Freedom of Science

Urs Schreiber in article Charges and Twisted Bundles, III: Anomalies writes:

They are called “anomalies”, I’d say, because to a large extent in physics the approach is to pretend that working locally is fine – until one happens to run head-on into global issues. A mathematician might say at this point: “We made a mistake at the beginning in assuming that everything is globally well defined, instead there may be obstructions to doing so”. The physicist says: “My naive approach of working locally is fine, but since it fails to work in this situation, it is the situation which is not normal: it is anomalous.”

So the physicist assumes that the local is the norm? Like all antonyms in physics local/global pair is a pun. Physicists always extrapolate the local to global by using this pun. Local is trivially boring, global in the sense of cosmic is what sells. And what obstructions? There are no obstructions in physics that can stop physicists from making the most absurd extrapolations. My apologies for totally ignoring the technical meanings, if any, of local, global and obstructions.

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