Fun Science Question (I think!)

[China Doll]

Evening All,

It's been a while since I graced Science with my ramblings so hopefully you've all had suitable time to recover!

I was out for dinner with a friend this evening and he was telling me about a show he heard on Radio Four (he thinks). The show itself was apparently about a maths equation or something with an Oxford Professor as part of the pannel (again, he thinks, I never heard it). At some point in this show a tangent was taken and the prof remarked that he believed in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy because you couldn't actually disprove their existence 100%

I obviously had a bash but I quite like the idea of fairies so I was rubbish. I was wondering if any of you could scientifically prove it? (Alternatively, if you know what show he was listening to, I'd quite like to know what the maths thing was about too!)

Cheers
China

[vascop]

The bit about the tooth fairy and Father Christmas is the old one about not being able to prove a negative. What the prof meant was that nobody can ever prove this - not that he has tried and failed. Its not something worth wasting time on.
Reason:
If you say there IS a tooth fairy then you can prove it by finding the tooth fairy and introducing me to her. So it's theoretically possible to prove it.

If I say there is no such thing as a tooth fairy, then I can never prove it .
All I can say is:
It is very unlikely that there is a tooth fairy.

Other examples are:

-claiming that there no such thing as a spaghetti monster
-claiming that there is no such thing as a teapot orbiting the sun
-claiming that God does not exist

Non of these can ever be proved, because you cannot prove a negative - all you can do is say how likely or not these things are to be true.

I'll try and find out which show it was. It could have been "In our Time" with Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4.

[mibn2cweus]

Could a been this guy?
(see radio appearances)

I believe he got Dawkins� old job.

Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy

of possible interest

Good luck with the fairy thing!

[jake-the-peg]

Nice to see you back China

This all started reall with a philosopher of science called Karl Popper.

He pointed out that for a position to be truely rational it had to be possible to prove it wrong otherwise it was as much a matter of faith as a religious view point.

As Vascop says, I might say that as an atheiest I don't "believe in God" that rather sounds like an matter of faith doesn't it?

However that's only really the case if I were to add that nothing would convince me otherwise.

Check out the principle of valsifiability

Here's Andrew Marr on Popper on Radio 4 here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ greatest_philosopher_karl_popper.shtml

[heathfield]

Alas, Vascop, there are simply millions of teapots orbiting the sun. I have one in front of me right now, on my kitchen table!!

[vascop]

I assume you are just being facetious. In any case here's the full story

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

[jake-the-peg]

You can of course sometimes prove a negative.

You can do this if the question is inherently mutually exclusive and you prove a different positive.

So for example - one might claim that lightning is caused by Zeus hurling thunderbolts we can disprove this by showing where lightning really comes from.

We have pretty conclusively proven there are no crystal spheres on which the Universe rotates.

This is the sort of proof that has been eroding God's responsibilities for 500 years. "God of the Gaps"

It is much harder to disprove God though.

To start with you have to agree on your definition - those budhists are damn slippery!

Personally I think people tend to look outwards to the Universe when they should be looking inward to the soul.

If you can distroy the notion of the immortal soul the whole notion of God becomes moot - he turns into some hyper- intelligent alien.

[vascop]

Jake
You say:
"for example - one might claim that lightning is caused by Zeus hurling thunderbolts we can disprove this by showing where lightning really comes from. "

But that's not a negative - that's a positive. You could prove it by finding Zeus and getting him to demonstrate.

if you said "Lightening is NOT caused by Zeus" that would be a negative and could not be proved by logic.

Most people don't believe that lightening is caused by Zeus because their common sense and education makes it highly unlikely. If they insisted they would probably end up in a lunatic asylum.

[chakka35]

Though I fully agree with the generality of vascop's first answer I do wish that people wouldn't keep repeating this mantra that you can't prove a negative. Of course you can.

I can prove that I wasn't dancing a samba in Chester-le-Street last Wednesday night; I can prove that my father didn't live for 237 years; I can prove that the animal that just came in and rubbed itself against my leg is not a Great White Shark. And so on.

What it amounts to is that if someone invents an entity or an idea which is beyond all sense ( God, fairies, magic carpets, teapots in solitary orbit) and produces no evidence for it, it isn't possible to disprove it because there is nothing to disprove. All you can say is that it is so improbable that you needn't take it seriously.

[jake-the-peg]

But we're not talking about pure Logic here are we?

We are talking about the philosphy of Science, Popper's field.

Are you suggesting that we cannot prove the non exististance of crystal spheres by flying rockets through where they are meant to be?

[Symmetryigr8]

Chakka all you are logically doing is proving positives phrased with a negative statement. You prove you weren't dancing a samba, you are proving the statement "I wasn't dancing" true. Also you are proving it empirically by producing evidence not proving it logically by deduction of thought, i.e. proving that a statement must be true by showing it can't be anything else. As jake said though you can prove a negative by constructing a mutually exclusive truth and disproving that.
You can only empirically prove there is no tooth fairy by finding everything that exists and showing none of it is a tooth fairy, but you can never prove you have everything to test, not least because logically you cannot check the apparatus you use to test for tooth-fairiness.

And p.s. jake you can't disprove God by disproving the immortal soul. Sadly most scientists have little or no clue about theology/philosophy and most think they know more about it than theologians/philosophers.

[jake-the-peg]

You can't disprove God by disproving the immortal soul? - but what is God without that? - an impersonal life form. Not what any religion would see as God!

Find me a religion that doesn't believe in the soul and I'll agree.

Proving things logically by deduction is a rather sterile process we left behind 400 years ago.

Outside of Mathematics all reasoning is based on some evidence from which it is deduced in the first place!

And even that is based on axioms which have been questionable in the past - Riemannian geometry being a case in point.

Most "non-provable" negatives are simply phrased in too vague a manner.

Take my crystal spheres
My sadly empirical rocket may prove that there are no crystal spheres supporting our planetary system but can't prove they don't exist anywhere.

It's this process of becoming increasingly vague that has been the refuge of theology over the years.

It's not philosophy and theology that scientists challenge philosophers and theologians on - those are merely the tools.

We challenge them on the nature of reality.

I would say that the tools of philosophers in this have been in the past seriously flawed. The tools of Theologians completely so.

In the real world you can deduce what you like, in the real world experiment is king.

As Huxley put it "Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact"

[China Doll]

I'm just about to start reading the links, (thank you once again to the only topic on AB that gives me homework), but out of interest, is this negative/positive thing an english question as much as a science one? (Just struck me that it's the statement that seems to be the problem rather than the logic).

[mibn2cweus]

The existence of "The Tooth Fairy" is indisputable. The evidence is obtained when one observes that through the night the tooth you placed under the pillow is replaced by a gold coin.

It is in feigning sleep one discovers the true and devious nature and person of . . . "The Real Tooth Fairy"

[mibn2cweus]

It strikes me that you might be looking for the �philosophy� section of AB.

Science is an evolved, highly successful and evolving method for exploring and validating the nature of the manifest and underlying physical world awaiting discovery.

Logic, the art of non-contradictory identification, is at once a branch (as is science) and essential root of philosophy. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge, what knowledge is and how it is obtained and verified. Such an understanding is the essential foundation on which determining the efficacy of all subsequent knowledge rests.

If you really want to know and understand . . . anything . . . perhaps you should start with the axioms . . .

more homework . . . wheeee ! ! ! . . .

[Symmetryigr8]

Science is the study and proof of what the universe around us and the world around us does in a given set of circumstances. Philosophy and theology look to find how we fit in, how we want to fit in and what pattern of thought and means of existing are best.
Science can say nothing of ethics, morality or faith, yet morality,ethics and faith have much to say about not only science but everything you see and experience. The truth is that philosophy and faith have powered and motivated humanity far more than science. Faith is far more than just a religion or the doctrine thereof, it is an acceptance or a trust in something, anything that cannot be proved or predicted. Faith in a football team even though their results cannot be predicted.

Science cannot prove anything empirical about matters of faith because by definition they defy empirical scientific analysis, but to dismiss them as most scientists do is a huge error. They influence the world so much they cannot be ignored. Philosophy and theology can study these by processes of thought and belief, it is no coincidence that science began as natural philosophy, a philosophy of nature.

Also find a religion that would collapse with the disproof of the immortal soul. (Even though it can't be disproved.) Every faith has said something and had it disproved and survived, that is the nature of faith. Every major religion's original texts were based on the right way to live and exist, the concept of the immortal soul is often added later historically as an inducement, a reward for following the doctrine. But originally following the faith was its own reward, or you were threatened with mortal death, the bible only mentions Satan and Hell twice, the idea of heaven and hell was focused on in the middle ages by churches trying to get more strict followers and even money to spend less time in purgatory.

[Symmetryigr8]

Also empiricism is far from empirical, an experiment only really proves what happens at the specific time and place with specific things, we just assume that it is the general case, even if a theory proves true a billion times it is still not true empirical proof. Only logical mathematics can prove something to be totally true by proving a truly general case, the statement that logical reasoning died out 400 years ago is wholly and hugely erroneous, all mathematics is based on it ad all science is expressed using mathematics solely because mathematics is always true and unambiguous due to its logical nature.
To simply say outside of mathematics everything is empirical is nonsense, outside of mathematics everything we deduce and "prove" is done using the logical proofs of mathematics, even the statistics to analyse experimental data. Outside of pure mathematics is in fact more mathematics trying to filter the pure truth from an infinite range of possibilities by a process of logical deductive reasoning, does a particular possibility adhere to a mathematical truth. i.e. does a phenomenon obey the same equation always.

[heathfield]

The earth, and everything on it, orbits the sun, so the teapot on my table orbits the sun. QED. Am I being pedantic? - perhaps, hair-splitting? - maybe, but facetious? That's a bit harsh, Vascop! ;-)

[Symmetryigr8]

That heathfield was a piece of logical deductive reasoning. Quod erat demonstrandum being a tell-tale sign. Also after watching the wire last night the police use logical reasoning too. You were only person with the victim all day ergo you did it.

[chakka35]

Symmetryigr8, who said anything about having to prove it by logic or reasoning?
"I wasn't dancing in Chester-le-Street last Wednesday" is a negative statement. Since I can certainly prove it, what does it matter whether that proof is by reasoning or empirical? I have proved a negative.
Anyway, "I was at an amdram rehearsal in Kingston upon Thames with 30 other people as the security cameras will show " (or whatever) "therefore i could not have been in Chester-le-Street" is logical reasoning, isn't it?

I did say that I cannot prove the non-existence of the tooth fairy (or God, Santa Claus, etc.) but that they are so improbable that one needn't take them seriously. (Improbable because they are all supernatural beings who do magical things and for whose existence there is not a shred of evidence.) The idea of the immortal soul is similarly baseless.
Therefore the statement that one cannot prove their non-existence is true but trivial, not worth the expenditure of intelligence.

Science does not concern itself with matters like faith. "Not my part of ship," a scientist would say. Philosophers (who include many scientists such as Dawkins, the late Peter Medawar, etc.) muse interestingly on such matters. Religionists merely repeat them as dogma.

[Symmetryigr8]

The post began as a discussion of logically trying to disprove a negative without a mutually exclusive sattement i.e. an alibi. There is no positive alibi that can be proved empirically or otherwise that would exclude the possibility of a tooth fairy or Santa. Even if all parents owned up to buying the presents and putting them under the tree there could still be a Santa, just a lazy one.
The argument of so improbable I can ignore them is dangerous. It was ludicrous that the Earth orbited the sun, it was magical that matter was made of invisible little balls and nobody would have believed in any of the implications of quantum or relativistic theory 150 years ago. As Arthur C Clarke said "any sufficiently advanced technology look like magic".
Also who or what is a religionist, a theologian examines religious texts, histories and their influence on people and society often critically from a neutral (atheistic) viewpoint. Religious people of faith don't "merely" repeat as dogma but rather repeat as their truth and way of living, to dismiss this and all other aspects of religion as casually as most scientists do, with a simple "mere" or not provable by experiment is such a cop out that scientists refuse to acknowledge, ignoring something doesn't mean it is worth ignoring.