[OBJECTIVE SCIENCE.COM] Philosophy in the twentieth century is characterized by its essential superficiality. In every branch, contemporary philosophers explicitly renounce the basic content of their subject, leaving them with empty methodology applied to nothing. The result is logic divorced from concepts, concepts divorced from percepts, ethics without epistemology, epistemology without metaphysics -- in short, form without content.

This post-modern philosophy of emptiness is the source of the superficiality found in so many areas of art and science today. For example, in psychology we have elaborate statistical studies with no acknowledgement that man is a conscious being; in painting and sculpture, the explicit repudiation of representational art; in economics, complex theories that fail to recognize man's ability to produce material wealth. We have literature without plot, politics without principles, and music without melody. The influence of contemporary philosophy on virtually all subjects has caused them to drop their substance and collapse into the arbitrary manipulation of symbols, into contentless formalism.

Even the hard-nosed science of physics has not been immune to the influence of contemporary philosophy. In physics, this modern superficiality takes the form of mathematical formalism divorced from any reference to causal mechanisms, i.e., equations whose referents in the physical world are unknown and not sought.

Most people are familiar with the bizarre interpretation usually given to the twentieth century's major development in physics: quantum mechanics. This interpretation, due to Bohr, Heisenberg, and the other founding fathers of the theory, holds that on the microscopic scale matter lacks identity, the law of cause and effect breaks down, and reality fails to exist independently of the act of observation.

While a lot is made of this irrational interpretation in the various popularizations of twentieth century physics, most physicists do not explicitly endorse this obvious nonsense. Instead, they adopt a "pragmatic" approach, in which questions of interpretation -- that is, the physical meaning of the mathematical formalism -- are simply dismissed. They take the equations themselves as the essential content of the theory, the attitude being: "Don't worry about what the equations mean or what reality is really like. Such things don't matter. What matters is only that the mathematical laws have been discovered -- now let's just use them to calculate something."

In quantum mechanics, this apathy toward the physical meaning of the mathematical formalism shows up in physicists' complete indifference to the few more rational interpretations which have surfaced. Examples include David Bohm's so-called Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, discovered in the 1950's, and Lewis Little's recent Theory of Elementary Waves, both of which attempt to give a causal account of the physical mechanism behind the equations of quantum mechanics.

The attitude of most physicists toward such theories is a mixture of apathy and hostility. Generally, such work is regarded as, at best, a waste of time, since it doesn't generate any "new physics." The equations, after all, are the same -- as of course they must be, since the correctness of the equations is not in doubt. And since the equations are regarded as the only real content of the theory, these attempts at a causal interpretation are dismissed as unimportant. Any attempt to understand how physical objects move and interact in reality -- that is, to understand the physical meaning of the equations -- is regarded as a throwback to an unenlightened 19th century attitude which was supposedly overthrown by experimental results early in the 20th century.

In the other major 20th century theory in physics -- relativity -- the story is much the same. The physical discovery that led to relativity theory was that the measured speed of light is independent of the state of motion of the source and the detector. So, for example, one would measure the same speed of light whether one were racing toward the light source, or speeding away from it. (Obviously the corresponding experiment with, say, baseballs would yield different results. If you were sprinting toward the pitcher as he delivered a fastball, it would move just that much faster relative to you.)

Relativity theory, however, does not explain this surprising and counter-intuitive observation. Instead, it simply works out the consequences when the constancy of the speed of light is taken as a mathematical axiom. The standard view of physicists is that the axiom needs no physical explanation. Rather, it is simply a brute fact which must be accepted and from which additional predictions may be deduced.

It is perhaps necessary to clarify exactly what the problem with 20th century physics is and what it is not. The problem is emphatically not that the equations of contemporary physics are wrong, nor even that the equations were discovered before the underlying causal mechanisms were understood. Historically, it is the normal progression for a regularity in nature to be observed and quantified mathematically before the underlying causes are identified. For example, the motions of the planets were well-known and fit to the equivalent of equations some two thousand years before Galileo and Newton finally established the heliocentric picture of the solar-system that explains their trajectories across the sky. Similarly, Gregor Mendel identified the mathematical laws of biological inheritance long before the mechanism of inheritance was discovered. And as a final example, the quantitative relationship between the density, pressure, and temperature of a dilute gas (the ideal gas law) was formulated long before the atomic theory of matter provided a causal explanation of that relationship.

Thus the problem with contemporary physics is not simply that we have equations without yet knowing the causal mechanisms behind them. That is the current state of affairs, but it is a normal, intermediate stage in the growth of knowledge. Rather, the problem is that physicists have abandoned the attempt to discover causal mechanisms. Such explanations of the equations are regarded as unimportant or impossible.

This attitude, which I call the Primacy of Mathematics, takes causal explanations to be either irrelevant to the progress of physics or inaccessible by the methods of physics. In either case, such explanations are no longer sought. This obviously stunts the growth of knowledge, since it makes physicists think they are finished understanding a given phenomenon when in fact they have only begun to describe it. Deep questions, the kind that lead to identification of underlying causes, simply no longer get asked.

Sir James Jeans, one of the founding fathers of the quantum theory, eloquently summarizes this contemporary Primacy of Mathematics attitude:

[T]he final truth about a phenomenon resides in the mathematical description of it; so long as there is no imperfection in this, our knowledge of the phenomenon is complete. We go beyond the mathematical formula at our own risk; we may find a model or picture which helps us to understand it, but we have no right to expect this, and our failure to find such a model or picture need not indicate that either our reasoning or our knowledge is at fault. The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulae and the phenomena they describe is not a step towards, but a step away from reality; it is like making graven images of a spirit. [1]

What then is left of theoretical physics? Equations - along with the motto: "Calculate, calculate, calculate." Or in other words: "The equations are here; let's use them. What do they mean? Blank out."

The purpose of what follows is to identify the causes in philosophy of physicists' obsession with mathematical formalism -- and the incredible superficiality to which this leads. We will thereby also explode the myth that it was scientific discoveries that led physicists to reject the need for causal explanations of their formalisms. As we will see, the rejection of the physical world in favor of mathematical formalism comes from the influence of two philosophers -- Plato and Kant -- and not from any 20th century scientific laboratory. Indeed, the Primacy of Mathematics attitude is nearly as old as Western Civilization itself. Let us, then, begin with the originator of the Primacy of Mathematics, the man who planted a seed which Plato turned into a complete philosophic system: Pythagoras in Ancient Greece.

To be continued in Part 2 next month.

References:

[1] Ken Wilbur, ed., Quantum Questions, page 142.

Copyright 2001 Travis Norsen/ Objective Science. All rights reserved. Permission granted to link to this article only; but, permission is not granted to republish it. 

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