1/6/2024 0 Comments Roger penrose road to realityMost philosophers simply desire to know and as talkers, they are prepared to write but few are ready to really do something useful with their hands just as it was in Athens 2500 years ago. Even the great scientists like Newton and Maxwell, who sometimes performed hands-on physics research, really had personal obsessions with religion more than philosophy. Pierce (professional chemist before turning to philosophy) Einstein was a theoretical physicist, who mainly worked as a mathematician but had an ongoing interest in philosophy. Here we deliberately position most mathematicians with the philosophers as their work also rarely involves direct experience with reality. The problem seems to be related to the specialization of western intellectuals: few philosophers have been real, practicing scientists (doing it, not just reading about it), while most scientists have little knowledge of philosophy so a dangerous chasm has developed in these two aspects of our mental world. This analysis is made from a Natural Philosophy perspective because the thesis here is that the problems arose from weak metaphysical assumptions that can be traced back to Aristotle, 2500 years ago. This analysis is structured by exploring the history of the major advances in physics since 1600 in terms of innovators, concepts, underlying mathematics and the major problems exposed by these advances. Therefore, physics has been separated off from the rest of the sciences in this essay and all the others have been given a parallel essay, called ORG-SCIENCE. Physics is the oldest science and the one that set the pattern for most of the others, it has been mostly related to mathematics and has become the one with the largest number of specialties​. The thesis of this essay is that science will only renew its progress after its cuts off these historic roots and adopts more positive goals oriented to Helping Humanity, instead of pursuing its religiously inspired search for truth and certainty. This essay attempts to analyze the impact of continuing to tolerate the Warrior Values in an era of Advanced Technology that has been promoted by two of the oldest intellectual subjects for over 2500 years: mathematics and philosophy. The exactness of those astonishing measurements (to 14 digits no less) is shown to be an illusion. Laughlin is so radical that he now proposes that central foundations of this core science, such as Newton's classical Laws of Motion and the sacred Rules of Quantum Mechanics (QM) are themselves 'emergent'. When senior academics have invested their whole lives in techniques, concepts and assumptions then a major reversal of basic direction is far too threatening. This is NOT the message that most of his fellow physicists even want to discuss, never mind reject. He now alerts us to a major new idea that is growing quietly in the Theatre of Science: Emergence where the usual properties of matter (we are already familiar with) arise from the organization of large numbers of atoms not from obscure mathematical equations that usually resist interpretation, as well as analytic solutions. However, he has had an epiphany that we have been thinking about physics in a incorrect way, resulting in an endless (and expensive) reductionist quest for the Ultimate Small Thing. Now he is a visiting scholar at major research institutes in Asia. The author, Bob Laughlin is still a senior statesman of science, long-time Professor of Physics at Stanford, where he has taught since 1985. Philosophers have been ejected from the subject that was originally known as Natural Philosophy as they have always offered (since Isaac Newton) subtle critiques of the basic assumptions of this mathematical science and now they would be deeply embarrassed by this self-congratulatory tribe of elitists. Contrary to the opinions of most well-educated intellectuals, who have been deeply influenced by the Abstract Ideas of this abstract science, most people have little knowledge of the limited progress that has been made since the physicists made their historic Faustian deal with the modern state and its military. This essay evolved from my realization that physics has become a moribund science and when even a recent winner of the Nobel prize in Physics (1998) cannot create a ripple in the reductionist programme that fights long and hard to remain at the center of publicly-funded science that has been central to the modern viewpoint of Western Civilization.
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