From: andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Report on Philosophies of Physicists
Date: 31 Aug 92 03:15:19 GMT
Organization: Renaissance Technologies Corp., Setauket, NY.

In article <Aug.28.14.08.10.1992.14230@ruhets.rutgers.edu> bweiner@ruhets.rutgers.edu (Benjamin Weiner) writes:
>Barry Merriman writes:
	[No Mush Allowed! Deleted]

>Like many of us, I imagine, I am sometimes quizzed about the Tao of 
>Physics and other such silliness, or about, say whether Einstein
>proved that everything is relative.  Rather than dismiss the questioner
>as a fuzzy-head or someone with a hidden New-Age agenda, I try to
>carefully explain why I don't agree with that kind of stuff, and
>to explain what the science really is, and emphasize the limitations
>of it: you can't use physics to justify a moral/philosophical stance
>like "everything is relative," etc.  Sometimes it works.  If
>scientists want their public image to improve they have to spend more
>time explaining what they do - otherwise Fritjof Capra will do it for us.

This is a good point. But there is also room for a little mush in the real
physics - but let me say carefully what I mean. The laws of physics are a
human construct, and a result of choices. There is no particular reason why
they should appear serious or silly or cruel or mushy other than the choices
of the authors.

Since even before Aristotle, there has been an inexplicable (Wignerian) success
in the use of mathematics as the expressive idiom of physics. But there is a
great blindness in the idea that mathematics is "objective", as opposed to the
result of choices. It is quite possible to create many convincing mathematical
pictures of the universe but some (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) have subtle flaws
which may be quite difficult to expose. What this means is that you cannot
attempt to ground mathematics in the objective physical world in any convincing
way, other than as an intensional activity of humans. Thus connected to human
concerns, what isn't "warm" or "fuzzy" about mathematics.

In other words, I defy anyone to make sensible the claim that mathematics is
_not_ a soft, warm fuzzy, human frailty. Mathematics is a nearly universal
human cultural activity, and participates in resonances with some of the
deepest human philosophical concepts - exnihilation (existence), annihilation,
infinity, and finitude. The linguistic and epistemological versions of the
problem of truth are never far removed in mathematics. Ultimately, we have
found that mathematics does not provide irreducible certainty, rather it
expresses definite choices of humans.

So consider then the problem confronting the claim that mathematics is the
only way to spell out the universe "as it is". You cannot point to anything
in mathematics which can help, and mathematics itself is a bag full of choices.
Your only card to play is that it seems to us today be the only way to arrive
at a description of the world which satisfies certain requirements. But then the
choice of requirements is again questionable. There is a scientific method,
but nobody has accurately described it. We live in a phase of world history
where it seems desirable to have an impersonal, pseudo-objective physics. This
was not always the case, and there is very little available to anyone who
would claim that the situation today will be permanent.

It seems largely a question for the psychologists _why_ we prefer an impersonal
physics, and one which will not have a physics answer until physics looks a
whole lot more fuzzy and warm than it does today.

If you put on your hardest core positivist pretense you have to be content with
_ignoring_ statements like "physics is cold and impersonal" since they are not
easy to design good experiments to test. You certainly can't embrace one as
truth. If you put a more realistic hat on, you might observe that people will
develop relationships to ideas they espouse, and so you will expect that if
quantum mechanics was a disturbing shift away from a comfortable world view,
that some day it too will be the cozy old thinking encrusted with sympathy and
sentiment. There is absolutely _nothing_ particularly Christian about the
geocentric universe, and Christianity has indeed survived the demise of that
system - but that does not mean that the geocentric universe was not the focus
of a lot of emotional attachments of certain Christians. From where we sit
today, we can pretend that we would not find anything particularly happy
about whether the sun revolves about the earth or the other way 'round, but
history informs us that emotional attachment to this question is to be
expected. The idea that we will not form emotional attachments to quantum
chromodynamics looks pretty suspicious to me.

The Bottom Line: What is warm and fuzzy is purely up to humans. Physics may
be able to survive just fine even if it is not always refrigerated. Or else
it may not survive. But there is nothing in physics which can prevent people
from having an emotional component in their relation with it.

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt
Newsgroups: sci.physics