科学必须可证伪吗：一场弦论战争

重点内容

原文 / 段落

I had a front row seat at one round of such, shall we say, frank discussions last year, when I was invited to Munich to participate in a workshop on the status of fundamental physics, and particularly on what some refer to as 'the string wars'. The organiser, Richard Dawid, of the University of Stockholm, is a philosopher of science with a strong background in theoretical physics. He is also a proponent of a highly speculative, if innovative, type of epistemology that supports the efforts of string theorists and aims at shielding them from the accusation of engaging in flights of mathematical fancy decoupled from any real science. My role there was to make sure that participants – an eclectic mix of scientists and philosophers, with a Nobel winner thrown in the mix – were clear on something I teach in my introductory course in philosophy of science: what exactly Popper said and why, since some of those physicists had hurled accusations at their critical colleagues, loudly advocating the ejection of the very idea of falsification from scientific practice.

In the months preceding the workshop, a number of high profile players in the field had been using all sorts of means – from manifesto-type articles in the prestigious Nature magazine to Twitter – to pursue a no-holds-barred public relations campaign to wrestle, or retain, control of the soul of contemporary fundamental physics. Let me give you a taste of the exchange, to set the mood: 'The fear is that it would become difficult to separate such 'science' from New Age thinking, or science fiction,' said George Ellis, chastising the pro-string party; to which Sabine Hossenfelder added: 'Post-empirical science is an oxymoron.' Peter Galison made crystal clear what the stakes are when he wrote: 'This is a debate about the nature of physical knowledge.' On the other side, however, cosmologist Sean Carroll tweeted: 'My real problem with the falsifiability police is: we don't get to demand ahead of time what kind of theory correctly describes the world,' adding '[Falsifiability is] just a simple motto that non-philosophically-trained scientists have latched onto.' Finally (but there is more, much more, out there), Leonard Susskind mockingly introduced the neologism 'Popperazzi' to label an extremely naive (in his view) way of thinking about how science works.

This surprisingly blunt – and very public – talk from prestigious academics is what happens when scientists help themselves to, or conversely categorically reject, philosophical notions that they plainly have not given sufficient thought to. In this case, it was Popper's philosophy of science and its application to the demarcation problem. What makes this particularly ironic for someone like me, who started his academic career as a scientist (evolutionary biology) and eventually moved to philosophy after a constructive midlife crisis, is that a good number of scientists nowadays – and especially physicists – don't seem to hold philosophy in particularly high regard. Just in the last few years Stephen Hawking has declared philosophy dead, Lawrence Krauss has quipped that philosophy reminds him of that old Woody Allen joke, 'those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym,' and science popularisers Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye have both wondered loudly why any young man would decide to 'waste' his time studying philosophy in college.

生词表

理解要点

• 留意作者用"shall we say"这类插入语制造轻描淡写、暗含讽刺的语气，不要只当成填充词跳过。
• 引号里的 Twitter 发言属于非正式语域，跟前后正式的学术叙述形成鲜明对比，读的时候要分辨"叙述声音"和"被引用者的声音"。
• "Popperazzi"是仿照"paparazzi"造的新词，带贬义嘲讽——识别这种造词修辞是读懂物理学家彼此态度的关键。
• 段落最后一句往往才是作者的真实评价（比如"This surprisingly blunt...talk"这句），不要只读引言内容而忽略框住引言的评论句。

Sources

Blog / Website：

1. Must science be testable? – Aeon Essays