George:Just came across this discussion of scientific method 
> and thought it might be of interest here.
> 
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundari... you dropped by. We have mentioned these folks and these views before under several threads. This is a good review article on the issue of 'if it is two beautiful mathematically it must be true, without confirmation necessary". It is a ridiculous approach in my opinion, like Ellis and Silk."-"The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today's theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”-***-"But what requirements must an untested theory meet to be considered scientific? Theorists guide the scientific enterprise by dreaming up the ideas to be put to the test and then interpreting the experimental results; what keeps theorists within the bounds of science?-"Today, most physicists judge the soundness of a theory by using the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper's rule of thumb. In the 1930s, Popper drew a line between science and nonscience in comparing the work of Albert Einstein with that of Sigmund Freud. Einstein's theory of general relativity, which cast the force of gravity as curves in space and time, made risky predictions — ones that, if they hadn't succeeded so brilliantly, would have failed miserably, falsifying the theory. But Freudian psychoanalysis was slippery: Any fault of your mother's could be worked into your diagnosis. The theory wasn't falsifiable, and so, Popper decided, it wasn't science.
 
"Critics accuse string theory and the multiverse hypothesis, as well as cosmic inflation — the leading theory of how the universe began — of falling on the wrong side of Popper's line of demarcation. To borrow the title of the Columbia University physicist Peter Woit's 2006 book on string theory, these ideas are “not even wrong,” say critics. In their editorial, Ellis and Silk invoked the spirit of Popper: “A theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.”-"But, as many in Munich were surprised to learn, falsificationism is no longer the reigning philosophy of science. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, pointed out that falsifiability is woefully inadequate as a separator of science and nonscience, as Popper himself recognized. Astrology, for instance, is falsifiable — indeed, it has been falsified ad nauseam — and yet it isn't science. Physicists' preoccupation with Popper “is really something that needs to stop,” Pigliucci said. “We need to talk about current philosophy of science. We don't talk about something that was current 50 years ago.”-***-"The Munich proceedings will be compiled and published, probably as a book, in 2017. As for what was accomplished, one important outcome, according to Ellis, was an acknowledgment by participating string theorists that the theory is not “confirmed” in the sense of being verified. “David Gross made his position clear: Dawid's criteria are good for justifying working on the theory, not for saying the theory is validated in a non-empirical way,” Ellis wrote in an email. “That seems to me a good position — and explicitly stating that is progress.”-"In considering how theorists should proceed, many attendees expressed the view that work on string theory and other as-yet-untestable ideas should continue. “Keep speculating,” Achinstein wrote in an email after the workshop, but “give your motivation for speculating, give your explanations, but admit that they are only possible explanations.'”-Comment: I'm with Ellis and Woit.

GEORGE: Just came across this discussion of scientific method 
and thought it might be of interest here.-https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundari...-I hope you are all well and still as argumentative. 
I've been too busy to look in here on a regular basis.-It's always a pleasure to hear from you, George, as one of the very first contributors to this forum. We are indeed as argumentative as ever. David will disagree. (That's a joke.) Interesting article, which offers us enough diversity of opinion to justify caution in all our judgements. Two cherry-picked quotes:-QUOTE: Physicists' preoccupation with Popper “is really something that needs to stop,” Pigliucci said. “We need to talk about current philosophy of science. We don't talk about something that was current 50 years ago.”-Wonderful. So in fifty years' time, scientists won't talk about trends that are current now. Ugh, hardly worth bothering, then, is it? Link this to the next quote: -QUOTE: “Keep speculating,” Achinstein wrote in an email after the workshop, but “give your motivation for speculating, give your explanations, but admit that they are only possible explanations.”
“Maybe someday things will change,” Achinstein added, “and the speculations will become testable; and maybe not, maybe never.” We may never know for sure the way the universe works at all distances and all times, “but perhaps you can narrow the live possibilities to just a few,” he said. “I think that would be some progress.”-You could hardly wish for a more explicit endorsement of the sceptical approach to all universal theories. Our scientists and philosophers are all currently groping in the dark, and there is no more scientific backing for their hypotheses than there is for the hypotheses of the theists and the atheists. Three cheers for Achinstein: yes,we should keep looking, but we should keep our minds open because NOBODY knows the truth.

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/is-falsifiability-essential-to-scie... is for me a really nuanced view of falsifiability compared to some of the fare we get here.-Hi George ... nice to have you back.