Physics and Philosophy

I found this interesting: R. F. Streater's Lost Causes in Theoretical Physics (HT: Reality Conditions). The primary purpose of this list is, as Streater says at the beginning, is to note topics of various degrees of popularity that, due to difficulty, obsolescence, or lack of promise, are probably not topics suitable for students. I don't have the expertise to comment intelligently on the more physics-related issues, but while some of the topics listed would fairly narrowly be of interest only to physicists, the list is also useful in giving sets of topics to be wary of if you are not a physicist, particularly if you are in a field (like philosophy) that will at least occasionally touch on physics-relevant issues. The most obvious case, because the most popular, is the many worlds interpretation, which secretly carries all the most serious dangers for the philosophically minded: it's different enough from ordinary assumptions that it gives an intoxicating feeling of liberation, its basic idea is accessible enough that it quickly gives you the misleading impression that you understand it, it has a long series of sci-fi associations that give the misleading impression of old familiarity, and it looks vague enough that you can think about it at will without bumping too often into pesky things like facts or needing to conform your inferences too often to rigorous mathematical equations. It's a breeding ground for bad reasoning. There are others among the topics listed by Streater that, although less popular, can get philosophers into similar dangerous territory. Even if some of these ideas eventually pan out in one way or another, or are eventually re-thought enough that they become useful, physicists at present simply haven't worked them out enough for others, and especially philosophers, to do anything with them (beyond writing fictional stories).

On a complete tangent, I liked the following passage in the discussion of the many worlds interpretation:

Science is not the collection of impressions got by watching Nature unfurl. In the most useful phrase from the book by Durr, Goldstein and Zanghi, Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Theory, "we do not come to the Navier-Stokes equations by admiring water waves". We find the laws of Nature by reproducible experiments. The theory needs a cut, between the observer and the system, and the details of the apparatus should not appear in the theory of the system. The heat capacity of a crystal should not depend on the shape of the calorimeter used to measure it. The result of an experiment should not depend how it is performed (contrary to the claim of Durr et al. q. v. above, p 36, lines 1-2), but on what it is measuring.

It puts me in mind (on a tangent again) of the Romantic critique of Newtonianism in the nineteenth century. Contrary to what seems to be the common impression, the Romantics were not in general opposed to science; in fact, they usually regarded themselves as pro-science and their opponents as anti-scientific. Thus Goethe, for instance, criticizes Newton's theory of color not for being scientific but for not being scientific enough. But the Romantics had a quirky view of science, one that made science out to be very empiricist in its approach. So on the Goethean view of science science really does just collect impressions by watching nature unfurl; it eventually gets into the theoretical, but the theoretical is supposed just to grow out of the impressions, bit by bit. No fact is irrelevant, every fact -- including those pertaining to the observer -- has to be somehow taken into account in your theory, and idealization is not acceptable unless it is reached by carefully taking into account everything you experience in the phenomena. If that's your view of science, it's not surprising that you would have a problem with Newton's whole approach, doubting its status as scientific, since Newton makes all sorts of choices about which facts are most important for understanding the phenomena, and is willing to theorize about nature at large on the basis of a handful of carefully controlled experiments. I think one lingering problem of that dispute is that the Romantic view of science is fairly common in our culture: we have a tendency to overemphasize how empiricist its approach is, particularly with regard to physics. I once TA'd for a Science and Society course -- philosophy of science dealing largely with issues like pedagogy, popularization, and policy-making -- which was largely filled with engineering students. The course touched on the Romantics at a few points, and I was surprised at how much sympathy there was for this approach, despite the fact that most of the students had a science background; there was a tendency to regard Goethe as right about how physics in general should go, and Newton was allowed in as an exception. Try as I might, I couldn't convince most of them that it was odd to think of the success of Newtonian physics as a matter of Newton's just happening to luck out in diverging from good scientific practice. I don't know if some of this had to do with their being engineers, or if I had without realizing it oversold Goethe and the Romantics in explaining their view; but I'm fairly sure from some of their comments that a great deal of it had to do with pedagogy and popularization: one way or another they had had it so drilled into them that science was empiricist that they would sympathize with any critique that focused on neglect of empirical facts -- even if the neglect of facts were being done by Isaac Newton, in the midst of some paradigmatically good science, and the facts neglected weren't especially helpful for construction of theory, and the resulting idealization was wildly successful. In any case, the Romantic view still seems common; and it is worth reminding ourselves that science does not simply consist in gathering impressions from watching nature unfurl. That's what painting is for.