carllooper said:
Any philosophical principles that Einstein may have used may very well have played an important, if not key role in his contribution to physics. Indeed, personally, I'm sure of it. But how can we conclude that if we "get those principles wrong" science will go astray? Bohr was equally inspired by philosophical principles, but a somewhat different set of principles, yet was perfectly able to make a contribution to physics.
The way in which physics generally works is that ideas are put to a physical test. If there's agreement between the physical test and the ideas that conceive it, then the idea is considered provisionally correct. Or useful. In other words, the idea could be philosophically right or wrong, but in terms of the physics it points out, (to the extent that it does) it wouldn't actually matter. What matters is whether it's physically so, (ie. physically wrong or provisionally correct). Not whether it's philosophically so.
Of course, in practice, it can get a lot more complicated than this.
C
Carllooper, I believe it is self-evident that if we get the philosophical principles underlying science wrong, that science will go astray. Unfortunately my sense is that not only is this not believed these days, but that the opposite idea has practically become orthodoxy--namely, the idea that the only meaning of a scientific theory is in its ability to make accurate predictions.
You say "what matters is if a theory is 'physically right or wrong' not whether it is 'philosophically so'." By a theory being "physically right or wrong" here, you could mean two things: (1) you could mean "physically" in the sense of having to do with the real physical matter of the world, and thus be saying something like "a physically true theory correctly describes what is actually out there in the world," or (2) which is practically the opposite of that, you could mean "physically" in the sense of "as in physics"--which, these days, often explicitly repudiates the idea that theories are describing a "world out there," but rather insists on the above point about just being about accurate experimental predictions.
In my view, a theory will only be able to make accurate predictions consistently by truly describing the actual world.
I know you will say, "what does it matter?"--let physics talk about experiments and philosophers talk about the meaning of scientific claims. But I think it does matter, and I think that the infiltration of physics by wrong philosophical assumption has affected it significantly.
I will try to say why I think this, but let me first give the disclaimer that I know very well that I am not an expert, and I am confident that there are many detailed replies to this that I will not be able to follow. What I have to say is more of a sense than it is grounded in something I fully understand. I am aware of this, and that's why I am interested in studying physics, and why I started this thread!
To me it appears that what has happened is that physicists started with choice #2 above (that physics does not describe a "world out there" but just makes predictions that either can, or can't be experimentally verified) and were led by that conclusion to disbelief in the out-there reality of the very particles they are supposed to be studying. You can clearly trace the lineage in the latter "scientific conclusion" to the former philosophical error. You can see how this would affect physical research. If you don't believe that the thing you are studying really exists (at least in any way you can make sense of) that is OBVIOUSLY going to affect the paths that you choose to study it!
Currently physics is moving forward largely under that understanding, and it seems to me that it is greatly affecting the path. What I see is a whole bunch of theories which all have to do with the ways that complex equations can match experiments--with fairly little progress on achieving consensus on theoretical advancement. That would be consistent with a mis-step of the type that I describe above, where a philosophical error would retard scientific progress.
And I feel like that explanation makes sense with what we know. Whereas classical physicists had the considerable advantage of being able to use their mental intuitions to form theories, today's physicists are trained in the art of NOT doing that. You have to accept that your intuitions (including the very fundamental intuition that physical theories are about the "real world" or the intuition that "everything has an explanation for being as it is," which was so important for Einstein) are of no use, and they are actually a hindrance to advancement. Well, if those intuitions are as essential to scientific advancement as I think they are (and as Einstein found them to be), then transforming the entire physics community into an institution that trains everyone who goes through it to mutilate those intuitions will obviously have a very negative effect.
Personally I simply can't conceive of why, if you don't actually believe the theory is about an independent objective world, you would expect experiments to match theories, or why you would care. In my view, you simply can't, and everyone carries that assumption around with them no matter how well they've trained themselves to mutilate it. So progress in physics may go on in spite of the error, but the error (and its having become orthodox) could be a significant hindrance.
Of course, I know that there are ways that we really do have to overcome our intuitions. I know we don't have the capacity to intuit general relativity, and to think in terms of it you have to in a sense twist your mind into a shape it just won't go. And furthermore, I know there really are things going on "down there" that are pretty much mind-blowing.
But whereas scientific advancement has often occurred by trying so solve paradox, it seems to me that part of the philosophy behind QM is very much the opposite. Rather than trying to solve the paradox, there is a sense in which they are deliberately embracing it. Rather than saying, "there is something that is going on here that we don't understand and we need to study it further," they are saying, "we understand exactly what is going on here, and it is that the particles cease to exist"--at just the point where they reach the limit of their ability to understand them! Thus it is with the alleged "completeness" of quantum theory. It amounted to transforming their inability to understand into a "scientific conclusion" (that was really a philosophical error, in my view) that (a) is taught to all students of science nowadays, and (b) actually puts a stop to the process of scientific inquiry.
So...if the philosophical error lead to physicists believing that there was no further need to study something because they had already understood everything there was to know about it, you can see why philosophy affects physical research, and so matters a good deal.