At Cosmic Variance, physicist Sean Carroll has been liveblogging in great detail about “Philosophy and Cosmology 2009: Characterising Science and Beyond,” an interdisciplinary conference featuring leading physicists and philosophers of science:
9:00: [George] Ellis gives the opening remarks. Cosmology is in a fantastic data-rich era, but it is also coming up against the limits of measurement. In the quest for ever deeper explanation, increasingly speculative proposals are being made, which are sometimes untestable even in principle. The multiverse is the most obvious example.
Question: are these proposals science? Or do they attempt to change the definition of what “science” is? Does the search for explanatory power trump testability?
The questions aren’t only relevant to the multiverse. We need to understand the dividing line between science and non-science to properly classify standard cosmology, inflation, natural selection, Intelligent Design, astrology, parapsychology. Which are science?
Read Carroll’s report from day 1, day 2, and day 3 at Cosmic Variance.