(December 20, 2008 at 4:01 pm)Purple Rabbit Wrote: String theory so far has no falsifiable formulation. Vast numbers of theoretical scientists are involved though. But according to Popper's demarcation rules string theory on this ground cannot be called science. So what is it? Sheer speculation, an intellectual excercise with no bearings in the real world? Or is it philosophy excercising a brilliant idea with mathematical tools and logic. I say it is philosophy feeding to science. Philosophy and science are in symbiosis. Science feeds philosophical investigation and vice versa.I'd say String theory is primarily a philosophical question, but that doesn't prohibit it from being researched by science, especially if it affects science in such a big way. I never stated that science and philosophy should be separate, but that they are not the same thing. Philosophy isn't a part of science, and science isn't a part of philosophy. Philosophy tries to answer questions that cannot be reasonably answered by the scientific method; things like the matter of ethics. Science cannot tell us whether we should have abortions, because there is no scientific way of determining what constitutes a "human life" because there are different ideas of what we should call "human". There are many different opinions about it, and it is a question of philosophy to answer. Likewise, philosophy has nothing to say on electric cars, because science can answer all the questions about electric cars.
So you can think of science and philosophy as separate entities that work together well in some situations. They are both aspects of human endeavour, but are not part of each other. One relies primarily on human reason alone, and the other relies primarily on human research.
