Why Science Needs Philosophy More than Ever
What’s the Latest Development?
For the last forty years, scientists have been unable to reconcile a series of fundamental contradictions in the arenas of math and science. Generally relativity and quantum mechanics, for example, have opposing views of the universe and have yet proven experimentally true. Endeavors to unite them, such as string theory, are widely regarded as incomprehensible even to those working in the hard sciences. Within quantum mechanics itself is a contradiction called the measurement problem, arising from the Uncertainty Principle, which suggests that the very measurements established to confirm quantum theory should be impossible.
What’s the Big Idea?
Mathematics and physics have had similarly hard times coping with consciousness, or how matter reveals itself to other matter, and the fact that, as Einstein said, the present tense—“now” in the strictest sense—lies just outside the realm of science. “This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world—and what we mean by ‘reality’. … ‘It is time’ physicist Neil Turok has said, ‘to connect our science to our humanity, and in doing so to raise the sights of both’. This sounds like a job for a philosophy not yet dead.”
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