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The Last Word


Bazza

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On 6/15/2023 at 6:15 PM, Bazza said:

 

 

I see why you like this; the speaker perpetuates the myth of the Lone Genius who appears to make up stuff purely from his own mind, and dismisses people who actually study directly what the Universe does and publish their findings, people like Faraday, Michaelson, Thomson, Rutherford, the Braggs, Hubble, Stern, Wu, Penzias & Wilson, etc.  And those rare individuals who do both, like Kirchhoff and Fermi.

 

He seems only to care about the most abstracted "fundamental" theories, and explicitly cherry-picks from purely theoretical work where it has become easy to overlook the underlying reasons for the development of those theories. This absolutely ignores the fact that advances in theory have only come once a critical mass of unexplained experimental and observational results have accumulated.  To put it more harshly, he constructs a fallacious picture of physics theory by ignoring that science is empirical.  He is implicitly setting at zero value those who test theories, find where they don't work, and indicate the directions in which new physics must be, or find utterly unexpected phenomena exposing hitherto unrecognized shortcomings in accepted theory. 

 

I suspect also he's got a very dangerous ulterior motive, as well.  He stops short of saying so explicitly, but it smells like he wants established academia pulled down and replaced by new thinkers.  That has been tried in the last century, too, though the most famous case is in evolutionary biology rather than physics.  Stalin did that in the Soviet Union because he liked Comrade Lysenko's ideas, which set biological sciences back for a few decades, and contributed to a famine or two in eastern Europe.

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