284
"string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard"
(www.youtube.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
284 points (100.0% liked)
Science
13006 readers
86 users here now
Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I think she leaned a bit too heavily onto the notion that string theorists, as a whole, were lying. I think more likely they genuinely thought they were on to something. They may have been wrong but they didn't think they were wrong. A lie is deliberate misinformation, not simply being mistaken.
Back in the late-80s or early-90s, I remember OMNI Magazine ran an interview with a researcher of veracity in science publications as a topic, don't remember anything but a whopper of a quote in which he said that around a third of science papers fudge the numbers, even if just a little bit, to make them fit the hypotheses.
Which is why the funding mechanism of science is so profoundly unscientific. Funding must be based on the quality of the experimental process, not positive results.
I'd go further, and say that most scientific papers are profoundly unscientific: without the data and analysis process they base their claims on, most papers are no different than just saying "believe me, I'm a scientist".
There are some honorable exceptions, of papers which publish accompanying data and the tools they used to process it, but the vast majority don't.
The fact that negative results don't get published at all, is just disrespecting the word "science". One of its basic premises is that of falsability, so proving a theory wrong, is just as valuable as proving a different one right.