Scientism, Aircraftism, Philosophism… But Human Knowledge Is One

Scientism considers that science is the only reliable source of knowledge about the world, including questions traditionally addressed by philosophy, ethics, and religion. This does not resist examination, because, first of all, one has to define “science”. Is love a science? Try a world without love: it won’t happen. More prosaically, there are many degrees of certainty in science, from clumsy guesswork to 100%, aircraft engineering degree of certainty. 

For example the Big Bang theory is full of hypotheses rolled out to make the theory work. The general idea of the Big Bang came first in various publications, for example the Jewish Bible, and then the “science” was adjusted accordingly… for want of a better alternative! 

Newton’s gravitation theory was itself full of hypotheses, and for at least one of them, that gravity was instantaneous, Newton in private correspondence confided that it was “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”. One can see that Newton had a robust understanding of the limits of science…. Even his own science!

There is such a thing as aircraft science, it better be certain, it’s very close to 100% certain.  Aircraftism, would be trying to extract all and any wisdom from the enormously certain knowledge found in an aircraft… it would be ridiculously limited. “Scientism” is an exalted version of aircraftism, it’s ridiculously limited.

Hawking declared philosophy to be dead. Philosophy is dead,’ Stephen Hawking once declared, because it ‘has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.’

One has to be careful here. One could invert matters a bit by declaring science to be dead because it has not kept up with all the modern developments in human sciences, particularly philosophy. Quantum Field Theory could easily be exhibited as a social cult full of exaggerated claims from hallucinating gurus (Theory Of Everything anybody?), assisted by gross schizophrenia: the most exact theory ever, QFT, is also the most false, ever, as QFT is off by a factor of 10^120…

Hawking’s greatest claim to justified glory is Hawking radiation, the prediction of Black Hole emission of radiation from the event horizon itself. That’s beautifully simple… as long as one believes in the theoretical machinery to create particles out of nothing in QFT (the latter as experimental support, as it makes predictions found to be true!) 

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A once naive Feynman also fired broadsides at philosophy… so his son became a philosopher, bringing Feynman to admit that he was also a philosopher (for example when he and his accomplice Wheeler concocted the extremely philosophically dubious idea that there was just one electron in the universe going back and forth in time… perhaps the weirdest idea, ever). Feynman realized the analogy between the Principle Of Least Action, and a divine revelation. Except that POLA is demonstrated in countless experiments and theories…

In a variant of “scientism”, so-called “weak scientism”, science is held to be the best source of knowledge… But science will never tell us if it is right, correct and appropriate to love poetry or a mysterious neighbor…

Hawking claimed that scientists, not philosophers, are now ‘the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge’. The response from some philosophers was to accuse Hawking of ‘scientism’… However the simple truth is that Hawking may have confessed stealthily a surprising truth: Hawking, as many modern physicists, was guilty of philosophism… explaining much of putative possible science with barely hidden philosophy. Much of Black Hole science is philosophy in disguise (I explained this to Hawking and other luminaries in a seminar at Stanford, decades ago by pointing out logical steps in BH theory where Quantum Mechanics was ignored!). 

Indeed, much of Hawking’s own “science” is barely disguised philosophy of sorts. Hawking’s “Science” contains philosophically dubious notions such as Black Hole entropy (originally an idea of Bekenstein)… from an analogy, between how the area of a Black Hole would behave and the fact that, the bigger an area, the more states thus the more entropy. The Black Hole information paradox uses a philosophy of Quantum Mechanics… which one may well disagree with. The very field of science in which Hawking made his name, is all too… philosophical. Much of modern physics has this problem, with time going in the wrong direction, “retrocausality” and other absurdities…

Whereas, say, protein folding is straight science, producing certain knowledge, it has nothing to say to the rest of the world.

Philosophical objections to some science, or scientific objections to some philosophy are both irreplaceable. Advancing science without philosophy is just as impossible as advancing philosophy without science. They are two extremities of the same spectrum of advancing understanding. Human knowledge is not just many, it’s also one.

Patrice Ayme

Rafale fighter-bomber: a work of art and science, operating with absolute certainty, but is it all what wisdom has to offer? (The active stealth of the Rafale shrouds all the weapons in an electronic cloak… )

WANT BETTER PHYSICS? GET BETTER PHILOSOPHY

Philosophical progress, the art and desire of guessing new utmost significance, guided our progress in understanding physics for the last three million years, and always will, indeed. 

We can’t experiment before we guess what experiments to conduct, according to the obscure light of a half-baked theory (in other words, philosophy). 

So why has the philosophical training of physicists become so abysmal in the last century? The symmetrical question is why most of those called philosophers have had no training in physics and math? Plato would have scoffed that those were not philosophers. 

Neglecting the importance of the philosophical method in physics, for the last two generations may have been caused by the militarization of physics: obeying and pleasing those who order military spending requires yes men, shutting up and calculating, not deep thinkers [1]. History is full of examples of period of stasis, or even massive backsliding, of the understanding of nature, due to the hostility of the establishment to further understanding. This is why the Greeks’ progress in “Physis” stagnated after the establishment of Greek (so-called “Hellenistic regimes”) and Roman dictatorships. Soon after the Macedonian dictatorship grabbed Greece, Euclid wrote his elements… completely forgetting the non Euclidean geometry established a century before! (And it stayed forgotten for 21 centuries!) one wonders which other parts of Greek science got also immediately forgotten: these were times when thinkers would be killed on sight (Demostenes actually argued with the guy dispatched by the Macedonians to kill him: they knew each other; the assassin at the head of his squad pointed out to the philosopher he had to earn a living, and him not Demosthenes would have no effect, as somebody else would do the deed. Best to go with a friend!) 

Greatest physicist ever? Du Chatelet discovered… ENERGY, no less! Not just infrared (which she also discovered)! She was also a first class philosopher, and of course, a feminist. Dying from childbirth at 41, she left extensive writings.

Once the will, desire, and methodology of deep thinking has been forgotten, it takes a long time to get it restarted: Europe tried half a dozen attempts at a sustainable Renaissance, over a millennium [2]. What had happened? Books and scholars got deliberately eliminated for 250 years: starting  in 363 CE, religious fanatics systematically burned libraries and tortured to death intellectuals (see Hypatia’s tragic assassination directed by Christian “saint” Cyril).

Spending in physics is good… if nothing else, new technologies can be developed, especially involving high energies. But it shouldn’t focus on only a few avenues of inquiry. However, “High Energy” physics is a revealing term: do we live in a “High Energy” world? No. So why don’t we also focus on “Low Energy” fundamentals? 

Sociological considerations of career advancement show it is safer within the herd, and the herd thinks alike. This is why university physicists form a herd.

“Cathedral schools” were mandated 13 centuries ago, and then turned into universities. However, when one looks at quantum jumps in understanding, one realizes that most such jumps happened outside of the career mainstream. The greatest thinkers tend to not follow the most prestigious path at the time! Obviously on the path less traveled are the diamonds found. Master thinkers such as Abelard, Buridan, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Descartes, Fermat, Leibniz, Papin, Du Chatelet, Lavoisier, Lamarck, Cuvier, Faraday, Darwin, even Poincare, De Broglie… are examples of master thinkers who didn’t have conventional careers [3].

There are too many of the most towering intellects standing straight out of all society and academia, for it to be an accident, or a coincidence [4]. And the reason is very simple: it’s easier to be an intellectual hero, and jump out of the box, if you are mostly out of the box of obsolete logic already.  

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Military science has been hard core high energy physics, ever since the French army ordered research on tanks, under the Ancien Regime (now viewed as the first “cars”, but, truly, tanks…18 C). New high explosives saved the French at Valmy. Within a few weeks the first production combat lasers will start protecting some US air bases…

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[2] Clovis immediately made a reinterpretation of Christianism into something milder, tolerant, compatible with other faiths (~ 500 CE). Within a century, Frankish bishops were teaching secularly, ignoring lethal threats from Rome. In the Eight Century, a law was passed making schooling and its teaching by religious establishments mandatory. In the Eleventh Century, full Renaissance in north-west France brought a violent territorial expansion (England, Sicily, Italy, etc…), a booming economy, the Duke questioning the geocentric system and his protege Berengar assimilating god to reason… 

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[3] Abelard, Buridan, Leonardo da Vinci, Tycho, Kepler, Descartes, Fermat, Boulliaut/Bulaldius, Leibniz, Papin, Du Chatelet, Lavoisier, Lamarck, Cuvier, Galois, Faraday, Darwin, even Poincare, De Broglie…

1. 1. At twenty-two, Abelard set up a school of his own, although opponents barred him from teaching in Paris. Eventually without previous training or special study, triumphed in theological debates, and stepped into a chair at Notre—Dame. The rest of his life was a “calamity” (his word) reminiscent of the adventures of all too many an intellectual of Antiquity, and others in my little list: he got emasculated and nearly killed in an attack… Abelard fought Saint Bernard, Christianism most important person,  nearly to death, and, though an abbot was excommunicated… twice. 
   2. Buridan chose not the faculty of theology but the much lower one of arts. 
   3. Leonardo da Vinci was a serious physicist… Yet took to painting and direct regalian support…
   4. Kepler was Tycho’s assistant. Tycho lived off a grant from the Germanic Roman emperor. Kepler spent a lot of energy preventing the execution of his mother as a witch.
   5. Descartes, discoverer of Algebraic Geometry (“equations”), and calculus, an army captain, was on the run, and was not dumb enough to return to France where the Catholic fanatics ruled.
   6. Fermat, co-discoverer of calculus, was a lawyer and MP.
   7. Boulliaut/Bulaldius was a French priest. He got the idea of the 1/dd law of gravitation… As Newton pointed out.
   8. Leibniz was all over the place, even an ambassador. Nobody knows where he is buried.
   9. Papin made the first working steam engine, and the first steam boat (which worked very well). He had to flee France (being a Protestant), then he ran in trouble in England as locals stole his invention, and after legal action, fled to Germany (where he interacted with Leibniz… Same Leibniz of infinitesimals, who made preliminary work on energy which Du Chatelet extended. 

• Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet was top nobility, and hot to trot. She had no academic career, but converted her castle into a lab on her own dinero… Lavoisier did something similar, but the Revolutionary Tribunal found he had used taxpayer money to do this (so what? He should have had an exemption and got an award instead of being shortened…)

• Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier were research professors at the Museum of Natural History, where they established evolutionary science, but they were not university professors… Darwin, who pointed out natural selection by itself was enough to cause evolution, without the arsenal of contingence deployed by Lamarck and Cuvier two generations earlier, was not a professor at all, but an independent scholar.

• Galois, an absolute revolutionary. He invented groups, and  demonstrated some equations couldn’t be solved. He got in big trouble for his republican politics, under a dictator, and was killed age 20 (!) spending his last night writing down Galois theory.

• Faraday, not a university professor, and little schooled in mathematics, was directly funded by the king.

• Poincare followed an unusual, secondary career path, until he shattered mathematics and physics (he established Relativity, including E = mcc), De Broglie, a prince, studied Medieval history, before pivoting and decreeing Quantum Waves, inventing Quantum uncertainty and the “Schrodinger” equation on the way… (Germanophiles did the rest by attributing his discoveries to… Germanophones; however he got the Nobel within 4 years of the ebauch of his thesis). He was never a professor, but I met him in person… Fellow minds…  

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[4] Just restricting oneself to Paris, the largest city in Western Europe for most of the last 15 centuries, one could get evaluations of the number of professional intellectuals. Those who really brought progress, were very few, and they have in common that, even though sometimes they were part of the establishment, they were also continually at war, because their advanced ideas alternatively seduced and infuriated the powers that be. But 99.9% of intellectuals, most of the time, didn’t cause a ripple…