3 ms·

Goodness yes. When I was in physics, there were a lot of these philosophers who had some kind of real problem with (special) relativity, like it had swerved an

Goodness yes. When I was in physics, there were a lot of these philosophers who had some kind of real problem with (special) relativity, like it had swerved and driven over their dog on purpose. I'm not talking about the spackling of idiots who were under the impression that Michelson-Morley was performed precisely once, but folks who just found it antithetical to their personal outlooks, aside from the space opera types whose dreams are cruelly crushed underfoot by c (no exotic matter has yet called Lazarus forth from his tomb). Normally, one could dispel them with some holy water and a copy of Dr. Will's Was Einstein Right? but some had a tenacity to them which had long transformed from a virtue to a vice.

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ChrisSD 5y ago
It's funny because of the number of physicists who loudly proclaim philosophy is either dead or at least useless (while also extolling the virtues of their own philosophy of science, with bonus points for mangling Popper).
quantum_mcts 5y ago
Also physicist. My beef is more with philosophy-of-science folks in particular. They think that we, physicists, really need them and their insights about how to do physics properly. For example they really like this meme: reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/gjz24v Which is totally dishonest. (I tried to counter that with this https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ , but that's not memey enough.)
- bangkoksbest 5y ago
  It's not a coincidence that the left side (more positive to philosophy) and Born (whose quotes are more neutral) are also continental European, while the three critical examples (can add in Krauss, Hawking, and many others) come from Anglo-Americans. There's too often a pettiness in the latter (to an extent, also in your post) in which what look like fairly limited and contemporaneous gripes about academics in another field is given the trappings of some historically unbound and universal insight. There's no inherent tension between science and philosophy; even Meermin's "shut up and calculate" is a philosophical position (instrumentalism), to say nothing of the philosophical, scientific and mathematical contributions of e.g. Poincaré, Helmholtz, Mach, Duhem, Peirce, Leibniz, Von Neumann, Jaynes etc. Even modern Anglo-American physicists contribute to and draw a lot from philosophy, e.g. Wheeler and Paul Anderson.

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ChrisSD 5y ago

It's funny because of the number of physicists who loudly proclaim philosophy is either dead or at least useless (while also extolling the virtues of their own philosophy of science, with bonus points for mangling Popper).

quantum_mcts 5y ago

Also physicist. My beef is more with philosophy-of-science folks in particular. They think that we, physicists, really need them and their insights about how to do physics properly. For example they really like this meme: reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/gjz24v Which is totally dishonest. (I tried to counter that with this https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ , but that's not memey enough.)

bangkoksbest 5y ago
It's not a coincidence that the left side (more positive to philosophy) and Born (whose quotes are more neutral) are also continental European, while the three critical examples (can add in Krauss, Hawking, and many others) come from Anglo-Americans. There's too often a pettiness in the latter (to an extent, also in your post) in which what look like fairly limited and contemporaneous gripes about academics in another field is given the trappings of some historically unbound and universal insight. There's no inherent tension between science and philosophy; even Meermin's "shut up and calculate" is a philosophical position (instrumentalism), to say nothing of the philosophical, scientific and mathematical contributions of e.g. Poincaré, Helmholtz, Mach, Duhem, Peirce, Leibniz, Von Neumann, Jaynes etc. Even modern Anglo-American physicists contribute to and draw a lot from philosophy, e.g. Wheeler and Paul Anderson.