Mathematics relies on its own formal methods of proof and of logic, but how would you characterize mathematical research methods including experiment, conjecture, analogy, generalization, etc.? Pure philosophy? It seems unfair to suggest there is no science to it.
How can you have an experiment testing that a mathematical theorem is true or false? A mathematical theorem is true when it’s proven and false when it’s disproved, regardless of whether or not it accurately describes some part of the world.
Speaking of sports, I recall a program on TV, probably Last Week Tonight, doing a piece on cities building stadiums for sports teams with the hope of generating more revenue for the cities businesses like bars and restaurants even though there were no studies that showed the investment of a stadium ever paying off for the city.
You certainly can, at least in some instances. It just doesn’t mathematically establish that it is true or false.
As for @DPRK’s general point, I would be interested in seeing what one of the professional mathematciians we have on the board thinks.
Ah, I see the use of “experiment” with a different connotation. It’s not an empirical test, but a computational investigation.
Many years ago, while I working at a boring mundane job, I thought that by analyzing lyrics of popular songs that one could write the best (pop) song ever. Certainly we know all the lyrics of all the popular songs, and what the song ratings were on the Billboard-Top 100 list. Sort through the words and compare them with the song’s rating, and come up with a new song with the highest-rated lyrics. Score! the best song Ever! (I imagine that someone somewhere has already tried that.)
BUT what makes a song popular? That’s an art, something that no database analysis can create.
Well, that just bears out my point that the NFL, a group with about 15 billion in revenue (on par with Nordstrom, General Mills or Colgate/Palmolive) took until the 2019 season to substantially implement any sort of player or game analytics bears out my point.
And I’m willing to bet that it hasn’t filtered into colleges yet, or if it has, it’s at a small handful of Power-5 schools.
Well, yes, that’s exactly my point. Making a good movie is, indeed, an art. It’s a broader art than a solo form like painting, because in addition to the arts of acting, music, production design, and so on, you also have the art of coordinating dozens or hundreds of people in a unified project. Ultimately, though, what makes a movie good is that it an interesting story, well told.
But the executives don’t want to be revealed as not knowing how to do that. So they layer on all of this extraneous supposedly-objective analytical stuff, trying to quantify the factors contributing to profitability, so if/when the movie tanks, they can shift blame away from the fact that they don’t know how to help the filmmaker tell the story.
In short, the business of making movies is now, and always will be, fundamentally non-scientific, but studio management has imported a spreadsheet mentality as a way of protecting their own job security.
That’s all I was trying to get at. It’s a bit of a tangent from the original point of the thread, but someone mentioned the movie business in an earlier reply, so I thought I’d elaborate a bit, as it’s something I know a lot about.
I would bet there’s a lot of scientific analysis to be done in HOW to market a movie, when (and now how) to release it, etc… to maximize the movie’s performance. Probably even to the degree that they know whether a movie is good or a turd ahead of time, they can position it thusly.
But you’re absolutely right in that the actual making of the movie is fundamentally unscientific, and that someone like say… Guillermo Del Toro brings something unquantifiable to the mix.
I’m too lazy to dig, but I suspect that endurance sports, like cycling, and individual sports, like weight lifting, have much better science behind them.