Physics also seems to help with clear philosophical thinking, and has lots of unintuitive stuff that trains the skill of looking past your models and into the Real Thing. Of Deep Fundamental Principles, I also think physics has some of the easier ones to see, like the conservation principles (once you get why a physicist can be so confident of the non-existence of a perpetual motion machine, you can start to imagine how there could be other Deep Principles which could justify seemingly excessive confidence about other complicated domains).
On the other hand, mediocre physicists tend to be too arrogant, and the current generation of physicists seems to have lost the way in some important (but hard to pin down) sense.
the current generation of physicists seems to have lost the way in some important (but hard to pin down) sense
My impression of physics (1) post-1970-or-so is that it’s lost the balance between theory and experiment that makes science productive. Hypotheses like “superstring theory” or “dark matter” are extremely difficult to test by experiment (through no fault of the physicists’ own). Physicists have tried to to make up for it with improvements in theory, but without experiments bringing discipline to the process it doesn’t quite work.
In one sense, this is good news. Physicists have reached the point where it is extremely difficult to observe a physical phenomenon they can’t predict, which is very similar to saying the project is almost complete.
(1) Here I’m speaking mostly of particle physics. Condensed-matter physics has been much more successful over the past 50 years or so. Other disciplines may vary.
Physics also seems to help with clear philosophical thinking, and has lots of unintuitive stuff that trains the skill of looking past your models and into the Real Thing. Of Deep Fundamental Principles, I also think physics has some of the easier ones to see, like the conservation principles (once you get why a physicist can be so confident of the non-existence of a perpetual motion machine, you can start to imagine how there could be other Deep Principles which could justify seemingly excessive confidence about other complicated domains).
On the other hand, mediocre physicists tend to be too arrogant, and the current generation of physicists seems to have lost the way in some important (but hard to pin down) sense.
the current generation of physicists seems to have lost the way in some important (but hard to pin down) sense
My impression of physics (1) post-1970-or-so is that it’s lost the balance between theory and experiment that makes science productive. Hypotheses like “superstring theory” or “dark matter” are extremely difficult to test by experiment (through no fault of the physicists’ own). Physicists have tried to to make up for it with improvements in theory, but without experiments bringing discipline to the process it doesn’t quite work.
In one sense, this is good news. Physicists have reached the point where it is extremely difficult to observe a physical phenomenon they can’t predict, which is very similar to saying the project is almost complete.
(1) Here I’m speaking mostly of particle physics. Condensed-matter physics has been much more successful over the past 50 years or so. Other disciplines may vary.