Footnote Physicist

          “Bad faith changes everything.”           – Bret Weinstein I           “Trust, but verify.”           – U.S. President Ronald Reagan II           Intellectual honesty is one of the most difficult ethics for people to follow, but also one of the biggest non-starters in science.  It is just not optional.  One does not want any amount of trust in science, yet reluctantly concedes that it is necessary methodologically (in-principle, we could all replicate every experiment, in-practice, we cannot do everything for ourselves, and need to rely on the credible reports of others).  Yes, there are experts, but no, they are not authorities.  Science does rely in practice, methodologically, on some small amount of trust because, dollars to donuts, once one implements the scientific process, the reality is th...

          “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”           — Ernest Rutherford I           The key dichotomy in philosophy of science, that of epistemology and ontology, gives rise to many other interesting manifestations.  One, which scientists often argue over today, are laws versus facts.  In the past, it was understood that laws—the mechanical philosophies by which the world unfolded, were fundamental and gave rise to facts (the empirical measurement of which could be used to falsify or verify such mechanical hypotheses).  This is the correct understanding, epistemologically, as it actually explains rather than merely describes the world (it describes the relationships between objects and their dynamics over time, not just the state of an object at a given time).  In this way, we may grasp causes, not just effects.       ...