athletic
physics:
jump
over philosophy
I’ve
already express my discontent on the current disregard of philosophy
both in the case of Stephen Hawking [WEEKLY_1]
and, more generally, Big Bang hypothesis [WEEKLY_2].
It troubles me because I pay respect to philosophy and because I
lack a formal philosophical education to conflict those
theoreticians professionally.
I
see the state of affairs like this: Physics has its roots in a slow
compilation of observations aimed to both practical knowledge and
curiosity fulfillment. Any generalization from the direct
observations requires thought processes and old Greek philosophers
have shown to us, with extraordinary cleverness, what are the rules
and limits of these processes. We can explain an event only in terms
of other events while obeying the rules of thinking. Old
philosophers made some wrong statements about Nature, like Aristotle
about motion, because they didn’t observe other relevant events,
not because philosophy was wrong. Galileo was the one to conclude
that the laws of Nature could not be ascertained through pure reason
only, that a design of an intentional and reproducible event, we
call experiment, is needed. Eventually, experimental results are
fused with philosophical ideas to yield theories, Newton’s laws
for example.
Quantum
physics, however, introduced a slippery ground into
experiment-theory relationship because of unavoidable uncertainty of
measurements in the microworld. Theory went ahead of experiment with
some philosophically unacceptable consequences. The most damaging
are: (1) uncertainty is prescribed to Nature itself, not to our
observation of Nature, and (2) experiments are designed to fit a
particular theory, not to discriminate among the plausibility of
various events. Some theoreticians, Weinberg and Hawking |
among
others, feel uneasy about philosophical inconsistency of their
thinking, at least subconsciously, so they declare sudden death of
philosophy and offer their science instead. Maybe they believe that
philosophy is fused into their science. Wrong, more likely it is theology.
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