The Black Box Theory of Everything

What is science? What makes a theory scientific?



Seems reasonable, right? Let’s try a thought experiment.





Behold, your theory




But is this “quark theory” scientific?


And in practice? I doubt that many scientists would care.


Why am I thinking about this? For two reasons:




What if we do the experiment first, though?









3 thoughts on “The Black Box Theory of Everything

  1. Orin Harris

    It’s for these kinds of reasons that I think students should be required to take a “philosophy of science” course. It’s unfortunately all too common for physicists to adopt a naively scientistic and falsificationist stance that breaks down under scrutiny. I’ve always found it ironic that the dissonance you are pointing out is particularly striking in the case of physics pedagogy, where unfalsifiable realist mental models that coherently and parsimoniously unify, explain, and postdict previously encountered facts, are taken for granted by virtually every physicist as synonymous with “conceptual understanding” and “physical insight.”

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  2. itaibn


    This is a common sentiment among physicists and I want to push back against it. We might be close to a final theory of everything or we might not be. It’s not arrogant to suspect either possibility is true. It is arrogant to assert with high confidence that there’s something fundamental we’re missing, just as it’s arrogant to assert that the final theory is right around the corner.

    The argument people usually make is that there have been so many times that when physicists were confident they were on the cusp of a theory of everything only to discover they were completely missing something fundamental. First of all, it’s actually not that many times: I dare you to name more than four. The only example I usually see is the period right before quantum mechanics. This history doesn’t prove much: if modern physics has been going for 500 years without finding a fundamental theory of everything then the naive estimate is that the chance it will be found in the next 50 year is no more than 10%, which can still be a significant chance.

    Second, the state of our knowledge today is genuinely better than it was 100 years ago or earlier. As Sean Carrol points out, we completely understand the laws of physics underlying everyday life, which is not something any previous paradigm before our own claimed. The reason why physics research was so slow in the last decades is that we understand physics so well that if we want to find anything at all we can’t account for it takes thousands of collaborators running giant machines and even that usually doesn’t work. The number of remaining mysteries is so small that a single physicist can know about all of them, and many do. Except perhaps for the cosmological constant problem, every mystery can in principle be explained using existing paradigms, although we have no way of knowing which if any of the explanations is correct. (I’m counting the quantum measurement problem and the problem of consciousness as philosophy rather than physics.) Although fundamental physics is currently at a standstill and it’s possible we’re missing some fundamental stuff I also think it’s possible a theory of everything is near.

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  3. Marees

    Science has always seemed as a bit of magic compared to maths.

    In maths everything is a given

    But in science you have to decide what assumptions to make, which are the critical assumptions and parameters etc

    So if a model predicted everything without explaining anything then it would be maths rather than science

    In science, I expect, first you have to explain and then predict new things which you didn’t explain

    Liked by 1 person


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