably convinced and move on to other things. Likewise, there are hypotheses that really should be dismissed with a "So what?" such as "I think there is a monster in this room which cannot be detected in any way." Well, if it can't be detected, it's exactly the same as if it's not there, right? We might say that the universe has a symmetry has an undetectable monster density symmetry ³. This means that absolutely nothing real is changed by any presence, how ever distributed, of undetectable monsters. Meaning, then, that this is a curiosity, but if it doesn't matter how many undetectable monsters there are, let's just make things simple and assume that there are none, because it won't change anything. It happens to be my conjecture that the really unanswerable questions will end up looking like symmetries of reality, such as a symmetry under change in number of gods. Whatever the details of gods are, changing the universe from having none to one to a thousand of them won't change anything we can observe, so it's all the same as if there aren't any. Thus scientific inquiry will say that the answer to these questions really is "So what?" That's an answer, even if not a form that people may expect. But that's an important point of scientific thought: you seek out the answer, whatever it is and whether you expect it or not, because only what is true matters and will remain after rigorous examination. If anybody can propose to me another non-equivalent thought system that will do the same or better job to seek out truth, I'll be happy to give it a try.