|
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. |
WEBSITE EDITOR:
Krešimir J. Adamić
