Freedom of Science

Fliptomato has a great picture:

This is an instant classic. I have so many things to comment about his picture.

Let’s start with this. I have been writing for many years that it is now time to establish a kind of separation in physics that is standard in the arts: Physics need to be divided into two departments: Physics and Fine Physics.¹ 

Like fine artists fine physicists will be bound by no standard of evidence.² The canvas of fine physicists is spacetimes and their brush is Einstein’s equations. They will just keep painting landscapes of universes with no requirement of any kind of evidence, experimental verification or logic. Their only concern would be to create new and elegant forms. Welcome to the string theory. Just make it official and call these people fine physicists.

This is what I wrote in my book on this subject:

Fine artists and theoretical physicists meet at the Scholastic center.

The unofficial separation of the applied and useless will be official when the academic scholastic physicists will start calling themselves fine physicists to differentiate their noble and useless occupation from those applied physicists who are bound by Nature.

Fine physicists will continue to do what they are doing now, speculate in spacetimes and forces and causes of all sorts and will arrange labels they invent in a pleasing composition and give each other critiques about opening up this universe a little bit, or moving this one a hair to the right, making this spacetime a little denser, this one would look better with a bit more quintessence in it, and so on, just like the artists, but all this will be discussed abstractly in formal papers conforming to all scholastic forms including beautifully typeset equations with indices and indices on indices proportioned just right, not too big but still readable up to the fourth level, a nice blend of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, and a special idiosyncratic new symbol never seen before would definitely add class and raise eyebrows in scholastic circles, the upper and lower cases must also be distributed in an eye pleasing way, and published in a journal printed in heavy stock to make justice to these nice scholastic forms.

The physicist who invents a new form which can be used by others, just like in fine arts, will get to be enshrined and deified and become the head of a school named after him. This is why they are called scholastics….

Read the rest here.

1. I believe that experimental physicists, even astronomers who see their field corrupted by string theorists, ought to support this separation. [↩]
2. Natalie Jeremijenko fun club. Crooked timber of scholasticism. Good physics v. fine physics. Standard of evidence. [↩]

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