In Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science)

by Steven Gussman

        Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg admits (against my hopes) that To Explain The World isn't a philosophy of science book, but he does appear to claim that it's a history of philosophy of science book.¹  On this front, I believe it fails.  To be fair, Weinberg also admits that he's being intentionally irreverent throughout the text, sometimes judging history's thinkers with the full cumulative hindsight of present knowledge to gauge progress.²  The occasional irreverence towards a scientist may be forgiven as the author tends to nevertheless take the subject matter very seriously.  But a noticeable exception to this rule is Weinberg's sometimes irreverence about philosophy of science itself (a trait not uncommon in physicists).³  I argue that Weinberg, like many particle physicists, is too focused on particular kinds of experimentation as if it were the only tool, answering the only questions, in science.⁴  As a result, the book glosses over the significance of the ancient Greek naturalists and almost doesn't at all mention the role of mechanical philosophy in The Enlightenment.  This then has the effect of culminating in a criticism of those great scientists who have taken issue with the anti-realism implied by naive views of quantum physics.⁵  Weinberg won the Nobel prize for very important contributions to quantum field theory and helped to coin the term, The Standard Model Of Particle Physics⁶—in fact, like many, he calls The Standard Model “complete” moments before admitting it so far has very little to say about gravity;⁷ conversely, Einstein's general theory of relativity is a thoroughly classical gravitational theory in the sense that it completely obeys mechanical philosophy, (even moreso than Newton's theory!).  At least Weinberg admits that quantum physics is “the most radical” paradigm shift since Newton (many act like there's no particular elephant in the room),⁸ but he appears to be somewhat indifferent to the demise of determinism.⁹  Weinberg's emphasis is to try and trace the history of experimental methodology, but along the way he at times altogether discounts non-experimental observation.¹⁰  While I agree that experimental evidence is the platinum standard, observational evidence is then the gold standard—indeed, (by his own admission) it's a large part of the astrophysics and cosmology that he mentions positively.¹¹  No history of philosophy of science or methodology should trivialize the importance of (even non-experimental) observation; even to this day, many thinkers appear to choose their favorite ideas over (or entirely outside of the consideration of) the empirical evidence.¹²  I argue that there are dueling crises in physics because the physicists, who were largely coherent since Newton, split into two factions during Einstein's time.   Gone is the balance between mechanical philosophy and ontology (or realism) with the importance of verification by (in the best case, experimental) observation.   I see two broad camps: the ontological extremists who want a genuine theory of everything, but who have all but abandoned the fact that they need to be guided (and ultimately, verified) by empirical evidence (perhaps the worst offenders have the most popular such hypothesis: string theory);¹³ and the epistemological (or perhaps more myopically, the methodological) extremists: The Standard Model quantum physicists are so singularly interested in a mathematical description of ever more unnatural experimental results (it's not obvious to many of us that superpositions and other quantum phenomena extrapolate to macroscopic scales), that when they can be bothered to speak of a world-view, they make ridiculous statements like, “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”¹⁴  That is, a faction that is so ontologically focused that they have neglected epistemology, and vice versa.¹⁵  In light of this argument (which I formulated some time ago), it was interesting to read of the historical argument about the model of the solar system between the philosophical Aristotelians and the pragmatic Ptolemaics.¹⁶  Though the latter did win most of the direct battles, I think Weinberg comes down far too hard in their favor; in literal terms, both are made obsolete (now, thrice) by later paradigm shifts, the latter two of which are sensitive both to agreement with observation and mechanical ontology (Keplerian geometry, Newtonian mechanics, and Einsteinian mechanics).¹⁷

        Ironically, given Weinberg's glib disposition towards philosophy of science (which is the only justification for the detailed work he does as a physicist),¹⁸ Weinberg goes on to praise multiple facets of research which are clearly arguments from philosophy of science (moreso than from physics).  One is the need for empirical evidence.¹⁹  Second is the provisional nature of knowledge (the fact that we're never completely certain of a claim because we tend only to falsify alternative explanations and accrue statistical, not absolute, proof in favor of one).²⁰  Third is Occam's Razor (or The Principle Of Parsimony), which is the preference for the simpler of two theories both of which give equally good empirical predictions.²¹  Fourth, Weinberg argues that theories ought to have as little fine-tuning (or what I would call free-parameters—variables whose values need to be fit to empirical data for the theory to work, without the theory itself constraining or explaining such values) as possible (this argument is not merely practical; if all you wanted were the right numerical answers, you wouldn't worry about such things).²²  Fifth is the abandonment of teleology (the intuition that the natural world has some human-like purpose or goal, except where properly understood by analogy, as in an evolutionary context).²³  Those listed so far are fairly standard principles of philosophy of science; they cannot be considered “physics”, exactly, because they apply to all levels of the scientific world-view (they are the shared epistemology of the scientific method).   Sixth is a controversial claim about “aesthetics”, which includes elegance and symmetry²⁴ (the latter is a kind of “beauty” which is not necessarily as frivolous as it may sound—mathematical physicist Emmy Noether famously discovered the correspondence between conservation laws and mathematical symmetries).²⁵  Seventh is the disregarding of worries about the artificiality of experimental design obfuscating or changing the observed results (in other words, assuming that experimental results represent natural behaviors).²⁶  These two could be forgiven moreso for seeming like physics proper, rather than philosophy of physics (but I still think we benefit from their being understood under the latter category).  The eighth is what Weinberg's fellow physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out”²⁷ and what evolutionary entomologist E. O. Wilson called “the Ionian Enchantment”²⁸ (that is, the psychological disposition to enjoy discovery and understanding).²⁹  It is strange to me that one who is hostile towards an articulated philosophy of science (he emphasizes of Newton's success that, “This was not because Newton's theory satisfied a preexisting metaphysical criterion for a scientific theory.  It didn't.”) would, instead of merely admitting that concerns must then necessarily be more practical than explanatory, actually put forth an alternative philosophy of science that is all about individuals being guided by ill-defined, felt criteria such as “irresistibility”, “desire”, “pleasure”, “satisfaction”, “joy”, “delight”, “experience”, or “happiness” (particularly given his, like myself, being explicitly anti-social-constructivist).³⁰  As Weinberg knows, this is a story easily refuted by cross-cultural evidence: perhaps most cultures find mythology meets all of these criteria (why would The Scientific Revolution be so special if the philosophy under-girding it were so irresistible?), and Weinberg admits that even most non-mythological cultures do not produce scientific knowledge.³¹  I suppose one could square his arguments by assuming that he agrees about the tastes of the general populations of most cultures for most of history, but believes there to be a select few with the right sensibilities to do good science.  I do think there are innate aptitudes and attitudes (which also need cultivation) that lend themselves to science, and I am happy to see thinkers like Weinberg and E. O. Wilson defend this unpopular concept, but the idea that this spontaneous class of people's tastes are enough to guide scientific research properly without serious reflection upon the philosophy of science they intuit and discover is wrong-headed, and it is not even what Weinberg believes.  In truth, he has all sorts of provisional philosophical prescriptions for valid science (such as those I have been listing, here), but he just seems to consider these either to be “physics”³² or too obvious to warrant explicit mention as “philosophy of science”.  He can say that these concepts discovered over the millennia³³ aren't prescriptive, but the fact is, if he detected a breaking of any of them in someone's hypothesis, he would quickly use the heuristic to disregard it and move on to something more likely to be fruitful (and he certainly wouldn't let students break these rules without correction)! Despite all of this, Weinberg writes,

        ... the a priori presumption in favor of principles of symmetry arose from many years of experience

        in searching for physical principles that describe the real world, and broken as well as unbroken

        symmetries are validated by experiments that confirm their consequences.”³⁴

But this is all that philosophy of science means!  Philosophy of science does develop through free inquiry over time (like any science), and I agree that we don't want stiflingly prescriptive dogma for how to properly conduct science, but like any other body of knowledge produced by the scientific method, to ignore or break those laws of philosophy of science we have recognized over the millennia is to contradict a physical law (or some other known facet of a science): it's not perfectly illegal, given the provisional nature of all knowledge, but one needs serious evidence for doing so.  We need to react to the breaking of the philosophy of determinism or mechanical philosophy with at least the level of skepticism any physicist approaches claims (empirical or otherwise) that one can break light-speed.  Einstein's relativistic theories were put through the wringer in part for good reason; quantum physics has from the start been accepted with astonishing acquiescence to hand-waving away the ontological issues with “quantum weirdness”.³⁵  If quantum physics is as fundamentally true as it is usually taken to be, we need to demonstrate the philosophical implications of this explicitly and rigorously, and we need to view it as progress in philosophy of science, not demonize philosophy of science as a meaningless sideshow (the same way quantum physics' more obvious successes are seen as progress in physics, not a refutation or disproving of the field up to that point).³⁶  While there are psychological prerequisites for a good scientist, they are not a replacement for philosophy of science, nor do they do much work in explaining the history of how that philosophy developed (for many people, all different kinds of philosophies have felt pleasing to engage in—Weinberg's own argument that experiment trumps passive observation has nothing to do with his feeling pleasure at one and not the other, for example).   The argument that the pleasures of good scientists are our guide to scientific research is essentially circular because the proper construal is that there is an objective normative philosophy of science which we struggle to discover (in much the same way we struggle to discover the descriptive laws of physics), that we are at a given time only in possession of a provisional best approximation of that epistemology, and that the character of good scientists' pleasures and intuitions merely lines up with this proper philosophy (making these men more likely to discover it, not define it in the first place).³⁷ Ninth, Weinberg defends reductionism (properly construed, with emergence always reducible).³⁸  With these last two, I am glad to see some of the most important (yet, along with essentialism, thoroughly stigmatized) concepts in philosophy of science be celebrated³⁹ (for example, if someone in the social sciences doesn't like a result, they can easily cash in on the base negative connotation associated with “reductionism” in lieu of a substantive counter-argument—almost always against genetic arguments).  Reductionism truly is one of the most important aspects of philosophy of science, though I can also see how one could hold that it is chiefly a physical result: the point is that every phenomenon is in principle reducible to its underlying physics, but the concept is ultimately related to the philosophy of science argument known as natural philosophy or naturalism which denies dualism and supernature.   It's not just that these concepts are chiefly philosophical rather than physical; more importantly for the present argument, many of them are surely flimsier requirements than determinism / mechanical philosophy (illustrating the problem with feeling your way through philosophy of science without taking it seriously).  Einstein's special theory of relativity's incorporation of a finite upper speed limit further details the laws of causality (causal information may travel from cause to effect at most as quickly as the speed of light); conversely, quantum physicists have yet to provide satisfactory explanations for several instantaneous effects (usually called unitary due to the matrix math that describes them) in their theory—as examples: quantum measurement / wavefunction collapse, and state correlations between distantly separated but quantum-entangled particles.  Some recent work has begun to show that at least some of these “random” events are slightly predictable, occur over a finite period of time, and may even be stopped from occurring as a result.⁴⁰  Finally, it seems as though Weinberg's philosopher is a straw-man: none of the great men he enumerated (nor myself) thinks that quantum physics should be thrown away—it is presumably unanimously agreed that of course any underlying theory which removes fundamental “quantum weirdness” would need to predict its emergence at the level of these experiments (it's not as though we disbelieved in Brownian motion before Einstein explained how the phenomenon emerges from underlying deterministic physics; but anyone who believed it fundamentally random was unwise), and that the theory we have so far is indispensable for its uses in the mean-time⁴¹ (in fact, if it's mathematically simpler, it'll probably still be a widely-used approximation as Newtonian physics is today).   What we argue against is the tendency of particle physicists to assume quantum theory is effectively complete and fundamental; they do not speak as though they're open to the possibility that the most fundamental bedrock of reality isn't so weird, lawless, and frankly, structureless.   Chaos is a terrible foundation for anything but a house of cards.

        I don't want to make it sound like I don't like To Explain The World for what it is, however.  This is a history of astronomy, and to some degree, astrophysics.   While almost all modern progress from the 20^th and 21^st centuries (as well as the history of all other branches of science) is rushed into the last few pages, as a history of physics culminating in Newton's Principia, I nevertheless learned a lot.  I appreciate Weinberg's clarification that the historical situation was not heliocentricity v. epicycles; whether geocentric or heliocentric, there was good empirical reason to believe in complications like epicycles that “preserved the phenomena” (agreed with empirical observation of the positions of the planets in the sky),⁴² and these didn't go away easily (really not until at least when Kepler realized orbits were generally elliptical and not perfectly circular).⁴³  One of my favorite chapters was “The Arabs” because I've long wanted to further explore the history of the scientific progress of The Middle East (at one time, a very big player).⁴⁴  I had not realized that some of these thinkers were given latinized names, so that one may at times come across them without realizing it.⁴⁵  Thinkers like al-Khwarizmi (with his contributions to algebra) are impressive, but it is also refreshing that in such politically correct times, Weinberg is not only willing to defend the European Scientific Revolution, but to point out that nowhere else, including The Middle East in its prime, made that level of progress (even pointing out that al-Khwarizmi's algebra wasn't a full mathematical formalism by today's standards).⁴⁶

        Now, I tend to rebel against what I see as the revisionist history of scientific progress that today's “big science” teams argue in favor of: that the lone genius is a fallacy; I disagree—lone geniuses are almost always responsible for the giant paradigm shifts and the “little guys”, most scientists, flesh out the general theories and their consequences, and exploit them for engineering purposes.⁴⁷  However, I make it a point to note any level of disconfirming evidence, and To Explain The World does give me some pause when Weinberg reveals that ideas associated with great men like Sir Isaac Newton were often built more piecemeal than I realized, over time, by the contributions of multiple thinkers (Newton famously writes, after all, that he “stood on the shoulders of giants.”).⁴⁸  I still think my conception of scientific progress is a better first approximation; no amount of even great scientists working together would be likely to produce the insights of an Einstein.  Genius exists, and for science, it is crucial.

Footnotes:

1. “So this book is not solely about how we came to learn various things about the world... My focus in this book is a little different—it is how we came to learn how to learn about the world... this is a work on the history rather than the philosophy of science... this book will emphasize physics and astronomy. It was [here] that science first took modern form.” See To Explain The World: The Discovery Of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg (Harper Perennial) (2015) (pp. x-xi).

2. See To Explain The World (pp. xiii-xiv, 145).

3. As one example, Weinberg writes, “It was essential in the discovery of science to separate science from what is now called philosophy. There is active and interesting work on the philosophy of science, but it has very little effect on scientific research.” (It is not obvious to me that this is the fault of those philosophers and not the physicists). See To Explain The World (pp. 28, 141, 179). For more examples of physicists signaling disrespect for philosophy writ large, see What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest For The Meaning Of Quantum Physics (Basic Books) (2018) (pp. 272). Stephen Hawking has also made disparaging comments about philosophy, see A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking (Bantam Books) (1988 / 1996 / 2017) (pp. 190-191). Frankly, knee-jerk criticism of much of academic philosophy is well deserved—continental philosophy, in particular postmodern anti-science, is largely sophistry (and I admit I had fun poking at it in Philosophy 101 in college). But many great scientists don't seem to realize that their scientific work is only justified by the analytical philosophy, philosophy of science, that underpins it. See philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's article (against the idea that) “Science Makes Philosophy Obsolete” in This Idea Must Die edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial) (2015) (pp. 129-131).

4. For a recent debate over this topic, see “The Uncertain Future of Particle Physics” by Sabine Hossenfelder (The New York Times) (2019) (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-large-hadron-collider.html) and “The Worth of Physics Research” by Lisa Randall (The New York Times) (2019) (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/letters/physics-research-collider-cern.html). Weinberg addresses the criticism that, “Elementary particle physicists are sometimes accused of a snobbish and expensive preoccupation with phenomena at the highest attainable energies...”, see To Explain The World (pp. 9). However, I maintain that no interest is paid to the mechanical behavior of particles (randomness is apparently good enough).

5. See To Explain The World (pp. 248-249). Ironically, Weinberg makes much of the fact that millennia-long philosophical holdouts for atomism (the view that the world is made of fundamentally indivisible particles) finally won the day against stark criticism in the early 20^th century. The situation is so close that Weinberg relays that anti-atomists even argued that the “fundamental” nature of thermodynamics precluded a deeper explanation, as quantum physicists do with key phenomena in their framework today (despite it being quite common-place in the grand scheme of science for a theory to turn out to emerge from a more fundamental one, as Newton's theory of gravity arises from Einstein's general theory of relativity—something Weinberg writes about in the book). See To Explain The World (pp. 250-251, 253, 259-260, 263-265). Of course, there was no reason for the null hypothesis to be in favor of or against atomism, and it was the new availability of just such adjudicating evidence that changed minds. But is there really no pause to wonder why those holdouts had been right? In the present case, I argue that deterministic mechanical philosophy is the null hypothesis: we have required it of every single scientific theory in all serious disciplines besides quantum physics (in fact, it wasn't even prerequisite; just an obvious feature of any serious explanation). The evidence from quantum physics alone, in its present state, certainly does not rise to the challenge of overthrowing that otherwise ubiquitous (even tautological) feature of science.

6. See To Explain The World (pp. 249).

7. See To Explain The World (pp. 264).

8. Weinberg admits that The Standard Model is surely emergent from some deeper explanatory theory, see To Explain The World (pp. 264-265). I am also aware that he has a chapter in his recent book, Third Thoughts: The Universe We Still Don't Know, entitled “The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics” (though I've yet to read this work). I feel somewhat conflicted picking on Weinberg on this particular topic: while he leans too far in the direction I am opposing, he is decidedly not the archetypal mainstream physicist in denial that there is anything at all weird about “quantum weirdness”—see for example, my critique of physicist Michael G. Raymer's Quantum Physics: What Everyone Needs To Know, which was published on Instagram on September 29^th, 2019 (https://www.instagram.com/p/B2naHrXAKi3/).

9. Weinberg writes, “The abandonment of determinism so appalled some of the founders of quantum mechanics, including Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Louis de Broglie, and Albert Einstein, that they did no further work on quantum mechanical theories, except to point out the unacceptable consequences of these theories... The rejection of quantum mechanical theories by these physicists meant that they were unable to participate in the great progress in the physics of solids, atomic nuclei, and elementary particles in the 1930s and 1940s.” See To Explain The World (pp. 248-249). One would think these men did more than enough for the development of quantum physics, as is! Besides, those criticisms of quantum physics often (I think temporarily) backfired into being contributions, such as Einstein et al. pointing out quantum entanglement, and Schrodinger's Cat essentially anticipating Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation. I think these philosophers of science Weinberg named will have the last laugh on quantum foundations. To be completely fair to Weinberg, one could argue that he's mainly making a point about timing: perhaps the measurement problem is a real problem, but one must push where there's mush, and the progress being made in the past century has been in work which leaves quantum physics well enough alone (although this is a somewhat circular defense of why we shouldn't be too worried about how radically different quantum ontology is from any other scientific theory), see To Explain The World (pp. 249). Weinberg also seems to insinuate that Newton would have been dissatisfied with The Standard Model due to its lack of teleology (even though his own theory lacked this), but neglects to mention that he is yet another great who would have agreed with the above thinkers' criticisms of quantum physics (Newton was dissatisfied that his own theory of gravitation acted at a distance)—all of this even as Weinberg emphasizes the similarities between Newton's kind of physics and Einstein's, though he places The Standard Model in the same category), see To Explain The World (pp. 253, 264).

10. See To Explain The World (pp. 194, 200, 255)

11. See To Explain The World (pp. 189). In the social sciences, geographer Jared Diamond is known for emphasizing the use of “the comparative method” or “natural experiments of history” where practical and ethical considerations disqualify experimentation, see the podcast episode “Science Salon Episode #65: Jared Diamond — Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis” (Skeptic) (2019) (https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/jared-diamond-upheaval-turning-points-for-nations-in-crisis/). Indeed, in support of federalism, The United States' Founding Fathers defended individual state autonomy partially by describing them as “experiments”—different attempts to solve similar problems that would naturally be adopted by other states if one found a suitable solution.

12. I emphasize this because most people have little respect for any form of empirical confirmation on their beliefs (Weinberg appears to agree—see To Explain The World, pp. 254), much less a distinction between passive and experimental observation (the former is clearly a much better standard than one's preferences, biases, and anecdotes, even if experiment tends to be better yet). A former computer mathematics professor of mine once lamented that he didn't believe in the science of climate change because we weren't there to directly observe longitudinal climate conditions in the deep past (much less experiment on the climate; this view of course precludes much of science, including cosmology). A humanities scholar acquaintance of mine (and fellow critic of the excesses of “woke” academia) once told me he's not a postmodernist but a poststructuralist (folks who think the subtleties of language such as word-choice have an outsize causal effect on the political world). He gave the example that he believed normalizing the use of “firefighter” in place of “fireman” was more inclusive to women. When I asked if he had any empirical evidence that this change had occurred, and that it had caused a higher percentage of women to become firefighters, he seemed as though he had never even thought to check whether the most basic evidence was in favor of his abstract reasoning! Worse yet, a history student friend of mine at a party got into an argument with me over whether history was a science, and argued (among other things) that the lack of experimentation in history meant that one could basically make up whatever they wanted without fear of serious disconfirmation! Of course, Weinberg must be sensitive to all of this, having written a book titled Facing Up: Science And Its Cultural Adversaries (though I have not read this work) and explicitly distancing himself from social constructionism (which he erroneously believed to be dwindling in number just as they were finally seizing the academy and popular belief), see To Explain The World (pp. xi).

13. Some of the physicists most associated with the empirical criticism of string theory are Sabine Hossenfelder, David Lindley, Lee Smolin, Eric Weinstein, and Peter Woit (though my engagement with their work on this problem is very limited at this time).

14. Retrieved from BrainyQuote (https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/niels_bohr_384378). I was unable to find the present quote in astrophysicist Adam Becker's book (though it is likely in there!); for similar anti-realism quotes from quantum physicists, see the excellent What Is Real? (pp. 14).

15. Peculiar to me is that the ontologically focused group tends to import some of the very ontologically problematic components of quantum physics right into their attempts at a theory of everything—those looking for a more fundamental theory which underlies The Standard Model, like string theory, loop quantum gravity, or twistor theory, import “quantum weirdness” into the base of their model rather than try to have these phenomena arise from something deterministic. I think this approach is wrong-headed (unless they're finding another, albeit deeper, interim theory which is not fundamental).

16. See To Explain The World (pp. 90, 95-100, 106, 141-143, 202) (in which Weinberg also notes that in their time, the Aristotelians were called “mathematicians” or “astronomers”; the Ptolemaics, “philosophers”, “physicists”, or “physicians”). Further, Weinberg describes philosopher Francis Bacon as such an empirical / practical extremist that he rejected even Ptolemy; and Weinberg considers Plato as a theoretical extremist, emphasizing the need for balance, see To Explain The World (pp. 201-202). Weinberg summarizes the debate thus, “For over a thousand years philosophers argued about the proper role of astronomers like Ptolemy—really to understand the heavens, or merely to to fit the data.” See To Explain The World (pp. 255). Weinberg argues that he's on the explanation side of things (and I certainly think he tends in that direction), but while The Standard Model can no doubt make exquisite (and indispensable!) predictions about certain physical constants, it cannot tell you anything satisfactory about what a particle is or what it's doing before measurement (and quantum physicists have seemed largely uninterested in this basic question); I think the problem is essentially that Weinberg (and most physicists) does have a philosophy of science even as he denies the need for one, and one which gets a lot right, but that has the fatal flaw of not including deterministic mechanical philosophy therein.

17. To Weinberg's credit, he does disagree with Ptolemaic “physicist turned philosopher Pierre Duhem”, who “... sought to restrict the role of science merely to the construction of mathematical theories that agree with observation, rather than encompassing to explain anything.” See To Explain The World (pp. 98-99, 372-373) which further cites To Save The Phenomena—An Essay On The Idea Of Physical Theory From Plato To Galileo by Pierre Duhem edited by E. Dolan and C. Machler (University Of Chicago Press) (1969) (though I have not read this work). Weinberg writes that explanation consists of more than a mere “collection of facts”, further writing that, “... the work of my generation of physicists certainly feels like explanation as we ordinarily use the word, not like mere description.” See To Explain The World (pp. x, 99, 373) which further cites “Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?” by Steven Weinberg (New York Review Of Books) (2001) (though I have not read this work). True, the later work in quantum physics does explain many things, capable of, for example, predicting aspects of chemistry, see To Explain The World (pp. 262). But in what way does it explain (or even describe!) what a particle is, or what it is doing, or how it gets from point A to point B? Perhaps quantum weirdness such as superpositions are fundamental and so need to be accepted as bed-rock truths, but they're certainly not self-explanatory (and The Standard Model has nothing to say about it one way or the other). Weinberg also points out that Ptolemy's and Aristotle's models actually make the same empirical predictions, when properly understood (meaning this was truly a philosophical battle at that point), see To Explain The World (pp. 90).

18. For an essay on the necessary philosophical underpinnings of all of science, see Goldstein's article (against the idea that) “Science Makes Philosophy Obsolete”. Weinberg includes a quotation by “Geminus of Rodes” for an ancient view of this debate, see To Explain The World (pp. 95-97).

19. See To Explain The World (pp. 254-255).

20. See To Explain The World (pp. 254-255).

21. I disagree with Weinberg that this is an essentially aesthetic argument, it seems only logical to me that we can only trust the reality of the simpler explanation when the more complicated one tells us no more about the world with its extra ontological baggage. Nonetheless, it is interesting that he mentions the preference for a simpler theory even when another has only marginally better empirical predictions (likely through some ugly corrective measures to fit the data rather than a realistic mechanism to actually predict it, I might add), see To Explain The World (pp. 150-151).

22. See To Explain The World (pp. 82-83, 149-151, 155 255). Weinberg also refers to them as “free numerical parameters”, see To Explain The World (pp. 88). While I agree that a proper theory should have few free parameters, I am comfortable with the existence of empirically measured physical constants (such as Newton's gravitational constant, G, or Einstein's speed limit, c) in our equations (nonetheless, I would of course be impressed by a theory which intrinsically implied these values without the need for measuring-and-inserting them), see “A Profusion Of Place | Part I: Of Unity And Philosophy” by Steven Gussman (Footnote Physicist) (2020) (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-profusion-of-place-part-i-of-unity.html). Weinberg argues that changing from the view of whether the heavens orbit the Earth or Earth simply rotates on its axis (or from Mercury and Venus orbiting the Earth to their orbiting the sun) is a matter of reducing fine-tuning, a reduction I would say is achieved through the use of Occam's Razor, see To Explain The World (pp. 85-86).

23. See To Explain The World (pp. 255, 265-266).

24. See To Explain The World (pp. 9, 150-151, 255).

25. See Why Does E = mc²? (And Why Should We Care) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Da Capo Press) (2009) (pp. 59-60, 113, 118). Weinberg also cautions that we of course cannot simply assume any given symmetry we can imagine will hold, noting that particle decays can be asymmetric, see To Explain The World (pp. 82-83).

26. See To Explain The World (pp. 255). I'm of two minds with this. As I mentioned before, experiment is the platinum standard of evidence, but experimental design matters a great deal! One's experimental design, especially as you climb towards the complexities of the social sciences, can (and have!) easily given misleading results. As I have also mentioned before, supplemental data from the passive observation of nature can help adjudicate in these situations. A potential example is evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein's argument that lab mice have been artificially selected into having unnatural characteristics, and as a result, much of our biomedical research contingent on the use of them may be in question, see the podcast episode “Bret Weinstein on 'The Portal' (w/ host Eric Weinstein), Ep. #019 - The Prediction and the DISC” uploaded to YouTube by Eric Weinstein (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s). In the context of the current covid-19 pandemic, some have emphasized the difference between experimental efficacy and in-situ effectiveness, see biostatistician Natalie E. Dean's Novermber 23^rd, 2020 Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1330917502407368706?lang=en); passive observation of correlations between interventions and outcomes in different locations during the pandemic should prove useful. I will even tie this point back into the quantum foundations debate: it seems to me that the standard view is a result of careless extrapolation from highly artificial experimentation (which suggests “quantum weirdness”) to the rest of the natural world, at all scales and under all conditions (this is what the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment was designed to expose, see What Is Real?, pp. 2-3)—I made a similar point in my review of What Is Your Dangerous Idea edited by John Brockman, an essay uploaded to Instagram on January 2^nd, 2021, entitled “The Good Kind Of Danger” by Steven Gussman (2021) (pp. 6-7 / img. 7-8) (https://www.instagram.com/p/CJkY5HlA_98/) (see footnote 13 on how I remembered someone making a similar point on Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast, but could not quite find it in the interviews with Rob Reid, Adam Becker, nor David Albert).

27. Feynman used this term in particular to talk about the joy of discovering (as in, deriving) things for oneself, even if the discovery had been made by (and credit given to) someone else before, see perhaps Surely, You're Joking Mr. Feynman (Adventures Of A Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman, edited by Ralph Leighton (W. W. Norton & Company) (1985 / 2018) (though the term is not indexed).

28. E. O. Wilson (who further cites “physicist and historian Gerald Horton”) uses this term in particular to mean that joyful experience of realizing the unity of scientific knowledge (that is, the way it all fits together like a snug puzzle), see Consilience: The Unity Of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson (Vintage Books) (1998) (pp. 4).

29. See To Explain The World (pp. 214, 248, 254-255).

30. See To Explain The World (pp. xi, 214, 248, 254-255).

31. See To Explain The World (pp. 254). It is especially surprising to hear this kind of argument from Weinberg, given he has written a book entitled Facing Up: Science And Its Cultural Adversaries. As a result, I know his positions cannot be as far from mine as they sometimes seem, but I do think that the difference in emphasis on philosophy of science is more than mere semantics.

32. See To Explain The World (pp. 267).

33. See To Explain The World (pp. 254-255).

34. See To Explain The World (pp. 9).

35. See To Explain The World (pp. 214).

36. Weinberg comes close to seeing the development of the scientific method in this way, see To Explain The World (pp. 254-255).

37. Weinberg briefly surveys some arguments for the historical and cultural forces that may have seeded or at least rewarded some of these scientific ethics, see To Explain The World (pp. 253). Early on, in what strikes me as a direct contradiction to hostility towards an articulated philosophy of science, he even emphasizes the “... 'discovery' instead of 'invention'...” of science because it is “... a technique that was waiting for people to discover it.” See To Explain The World (pp. xi). Weinberg also suggests an analogy from biology that some of us have thought of before: that science (really any philosophy) can be modeled with cultural evolutionary theory: the memes (idea-fragments) that survive do so because of a selection pressure (in his case, the “pleasure” felt by discoverers) which act on mutations (new ideas), see To Explain The World (pp. 248). But in the case of science, that selection pressure is philosophy of science (the scientific method)—among the fruits of modeling science this way is not an explanation of that selection pressure itself; it's just a fancy restatement of the problem in regards to that question (namely, where does the selection pressure come from?).

38. See To Explain The World (pp. 266-267). It has become fashionable to argue that certain emergent properties are not reducible to their underlying basic physics—that these systems are literally “greater than the sum of their parts” (this is sometimes called vertical causality). This is of course nonsense! Everything is in principle reducible to physics, but emergent patterns riding atop the full-resolution image are often useful approximations to study (nonetheless, these higher patterns must always be present in the patterns of information at every lower level: biology really is just complex chemistry and physics). When Weinberg agrees with my position on this, he is participating in an on-going philosophy of science debate! See To Explain The World (pp. 267).

39. I am always pleased with E. O. Wilson's un-apologetic defenses of said concepts, see Consilience (pp. 33, 58-60, 74, 91, 93-94, 109, 203, 230, 292) and Letters To A Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson (Liveright Publishing Corporation) (2013) (I would like to give a more specific citation but to my horror, the aforementioned book lacks an index and I was not able to find what I was looking for by flipping through!).

40. Such unanswered questions, dubbed quantum foundations, though not taken seriously by most physicists, are the topic of many books (such as What Is Real). Recently, (what appears to be very underrated) work was done showing that at least some quantum phenomena are more classical than physicists normally think, see “Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to Be Instantaneous, Take Time” by Philip Ball (Quanta Magazine) (2019), which discusses the results of “To catch and reverse a quantum jump mid-flight” by Z. K. Minev, S. O. Mundhada, S. Shankar, P. Reinhold, R. Gutiérrez-Jáuregui, R. J. Schoelkopf, M. Mirrahimi, H. J. Carmichael, and M. H. Devoret (Nature / Arxiv) (2019) (Paid: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1287-z) (Free: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.00545) (though I have not yet read this primary research).

41. Weinberg points out that The Standard Model (and generally any theory that isn't the final theory) is provisionally true and must be an approximation of any deeper theory waiting to be discovered (though again, he criticizes those who sought something deeper), see To Explain The World (pp. 99, 248-249, 264-265). Weinberg also cites the example of Einstein's theory of general relativity giving rise to Newtonian gravity, see To Explain The World (pp. 252-253). As well, he mentions that partial progress should be published, as someone else can always come along and give a second approximation (as was the case with Schrodinger and Dirac), see To Explain The World (pp. 152).

42. A term that goes back to at least 200 AD with “the philosopher Sosigenes”, see To Explain The World (at minimum, pp. 86).

43. See To Explain The World (generally pp. 77-100, 151-153, 166-168).

44. See To Explain The World (pp. 103-123).

45. See To Explain The World (pp. 107).

46. See To Explain The World (pp. 101, 106-107, 118).

47. I think mathematician, economist, and physicist Eric Weinstein has independently made a similar argument to mine, in some audiovisual medium. In a related argument, he has also said that he supports “genius” over “excellence” (which I take to roughly meet my conception of “paradigm shifters” versus “cogs in the machine”), see “Excellence” by Eric R. Weinstein (Edge) (2013) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23879).

48. See To Explain The World (generally pp. 147-255). Nevertheless, Weinberg seems inclined to my position as well, citing not only the singular importance of thinkers like “Galileo and Newton”, but also especially emphasizing the superiority of The Scientific Revolution over other periods of scientific thought, see To Explain The World (pp. 106, 145-146, 253-254).