Celebration of Science 2016
Saturday 8 until Saturday 22 October 2016
All events will take place in the Mayor’s Parlour, Kensington Town Hall W8 7NX, except those marked * which take place in Committee Room 3.
UK Science after Brexit
12.30pm to 1pm
Professor Jane Rodgers
Warwick Lightfoot – chairman
Tim Worstall – Adam Smith Institute
Is Economics a Science?
2pm to 3pm
Dr D’Maris Coffman – panel leader
Tim Worstall – Adam Smith Institute
Professor Vicky Pryce – writer and policy maker
Frances Coppola – blogger and writer
Leigh Caldwell – blogger and writer
You need a whole hour to answer the question “Is Economics a Science?”?
Next Saturday, free food…and some other stuff.
Don’t be surprised when most of your audience have a bedraggled appearance and smell a bit, I’ve sent the link to a mate who runs a soup kitchen.
Was the Fat Comptroller NFI or NEFC?
“Is Economics a Science?” Of course not. But then increasingly science isn’t science either.
“UK Science after Brexit”: that probably means ‘Give me da money’.
I suppose it’s possible that economics is a ‘social’ science. But as Rutherford remarked:
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the ‘social sciences’ is: some do, some don’t.
Mind you, he also claimed:
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
I always thought Rutherford was right about that, so long as you replaced “physics” with “maths”.
“UK Science after Brexit”: that probably means ‘Give me da money’.
That’s how it would be interpreted in the U.S.
So… Does that mean that by the end of Saturday we will whether Richard Murphy is a scientist or not?
Or whether chemistry is a neoliberal construct?
Candidly, I signed up. Maybe see some of the other readers before/after for some free coffee…
@Mr Suet
Physics seems to have occurred quite successfully before the intervention of mathematicians. Mathematics is simply the language describes physics.
Unless one takes the rather obtuse view that the laws of physics only crystallise AFTER being described by mathematicians. In which case, if Einstein had kept his mind on his patent work, we’d have a FTL drive by now.
I tell my students,
A physicist is a mathematician that does not fully understand maths. A chemist is a physicist that does not understand maths, and a biologist is a chemist that does not understand chemistry.
N.B. I am (was) an Organic synthetic chemist!
@TJ,
And by extension a clinical scientist is one who understands that Kelvin’s injunction about statistics is tempered by the Declaration of Helsinki.
Tim, you always do these things when I am away. One of these days…
Economics is a science if the scientific method can be applied to it. You make a guess as to the nature of human behaviour when resources are constrained or incentives are offered, you predict the outcome, and you compare the prediction to the outcome of the natural experiments that take place all around us ( because you can’t design your own by dividing the UK into two control groups just for you for example ). And then you reject your theory, or let it live to fight another battle.
Feynman will have said it better.
Of course Economics is a science. It has testable hypotheses etc.
It’s also, mostly, wrong about things at the moment..
But that may change, just as Chemistry and Biology took a while to sort themselves out.
@Chris Miller:
I suppose it’s possible that economics is a ‘social’ science.
If one may be permitted to paraphrase the esteemed Prof Brignell – Putting “social” in front of “science” is the equivalent of putting “witch” in front of “doctor”.
@Andrew Carey:
“In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. It’s that simple statement that is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”
Dr. Richard Feynman, “The Character of Natural Law”, The MIT Press, 1965, p. 156.
Will the second discussion touch upon Romero’s recent description of the last few decade’s macro being pseudoscience? https://paulromer.net/trouble-with-macroeconomics-update/
That’s roughly where I will be going.