Philosophy and science

What do you take to be some of his faults?

>physicist
Beat it stemlet

...

>What do you take to be some of his faults?
I think there's two main aspects I dislike him for:

1) He speaks about things he obviously doesn't fully yet understand. To showcase this, I just googled him right now and this is from his most recent interview with Quanta Magazine:

>"I don’t think they saw it as a problem. The development was highly algebraic, and the more algebraic the technique, the further you get from having a geometrical intuition about what you’re doing. So if you develop the standard account of, say, the metric of space-time, and then you ask, “Well, what happens if I start putting negative numbers in this thing?” That’s a perfectly good algebraic question to ask. It’s not so clear what it means geometrically. And people do the same thing now when they say, “Well, what if time had two dimensions?” As a purely algebraic question, I can say that. But if you ask me what could it mean, physically, for time to have two dimensions, I haven’t the vaguest idea. Is it consistent with the nature of time that it be a two-dimensional thing? Because if you think that what time does is order events, then that order is a linear order, and you’re talking about a fundamentally one-dimensional kind of organization."
>"the metric of space-time, and then you ask, “Well, what happens if I start putting negative numbers in this thing?” That’s a perfectly good algebraic question to ask. It’s not so clear what it means geometrically."
To a non-physicist this might seem smart and deep and whatnot but one could argue that his statement is false or at least incomplete.

2) The other thing which I have a major issue with is that, at every conference I've seen him (about 3 or 4 idk), he puts his theories and ideas on a pedestal and treats everyone else and their ideas like braindead idiots.

sauce

Any book about the evolution of the concepts of physics

The story of philosophy by Will Durant. Really good summary of the major philosophers, a much better read for the majority than the original sources that can be so obscure and hard to understand.

There's literally nothing wrong with those Dawkins quotes.

Sauce on the girl, not the book you moron where do you think you are

on a board where off topic discussion and porn posting is a bannable offense and where you just got reported for encouraging off topic posting nigger

yeah his quotes are basically fine. Dawkins is completely autistic about religion but he isn't some anti-philosopher

OP here, I agree; the other 3 are cancerous tho.

You tell him, m'man!

Really, I know Veeky Forums likes to pretend they're deep and smart, but most of you would be better off reading summaries smarter people have made of the writings of these philosophers that you're interested in. There are some philosophers that aren't that hard to read (Aristotle comes to mind), but people like Kant are really hard to digest, which is why I really recommend Will Durant.

Physicist here. I can't say that any philosophy book will really actually help you with contemporary physical concepts. Note I say this as a criticism to contemporary physics and not to philosophy.

I suppose one of the works that really put a lasting impression on me and made me rethink the ways I was facing the whole academia thing was Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, for many reasons but mainly because I was really stuck into a position of logical positivism before that. It helped me grapple at the fact that relationships among members of sets do not actually give insight on some underlying nature of said members (e.g what is "work"? Whatever answer I can give on physical grounds relies on comparing it to more things I can only define by using "work" in their definition), in spite of it being very helpful and satisfying to work out these relations. Most of the other stuff I read is purely out of curiosity and not particularly looking for insight on physical matters. I have read some Greeks (Aristotle and Plato mainly), Hobbes and Hume (which I'm not sure I was prepared to do, because I compare literally any social situation to concepts they expose), and /ourguys/ meme philosophers like Nick Land and also people like Bostrom (I work with developing GPU packages like Monte Carlo and dynamical methods and recently machine learning stuff, so I'm very into the philosophy of emergence and complexity). I have also read the "New History of Western Philosophy" by A. Kenny, which is short but gives a good overall.

This is not poor bait, most physicists I collaborate with are heartless chinks and indians that get a hard-on when they see a graphene sheet spectrum or an X-ray diffraction. They have no idea what the underlying theory for whatever software package they are running even is, and I have to constantly rewrite papers to meet basic standards of methodology. Whatever attempt at understanding what is going on, is made by a few people while most of us are busy pressing buttons and calibrating equipment. Physicists are the most overspecialized bunch of technicians around, while the fundamental aspects themselves are mostly gone except for a few groups. It's a sad state of affairs where people like Krauss and Dawkins believe they have superseded Ontology and now have the last say in "why" things are the way they are, when they can't even bother with their actual job, which is saying "how" are the relations among things the way they are. Computers further help in stupefying my fellow colleagues because they don't even have to think about which things make sense to compare to each other and which don't make any sense at all. Most of what I say in conferences is completely wasted until I say "Well and this method is 30x faster than the established one, with the same error bounds". They don't even know what the error bounds are lol. Anyway I'm just venting in someone else's topic, OP should go read some Greeks.

Everything Bachelard ever wrote

A Nice Derangement of Epistemes by Zammito

Poincare

Koyre's Closed World to the Infinite Universe

Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought

Everything N.R. Hanson

Everything Sellars

Hard mode: Merleau-Ponty's Rebirth of Cosmology

Suppose I wasn't someone doing Monte Carlo simulations and stuff like that but was in fact a future theoretical/mathematical physicist; would your recommendations change? The things you're describing in your second paragraph is something I've sadly seen many of my professors do.

If it always makes you rage, wouldn’t that make it good bait?