Freedom of Science

Physics is not suitable for fundamental research. Physics is useless to investigate philosophical problems. Physicists have absolute authority to define what they study as science. They defined old scholastic topics as physics and therefore as science. In other words, physicists call millennia old philosophical topics physics. The best example is when physicists delve into the “fundamental” nature of matter.

Here a physicist ruminates about the hardness of matter:¹

The Pauli exclusion principle is probably involved at some level for all of them, though it could be obfuscated by other effects. From my reading, I was able to derive the hardness of one simple, but undeniably hard, material: metal. …

Apparently not much has changed since City of God. Physicists as good scholastics still argue by and with principles named after dead European scholastic philosophers.

What is interesting is that the writer calls metal an “undeniably hard material.” This is not true at all. Metal is no different then software. Only for physicists who blindly believe in the Newtonian atomic materialism and measure the world by taking human scale as absolute scale² that metal becomes an undeniably hard material.

This is what I mean by inadequacy of physics to study fundamental philosophical questions.

1. Studying hardness of matter has been the quientessential scholastic subject for millennia. [↩]
2. Physics is stuck in the pre-scientific state where anthropocentric reasoning is legal. [↩]

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