I had the privilege of meeting Carlo Rovelli (who attended university in my hometown, many years before me) in a public event targeting people that, like me, were at the time finishing high school and had to choose what to do with their lives.
We showed up already bored, waiting for the usual adults who would explain us why to study this and not that, what are the many possible career paths achievable by that, which economic sectors were growing and how, and so on. In fact, some of the speakers did mostly that.
On the contrary, Rovelli started to explain how he did not know what to do after school, and that he went to university initially because his family would have forced him to work as a plumber with his uncle if he decided not to go. He then advised us to choose to do only what we feel passionate about, and to distrust whoever, truth in hand, will explain us that by studying X we will be able to enter sector Y and achieve great success in life. It can seem trivial stuff, but when you are 18 and are being told those things by a humble but successful person, it really empowers you. He is also fairly easy to "approach", he himself came to speak to us after the event, joking about the fact we should not cut our hair "just to get a job" (I haven't since then, and I am 28 and working), hence I am not surprised he answers to people's comment on the interview, or that he is active on physics.stackexchange, for example.
I have studied computer science and got interested in physics and philosophy of science thanks to him, he kind of embodies my idea of science, and of civil responsibility, and I must say I have been a bit disappointed to see that also the academic world is full of "scientists" that underestimate the value of philosophy or other related subjects, or that teach students not to question "too much" what they are doing, preventing them to really see the "big picture" behind knowledge.
There seems to be a contradiction of his bashing of super-string theorists exploring "what if" theories disconnected from reality, and his elevation of philosophers who do the same. If anything, the super-string theorists are more like philosophers in the sense that they are working mainly with thought experiments, which they then try and reconcile with reality. If you read stuff written by cognitive philosophers on the mind, they do this all the time, proposing postulates and thought experiments, and then trying to rationalize them with the assumptions about the real world, often, with no reference to actual neuroscience.
Krauss et al's statements on philosophy are simply that when you build a particle accelerator, walk into a lab, or start working out mathematical theories, you don't start with philosophy of science. That's a backwards rationalization of how science is done, constructing it's underpinnings/justification after the fact. Most scientists who conducted experiments and proposed hypotheses throughout history did not start by first making sure what they were doing aligned with the Philosophy of Science. And indeed, children conduct scientific investigations all the time blissfully unaware of the philosophical underpinnings justifying it.
I'll go one further and say that the idea that you never need to do "what if" theories, but merely explore the existing ones to their ends, can lead to local optima. It is certainly possible you will run into the limits of the conceptual underpinning of the theory in which no iterative refinement can fix it in a way that leads to superior understanding.
Philosophy is useful, in the same way that logic and mathematics are useful, to explore formal systems, especially when the real world experiments are impossible or unethical to conduct. But the limits of philosophy are also born out in the assumptions used -- e.g. arguments about free will or consciousness, debates are artificial definitions that do not measurably or provably reflect the real nature of real things.
I read Lee Smolin's book on this debate (The Trouble with Physics). I think what happened in theoretical physics -- to the extent that it's spinning its wheels with untestable theories -- is largely that there are too many theoretical physicists and not enough hard experimental data to chase after. When there is nothing much interesting happening in a field, it's always going to be tempting to point the finger at whatever annoys you. But if there were important discoveries to be made, probably string theory would not prevent someone from making them.
1. On historical science. The process of science has changed drastically over the centuries. To discover the law of gravitation, a few people with telescopes had to tabulate a few thousand data points, do some manipulations and discover the law. For the search of the Higgs, eg. the statistical procedures to be used where established well in advance of data collection to avoid potential biases. The idea is that more advanced science requires more careful procedures and analysis. Rovelli is arguing that we need to change our method yet again towards being more careful and formal to make advances.
2. Your first paragraph is a strawman. There is much more to the philosophy of science than your examples. See [1]. Or consider that "what is probability?" does not have a good answer. This is a question that philosophy struggles with and that has deep relevance to physics - eg. the ontology of quantum mechanics.
I'm not sure you're on solid ground assuming that there is a "real nature of real things" beyond known time and space and sub-light speeds. As a passage in a recent piece I read on Schopenhauer pointed out:
Thus, for anything to be empirically real, it
must be spatial, temporal, and causal. Yet space,
time, and causality cannot be proven to be
empirically real themselves! If space is thought of
as an empirical entity, the insoluble problem arises
whether it is finite or infinite. In the first case,
there would have to be something 'outside' space, a
metaspace, which is an absurd notion; but in the
second case it could never be differentiated of
anything and would therefore have no identity. If
time is finite, there would have to be something
'before' and 'after' it, which again is absurd; but
if it is infinite, it would take an eternity to
arrive at the present moment, which therefore could
never come about. Finite causality would enhance an
unimaginable 'first cause' of all events in the
universe, while infinite causality poses, mutatis
mutandis, the same problem as infinite time.
Given that the very foundations of causal logic (cause --> event) assume our ability to differentiate in time and space, it does seem as if the most interesting aspects of physics are operating in areas where open-mindedness helps.
I hate to say it, but I have a feeling that the non-string-theory camp (Rovelli, Smolin etc.) have a fairly large (probably justifiable) chip on their shoulder regarding the amount of funding and support that string theory research has had over the last few decades, in comparison to "competing" theories.
It's a pity to see this come out in some of Rovelli's statements in this interview, because the rest of it is so wonderfully measured and thoughtful.
I don't think there's a contradiction. Modern philosophy never claimed to be science, while modern Theoretical Physics (science) in many parts strongly resembles philosophy, as you said, while never acknowledging it. Theoretical Physics is supposed to be a complement to Experimental Physics, explaining or predicting things that could later be confirmed by the Experimental branch.
I think string theory as a theory of everything is an excellent example. From the outside at first it seemed promising, but nowadays looks more like a very complex mathematical chimera which we don't have a particular way of proving nor disproving. But string theorists insist that these aren't merely thought experiments, this is SCIENCE, even if we have to add dimensions and multiple universes we never experimentally detected to try to make it work. Maybe it works in a blackboard, ¿but how do we know it reflects reality?
Philosophy of Science should be useful to check if we are doing science right or are being carried away by beautiful math and thought experiments. Maybe a scientist doesn't need philosophy a priori to do science, as a doctor doesn't need philosophy to cure people, but both epistemology and ethics are useful to contemplate if we are doing it right or something should be improved. At least that's my opinion.
Some philosophy consists of the exploration of formal systems, and some of it consists of expressing opinions in a weird parody of the above. (Go read Socrates's arguments* and find all the logical flaws and fallacies that his conversants conveniently ignore. We may like some of his opinions, but to believe they're derived with rigor is laughable.) The problem with physicists getting into philosophy is that they're generally only doing the second, less useful thing.
* Of course it's just Plato relating what he says are Socrates's arguments, so there's that too.
OK, "Critical views of science in the news" is probably a useful avenue of "hard looking" and quality control for science. But I think it behooves us to be a little more critical in our choice of critics.
This struck me when the author, in his introduction, mentioned a previous Q&A with telepathy proponent Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake only gets a brief mention in this piece as a critic of science, and I hasten to add that I don't have any beef with the article from that point on.
For anyone who doesn't know, Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is real. To this end, he's done a series of experiments which had the kind of inconclusive results you'd expect, yet in spite of a dearth of convincing, published results, in spite of a global failure to replicate his results, he keeps badgering science to take him seriously. Having been met with apathy and mild derision, he now blames science on his failure to be taken seriously.
So yes, Sheldrake is a "science critic." So are many of the purveyors of homeopathy, of miracle cancer cures, of coffee enemas, of dowsing and of Intelligent Design. Science is empirical, and people without evidence like to call this a shortcoming of science.
So my question is: how much debunking, how much finger pointing and pantsless emperors is required before we can in good conscience exclude certain groups of people from discussions about the philosophy of science? Those discussions are important, no doubt - and this is why I think we should be wary of allowing them to be bogged down by the contributions of frauds and crackpots.
> Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is real. To this end, he's done a series of experiments which had the kind of inconclusive results you'd expect.
Note that I'm not saying telepathy exists. I'm discussing an experiment for which I have no sensible explanation. Is there some data/papers/methods I'm missing?
They have to keep the conversation lighthearted, or else there's a chance we might actually talk about all the real problems with taking a scientistic view of the world. That is, the crackpots are way less threatening than someone with real critiques.
Lawrence Krauss: Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.
Neil Tyson DeGrasse: Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would be scientist but without a laboratory, right? And so what happens is, the 1920s come in, we learn about the expanding universe in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientists was rendered essentially obsolete, and that point, and I have yet to see a contribution — this will get me in trouble with all manner of philosophers — but call me later and correct me if you think I’ve missed somebody here. But, philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, the word physicist didn’t even exist in any important way back then. So, I’m disappointed because there is a lot of brainpower there, that might have otherwise contributed mightily, but today simply does not. It’s not that there can’t be other philosophical subjects, there is religious philosophy, and ethical philosophy, and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosophers to do, but the frontier of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.
> You see: the scientists that talk philosophy down are simply superficial: they have a philosophy (usually some ill-digested mixture of Popper and Kuhn) and think that this is the “true” philosophy, and do not realize that this has limitations.
Hardly. What definition of "philosophy" is in use here? It sounds like he just means "beliefs" which, of course, everyone has. If "philosophy" means ideas that do not need facts, reason, or testability then it is just nonsense. Philosophy that requires these qualities is called "science."
I really liked this article. The author gave real substantive answers to almost all the questions.
I would have liked to have more detail on his critique of the "guess and check" approach to science. My own opinion is that there is a very good reason why scientific progress follows the pattern he describes, of new theories being based on either new experiments, or in depth analysis of existing theories.
The reason is that science relies on belief in objective reality, and yet we don't know what objective reality is. So in order to reason about what the universe really is, the best and only starting point is our current model(s) of physics.
The moment we make an assumption about what reality is that isn't based in physical theory, we are liable to be wrong. For example, Newton was criticized for his theory of gravity, because people knew that reality was composed of little machine-like objects, interacting at a microscopic scale. There was no room in this worldview for Newton's "occult" force of gravity which acted at a distance.
I studied physics at the University of Maryland, one of the better (top 20) physics programs in the US. I was surprised at how often questions were answered with "that's for the philosophers to think about."
Granted, there's a lot of material to cover, I don't think that's an appropriate response–especially when delivered with contempt, as it typically was.
Coming from a professor, I, myself, would always presume that there was a worthwhile lesson in those kinds of short remarks. It sounds like they were possibly steering students away from questions that could not be resolved empirically, which would place them outside the scope of physics; those kinds of questions could also be debated endlessly and derail the class.
>He, like Thomas, would not follow the risen Christ unless he saw him himself
An extraordinary statement without evidence. People today have all kinds of beliefs without evidence. People also could lie, be pressured into belief by conformity, have hallucinations, etc. Not to mention people 2000 years ago didn't have todays strict standards delineating fact from beliefs.
There are numerous contradictions and discrepancies in these "accounts". The historicity of Jesus' resurrection is very much in doubt by the preeminent new testament scholars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHJE7cetkB4#t=81
And indeed the historical method can't be seriously compared to the scientific method, because it is vulnerable to errors in the accounts, falsification, forgery, intentional lying, biased interpretation. While science relies on repeatability.
You are completely missing the point. He didn't say that beliefs are disconnected from actual historical events, but that written down beliefs shouldn't be held as unquestionable truths.
For example, if the Bible says that God created the Universe as it is now in 6 days and we have lots of information confirming that it took way longer, then you have two sensible options: 1) You update the Bible so that it reflects what we know about the universe, 2) You leave the Bible as written but now you know that it doesn't reflect the truth about that at all. What you shouldn't do is leave it as it is and claim that's the truth, nobody except fanatics will take you seriously.
You know, religious texts were written a long time ago by people who didn't know many things that today we teach to kids in primary school. It's incomprehensible to take all these people said as unquestionable truth, makes us look dumb.
[+] [-] winterismute|11 years ago|reply
I have studied computer science and got interested in physics and philosophy of science thanks to him, he kind of embodies my idea of science, and of civil responsibility, and I must say I have been a bit disappointed to see that also the academic world is full of "scientists" that underestimate the value of philosophy or other related subjects, or that teach students not to question "too much" what they are doing, preventing them to really see the "big picture" behind knowledge.
[+] [-] cromwellian|11 years ago|reply
Krauss et al's statements on philosophy are simply that when you build a particle accelerator, walk into a lab, or start working out mathematical theories, you don't start with philosophy of science. That's a backwards rationalization of how science is done, constructing it's underpinnings/justification after the fact. Most scientists who conducted experiments and proposed hypotheses throughout history did not start by first making sure what they were doing aligned with the Philosophy of Science. And indeed, children conduct scientific investigations all the time blissfully unaware of the philosophical underpinnings justifying it.
I'll go one further and say that the idea that you never need to do "what if" theories, but merely explore the existing ones to their ends, can lead to local optima. It is certainly possible you will run into the limits of the conceptual underpinning of the theory in which no iterative refinement can fix it in a way that leads to superior understanding.
Philosophy is useful, in the same way that logic and mathematics are useful, to explore formal systems, especially when the real world experiments are impossible or unethical to conduct. But the limits of philosophy are also born out in the assumptions used -- e.g. arguments about free will or consciousness, debates are artificial definitions that do not measurably or provably reflect the real nature of real things.
Perhaps a better commentary here: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/08/23/accommoda...
[+] [-] mtdewcmu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|11 years ago|reply
1. On historical science. The process of science has changed drastically over the centuries. To discover the law of gravitation, a few people with telescopes had to tabulate a few thousand data points, do some manipulations and discover the law. For the search of the Higgs, eg. the statistical procedures to be used where established well in advance of data collection to avoid potential biases. The idea is that more advanced science requires more careful procedures and analysis. Rovelli is arguing that we need to change our method yet again towards being more careful and formal to make advances.
2. Your first paragraph is a strawman. There is much more to the philosophy of science than your examples. See [1]. Or consider that "what is probability?" does not have a good answer. This is a question that philosophy struggles with and that has deep relevance to physics - eg. the ontology of quantum mechanics.
[1] http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/02/24/post-deb...
[+] [-] trevelyan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Intermernet|11 years ago|reply
It's a pity to see this come out in some of Rovelli's statements in this interview, because the rest of it is so wonderfully measured and thoughtful.
[+] [-] Shamanmuni|11 years ago|reply
I think string theory as a theory of everything is an excellent example. From the outside at first it seemed promising, but nowadays looks more like a very complex mathematical chimera which we don't have a particular way of proving nor disproving. But string theorists insist that these aren't merely thought experiments, this is SCIENCE, even if we have to add dimensions and multiple universes we never experimentally detected to try to make it work. Maybe it works in a blackboard, ¿but how do we know it reflects reality?
Philosophy of Science should be useful to check if we are doing science right or are being carried away by beautiful math and thought experiments. Maybe a scientist doesn't need philosophy a priori to do science, as a doctor doesn't need philosophy to cure people, but both epistemology and ethics are useful to contemplate if we are doing it right or something should be improved. At least that's my opinion.
[+] [-] Tloewald|11 years ago|reply
* Of course it's just Plato relating what he says are Socrates's arguments, so there's that too.
[+] [-] Elrac|11 years ago|reply
This struck me when the author, in his introduction, mentioned a previous Q&A with telepathy proponent Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake only gets a brief mention in this piece as a critic of science, and I hasten to add that I don't have any beef with the article from that point on.
For anyone who doesn't know, Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is real. To this end, he's done a series of experiments which had the kind of inconclusive results you'd expect, yet in spite of a dearth of convincing, published results, in spite of a global failure to replicate his results, he keeps badgering science to take him seriously. Having been met with apathy and mild derision, he now blames science on his failure to be taken seriously.
So yes, Sheldrake is a "science critic." So are many of the purveyors of homeopathy, of miracle cancer cures, of coffee enemas, of dowsing and of Intelligent Design. Science is empirical, and people without evidence like to call this a shortcoming of science.
So my question is: how much debunking, how much finger pointing and pantsless emperors is required before we can in good conscience exclude certain groups of people from discussions about the philosophy of science? Those discussions are important, no doubt - and this is why I think we should be wary of allowing them to be bogged down by the contributions of frauds and crackpots.
[+] [-] alphydan|11 years ago|reply
Do you have a reference? The dog experiment seems statistically significant (http://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers/a-dog-that-s..., shows ANOVA, F-value (df 2,22)=20.46; p<0.0001). ). What exactly about that experiment is inconclusive?
Note that I'm not saying telepathy exists. I'm discussing an experiment for which I have no sensible explanation. Is there some data/papers/methods I'm missing?
[+] [-] jchrisa|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apalmer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aluhut|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3rd3|11 years ago|reply
Lawrence Krauss: Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.
Neil Tyson DeGrasse: Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would be scientist but without a laboratory, right? And so what happens is, the 1920s come in, we learn about the expanding universe in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientists was rendered essentially obsolete, and that point, and I have yet to see a contribution — this will get me in trouble with all manner of philosophers — but call me later and correct me if you think I’ve missed somebody here. But, philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, the word physicist didn’t even exist in any important way back then. So, I’m disappointed because there is a lot of brainpower there, that might have otherwise contributed mightily, but today simply does not. It’s not that there can’t be other philosophical subjects, there is religious philosophy, and ethical philosophy, and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosophers to do, but the frontier of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.
[+] [-] ExpiredLink|11 years ago|reply
So true.
[+] [-] protonfish|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuantumChaos|11 years ago|reply
I would have liked to have more detail on his critique of the "guess and check" approach to science. My own opinion is that there is a very good reason why scientific progress follows the pattern he describes, of new theories being based on either new experiments, or in depth analysis of existing theories.
The reason is that science relies on belief in objective reality, and yet we don't know what objective reality is. So in order to reason about what the universe really is, the best and only starting point is our current model(s) of physics.
The moment we make an assumption about what reality is that isn't based in physical theory, we are liable to be wrong. For example, Newton was criticized for his theory of gravity, because people knew that reality was composed of little machine-like objects, interacting at a microscopic scale. There was no room in this worldview for Newton's "occult" force of gravity which acted at a distance.
[+] [-] mparr4|11 years ago|reply
Granted, there's a lot of material to cover, I don't think that's an appropriate response–especially when delivered with contempt, as it typically was.
[+] [-] mtdewcmu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkcooper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekm2|11 years ago|reply
Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds
[+] [-] acornax|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] _urga|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cdi|11 years ago|reply
An extraordinary statement without evidence. People today have all kinds of beliefs without evidence. People also could lie, be pressured into belief by conformity, have hallucinations, etc. Not to mention people 2000 years ago didn't have todays strict standards delineating fact from beliefs.
There are numerous contradictions and discrepancies in these "accounts". The historicity of Jesus' resurrection is very much in doubt by the preeminent new testament scholars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHJE7cetkB4#t=81
And indeed the historical method can't be seriously compared to the scientific method, because it is vulnerable to errors in the accounts, falsification, forgery, intentional lying, biased interpretation. While science relies on repeatability.
[+] [-] Shamanmuni|11 years ago|reply
For example, if the Bible says that God created the Universe as it is now in 6 days and we have lots of information confirming that it took way longer, then you have two sensible options: 1) You update the Bible so that it reflects what we know about the universe, 2) You leave the Bible as written but now you know that it doesn't reflect the truth about that at all. What you shouldn't do is leave it as it is and claim that's the truth, nobody except fanatics will take you seriously.
You know, religious texts were written a long time ago by people who didn't know many things that today we teach to kids in primary school. It's incomprehensible to take all these people said as unquestionable truth, makes us look dumb.