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One thing that's always bothered me about modern physics is that they don't adhere to the scientific method in the interpretation of the most basic, repeatable experiments.
The scientific method is supposed to be you observe something, you hypothesize (guess) what's going on, then you conduct experiments to try to disprove the guess. Experiments don't ever prove the guess correct, and competing experiments that conflict with multiple guesses rule out all the guesses.
So the double-slit and single-slit experiments prove that light is NEITHER a particle (in the sense scientists use the term) NOR a wave. One experiment rules out one, the other experiment rules out the other. Instead of concluding that both guesses were wrong because they were contradicted by evidence, scientists decided both experiments proved contradictory theories correct and that light is a wave AND a particle. The scientifically rigorous explanation is that light is NEITHER.
Replies (2)
i don’t think qm is incompatible with science. you just have to run the experiment many times to converge to an expected value.
science is about determining what is true. the truth is that reality appears to be probabilistic due to the fact you can’t simultaneously measure position and momentum.
this isn’t saying qm is unscientific, it just means we are limited in what we can measure all at once, so we are forced to average.
the math works out surprisingly well, qm is one of the most accurate science we have.
The issue is that this is not a problem of physics, but of modern science itself. Another point—which should already be well known but seems to be deliberately ignored by scientists—is that the scientific method DOES NOT WORK! In fact, it is not even applied strictly. This has already been documented and is well known, yet it is solemnly ignored.
Take, for example, the idea of scientific verification.
If we speak of scientific verification as it is understood in the natural sciences, we end up brutally restricting the field of verification, because scientific verification presupposes a consensus across an entire scientific community. A scientist who performs a verification in a laboratory has proven nothing scientifically as long as ALL others have not verified the same thing.
This means that what we call scientific verification is nothing more than a consensus involving an enormous number of people. And even assuming that everyone actually tests it, the possibility that thousands upon thousands of people observe the same thing, in the same way, at the same time, and on top of that interpret it in the same manner is ZERO. In most cases, verification is not scientific but direct and PERSONAL.
In short, what authority does a field of study have that:
1 – Cannot apply its own method
2 – Does not possess its own foundation within itself
3 – Ignores the fact that all verification is, in the final analysis, consensual
and
4 – Rejects any kind of knowledge that goes above and beyond its own field of activity?
