Freedom of Science

I saw this article by Abhay Ashtekar at CosmoCoffee. ¹ What a tangled web physicists have put themselves in! They are simply going through motions and waiting for their own Alexander to cut the knot for them and throw the mess they have created on the old scholastic garbage heap and free physics from itself.²

Scholastic physics

Ashtekar writes that the

emphasis is on underlying ideas, conceptual issues and overall status of the program rather than mathematical details and associated technical subtleties.

I have not seen any such statement by a physicist explicitly defining physics as scholastic philosophy. For professional physicists, such as Ashtekar, mathematics is just a detail and all that hair splitting about elegant mathematics are “technical subtleties.”

It is not surprising that Doctors of Philosophy make their living by philosophizing. When physicists will admit that they are Doctors of Philosophy who make their living by philosophizing they will come one step closer to being scientists.

Underlying ideas come before the mathematical veneer

Therefore, in physics, underlying ideas and conceptual issues come before mathematics which is used only to make calculations. As everything else in physics this notion of the sanctity of the mathematics that physicists like to project as the hallmark of their profession originated with Newton. Newton corrupted Euclidean geometry and scholasticized mathematics and showed his disciples how to use mathematics as an authoritative polemical tool. Physicists have been gladly obliging ever since.

1. The article describes the state of academic physics about three years ago. [↩]
2. Note, how physicists cannot conceive a clean slate physics, instead they can only invent a new layer of physics by calling it the “physics beyond SM.” [↩]

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