Has Occam’s Razor distorted history of science?

_{Denyse O'Leary

August 15, 2016

News, Philosophy, Science}

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From Philip Ball at Atlantic:

The history of science has been distorted by a longstanding conviction that correct theories about nature are always the most elegant ones.

…

Occam’s razor was never meant for paring nature down to some beautiful, parsimonious core of truth. Because science is so difficult and messy, the allure of a philosophical tool for clearing a path or pruning the thickets is obvious. In their readiness to find spurious applications of Occam’s razor in the history of science, or to enlist, dismiss, or reshape the razor at will to shore up their preferences, scientists reveal their seduction by this vision.

But they should resist it. The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum is cognitive, not ontological: It helps you to think. A theory is not “better” if it is simpler—but it might well be more useful, and that counts for much more. More.

See also: Occam’s Razor (by contrast with LOI, LNC and LEM as well as W-PSR) is not an absolute principle of correct reasoning (kairosfocus)

and

Now Materialists Are Trying to Turn Occam’s Razor On Its Head (Barry Arrington)

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BA77, "IMHO, “the empirical evidence itself has final say as to which theory is to be preferred.” But how does Occam's Razor negatively affect this? Occam's Razor has never been about selecting the simplest theory unconditionally. It is simply saying that if two theories are equally strong in explaining the data, the one with the fewest assumptions (simpler, if you will, but I think that word is misleading) is more likely to be the best choice.Rationalitys bane_{August 15, 2016
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In further reference to empirical evidence, Quantum Mechanics goes one step further than the geocentric anomalies in the CMBR and gives centrality to each conscious observer. Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics at John Hopkins University, puts the untenable situation between quantum mechanics and the Copernican principle as such:
Quantum Enigma:Physics Encounters Consciousness – Richard Conn Henry – Professor of Physics – John Hopkins University Excerpt: It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe. And yet, have you ever before read a sentence having meaning similar to that of my preceding sentence? Likely you have not, and the reason you have not is, in my opinion, that physicists are in a state of denial… https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-quantum-enigma-of-consciousness-and-the-identity-of-the-designer/ New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking at It - June 3, 2015 Excerpt: The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said. Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html Einstein: An Exchange - 2007 Excerpt: In fact, a quantum mechanician like Bohr would say that, in the absence of an experiment to determine them, these quantities have no existence at all. This is what Einstein objected to. He once walked back from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with the late Abraham Pais. The moon was out and Einstein asked Pais, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/08/16/einstein-an-exchange/ “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!” – Scott Aaronson – MIT associate Professor quantum computation - Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables
Moreover, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death intersects both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics:
Resurrection of Jesus Christ as the Theory of Everything - Centrality Concerns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uHST2uFPQY
Of related note is this very recent experiment in which it was more rigorously established that a beyond space and time cause must be invoked in order to explain quantum correlations:
Quantum correlations do not imply instant causation August 12, 2016 Excerpt: A research team led by a Heriot-Watt scientist has shown that the universe is even weirder than had previously been thought. In 2015 the universe was officially proven to be weird. After many decades of research, a series of experiments showed that distant, entangled objects can seemingly interact with each other through what Albert Einstein famously dismissed as "Spooky action at a distance". A new experiment by an international team led by Heriot-Watt's Dr Alessandro Fedrizzi has now found that the universe is even weirder than that: entangled objects do not cause each other to behave the way they do. http://phys.org/news/2016-08-quantum-imply-instant-causation.html Experimental test of nonlocal causality August 10, 2016 DISCUSSION Previous work on causal explanations beyond local hidden-variable models focused on testing Leggett’s crypto-nonlocality (7, 42, 43), a class of models with a very specific choice of hidden variable that is unrelated to Bell’s local causality (44). In contrast, we make no assumptions on the form of the hidden variable and test all models ,,, Our results demonstrate that a causal influence from one measurement outcome to the other, which may be subluminal, superluminal, or even instantaneous, cannot explain the observed correlations.,,, http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600162.full
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IMHO, "the empirical evidence itself has final say as to which theory is to be preferred." from Ball's article
The Tyranny of Simple Explanations - Philip Ball - AUG 11, 2016 Excerpt: Occam’s razor is often stated as an injunction not to make more assumptions than you absolutely need.,,, In layman’s terms, the simplest explanation is usually the best one.,,, But Occam’s razor is often fetishized and misapplied as a guiding beacon for scientific enquiry.,, The worst misuses, however, fixate on the idea that the razor can adjudicate between rival theories. I have found no single instance where it has served this purpose to settle a scientific debate. Worse still, the history of science is often distorted in attempts to argue that it has. Take the debate between the ancient geocentric view of the universe—in which the sun and planets move around a central Earth—and Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, with the Sun at the center and the Earth and other planets moving around it.,,, It is often claimed that, by the 16th century, this Ptolemaic model of the universe had become so laden with these epicycles that it was on the point of falling apart. Then along came the Polish astronomer with his heliocentric universe, and no more epicycles were needed. The two theories explained the same astronomical observations, but Copernicus’s was simpler, and so Occam’s razor tells us to prefer it. This is wrong for many reasons. First, Copernicus didn’t do away with epicycles.,,, In an introductory tract called the Commentariolus, published around 1514, he said he could explain the motions of the heavens with “just” 34 epicycles. Many later commentators took this to mean that the geocentric model must have needed many more than 34, but there’s no actual evidence for that. And the historian of astronomy Owen Gingerich has dismissed the common assumption that the Ptolemaic model was so epicycle-heavy that it was close to collapse. He argues that a relatively simple design was probably still in use in Copernicus’s time.,,, Occam’s razor was never meant for paring nature down to some beautiful, parsimonious core of truth. Because science is so difficult and messy, the allure of a philosophical tool for clearing a path or pruning the thickets is obvious. In their readiness to find spurious applications of Occam’s razor in the history of science, or to enlist, dismiss, or reshape the razor at will to shore up their preferences, scientists reveal their seduction by this vision. http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/occams-razor/495332/
To support my contention that "the empirical evidence itself has final say as to which theory is to be preferred", geocentricism is now verified by reference to CMBR:
Why is the solar system cosmically aligned? BY Dragan Huterer - 2007 The solar system seems to line up with the largest cosmic features. Is this mere coincidence or a signpost to deeper insights? Caption under figure on page 43: ODD ALIGNMENTS hide within the multipoles of the cosmic microwave background. In this combination of the quadrupole and octopole, a plane bisects the sphere between the largest warm and cool lobes. The ecliptic — the plane of Earth’s orbit projected onto the celestial sphere — is aligned parallel to the plane between the lobes. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~huterer/PRESS/CMB_Huterer.pdf Here is the actual graph of the alignment from the Huterer 2007 paper (worth a thousand words): http://i44.servimg.com/u/f44/16/14/18/96/axis_o10.jpg Large-scale alignments from WMAP and Planck – 2013 We revisit the alignments of the largest structures observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the seven and nine-year WMAP and first-year Planck data releases. The observed alignments — the quadrupole with the octopole and their joint alignment with the direction of our motion with respect to the CMB (the dipole direction) and the geometry of the Solar System (defined by the Ecliptic plane) — are generally in good agreement with results from the previous WMAP data releases.,,, both the WMAP and Planck data confirm the alignments of the largest observable CMB modes in the Universe. http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.4562 Is there a violation of the Copernican principle in radio sky? - Ashok K. Singal - May 17, 2013 Abstract: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) observations from the WMAP satellite have shown some unexpected anisotropies (directionally dependent observations), which surprisingly seem to be aligned with the eclipticcite {20,16,15}. The latest data from the Planck satellite have confirmed the presence of these anisotropiescite {17}. Here we report even larger anisotropies in the sky distributions of powerful extended quasars and some other sub-classes of radio galaxies in the 3CRR catalogue, one of the oldest and most intensively studies sample of strong radio sourcescite{21,22,3}. The anisotropies lie about a plane passing through the two equinoxes and the north celestial pole (NCP). We can rule out at a 99.995% confidence level the hypothesis that these asymmetries are merely due to statistical fluctuations. Further, even the distribution of observed radio sizes of quasars and radio galaxies show large systematic differences between these two sky regions. The redshift distribution appear to be very similar in both regions of sky for all sources, which rules out any local effects to be the cause of these anomalies. Two pertinent questions then arise. First, why should there be such large anisotropies present in the sky distribution of some of the most distant discrete sources implying inhomogeneities in the universe at very large scales (covering a fraction of the universe)? What is intriguing even further is why such anisotropies should lie about a great circle decided purely by the orientation of earth's rotation axis and/or the axis of its revolution around the sun? It looks as if these axes have a preferential placement in the larger scheme of things, implying an apparent breakdown of the Copernican principle or its more generalization, cosmological principle, upon which all modern cosmological theories are based upon. http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4134 What Is Evil About The Axis Of Evil? - February 17, 2015 The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation contains small temperature fluctuations. When these temperature fluctuations are analyzed using image processing techniques (specifically spherical harmonics), they indicate a special direction in space, or, in a sense, an axis through the universe. This axis is correlated back to us, and causes many difficulties for the current big bang and standard cosmology theories. What has been discovered is shocking. Two scientists, Kate Land and João Magueijo, in a paper in 2005 describing the axis, dubbed it the “Axis of Evil” because of the damage it does to current theories, and (tongue in cheek) as a response to George Bush’ Axis of Evil speech regarding Iraq, Iran and, North Korea. (Youtube clip on site) In the above video, Max Tegmark describes in a simplified way how spherical harmonics analysis decomposes the small temperature fluctuations into more averaged and spatially arranged temperature components, known as multipoles. The “Axis of Evil” correlates to the earth’s ecliptic and equinoxes, and this represents a very unusual and unexpected special direction in space, a direct challenge to the Copernican Principle. http://www.theprinciplemovie.com/evil-axis-evil/ At the 13:55 minute mark of this following video, Max Tegmark, an atheist, finally admits, post Planck 2013, that the CMBR anomalies do indeed line up with the earth and solar system "Thoughtcrime: The Conspiracy to Stop The Principle" - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0eVUSDy_rO0#t=832
Also of note, general relativity does not differentiate centrality in the universe:
“Can we formulate physical laws so that they are valid for all CS [coordinate systems], not only those moving uniformly, but also those moving quite arbitrarily, relative to each other? […] The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.” Einstein, A. and Infeld, L. (1938) The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.); How Einstein Revealed the Universe’s Strange “Nonlocality” – George Musser | Oct 20, 2015 Excerpt: Under most circumstances, we can ignore this nonlocality. You can designate some available chunk of matter as a reference point and use it to anchor a coordinate grid. You can, to the chagrin of Santa Barbarans, take Los Angeles as the center of the universe and define every other place with respect to it. In this framework, you can go about your business in blissful ignorance of space’s fundamental inability to demarcate locations.,, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-einstein-revealed-the-universe-s-strange-nonlocality/ “People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations… For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations… You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds… What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.” – George Ellis – W. Wayt Gibbs, “Profile: George F. R. Ellis,” Scientific American, October 1995, Vol. 273, No.4, p. 55
bornagain77_{August 15, 2016
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BA77, "I agree that simplicity does not determine whether a theory is true or not." Occam's Razor has never claimed that the simplest must be true. It is presented in many ways but the one I like the best is that we should conditionally select the theory that best explains the data with the fewest number of assumptions. In some cases, this may be the more complex theory (eg., relativity vs Newtonian mechanics).Rationalitys bane_{August 15, 2016
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I agree that simplicity does not determine whether a theory is true or not. For instance, who in their right mind would ever argue that general relativity supplanted Newtonian mechanics because of its simplicity? No, the truthfulness of a new theory in science is not established by its simplicity but by its ability to make more accurate predictions than the theory it replaces. Predictions that can be tested and also that withstand repeated attempts at falsification. In other words, the empirical evidence itself has final say as to which theory is to be preferred. Of note, in his article, Philip ball mentioned Geocentricism vs. heliocentrism, Darwinian evolution vs. Design, and Many Worlds Interpretation vs. Quantum Wave collapse, as examples that cannot be decided by Occam’s Razor. Though Ball may disagree, I find all of his examples to have been adjudicated by empirical evidence in favor of theists. And although I agree with Ball that simplicity is certainly not an accurate judge as to whether a theory is correct or not, contrary to Ball's assertion in another article he wrote, I do have respect for the notion that beauty implies truthfulness:
Truth not equal to Beauty - Philip Ball – May 2014 Excerpt: ‘the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones’ Albert Einstein http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/beauty-is-truth-theres-a-false-equation/
As well, In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said,
“This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”
In regards to General Relativity, mathematical physicist Clifford Will said
“Fiddling with general relativity, he believes, would be tantamount to changing the Fifth Symphony. “General relativity is so unbelievably beautiful and simple – it’s in some ways the most perfect gravitational theory that you could possibly imagine,” he says. All of the alternatives he’s seen so far are “horrendously ugly by comparison”.” Einstein’s Masterpiece - Michael W. Begun – Fall 2015 Excerpt: General relativity has served as a paragon of a scientific theory, and generations of physicists have hailed its sublimity. Ernest Rutherford, for instance: “the theory of relativity by Einstein ... cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.” Wolfgang Pauli: “it will always remain the pattern of a theory of consummate beauty of the mathematical structure.” Sean Carroll: “General relativity is the most beautiful physical theory ever invented.” http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/einsteins-masterpiece
Alex Vilenkin, who mathematically proved that all hypothetical inflationary universes must have also had a beginning, commenting on Euler’s Identity, stated,,,
"It appears that the Creator shares the mathematicians sense of beauty" Alex Vilenkin - Many Worlds in One: (page 201) http://books.google.com/books?id=9nRGwQnvGx0C&pg=PA201
As well, Richard Feynman called Euler’s Identity a ‘jewel’:
“Richard Feynman was a huge fan and called it a "jewel".” http://www.sciencedump.com/content/world%E2%80%99s-most-beautiful-equations
‘Mathematical beauty’ even had a guiding hand in the fairly recent discovery of the Amplituhedron:
The Amplituhedron (mathematical beauty - 21:12 minute mark) - Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By27M9ommJc#t=1272
Paul Dirac, a big fan of mathematical beauty, when pressed for a definition of mathematical beauty, reacted as such:
Dirac threw up his hands. Mathematical beauty, he said, ‘cannot be defined any more than beauty in art can be defined’ – though he added that it was something ‘people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating’. http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/beauty-is-truth-theres-a-false-equation/
And indeed, just as Dirac held, it is found when mathematicians are shown equations such as Euler's identity or the Pythagorean identity the same area of the brain used to appreciate fine art or music lights up:
Mathematics: Why the brain sees maths as beauty – Feb. 12, 2014 Excerpt: Mathematicians were shown "ugly" and "beautiful" equations while in a brain scanner at University College London. The same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art were being activated by "beautiful" maths.,,, One of the researchers, Prof Semir Zeki, told the BBC: "A large number of areas of the brain are involved when viewing equations, but when one looks at a formula rated as beautiful it activates the emotional brain - the medial orbito-frontal cortex - like looking at a great painting or listening to a piece of music." http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26151062
What is astonishing, in this seemingly deep connection between math and beauty, is the fact that the ‘argument from beauty’ is a Theistic argument.
Aesthetic Arguments for the Existence of God: Excerpt: Beauty,,, can be appreciated only by the mind. This would be impossible, if this `idea’ of beauty were not found in the mind in a more perfect form. http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/williams-aesthetic.shtml
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