bluefugue

IIRC, one of the famous examples of verification in science was the eclipse of 1919, in which a prediction of relativity (sorry, can't remember whether it was General or Special) was emperically verified.

I certainly don't know whether people had been accustomed to calling it the "Hypothesis of Relativity" prior to that, and then switched to the "Theory of Relativity" upon confirmation. I rather imagine such choices of lingo tend to be more ad-hoc and casual than that.

tronvillain

I imagine that it was a theory all along.

bluefugue

Well, you still have to distinguish between "a theory that has bags of evidence supporting it" and "a theory Dr. Snodgrass just thought up last week." What vocabulary you use to make the distinction is ultimately a rather minor point... though inconsistency in terminology can come back to haunt scientists, if only because creationists seize upon it in their quote-mining.

tronvillain

You have to distinguish between them, but no one does so by calling one of them a hypothesis.

tribalbeeyatch

I do, and so does everybody else in my lab. IIRC, so did my science teacher when we learned the scientific method in grade 7.

KeithHarwood

This is a gotcha that, fortunately, the Creationists haven't come across yet. There are, in fact, three kinds of theory.
o Layman's theory (guess)
o Scientific theory (has bags of evidence)
o Mathematical theory.

It is said that a mathematician is someone who can take a word and make it mean something completely different from what everyone else think it means. (Have you ever seen the mathematician's definition for a knot?)

Superstring theory is a mathematical theory. In this case theory means something like
A collection of axioms and inference rules which can be shown to be self consistent.

Thus, you have Set Theory, the Theory of Galios Rings, Category Theory. None of these have evidentiary support because they do not assert anything about the world, they are exercises in pure reason.

Mathematical theories become scientific hypotheses when entities in the theory are identified with entities in the real world. At this point the theory can make predictions which can be tested by observation and the identification questioned. Superstring theory is at this stage at the moment.

Bill

I personally believe that every single scientific theory begins as a hypothesis. It is just that very few things that are labeled as a hypothesis ever gain any public attention until they do make it to the "theory" stage.

== Bill

Bill

ABSOLUTELY!

The difficulty is that we don't really know what the theory is yet! We only have such a vague description of the various versions of string theory that nothing is well enough understood to be able to produce any real empirical verification.

Of course, they are trying. But the tests are many orders of magnitude away from being able to yield actual verification of some aspect of string theory. (I am thinking of a recent test for gravity waves that was able to measure nothing down to something like 10 to the -10th power, but the real stuff is supposed to be down nearer 10 to the -35th power. So, the failure of the experiment didn't either verify or falsify the prediction.)

== Bill

tronvillain

tribalbeeyatch:
Interesting. I'm still not convinced though.

tronvillain

Specifically, I'm not convinced it's not just something people say.