For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the evolving challenges and philosophical implications in the field of cosmology.
In the Dec. 15, 2014 issue of Nature, cosmologists George Ellis and Joe Silk made an impassioned and unusual plea. In an essay titled “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics,” the two renowned scientists made the case that while several new developments in science — particularly string theory and the concept of a multiverse — seem to offer elegant solutions to otherwise intractable problems in physics, they nonetheless lack elements required for them to be truly scientific, most notably the capacity to be empirically tested and falsified.
“In our view,” they wrote, “the issue boils down to clarifying one question: what potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandon it? If there is none, it is not a scientific theory.” Ellis and Silk end their commentary with a specific call for philosophers of science to work together with scientists to develop better tools for dealing with the issue.