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Comment by traes | Hacker News Reader

A very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die hard philosophers playing the villain in physics history. See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein.)

This makes it perhaps not a particularly good example of the phenomena being discussed, as he was suicidal not because of what he had discovered, but because no one believed what he had discovered.

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I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support).

Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.)

You mean that two physicists had a disagreement, one held institutional power, and ostracized the other.

Fine, but then why attack philosophy? Things are philosophy until they're not. Dogma happens in every field.

Is it really wrong to blame this one on philosophy? The source of the disagreement was inherently philosophical, lead by a philosopher, backed up by other mainstream philosophers, and undeniably held back physics. I don't mean to imply that philosophy is fundamentally evil or useless even when applied to physics; most early physicists also considered themselves philosophers. I'm just pointing out a mildly interesting pattern that I have noticed while reading about the history of physics. I recall that Einstein credited many of his insights to the field of philosophy. He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs, which many consider a slight stain on his legacy.

> He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs

What you accept or not is irrelevant. It’s the math that guides you. I too believe we only perceive randomness because we don’t see the complete picture, but that’s irrelevant until we have the means to explore what that whole picture could be.

>He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs, which many consider a slight stain on his legacy.

The stain comes from the distortion of what others have interpreted as Einstein's "rejection". Einstein believed that quantum mechanics must be incomplete, not wrong. The famous EPR paper wasn't a paradox at all - Einstein proposed a model (local hidden variables) that might have been valid. It took until Bell and later experiments of Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger (and others, but these three got the recent Nobel) to rule out local hidden variables.

Emmy Noether was a mathematician not a physicist (despite Noether's theorem), and the main obstacle to her obtaining a professorship was pretty obviously sexism (not to mention antisemitism).

> See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein

I thought that was sexism rather than philosophers? This was the same era and place that mostly ignored Bertha Benz.

(Or did you mean after moving to the USA?)

It was indeed sexism, but it was not sexism from the math department, who very much wanted to hire her. In fact, the Chair of Mathematics David Hilbert (of Hilbert space fame) personally recruited her.

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