i'm gonna write about philo stuff for a couple of seconds!!
there's a christmas party going on downstairs right now, and there's a few physics people down there. well anyway, me and this one guy are talking about physics and philosophy and whether or not any philosophers ever actually study physics. now, coming from a (extremely modest) physics background, i always get pretty annoyed when i see philosophers pretending to be mathematicians/physicists. although i left physics early on, i was in it long enough to know a fake when i see one. anyway, a couple of weeks ago i was hanging around the dept. and heard jonah and adam talking about philosophy of physics and how much philosophy motivates physicists. i disagreed, but they dismissed me, so i walked away from the convo. anyway, i asked one of the physicist present about this.... about how much philosophy does motivate phyiscs... and he replied "very little." as a test, we asked some of the other physics people in the room if they'd ever even heard of the bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics. no clue. and, mind you, these are people actually working and studying in physics. no, this isn't conclusive... but, i think it does give us something to think about. as philosophers, we want what we do to matter, not just to ourselves, but to the world (even if it is just the academic world) at large.
the question here is, to what extent are we just fooling ourselves?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
perhaps the saddest thing about physics right now (and i think that this can go for a lot of other fields) is that people are no longer really encouraged to question. as an example, i was never taught about alternative interpretations to quantum mechanics until i left physics and got into philosophy. before that (and from the phsyics people i was talking to last night, i gather that this is rather standard) it was all copenhagen interpretation straight on through. granted, as university students, we're not being taught to be innovators... and we're not all expected to be either. but... we shouldn't be taught to be memorizing machines. yes, the big guys in physics made a lot of changes that were heavily motivated by philosophy and different ways of looking at the world. but, the fact of the matter is that philosophy isn't what normal day to day physics cares about. whether it should or not is another story, i guess. but that is what they were talking about that day i walked away... so that is what i'm responding to....
and i totally agree that we should be talking to other disciplines... now... how to do that...
Post a Comment