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 lifetime in analogy to other professionals such as pharmacists and physicians.³ Faraday hated the word and refused to be called a physicist.

So the change from natural philosopher to physicist was not merely a name change. Natural philosophy is not an academic profession; it has no bureaucracy.⁴ Natural philosophers were amateurs doing research for the love of it. Faraday went to his lab because that was what he wanted to do. Physicists do research to advance in the professional bureaucracy. The bureaucracy dictates what research to be done, by whom and how.

• Academic physicists are bureaucrats who practice a legal profession.

How the definition of science changed can be gleaned from what modern physicists do. When research was called natural philosophy it was science. When research became a profession it became legal.

Yesterday I wrote how physicists changed the definition of science to mean the opposite of what it meant when research was amateur. To me speculating about time machines by using doctoral authority is not science. Cosmology is not science either. Cosmology is cosmos-ology.⁵

These endeavors fall into the field of shamanism.⁶ Physicists turned the good old scholasticism into shamanism.

1. Unhuman organisms took over research from human researchers. An amateur works for himself; a professional works for a bureaucracy. [↩]
2. Faraday was affiliated with the Royal Institution but remained an amateur. [↩]
3. Not much harm is done when physicists are confused with physicians. They are both professionals in legal practice. [↩]
4. and no process. As Lessig says “process always win over substance.” [↩]
5. A cosmos is an anthropocentric truncation of the whole. Cosmos is a closed system invented to practice the current investigative tools of professional physicists. [↩]
6. Legalized shamanism is still shamanism. [↩]

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