“Physicists, stop the churlishness”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0172
Consider the opening of a 10 June New York Times commentary :
A kerfuffle has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.
David Albert serves as Columbia University’s Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy, directs Columbia’s MA program in the philosophical foundations of physics, holds a PhD in theoretical physics, and is identified by Columbia as the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience and of “many articles on quantum mechanics, mostly in the Physical Review.” His 23 March review—"blistering,” Ross Andersen of the Atlantic called it—attacked physicist Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Albert demanded answers:
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. … What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question?
In April, Andersen interviewed Krauss about “the sudden, public antagonism between philosophy and physics” and posted the results at the Atlantic . “What drove me to write this book,” Krauss reportedly told him, “was this discovery that the nature of ‘nothing’ had changed, that we’ve discovered that ‘nothing’ is almost everything and that it has properties.” Andersen quoted Krauss about Albert and about the core of the intellectual conflict:
I read a moronic philosopher who did a review of my book in the New York Times who somehow said that having particles and no particles is the same thing, and it’s not. The quantum state of the universe can change and it’s dynamical. He didn’t understand that when you apply quantum field theory to a dynamic universe, things change and you can go from one kind of vacuum to another. When you go from no particles to particles, it means something.
In May in the UK, the Telegraph reported , “Stephen Hawking has told Google’s Zeitgeist conference that philosophers have not kept up with science and their art is dead.” And then the 10 June commentary, “Physicists, stop the churlishness ,” appeared in the Times‘s “Sunday Review” section. The Times reports that the author, Jim Holt, also wrote the forthcoming Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story .
The conflict that Holt calls a kerfuffle “is hardly,” he says, “the first occasion on which physicists have made disobliging comments.” Besides Hawking, Holt adduces harsh words about philosophy from the Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg (“murky and inconsequential”) and Richard Feynman (“philosophers … never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem”).
Holt proposes, with examples, that “sometimes physicists are, whether they realize it or not, actually engaging in philosophy themselves.” Near the end, he sums up his argument:
Today the world of physics is in many ways conceptually unsettled. Will physicists ever find an interpretation of quantum mechanics that makes sense? Is “quantum entanglement” logically consistent with special relativity? Is string theory empirically meaningful? How are time and entropy related? Can the constants of physics be explained by appeal to an unobservable “multiverse”? Philosophers have in recent decades produced sophisticated and illuminating work on all these questions. It would be a pity if physicists were to ignore it.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.