David Deutsch, controversial quantum physicist extraordinaire, lays into modern science in a big way (H/t: WGL3):
I don’t know. I suspect it is related to a more general anti-rational phenomenon that was present in nearly all 20th-century philosophies, especially logical positivism, and reverberated into other fields. This was intended to be a retreat from metaphysics, which many philosophers considered meaningless, but really it was a retreat from reality and explanation. In physics, it took the form of deciding as a matter of principle that science is not about discovering how the world really is, but instead must confine itself to predicting the outcomes of observations. When quantum mechanics came along it required a drastic revision of people’s conception of the world. Many physicists responded by denying that physics is about the world at all, only about what we see.
Logical positivism is a form of solipsism. If you say physics is only about predicting the outcomes of experiments, you can only really say it’s about experiments that you personally do, because to you any other person is just another thing you’re observing. But solipsism is a dead-end philosophy and when it comes to science it’s a poison. It doesn’t allow further progress from existing theories, and that’s why I think applications of quantum theory, particularly quantum computation, were overlooked for decades. You could say people didn’t really think the theory was true because they had rejected the idea of truth in science. Truth in science must mean correspondence to reality, or it means nothing.
Logical positivism is a dead end, and in science it’s a poison.
Read the whole thing , as they say.
