The culture of physics
Published by admin May 12th, 2007 in Physics, String TheoryBee refuted my statement that “time is what clocks measure” is the “official view” of time in physics:
“Your idea of ‘official view’ in physics is bullshit.”
After this authoritative refutation I started to wonder. Is there an official view of time in physics?
But I think she is objecting to the idea of “official view” in general. “Official view” has connotations of “party line” and in physics no such notion can exist, she seems to say.
But there is a tradition of party line in physics. It is well known that physics, at least a big chunk of it, is ruled by official announcements coming from Princeton. Without the official nod from Witten no major changes can occur in String Theory. It is plausible that the rest of physics hierarchy also obeys party lines of theoritical leaders of the specific fields.
And this is inevitable. Given the size of professional legal code called physics, the practitioners, like lawyers, must specialize in a narrow portion of the code. When they need to discuss topics outside their specialty physicists recourse to “official views” or repeat the professional mythology.
In other words, the culture of physics defines the matter of physics.