2008 Woodie Awards
Einstein warned us about physicists
Fred Bauer
Issue date: 2/5/05 Section: Viewpoint
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Why can you take a course in physics without first taking a course in philosophy? For the same reason you can take a course in philosophy without first taking a course in philosophy. Every college student must have the five-year-old's common-sense worldview-philosophy plus a vocabulary. Without both, "Guten Morgen" would be as unintelligible as "Go to hell."
No infant is ready to take a course, but students who understand "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" are ready for Newton. They can grasp Newton's mathematical, natural philosophy 'law' about gravitational attraction between planets, because they already know about things in the sky. They can understand his idea that the moon is falling' because they know about apples and leaves that fall. They can grasp relativity fantasies about space stretching and time dilation because they understand "Space, the Final Frontier" and "Time's up!" Without a philosophy for interpreting physicists' formulas, formulas mean absolutely nothing! (What does "32 x 1 x 1" mean? Or "a x b = c2"?)
So long as we are unaware of the importance of our common-sense philosophy, we neglect it. When we neglect it, we get the result reported by M. Kline: "The greatest science fiction stories are in the science of physics." All theories use fictions. True, we need pragmatic fictions. But we need the five-year-old's understanding of the difference between real and imaginary things even more. The monster in our nightmare was imaginary. Mom, who comforted us, was real. Each of us who reads about particles or waves in space-time must decide for ourselves what is real and what is imaginary. To decide rightly, we must keep Einstein's warning in mind. "To him who is a discoverer in this field [physics], the products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he regards them, and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities."
Einstein's pragmatic fictions are useful. Even more useful are his reflections on theory.
No infant is ready to take a course, but students who understand "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" are ready for Newton. They can grasp Newton's mathematical, natural philosophy 'law' about gravitational attraction between planets, because they already know about things in the sky. They can understand his idea that the moon is falling' because they know about apples and leaves that fall. They can grasp relativity fantasies about space stretching and time dilation because they understand "Space, the Final Frontier" and "Time's up!" Without a philosophy for interpreting physicists' formulas, formulas mean absolutely nothing! (What does "32 x 1 x 1" mean? Or "a x b = c2"?)
So long as we are unaware of the importance of our common-sense philosophy, we neglect it. When we neglect it, we get the result reported by M. Kline: "The greatest science fiction stories are in the science of physics." All theories use fictions. True, we need pragmatic fictions. But we need the five-year-old's understanding of the difference between real and imaginary things even more. The monster in our nightmare was imaginary. Mom, who comforted us, was real. Each of us who reads about particles or waves in space-time must decide for ourselves what is real and what is imaginary. To decide rightly, we must keep Einstein's warning in mind. "To him who is a discoverer in this field [physics], the products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he regards them, and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities."
Einstein's pragmatic fictions are useful. Even more useful are his reflections on theory.