Sep 13, 2022 03:40 PM
https://iai.tv/articles/physics-alone-ca..._auid=2020
EXCERPTS (Sabine Hossenfelder): Many people have a bad start with physics in school. I did, too. Physics seemed all about magnets and atoms and balls rolling down inclined planes. I didn’t find it particularly engaging. And yet, today, I’m a physicist.
In school, we see only one side of physics, but it has another side. Physics is one of the best ways to make sense of our own existence: Does the past still exist? Do copies of us live in other universes? Can information be destroyed? Does science have limits? Those are some examples of questions that physics helps us answer.
Physicists don’t like to talk about this existential side of their research. I suspect that’s because, historically, existential questions have been the realm of religion, and scientists want to keep their distance. But keeping this distance has a downside: it also distances science from humanity. [...] It seems that physicists don’t care about what the fundamental laws of nature imply for people. That most physicists keep quiet about those big questions has another downside: it leaves the arena to those who conflate religion with science.
One case where science crosses over into religion is the beginning of our universe. [...] But the scientifically correct answer is, rather boringly, that we don’t know how the universe began. Indeed, there are good reasons to think we will never know. But some physicists are unwilling to accept this answer. They fill their knowledge gap with creation myths, written in the language of mathematics.
These creation myths are not wrong, so it is not unscientific to believe in them. It’s rather that we cannot tell them apart with observations – not now, and quite possibly never. My friend and colleague Tim Palmer from the University of Oxford suggested to call such ideas “ascientific”: Science can’t tell us whether they’re wrong or right...
[...] Once I started thinking about it, I realized that physics opens our mind to many ascientific ideas that we can neither refute nor confirm. ... In some cases, physics has brought up questions that we might not otherwise even have thought of. Einstein’s theory of space and time, for example, makes it impossible to pin down any moment in time as special. For all we currently know, our experience of time as passing is an artefact of our perception, not a fundamental property of nature. Without scrutinizing the math and the evidence for it, we might not have thought of this, exactly because it contradicts our experience.
[...] Another existential question in the realm of physics is whether information can get lost...
[...] When we try to answer the big questions of our existence, we have three options: Science, philosophy, and physics. Of those three, physics has made the most progress in the past century, and we yet have to fully understand what it all means. Yes, physics is the subject that deals with magnets and atoms and balls rolling down inclined planes. But it’s also so much more than this... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS (Sabine Hossenfelder): Many people have a bad start with physics in school. I did, too. Physics seemed all about magnets and atoms and balls rolling down inclined planes. I didn’t find it particularly engaging. And yet, today, I’m a physicist.
In school, we see only one side of physics, but it has another side. Physics is one of the best ways to make sense of our own existence: Does the past still exist? Do copies of us live in other universes? Can information be destroyed? Does science have limits? Those are some examples of questions that physics helps us answer.
Physicists don’t like to talk about this existential side of their research. I suspect that’s because, historically, existential questions have been the realm of religion, and scientists want to keep their distance. But keeping this distance has a downside: it also distances science from humanity. [...] It seems that physicists don’t care about what the fundamental laws of nature imply for people. That most physicists keep quiet about those big questions has another downside: it leaves the arena to those who conflate religion with science.
One case where science crosses over into religion is the beginning of our universe. [...] But the scientifically correct answer is, rather boringly, that we don’t know how the universe began. Indeed, there are good reasons to think we will never know. But some physicists are unwilling to accept this answer. They fill their knowledge gap with creation myths, written in the language of mathematics.
These creation myths are not wrong, so it is not unscientific to believe in them. It’s rather that we cannot tell them apart with observations – not now, and quite possibly never. My friend and colleague Tim Palmer from the University of Oxford suggested to call such ideas “ascientific”: Science can’t tell us whether they’re wrong or right...
[...] Once I started thinking about it, I realized that physics opens our mind to many ascientific ideas that we can neither refute nor confirm. ... In some cases, physics has brought up questions that we might not otherwise even have thought of. Einstein’s theory of space and time, for example, makes it impossible to pin down any moment in time as special. For all we currently know, our experience of time as passing is an artefact of our perception, not a fundamental property of nature. Without scrutinizing the math and the evidence for it, we might not have thought of this, exactly because it contradicts our experience.
[...] Another existential question in the realm of physics is whether information can get lost...
[...] When we try to answer the big questions of our existence, we have three options: Science, philosophy, and physics. Of those three, physics has made the most progress in the past century, and we yet have to fully understand what it all means. Yes, physics is the subject that deals with magnets and atoms and balls rolling down inclined planes. But it’s also so much more than this... (MORE - missing details)