Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Report on Philosophies of Physicists
From: mcirvin@husc8.harvard.edu (Mcirvin)
Date: 30 Aug 92 17:41:27 GMT

muttiah@stable.ecn.purdue.edu (Ranjan S Muttiah) writes:

>I wonder whether the discoveries in physics (say in terms of QM
>and relativity) made in the 20th century were really such a big
>deal after all.  

They certainly weren't a big deal in the ways they have often been
made out to be.  QM and relativity are radical ideas, and radically
at odds with our intuition about the world; and QM, at least, has been
technologically useful in myriad ways.  But relativity has nothing to
do with moral or cultural relativism, and QM has nothing to do with
Taoism or transcendental meditation; just as Darwinism has nothing to
do with "social Darwinism."

>I suspect the prevalence of the popular media
>are in large to blame. 

When you know a little physics (or, I suppose, any academic discipline
that receives popular coverage, but for me it's physics) it's a
sobering experience to pick up random books on the science shelf of
your local bookstore and read what the public is being told about
the subject.  There *is* good material out there, but in the absence
of the knowledge that the interested layperson wants to obtain, there is
absolutely no way to tell who is peddling garbage.  Heinz Pagels' fine
books are marketed in a line of paperbacks that also includes tracts
about crystal-gazing nonsense.  Books with virtually identical titles,
cover art, blurbs, and ostensible subject matter can give a sensible
overview of the field or distort it into a parody of itself.  And
unlike sci.physics, you have no way to post a followup.  
 
> Now, critic #II
>comes along and says that there is all this deep human psychology
>inbedded in this disturbing fact so much so that in fact it
>might even be connected to "eastern mysticism".  Not a bad
>way to earn money...  

A little bit of the fault lies with physicists at various times in 
the 20th century who chose to use terminology and symbolism from 
Eastern religions, on a whim or in the lack of anything better.  Bohr
put the Yin-Yang symbol on his coat of arms as a symbol of complementary
variables; Gell-Mann called the SU(3) classification "the Eightfold Way";
Sakurai once described a quantum field as "both Rama, Vishnu, and Shiva"
since it created, sustained, and destroyed particles.  There was nothing
inherently wrong with the terminology, though some might have found it
faintly blasphemous; but when lots of people in the West suddenly became
heavily interested in "Eastern mysticism" and saw that physicists had
been using their buzzwords, to use a metaphor from Western religion,  
all hell broke loose.

>The folks in the 17th and 18th century
>seem to have gotten along with Newtonian physics much easier
>than have the moderns.  Short of Leibniz's characterization of
>gravity as an "occult force", by and large, they were happy
>to accept and work with it in practice.  Not that it made it
>right of course :=).

I'm not quite so sure about this.  Newton himself was troubled by
the idea of action at a distance with no intermediary.  Many others
were as well.  Philosophers like Berkeley were distressed at what they
saw as sloppy reasoning in the math Newton had used to back up his
statements.  There was some support for Descartes' cosmology in which
planetary motion was determined by vortices in a swirling ether, and
for Goethe's optics, in which white light had no colored components.

There was easily as much jumping to theological and philosophical
conclusions from Newtonian physics as there has been from 20th-
century physics, at least if you scale for the respective size of
the media apparati.  Newton got into the act; he was an alchemist
and heretical religious thinker himself, and used the ideas of absolute
space and time and mechanical determinism to further his theological
views.

-- 
Matt McIrvin, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 
Newsgroups: sci.physics