Footnote Physicist

          “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”           –  Arthur Hays Sulzberger (as paraphrased by Carl Sagan) I           The modern term, “ skepticism , ” like so many philosophical terms, stems from the ancient Greek Sceptics (a profoundly doubtful school of philosophy). II    Skepticism is the amount of doubt one holds towards a particular claim—one might be ~1% skeptical of the claim that they are not in fact the children of their parents, and ~95% skeptical that the United States will enter into a war tomorrow, as examples. III   Like the ancient Greek namesake, people today confuse skepticism 's role in science, treating it as an unchecked virtue (or worse, as a double-standard to wield against evidence inconvenient to one's own tastes, all the while going easy on evidence that confirms their biases). IV   This naive view o...

          “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...

                    “Visions may be moral, political, economic, religious, or social.  In these or other realms, we           sacrifice for our visions and sometimes, if need be, face ruin rather than betray them.  Where           visions conflict irreconcilably, whole societies may be torn apart.  Conflicts of interests dominate           the short run, but conflicts of visions dominate history.                     We will do almost anything for our visions, except think about them.  The purpose of this           book is to think about them.”           – Thomas Sowell I           “The second law of thermodynamics is acknowledged in everyday life, in sayings suc...

          “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by           the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according           to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most           wonderful have been, and are being evolved."           – Charles Darwin I           “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”           – Attributed to Albert Einstein II           In philosophy of science, elegance (a term most commonly associated with the field of physics) is an important concept to get right, and there are many ways to misunderstand it.   Eleg...

          “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”           – Attributed to Albert Einstein I           A very important dichotomy that even working scientists frequently mix up is the difference between in-principle and in-practice .   In-principle means something is actually , ideally, ontologically the case.  For example, in-principle , one can deterministically predict which face a flipped coin or rolled die will land on, every single time.  This is because the system is understood: in-principle , if you had perfectly accurate and precise initial condition measurements (such as the object's orientation and the force exerted by the thumb) and applied Newton's kinematic equations, you would get the same (correct) answer every time you performed the calculation.   In-practice , however, means that in the real world where y...