PSI Blog 20080506 Physics Not Without Philosophy
"I am wondering if you could give me some pointers as to how to learn physics so that philosophy is not left out entirely."
I unabashedly and quickly recommended that he read "The Scientific Worldview," first. Learning physics during the current "Dark Age of Einstein" and the hey day of the enslavement of physics by mathematics is not easy. My own experience with physics was this: My first course was Physics 1a in 1962, which talked about there being four dimensions and all the strange paradoxes that Einstein devised. The text had a lot of cartoons, but I couldn’t make head or tails out of half of it. I got a C in the course. I took Physics 1b in the summer so I could concentrate on it. It was taught by an 83-yr old professor who totally ignored “modern physics” (i.e., the Einstein stuff) and taught the classical physics in the second half of the Sears and Zemansky College Physics text (3rd ed.). That made sense to me. I got an A in that course.
Philosophy was the same for me. I read “Science and the Modern World” by Whitehead and was totally confused, thinking that I must be pretty stupid. After I discovered “univironmental determinism” 20 yrs later, I went through the Whitehead book again, crossing out all the BS swiftly. There wasn’t much left of it after that. In reading much other philosophy, I found that most of it is nonsense, some of it pretty high-brow, but nonsense all the same. The universe consists of matter in motion. The idea of matterless motion that philosophers and “modern physicists” promulgate is just that, only an idea. It is popular for religious and political reasons. There could never be any experimental proof for it. I find it particularly disconcerting when those who call themselves scientists entertain such notions. Our goal is to discover the truth (via interaction with the external world), not to sell ourselves to the highest bidder for fantastic promises that can never be realized.
I have a few reading recommendations at:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Scientific-Worldview/lm/2K0COODP241GC/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_full
and a more complete list at:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/gborchardt
Nevertheless, I know my answer is really not good enough. Who teaches physics these days without all the relativity and non-Euclidean junk?