Steve Hsu pulls out a provocative quote from philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend:
The withdrawal of philosophy into a “professional” shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth — and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending.
It’s probably true that the post-WWII generations of leading physicists were less broadly educated than their pre-war counterparts (although there are certainly counterexamples such as Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg). The simplest explanation for this phenomenon would be that the center of gravity of scientific research switched from Europe to America after the war, and the value of a broad-based education (and philosophy in particular) has always been less in America. Interestingly, Feyerabend seems to be blaming philosophers themselves — “the withdrawal of philosophy into a `professional’ shell” — rather than physicists or any wider geosocial trends.
But aside from whether modern physicists (and maybe scientists in other fields, I don’t know) pay less attention to philosophy these days, and aside from why that might be the case, there is still the question: does it matter? Would knowing more philosophy have made any of the post-WWII giants better physicists? There are certainly historical counterexamples one could conjure up: the acceptance of atomic theory in the German-speaking world in the late nineteenth century was held back considerably by Ernst Mach‘s philosophical arguments. On the other hand, Einstein and Bohr and their contemporaries did manage to do some revolutionary things; relativity and quantum mechanics were more earth-shattering than anything that has come since in physics.
The usual explanation is that the revolutionary breakthroughs simply haven’t been there to be made — that Feynman and Schwinger and friends missed the glory days when quantum mechanics was being invented, so it was left to them to move the existing paradigm forward, not to come up with something revolutionary and new. Maybe, had these folks been more conversant with their Hume and Kant and Wittgenstein, we would have quantum gravity figured out by now.
Probably not. Philosophical presuppositions certainly play an important role in how scientists work, and it’s possible that a slightly more sophisticated set of presuppositions could give the working physicist a helping hand here and there. But based on thinking about the actual history, I don’t see how such sophistication could really have moved things forward. (And please don’t say, “If only scientists were more philosophically sophisticated, they would see that my point of view has been right all along!”) I tend to think that knowing something about philosophy — or for that matter literature or music or history — will make someone a more interesting person, but not necessarily a better physicist.
This might not be right, though. Maybe, had they been more broad and less technical, some of the great physicists of the last few decades would have made dramatic breakthroughs in a field like quantum information or complexity theory, rather than pushing harder at the narrow concerns of particle physics or condensed matter. Easy to speculate, hard to provide much compelling evidence either way.
It’s not clear to me why having a fundamentally agnostic, one might call it “instrumentalist”, attitude towards quantum mechanics precludes the development of quantum information theory. It seems to me one could ignore ontological matters related to superpositions entirely and still regard its mathematical description as the most accurate representation of subatomic reality so far contrived. From that mathematical description other things could naturally follow, couldn’t they? Why must one ponder what it all “means” to make use of qubits and invent quantum computational algorithms? I could see how it might help in certain circumstances, but I don’t see the necessity.
So based on the comments the verdict seems to be if you are logically challenged or afraid to question the authority then you should probably learn a bit of philosophy, of course not just any philosophy especially not anything modern, preferentially things that Einstein or other physicists enjoyed. If you don’t have such problems then you might give it a try in your free time, who knows maybe you will benefit somehow.
I think the problem here is that yes, learning philosophy might improve your thinking, but so can learning math, engineering, chemistry, and a lot of other stuff. Such answers do not take into account that our time for learning is limited.
The question should be posed differently, you are a physicist and you have limited time to study, would it be a good idea to skip a semester of physics and learn philosophy instead? Will it make you a better physicist? Based on the comments above the answer to this question seems to be no.
It’s hard to see how some philosophical training would be harmful to us as scientists. Still on the whole I agree with the thoughtful remarks by Weinberg (in “Dreams of a Final Theory”), wherein he concludes that professional philosophy has “been of no help” in the development of modern physics.
Pace Lee Smolin (#56), I suspect that the reason why the great physicists of yore, through the first third of the 20th century, were better educated in philosophy than we are today is simply because now there is so much more physics – and science in general – to learn. Given the choice of learning group theory, organic chemistry, or Kripke semantics, it’s pretty clear which is least likely to impact our research careers. Indeed, I would suggest that a physicist studying QCD phenomenology, a biologist working on bacterial evolution, or a chemist working on peptide synthesis will virtually never in their entire careers find it necessary to consult what philosophers have to say about epistemology, modal logic, or even philosophy of science. When we do import ideas from outside our chosen field, it is usually from other fields of science or mathematics. One can easily find citations to the biology, chemistry, and mathematics literature in physics articles, but very rarely to anything in philosophy journals.
In recent years there has been (in my opinion) a positive trend whereby philosophers are first receiving high level (e.g. PhD) training in science before moving into philosophy, or independently make a serious effort to learn the relevant science. Professor Callender (#64) is an example of an academic philosopher who is admirably well-versed in physics and mathematics. (Another who comes to mind is John Earman.) Such philosophers are in a good position to seriously engage with the scientific literature, and I am hopeful that there will be increasing opportunities for exchange between our communities.
We scientists already reason “philosophically”, and, we like to think, abductively (i.e. inference to the best explanation). We even employ modal logic, reflecting on necessity and possibility, and have been doing so since before Kripke. The formalistic approach to logic employed by many modern philosophers may be stimulating but I suspect it is rather barren in terms of its potential for physics. And just look at the sort of nonsense that passes for rigorous philosophy of religion today: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1992#more-1992 . (To their credit, many philosophers view philosophy of religion as an unwanted stepchild.)
Ultimately, I would endorse the view Einstein articularted shortly after he broke with the verificationists, that scientific theories are “free creations of the human spirit” (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/). I’m an instrumentalist at heart — I believe that the test for any theory is how well it explains and predicts observations. If a given theory is astonishingly predictive but metaphysically troubling, I would say that our metaphysics is in need of a tune-up. Our prephilosophical notions are, very plausibly, a partial product of our evolutionary path. Is there, to this very day, a philosophically tidy and uncontested interpretation of quantum mechanics?
Getting back to Einstein, I agree with him that the creative act — the “spark of genius” — defies any philosophical description or categorization. It seems quite possible that, for a variety of reasons, a crucial scientific advance might result from a blunder, or from not following the philosopher’s rules of inference. Our philosophizing about science may help us better contextualize our work, but it rarely if ever is responsible for essential *scientific* insights.
(np)
[quote] “One of the points made in Lee Smolin’s excellent book (it makes a great gift, btw, for scientists and non-scientists alike) is that (i) when the history of ideas are taught in physics classes, the “true” thread is highlighted while all the “blind alleys” are ignored and airbrushed out; and (ii) this is regrettable, because day-to-day, working physicists would be able to do a better job if they did have a knowledge of alternative ideas in history. [/quote]
This may be regrettable in some circumstances by usually it is not, most don’t want to spend time learning failed theories, there are too many working ones to learn.
However I believe today we have tools to get around this problem – internet.
I hope that eventually we can develop a database of free scientific knowledge maintained by scientists themselves, a tree of human knowledge. Such a database should contain not only theories considered current but also other possible alternatives and reasons why they were discarded. All theories should be ranked by their plausibility but still every one should be accessible and documented with links to publications preferably.
This would allow people to see what is wrong with each approach and save them from reinventing the square wheel. This would also allow easy resurrection of abandoned theories when new data changes the picture.
Now if such a database were also accompanied by (properly organized) forums it would make a great place for exchange and discussion of scientific ideas greatly facilitating collaboration between scientists. I think such a development is inevitable eventually but the sooner the better.
The problem with the lack of a philosophical culture (or personality) in the post-war physicists is that one’s always adopting a philosophical position regardless of our phi. culture or consciousness about it. This then translates as: “Scientist from the post-war era are really following philosophical positions from someone else, maybe unconsciously, and produce their work inside this philosophies that remain unquestioned for the time being”. I think physics is a product of the thought just as philosophy and with many obvious and not so obvious intersections.
So I believe the quotation is pertinent because it denounces not a lack of studies but a lack of critical conscience about the philosophies implicit in the work of the physicist and, as a consecuence, a descent in the quality of the physics produced in the areas in which you need to change your paradigm to get solutions to long-time unsolved problems like the marriage between QFT and GR.
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I once had a subordinate tell me that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. It was humbling, foremost, because I respected this individual more than all others under my direction (hello GN). It’s easy to get so absorbed in work, that you lose track of the bigger picture. Philosophy is essential to some, and not at all to others. Does it have a place in physics. Absolutely, for some, and absolutely not, for others. However, expanding one’s horizons will always be beneficial, not just because it will make you more interesting on a personal level. But, because personal levels always spill over into work. Does this mean you should take a class in Philosophy? Absolutely not! If you’re interested, there are plenty of books to self-study. Who will be the next Einstein or Bohr? It won’t be someone who’s so focused that he/she can’t see the forest for the trees.
Better use of philosophy might at least keep scientists from indulging in fallacious explanatory/pseudoexplanatory schemes like the idea that decoherence can resolve the collapse problem in quantum mechanics. Decoherence is a false path IMHO to understanding why our world isn’t found to be composed of superpositions. IOW, decoherence can’t even come close to explaining (away) the collapse of the wave function (from extended superposed states into a localized state representing only one of the original combination.) Interested readers can delve into the discussion at Tyrannogenius (Dish on MWH and decoherence. I think that the deco-con is a circular argument and has other flaws. It indulges several fallacies in the form it is often touted. I accept that decoherence can affect the patterns or information status etc. of hits and the interaction of waves. It has a role. And yes, I know proponents say deco doesn’t really/finally “explain collapse” anyway, and that entanglement is part of the issue and I don’t deal with that here. But I’m saying it can’t tell us even a little about why and how the waves don’t just stay all mixed up together in an extended state. Below are some of my rebuttals.
One decoherence argument looks at e.g. randomly-varying, relative phase shifts between different instances of a run of shots of single photons into a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Their case goes, the varying phases cause the output to be random from either A or B channel instead of any guaranteed output (into e.g. A channel), that is otherwise dictated by interference – in the normal case where phase is strictly controlled. They tend to argue, such behavior has become “classical.” Somehow we are thus supposedly moved away from even worrying about what happened to the original superpositions that evolution of the WE says typically come out of both channels at the same time – until they get “zapped” by interaction with a detector.
Well, that argument is fallacious for many reasons. First and foremost is the very idea of using what may or may not happen in preceding or subsequent events of an experiment, to argue the status of any given event. I mean, if the phase between the split WFs happened to be 70°, then the output amplitude in channel A = 0.819…, and the output amplitude in channel B = 0.573576… . In another case, with a different relative phase, the amplitudes would be different, umm – so what? There is still a superposition of waves, and the total WF exists in both channels until “detection” works its magic. That’s what the basic equation for evolution of the WFs say. They don’t have a post-modernist escape clause that if things change around the next time and the next time you run the experiment, then any one case gets to participate in some weird “socialized wave function” (?!)
And, what about the case where we don’t have messed up phases but a consistent e.g. 70° phase delta across instances – then what? So there really isn’t or shouldn’t be a collapse then, but waves remaining in both output channels? That isn’t what happens, you know. Chad said, the other WF doesn’t have to go away (like to “another world”), they just don’t interfere anymore. But that isn’t really the issue: the issue is that the calculation says there’s amplitude in both channels – and then how the photon ends up condensed at one spot.
The use of the density matrix doesn’t really solve or illuminate any of this either. One trouble with the DM is, it’s a sort of two-stage mechanism (in effect.) First, you start with the “classical” probabilities of various WFs being present. OK, that makes sense for actual description because we don’t always know what WFs are “really there.” But then there’s mishandling of two types. First, the actual detection probabilities are usually compiled out of the WF interactions (squared combined amplitudes.) But that takes a “collapse” mechanism for granted and can’t be used later in an argument attempting to “explain” it. If we just have Schrödinger evolution, the DM would just tabulate the likelihood of having various combinations of amplitudes, and that’s all! Without the supervention of a special collapse process, the DM has to be just a tabulation of the chances of having various amplitudes, not of the “probabilities” that only collapse can create IMHO. There wouldn’t be any “hits” to even be trying to “explain.”
Briefly, roughly: the decoherence argument is largely an attempt to force an implicit ensemble interpretation on everyone, despite the clear conflict of the EI v. any acceptance of a “real” wave function each instance, that evolves according to e.g. a Schrödinger equation. Yeah, how can they “collapse”; well who knows, and cheating isn’t the right way to deal with it.
Better an honest mystery than a dishonest “solution.”
This is all well and good, but we must remember that it is impossible to teach someone anything that his job requires him not to know. If physicists and cosmologists really understood the philosophy behind quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang Theory, they would have to look elsewhere for employment.
My analysis was based on the fact that the strange goings on in modern physics are solidly based on the philosophy of idealism, which is inherent in the works of all the philosophers cited in the discussion. There was hardly a hint that there might be a problem with that approach. In particular, there was no discussion of how and when to drop the ideality and replace it with materialism. Previously, I have been reluctant to criticize idealism because it definitely has its place in science. I use mathematical idealism and ideal models in my professional work all the time. These idealizations, however, should be slaves to science, not the other way around as in modern physics. For instance, we can invent more than three dimensions, but that does not give existence to more than x, y, z dimensions. We need to be able to distinguish clearly between the real and the ideal.
The discussion so far has lacked a recognition of the importance of the philosophical struggle that has taken place in science in relation to the one in the greater society. In “The Ten Assumptions of Science” and “The Scientific Worldview” I framed that struggle, not as a battle between materialism and idealism, but as the opposition between determinism and indeterminism. I did this to establish a modern determinism (univironmental determinism) as the philosophical goal for scientists as well as for those interested in the scientific worldview. We can discard indeterminism altogether, but we can never discard idealism. We just need to put it in its proper place.
As a rule I don’t read books if the author feels compelled to add his degree after his name on the cover.
In defense of the late Ernst Mach: his work on the principle of inertia and related topics remains at the center of contemporary discussions, not only on the philosophy of general relativity, but on its fundamental interpretation as it relates to the physical structure of spacetime. This latter issue must be embedded in our theory of quantum gravity, if not taken as a guiding principle — the loop quantum sector has certainly taken these issues seriously — so perhaps Mach comes out even.
In general, I find physics to be the closest science to philosophy; I think we sell ourselves short to say that the one cannot inform the other.
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