The Pinkness of the Unicorn, and Other Stories

The Invisible Pink Unicorn; Image via Wikipedia
Dear Readers,


   There's been quite a lot on my mind with regards to Science, experimentation, and philosophy of thought.  You can blame a couple of people I've run into around your time stream lately, who have gotten me into discussions of hypothesis testing and what makes knowledge "knowable."
   
   This post is mostly provoked by discussions of theism vs. atheism, but that question is one that I'm unwilling to settle for you.  Suffice it to say that in the time streams where there are gods or godlike beings who directly interfere with the affairs of the less powerful, I find this to be somewhat unprofessional behavior on their part.
  
   At any rate, the notion of a deity is fascinating from a Philosophy of Science perspective.  Science relies on the ability to formulate, and then test, certain hypotheses, which then allow the formulation of further hypotheses and more experiments.  By this method we have learned to push the boundaries of sentient knowledge of the universe.




   To fully understand this concept, we have to define a few things.  For one, hypothesis.  A hypothesis is a proposed model of an event or process.   Consider a hypothesis to be like an "answer" on Jeopardy.  In Science, what we're really doing is asking a question.  "Why is the sky blue?"  But we can't just go up there and ask it why it's blue.  We have to develop a set of hypotheses about the blueness of the sky, then test each of those methodically until one is left standing and the rest are ruled out, or until we have developed some sort of unifying hypothesis that combines those ideas that we found evidence to support.  Our hypothesis might be "The sky is blue because it is full of water," which provides an answer to our question.  Then we proceed to test the correctness of that answer.  Incidentally, whilst the sky does have water in it, it is not blue solely because of water vapor.  The actual reason is called Rayleigh scattering, and it took a great degree of hypothesis testing to understand that.




    Hypotheses do not have to be testable, but we can only apply Science to the ones which are testable.  What differentiates the testable hypotheses from the untestable?  Testable hypotheses predict a situation which we can then use a human sense, or a device that translates to a human sense, in order to observe.  You test the hypothesis by creating the predicted situation, and if it goes as planned, your hypothesis is confirmed.

   Hypothesis testing is a relatively straightforward experience when you can either immediately sense something (such as the death of a mouse in a laboratory experiment) or you can easily produce a reading that you can sense (such as using two clocks, traveling at different speeds, to confirm the phenomenon of time dilation).

 
   It's a much more difficult matter when you cannot readily test the hypothesis.  Deities are one of those problems, and there are two constructs that philosophers both amateur and professional have used to discuss the untestable hypothesis.  One is the ever-flawed Russell's teapot, and the other is the Invisible Pink Unicorn.  They're useful because of the differences between the two ideas.



   Both of these are presented as unfalsifiable claims.  The unicorn is both pink and invisible, so it is impossible to detect its presence and/or determine its pinkness.  The teapot is in space, which at the time of its formulation was a totally inaccessible region.

    You cannot test, using the telescopes of Russell's day, whether or not the teapot exists.  You cannot test if the Invisible Pink Unicorn is real or not.  Therefore they are doomed to a region of scientific ambiguity, wherein you cannot make predictions based on their existence (because it is unconfirmed) and you cannot rule them out (because they have not been ruled utterly impossible).


 
   But there is a key difference between these two ideas, and they illustrate two important classes of untestable hypotheses.  The Invisible Pink Unicorn is a contradiction in terms.  Something cannot be both invisible and pink.  It would be like a loud silence.  It can be said that the unicorn would be pink were it also visible, but it is not.  If you define something as unobservable, the characteristics that it would have it were observable would not matter and would not be testable, and thus would be a waste of time to even discuss.

   Russell's teapot, on the other hand, is only unobservable because it is limited by the technology of the time.  Russell supposed a teapot that could not be observed by telescopes of his day.  There are now better telescopes, and there are also space vehicles.  Were humankind to wish to consider falsifying the idea of Russell's teapot, you could now do that.  The unobservability of the teapot has changed, now making it observable.  What was a temporary problem has turned an untestable hypothesis into a testable one.

   When we're faced with apparently unanswerable questions in science, we have to think about these two alternatives.  We can, of course, waste our time on trying to find the answer to the question, and come up with all manner of untestable hypotheses.  That would, as mentioned, be a waste of time.

  What should be done in that circumstances is to address the question of which category our original question fits into.  Is it a hypothesis that will never be testable, or is it a hypothesis that is not testable right now?  That is the question that matters.  If the latter, we can move on to, "What do we need to invent in order to test it?"

  And then, we can answer it.


  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople