Flexible experiments

Experiments in Physics, Biology and Economics have become increasingly more expensive and they, unfortunately, produce no or irrelevant results. The scientific process, that helped humans navigate early years of science and technology, has become a major hindrance to advance knowledge further. The idea has been to create a hypothesis that fits with the status quo framework and then design experiments to prove an aspect of the framework. The success of the experiment, thus, does not prove the theory and only increases the probability of the theory being correct. As the complexity in theory increases linearly, the complexity in experiments needed to prove components of the theory seem to have increased exponentially.

CERN’s attempt at producing the Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider is one such situation. The existence of this elusive particle does not prove the hypothesized framework but only enhances the probability of it being correct. More importantly, the existence of the Higgs boson may create challenges to other established notions such as the irreversibility of time – making it very difficult to understand why we would spend over $10 Billion to do so. In such cases, it may be better to suspend physical experimentation as we may have reached the complexity threshold and further knowledge increase is unlikely to happen by following the conventional processes of hypothesis creation and attempting to find physical proof.

Humans have gone through these types of situations before. Our ability to abstract a situation moved us from the need to physically see something before we act. Art allowed us to imagine and add color to both observable and imagined things. We are approaching this threshold in science as well, where abstraction is more efficient – with mathematics being the dominant tool. Experiments, if needed, may have to be designed to be flexible – i.e. not to prove a hypothesis but to keep the end outcome undefined. Such experiments may have a higher probability of advancing knowledge at a much lower cost to society. As complexity increases, the frameworks are likely to switch faster and thus flexible experiments that have a higher probability to shift knowledge is more valuable than those with prescribed and rigid outcomes.