Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

THE ACADEMY’S POLLUTION TOUCHES EVERYTHING

You know, I don’t know what’s quite wrong with contemporary physics. I do know what’s wrong with contemporary politics, philosophy and economics (if anything).

What bothers me is that theoretical physicists seem to be talking just like the philosophers and economists – and so if they’re making the same verbal and logical errors, it just raises my suspicion that the reason we’re having problems in physics at present is for the same reason we’re having problems in philosophy and economics.

All that I know, is that mathematics is to science, what rationalism is to philosophy, what models are to economics: it’s not worth much really, unless you run tests. And I am fairly certain that we have a lot of people using paper, rather than a few people using expensive experiments.

And I think by and large that is the Academy’s fault – they want cheap slave labor (grad students), and so we produce a lot of unproductive people (yes, we have too many scientists, because that’s what the data says).

And if that money was spent on experiments (people are very expensive) rather than paper and formula pushers; it is likely that we would produce better results.

I can’t be sure of it, but it’s hard not to come to that conclusion.

The academy is damaging to everything everywhere.