popper is outdated

Many scientists, and practically all social scientists, have grown up with an inviolable principle engraved in their neurons: a theory can only be called scientific if it is refutable.

That means that there are observations or experiments that can be done and, if the results do not correspond to the predictions, the theory can be thrown in the trash without remorse.

The formalization of this idea is surely due to the Viennese philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994), who called it falsificationism and thus became the great

of the 20th century, at least in academic fields.

Falsificationism is easy to understand and gives us a criterion to decide what is scientific and what is not, nothing less, one of the most complex questions in the history of thought.

As is often the case in science, however, Popper's cosmogony has long been skating on the brittle ice of actual scientific practice, that which occurs in laboratories and on blackboards.

Einstein's own relativity makes amazingly accurate predictions, as Popper would have it, but at the cost of postulating a malleable space-time that we cannot directly observe.

No one would therefore say that relativity is a religion rather than a science.

It is the accuracy of his predictions that makes it an accepted scientific theory.

Even more amazing is quantum mechanics, which also predicts reality to many decimal places, but only in exchange for accepting a world governed by a probability wave (the Schrödinger equation), in which a particle can be in two places at the same time. time, two particles can be entangled and communicate with each other instantaneously, no matter how far they are from each other and, to finish it off,

all possible outcomes that we don't see are happening in other universes.

We can't directly observe any of it, and so it's not falsifiable (refutable), but it's a scientific theory because it predicts reality with extraordinary accuracy.

The Popperian debate not only continues, but has reached a new intensity among physicists.

The controversy is mainly about string theory (elementary particles are not points, but tiny strings that can vibrate in different ways, like the notes produced by a violin).

The theory aspires to unify quantum mechanics with relativity, the two foundations of contemporary physics, which are currently incompatible.

That unification is the holy grail of theoretical physicists.

But strings are so small that we can't access them with any current technology, and so half of physicists vehemently reject it as unrefutable.

Proponents of string theory, notably the New York physicist Brian Greene, argue that this is the same kind of immunity to disproof that plagues relativistic and quantum theories.

The crucial point, of course, is for string theory to make predictions that hold with high precision.

So far it has not, because the theory is too complex.

He has been abducting a large part of the young talent from half the world for three or four decades.

His work cannot be dismissed on a simple philosophical principle.

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