r/philosophy • u/noncommutativehuman • 19d ago

Article [PDF] Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics | Carlo Rovelli

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.10602
251 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/spencabt 19d ago

 This is the current “why not?” ideology: any new idea deserves to be studied, just because it has not yet been falsified; any idea is equally probable, because a step further ahead on the knowledge trail there may be a Kuhnian discontinuity that was not predictable on the basis of past knowledge; any experiment is equally interesting, provided it tests something as yet untested. I think that this methodological philosophy has given rise to mountains of useless theoretical work in physics and many useless experimental investments.

This is not how modern science and funding work. You must make a case, labs don't get funding for random ideas. 

9

u/Meet_Foot 18d ago

Don’t mistake necessary funding practice for good scientific method. In Utopia of Rules, David Graeber makes an excellent case for this system being detrimental to scientific breakthroughs.

2

u/spencabt 18d ago

I will look into that. I'm not sure how to disentangle the reality of seeking the means to perform research versus the theoretical being harmful. 

1

u/wanderer1999 17d ago

Yeah I think we all want to see scientists test almost everything. Unfortunately we have limited funding and time. Pesky age old problem ey.