> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"
Heisenberg and others knew that, I'm sure many current scientists do too, but going by output, the situation is dire, the intertubes are full of people talking about being "unbiased" or "objective" even about human matters, when not even the hard sciences are truly objective! It's like people simply agreed that because they're not religious or whatever, they're now correct. If they are wrong about anything, since they supposedly are on the side of science, they can be sure that will be corrected, so they can consider themselves correct even today. Before you know it, you have superstitious people who think their superstition constitutes the absence, the opposite of superstition.
We went from Heisenberg to a chemistry teacher cooking crack while his assistant gets all bug-eyed about the power of "science, bitch!". Or this "critique" of the game Soma I saw recently, where the Youtuber mentions that "people who are smarter than you and I are saying the universe might be a simulation". What I see is people booby-trapping everything with stupidity.. making things so stupid, and then glorifying that, that injecting even a lick of seriousness into anything would cause massive offense, hurt a lot of egos. To me it's the analog of religious fundamentalists going to church 20 times a day to get hyped and primed with caricatures of those not of their flock, and fantasies of how great it's all going to be when those are gone.
But I'm not sure I can blame physicists for that. I don't know enough about what they do, I see what "everyone" else is doing, and that's horrid by itself. It's not the job of physicists to ask deep questions about what it all means, it's the job of everybody.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"
Heisenberg and others knew that, I'm sure many current scientists do too, but going by output, the situation is dire, the intertubes are full of people talking about being "unbiased" or "objective" even about human matters, when not even the hard sciences are truly objective! It's like people simply agreed that because they're not religious or whatever, they're now correct. If they are wrong about anything, since they supposedly are on the side of science, they can be sure that will be corrected, so they can consider themselves correct even today. Before you know it, you have superstitious people who think their superstition constitutes the absence, the opposite of superstition.
We went from Heisenberg to a chemistry teacher cooking crack while his assistant gets all bug-eyed about the power of "science, bitch!". Or this "critique" of the game Soma I saw recently, where the Youtuber mentions that "people who are smarter than you and I are saying the universe might be a simulation". What I see is people booby-trapping everything with stupidity.. making things so stupid, and then glorifying that, that injecting even a lick of seriousness into anything would cause massive offense, hurt a lot of egos. To me it's the analog of religious fundamentalists going to church 20 times a day to get hyped and primed with caricatures of those not of their flock, and fantasies of how great it's all going to be when those are gone.
But I'm not sure I can blame physicists for that. I don't know enough about what they do, I see what "everyone" else is doing, and that's horrid by itself. It's not the job of physicists to ask deep questions about what it all means, it's the job of everybody.