{"id":29358,"date":"2015-12-17T16:07:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-17T16:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/?p=29358"},"modified":"2015-12-17T19:52:40","modified_gmt":"2015-12-17T19:52:40","slug":"a-fight-for-the-soul-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/a-fight-for-the-soul-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fight for the Soul of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science\/\">https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science\/<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Physicists typically think they \u201cneed philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,\u201d the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians and physicists last week in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today\u2019s theorists \u2014 chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis \u2014 appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of \u201cmoving the goalposts\u201d of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. \u201cThe imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,\u201d Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. \u201cOnly then can we defend science from attack.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science\/ Physicists typically think they \u201cneed philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,\u201d the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians and physicists last week in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman. &#8230; The crisis, as &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/a-fight-for-the-soul-of-science\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}