I’ve been looking at some biographical material of the founders of modern physics and it’s striking how much attention they paid to philosophy: Bohr was obsessed with Kierkegaard and his followers, Einstein read Kant. Heisenberg read Plato's Timaeus.
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There is a big list of physicists who avoided it.
But it seems like once upon a time, every academic read philosophy. It's just what you did.
Physics is essentially maths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8fG_FghAvc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmlyQ0PjLzY
And, y’know… I agree! He’s a convincing chap.
I think we’d all agree that physics maths are already in danger of straying quite far from empirically-proven facts; they definitely shouldn’t be unshackled completely!
Much like all biology becomes chemistry at some point, and all chemistry becomes physics at some point :)
Physics uses mathematical models and checks their correspondence to experimental evidence - well, if there is any correspondence.
Check out *The Rigour of Angels* if you haven’t yet, it covers Bohr (by far my fave!) incidentally through Heisenberg, and both of their relations to Kant.
IMO Mach is a *way* under-appreciated thinker, and perhaps the most explicitly philosophical of them all.
I'm thinking:
- Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (2021) about Heisenberg, Schrödinger
- William Egginton's Rigor of Angels (2024) on Heisenberg, Kant (1/2)
Chasing a scientific sublime, these books hone in on physicists' philosophy. I think they do so to make a bid at offering founding myths that work against modern disenchantment
Not as an edgy atheist, but a confused agnostic.