Freedom of Science

Joel Spolsky wrote:

All those crackpots with schemes of perpetual motion machines, unified theories of physics, and DeLoreans that travel in time while simultaneously converting toothpaste to gold happily regale you with countless stories about how “they said Galileo was crazy.”

Joel Spolsky is a programmer and an entrepreneur. At first reading I thought he was saying that “crackpots” with schemes of “unified theories of physics” actually referred to physicists themselves. I thought it interesting that crackpotism among physicists was now so well-known that general public was aware of it. Probably that’s not the case. He meant “crackpots” i.e., amateurs who come up with schemes of unified theories of physics, not physicists who come up with schemes of unified theories. I asked for clarification but he hasn’t replied so far. 

Obviously, it doesn’t matter who cooks up the theory of everything, physicists or non-physicists, the idea of theory of everything is outside of science.¹

But some thoughts:

First of all physicists are never crackpots. Crackpot means a person who is not a professional doctor but an amateur who finds in himself the unjustified right to speculate on subjects that professional doctors believe have a protected monopoly. Interestingly the Wikipedia entry does not make this distinction.

Physicists who care not about meaning of words can call each other crackpots² as part of their routine academic brinkmanship. Therefore, a physicist who may show signs of being a scientist by questioning Newtonian occult doctrines will be called a crank by his colleagues.

In general, questioning the legality of physics laws is called crackpotism.

By definition physicists are not crackpots. In fact crackpots are never anti-science. They may be fools but not anti-science. Professional doctors are the anti-science. Professional doctors of philosophy or theology have always been the anti-science. They still are.

What we are witnessing is a simple territorial skirmish between two types professional doctors. Physicists won and have become the new religious doctors, the old fashion anti-science. Doctors of Philosophy have taken the place of Doctors of Theology. Such things as reading the mind of God used to be the monopoly of Doctors of Theology. Now it is the undisputed realm of Doctors of Philosophy, i.e., physicists.

Building cosmogonic scenarios and branding them as god given true scenarios used to belong to Doctors of Theology. Now it is in the realm of Doctors of Philosophy, i.e. physicists.

What is sad for humanity is that, about 5000 years ago, during humanity’s historical childhood, humans built cosmogonies by projecting their local habitat into cosmic scale. Egyptian cosmology was based on the culture of the river Nile. Then, in the European middle ages a clockwork cosmos was imagined because that was the latest technology. In the 20th century apparently humanity have not grown up a bit and they’ve built a cosmogony based on the day’s technology, namely, atomic explosion.

It is always the same people who build these cosmogonies: the scribes. Today the class of scribes is called physicists and they still build the same anthropocentric cosmologies for the rulers and market them as true picture of the universe.

1. The fact that physicists are corrupt linguists who corrupted the good word “everything” to mean not “everything” but a combination of two type of irreconcilable physics symbolism does not change the fact that theory of everything is outside of science. [↩]
2. Both Lubos Motl and Peter Woit routinely call other physicists crackpots as this search reveals. [↩]

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