Freedom of Science

When research became professional1 the definition of science changed as well. Michael Faraday is a good example of an amateur natural philosopher.2 When Kea mentioned Faraday in a comment I wanted to read about him again.
Note how Wikipedia calls Faraday a physicist and a natural philosopher. In fact, the word physicist was introduced during Faraday’s […]

Brian Green writes:
Standard model is the most solid, pinnacle achievement of particle physics.
Standard model describes not one, not two but zillion of possible universes.
You can change the strengths of the forces, the strengths of the coupling constants as you wish.
The masses of the particles can be changed arbitrarily and the theory still makes sense, it […]

I do not agree with this statement:
The universe described by cosmology today is humanity’s first picture of the universe as a whole that might actually be true.
All cosmic mythologies appear true to believers. The statement that cosmic model described by cosmology is true can be written mathematically as follows:
O - C = zero
O = model
C […]

Flip tomato presents this as a joke:
 
But this is not a joke. It is a visual representation of the state of academic physics.
I would make one change on the plot. The plot is not Contributions v. Talent. In physics talent has no value. The currency of physics is authority. Therefore, the plot must be Publication […]

From an article in New Scientist:
The mysterious cosmic presence called dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe, might be lurking in hidden dimensions of space. … To get the same amount of acceleration seen by astronomers, Greene and Levin calculate that the extra dimensions should have a scale of about 0.01 millimeter.

Comments […]

After reading a summary of Witten’s upcoming paper at Not Even Wrong I posted Witten’s Pyramid of Authority and also wrote about Witten’s toy fiefdom.
People who actually read the paper could not control their sarcasm either: gunpowder&noodles commenting on Not Even Wrong wrote:
For all my admiration for EW, and gratitude to him for the way he […]

As reported here String maven Witten’s next research objective is “to study fully quantum black holes in an exactly solvable toy model” in anti-deSitter space with lambda=0, that is, AdS3
Witten wants to study quantum black holes but he wants to study these side effects of the physics code as exactly solvable toy models.1
What Witten is […]

As recommended in Asymptotia I bought Natalie Angier’s recent book called The Canon which is a tour of the “beautiful basics of science” presented in the ugliest possible hairy puns and tentaculate metaphors.
The book is full of tidbits of information which are interesting yet the writing is so repulsive that reading this book is torture. […]

As I was browsing in Borders today I noticed that they placed Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe in Fiction/Literature section. I checked if someone just put it there after picking it up from the science section. No, it was in the correct alphabetical location and there were a half a dozen of them on the shelf.
I […]

Lisa Randall on Freedom of Science 

Historically, technology, or applied physics, has always existed.
Historically, scholasticism has always existed, as well.
These two branches of human activity are incompatible.
Scholasticism changed its name to theoretical physics in order to use and abuse the authority of technology.
Scholasticism is the art of definitions.
By defining themselves as physicists and technology as physics […]