Back to "The Disintegration of Possiblity"

Back to H.F. Philosophy contents


1closed time-like curves

2The mangled diction is the authors'.

3The working scientist may sense that I am committing a violation here, without being able to articulate what the violation is. But I know what it is. Modern science rests on Francis Bacon's principle that one must submit to science's best answer, no matter how deficient that answer may be. That is why Darwinian Evolution is taught in secondary school as science, for example. It is also why Quantum Field Theory was granted acceptance. Bacon wanted to suppress the tradition of disputation in philosophy, as he believed that it had prevented natural philosophy from progressing. My own program embodies a situation which Bacon did not anticipate. One zigzags between dissecting science, on the one hand, and inventing post-scientific intellectual modalities, on the other. In the end, the answers we need will have a new basis; and science will have been superseded as a culture. Bacon would have thought that impossible.

4A. d'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought (1950), p. 450.

5Ibid., p. 215.

6This is a statement about the intellectual structure of physics, not a profession of faith by me.

7What they had was Aristotle's "natural place" teleology, which by today's standards is not credible.

8Boltzmann addressed this problem by adducing "certain fictitious laws" to mechanics. See Ludwig Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems (translation 1974), p. 230.

9An implicit premise of homogeneity of space.

10d'Abro, op. cit., p. 454.

11J.S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (1987), pp. 170-171.

12Cosmology, History, and Theology, ed. Wolfgang Yourgrau and Allen Breck (1977), pp. 99.

13"Accepting Scientific Ideas," The New York Times, April 28, 1982.

14Physical Review D, 42:1928.

15Physical Review D, 47:5345.

16Physical Review D, 42:1928.

17Ibid., p. 215.

18In Cosmology, History, and Theology, ed. Yourgrau and Breck (1977).

19At the N.Y.U. physics colloquium of November 18, 1993.

20Leibniz' particular version of rationalism was said to have been overturned by the developments in QM which I listed. But that was posturing: as I have noted repeatedly, classical physics is never erased.

21A. d'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought (1950), p. 212.

22The garbled exposition is d'Abro's.

23Cf. F. Dyson, Symmetry Groups in Nuclear and Particle Physics (1966).

24Physical Review 47:777.

25Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics 20:352.

26Physical Review D, 47:557.