Chris Peterson wrote:Occam wrote:The definition of "hypothesis" is "educated guess." In my haste to get out an answer, I substituted "empirical data" for scientifically appropriate education, and I overstated my point. Since science deals exclusively with observable phenomena, no amount of scientific education could arrive at an hypothesis of alternate universes.
One might as well call divine intervention or intelligent design a scientific theory.
Not at all. There is nothing unscientific about hypothesizing the existence of alternate universes, and then constructing a theory around that hypothesis. Science does not require direct observations to reach conclusions. An alternate universe theory might predict some particular observable feature of our own universe- for instance, a specific structure of the CMB. This then becomes a test which can either disprove the theory, or add support to it.
There is no inherent reason we can't ultimately have a lot of confidence about the conditions that existed "before" our universe was formed, or which existed (or exist) "outside" it, even though the direct observation of these things is impossible.
Hi Chris,
Thank you for your reply. If I understand it correctly, I believe it may be internally inconsistent. You may be using the common definitions of "hypothesis," "theory," and possibly "science" not the scientific definitions.
From wikipedia (I chose this definition because it is concise, readily accessible, and comes with references, not because I'm not skeptical about what I find there, or because I think the definition is the best one.) the definition of science is: Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is an enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the natural world.
Science *does* require observation in order to test explanations. The notion of a parallel universe cannot be observed. It's a stretch to call that notion an hypothesis in a scientific sense. If it makes a testable prediction that is not readily explained by existing theory, then it enters the realm of science. Note however, that in order to test a prediction, one has to make an observation. If your mental exercise does not make a testable prediction, then it is not science, but rather the free play of creative imagination: fantasy.
I did not say that scientific observations need to be made directly. For example, Robert Millikan measured the fundamental charge of an electron, but that was not done directly.
And as far as having confidence in what took place before the beginning of our universe as we understand it, science has no explanation of that. In fact, science has no good explanation for what took place in the first few milliseconds of our universe, except that the rules of physics, or our best models of the physical universe as derived by science, did not apply.
