Imre Lakatos and a definition of pseudoscience

I did several philosophy of science courses on my degree and although everybody knows about Sir Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn less people know about Lakatos; He had a lot to say about pseudoscience - things that look a bit like science (to gain respectability for their ideas?) but fundamentally differ from real scientific theories.

According to the demarcation criterion of pseudoscience originally proposed by Lakatos, a theory is pseudoscientific if it fails to make any novel predictions of previously unknown phenomena, in contrast with scientific theories, which predict novel fact(s).  Progressive scientific theories are those which have their novel facts confirmed and degenerate scientific theories are those whose predictions of novel facts are refuted. Lakatos's own key examples of pseudoscience were Ptolemaic astronomy, Immanuel Velikovsky's planetary cosmogony, Freudian psychoanalysis, 20th century Soviet Marxism, Lysenko's biology, Niels Bohr's Quantum Mechanics post-1924, astrology, psychiatry, sociology, neoclassical economics, and Darwin's theory.

There is a very good article on the LSE's website including a recording from the early seventies where he explains the difference between science and pseudoscience.

RIP incandescent bulbs

Being a global warming denier is currently a bit fashionable. It's all tied up with people thinking they have a better handle on the subject than professionals who know several orders of magnitude more about it than they do. Just because a Channel Four documentary digs up some renegade (failed!) researcher who has a theory it doesn't mean there is any truth in it. George W. Bush depends on this kind of double-think when he says 'science is divided'- well, it is divided if you think the opinion of a tiny minority (in the pay of the petro-chemical industry) holds weight against 99% of climatologists. The fact that the vast majority of scientists have come to the conclusion that man-made CO2 is responsible is not proof, anyone that suggests that is wrong. But it does imply a very high-probability that it is the cause. To not accept that high-probability is to pick your science like a sweet in a sweet-shop to suit your own taste.
To a degree I blame Kuhn, or rather the poor half-baked understanding lots of folks have of the nature of scientific revolutions. They have the notion that scientific advances always come from mavericks who tirelessly labour outside the mainstream. People like to think that they too 'just might have something there' and produce something valuable even though they have no scientific training - well it isn't true - it never happens!
Anyhow, the Aussies have done it, and now Europe is going to use legislation to phase out incandescent bulbs - good stuff.
Interesting take on the programme here and Marcus Brigstock had a brilliant rant (2.9 megabyte MP3, 7 minutes) on The Now Show where producer Martin Durkin gets some of the heat he deserves.

In the end you have to remember that all programmes on Channel Four (in common with all commercial television) are the loss-leaders for the commercials. The channel wants you to watch the ad breaks and so will make programmes that play fast and easy with the truth so long as it gets people watching them. The BBC is the only place you find accurate science programmes.

Save us from pseudoscience!

Although I graduated with a degree in maths & programming I did start out doing a Physics degree (but the maths was too hard!). I was fortunate enough to get a real passion for meta-science - the theory of scientific knowledge if you will.

...just because the sun has risen every day for as long as anyone can remember, doesn't mean that there is any rational reason to believe it will come up tomorrow. There is no rational way to prove that a pattern will continue on just because it has before.

Popper's reply is characteristic, and ties in with his criterion of falsifiability. He states that while there is no way to prove that the sun will come up, we can theorize that it will. If it does not come up, then it will be disproven, but since right now it seems to be consistent with our theory, the theory is not disproven. Thus, Popper's demarcation between science and non-science serves as an answer to an old logical problem as well. - from Wikipedia's entry on Karl Popper

So good scientists will regard all theory as provisional and work tirelessly to disprove accepted theory by counter-example. That is the way knowledge advances - in science nothing is proved, but things can be disproved. Anyone who tells you "science has proved...." is a charlatan!

Anyhow - the link to an article on New Scientist about Burkhard Heim, a little known German Physicist who did a lot of work in trying to unify the quantum theory with relativity. Rather than trying to unify the fundamental forces (gravity, electro-magnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces) he introduces a bunch more with some extra spacial dimensions for them to live in! The problem with this sort of thing is that he wrote all his work in code(!) so no-one else could steal his ideas - consequently there was no peer-review of his work and he fails Karl Popper's test spectacularly! The term "established body of knowledge" is important here, because the pursuit of scientific knowledge usually involves elements of intuition and guesswork; experiments do not always test a theory adequately, and experimental results can be incorrectly interpreted or even wrong. In legitimate science, however, these problems tend to be self-correcting, if not by the original researchers themselves, then through the critical scrutiny of the greater scientific community.

The article is an interesting read none the less - apparently the Pentagon have funding to resurrect some of his ideas.

This got me thinking about how badly most people understand the development of theories - cold fusion, poly-water and homoeopathy are all examples of developments where people said "..maybe they've got something there" and because there is this common belief that mavericks are the people who advance science - Einstein produced "paradigm busting" work with relativity but those events are few and far between (and we all use Newtonian mechanics anyhow!) but in most folks minds it is the people on the edges who produce improvements - well it isn't!
I once had a conversation with two friends - one of whom was/is a leading chest consultant - there are very few people in this world who know more about the lungs than him! The other friend had read about a Russian doctor who theorised that asthma was the body's way of stopping hyper-ventilation and so you treated asthma by making the patient hold their breath or by putting them in an oxygen-poor environment. She'd hear no criticism of this guy despite him having no published (i.e. peer-reviewed) work.

It is the same attitude that let the Y2K hoax take such hold. Unfortunately it's the tabloid-science style that most television shows rely on (have you even watched BBC's "Horizon" show?!).

So the end of this rant is that in the article;

.....in general relativity, space-time is an active, malleable fabric. It has four dimensions - three of space and one of time - that deform when masses are placed in them...

argh! No - in science fiction time is considered along with the spacial dimensions but in relativity there are four spacial dimensions and time.