08.19.10
The unreasonable stupidity of the physics cult
The Unreasonable Success of Physics
The success of physics has been spectacular, but it has lead to a set of fallacies that its success can/will be replicated across all human knowledge, with disastrous results. The first bad result is that scientists often think Darwin’s theory of natural selection to be such a law. But in fact, as with the citation of Newton’s second law Darwinian evolution has no ‘force’ agument. It instead pretends that the the situation in Newton’s first law is the real law: nothing happens, but actually evolution just happens, by chance.
Both Feynmann and Wigner, in my reading, conclude that science can never answer the question as to why science and mathematics work as well as they do.
If you consider all the talking points in ID–irreducible complexity, privileged planet, cosmological fine-tuning–some of which I find useless (irreducible complexity) and some of which I find interesting (the apparent sensitivity of life to the values of constants) no one observation from the world of science or mathematics has ever struck me as a more powerful apologetic than Feynman’s and Wigner’s point.
The world is not only governed by orderly laws, but those laws are expressible in simple enough terms that we can make sense out of them and use them to make astonishingly accurate predictions. As Feynman suggested, if I read him correctly, science can never explain why this is so. It is, in fact, unreasonable that this happens.
I often think of it this way. The dawn of modern science arrives with Newton. Newton’s Second Law is a simple linear differential equation. (Probably trivial is a better word–speaking not of Newton’s insight–which was genius–but of the degree of difficulty of his equation.) One can only speculate in a What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly? manner what would have happened if Newton’s Second Law had been a complicated nonlinear differential equation (or even a simple nonlinear differential equation)–but it is not far-fetched to argue that science would have been stillborn.
Darwiniana » Newton’s law, the a priori, and the physics pack of all space-time apes (man included) said,
August 19, 2010 at 1:06 pm
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