Over the last several years, I have consistently written that a shortcoming of our higher education system is that many, many students go all the way through a bachelor’s degree without having studied anything difficult such as Calculus, Chemistry, Statistics and Physics. It is my position that the rigor of thinking and hard work required to get through those classes is beneficial in any field of study. That being said, some try to justify sophomoric in areas outside of their area of expertise (e.g. Philosophy, Sociology and Theology) based on their mastery of complex material in totally unrelated hard sciences.
The following is from an article at Scientific American, not often a wildly objective source on subjects like these, but I really liked it. I recommend you read the whole thing. It is a quote from George F. R. Ellis that address the issue of a physicist from Arizona State University known for making buffoonish remarks about Philosophy. Ellis, a “physicist-mathematician-cosmologist” of renown, in responds here to a good question asked by the author of the article, John Horgan.
Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?
Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.
Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.
And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions.
It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy. It seems that science education should include some basic modules on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and the other great philosophers, as well as writings of more recent philosophers such as Tim Maudlin and David Albert.
Betty Blonde #144 – 02/03/2009
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