One of the key things to figure out is why scientists working in the field can make confident pronouncements like “oh, the Jupiter thing is just light moving slower” or “no, we swear there’s going to be a Higgs boson, we just need to build a more powerful particle accelerator” and have them actually working out. It’s a mathematical impossibility that the models of the world they use have lots of knobs they could turn and they have just hit the right setting of the knobs by accident many times (even with plenty of wrong turns along the way as well). And so clearly there is implicit knowledge, not at all obvious to the outside who just hears a one-sentence synopsis of this idea without having to attend any symposia on it or read a half dozen research papers about why it makes sense.
I mean, put like that, it seems like it has an obvious answer. And I think the obvious answer is mostly right, though there can be some interesting wrinkles in it.
Internal consistency of the theory, consistency with other known things, retrodiction of known observations, simplicity of the theory (as compared to its explanatory power), revealing and resolving unsatisfactory aspects of alternative theories…
I agree that those kinds of things are probably “not obvious from a one-sentence synopsis” but I don’t see why they have to be “implicit” or require reading lots of research papers.
I’d be interested to know how many different people around the world came up with explanations and empirically tested them. I don’t know whether people “got the answer right first time” or “lots of people threw lots of hypotheses at the walls and these are the ones that stuck”.
One of the key things to figure out is why scientists working in the field can make confident pronouncements like “oh, the Jupiter thing is just light moving slower” or “no, we swear there’s going to be a Higgs boson, we just need to build a more powerful particle accelerator” and have them actually working out. It’s a mathematical impossibility that the models of the world they use have lots of knobs they could turn and they have just hit the right setting of the knobs by accident many times (even with plenty of wrong turns along the way as well). And so clearly there is implicit knowledge, not at all obvious to the outside who just hears a one-sentence synopsis of this idea without having to attend any symposia on it or read a half dozen research papers about why it makes sense.
I mean, put like that, it seems like it has an obvious answer. And I think the obvious answer is mostly right, though there can be some interesting wrinkles in it.
Internal consistency of the theory, consistency with other known things, retrodiction of known observations, simplicity of the theory (as compared to its explanatory power), revealing and resolving unsatisfactory aspects of alternative theories…
I agree that those kinds of things are probably “not obvious from a one-sentence synopsis” but I don’t see why they have to be “implicit” or require reading lots of research papers.
I’m not sure what the right answer is.
I’d be interested to know how many different people around the world came up with explanations and empirically tested them. I don’t know whether people “got the answer right first time” or “lots of people threw lots of hypotheses at the walls and these are the ones that stuck”.
Particle physicists also made other confident predictions about the LHC that are not working out, and they’re now asking for a bigger accelerator.
Survivorship bias might be at play, wherein we forget all the confident pronouncements that ended being just plain wrong.
I mean, the other main things to look for were WIMPs and supersymmetry, but almost everyone was cautious about chances of finding those.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/08/04/what-will-the-lhc-find/