Quantum Gravity Expert Says "Philosophical Superficiality" Has Harmed Physics

1. On historical science. The process of science has changed drastically over the centuries. To discover the law of gravitation, a few people with telescopes had to tabulate a few thousand data points, do some manipulations and discover the law. For the search of the Higgs, eg. the statistical procedures to be used where established well in advance of data collection to avoid potential biases. The idea is that more advanced science requires more careful procedures and analysis. Rovelli is arguing that we need to change our method yet again towards being more careful and formal to make advances.

2. Your first paragraph is a strawman. There is much more to the philosophy of science than your examples. See [1]. Or consider that "what is probability?" does not have a good answer. This is a question that philosophy struggles with and that has deep relevance to physics - eg. the ontology of quantum mechanics.

[1] http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/02/24/post-deb...

        Thus, for  anything  to be empirically  real, it
        must  be spatial, temporal, and causal.  Yet  space,
        time,  and  causality   cannot   be  proven   to  be
        empirically  real themselves! If space is thought of
        as an empirical entity, the insoluble problem arises
        whether it is finite or infinite. In the first case,
        there would have to be something 'outside'  space, a
        metaspace, which  is an absurd  notion;  but  in the
        second  case  it could  never  be differentiated  of
        anything  and would therefore  have no identity.  If
        time  is finite, there  would  have  to be something
        'before' and 'after' it, which again is absurd;  but
        if  it is infinite, it would  take  an  eternity  to
        arrive at the present moment, which therefore  could
        never come about.  Finite causality would enhance an
        unimaginable  'first  cause'  of all  events  in the
        universe, while  infinite  causality  poses, mutatis
        mutandis, the same problem as infinite time.

It's a pity to see this come out in some of Rovelli's statements in this interview, because the rest of it is so wonderfully measured and thoughtful.

I think string theory as a theory of everything is an excellent example. From the outside at first it seemed promising, but nowadays looks more like a very complex mathematical chimera which we don't have a particular way of proving nor disproving. But string theorists insist that these aren't merely thought experiments, this is SCIENCE, even if we have to add dimensions and multiple universes we never experimentally detected to try to make it work. Maybe it works in a blackboard, ¿but how do we know it reflects reality?

Philosophy of Science should be useful to check if we are doing science right or are being carried away by beautiful math and thought experiments. Maybe a scientist doesn't need philosophy a priori to do science, as a doctor doesn't need philosophy to cure people, but both epistemology and ethics are useful to contemplate if we are doing it right or something should be improved. At least that's my opinion.

* Of course it's just Plato relating what he says are Socrates's arguments, so there's that too.

Do you have a reference? The dog experiment seems statistically significant (http://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers/a-dog-that-s..., shows ANOVA, F-value (df 2,22)=20.46; p<0.0001). ). What exactly about that experiment is inconclusive?

Note that I'm not saying telepathy exists. I'm discussing an experiment for which I have no sensible explanation. Is there some data/papers/methods I'm missing?

Lawrence Krauss: Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.

Neil Tyson DeGrasse: Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would be scientist but without a laboratory, right? And so what happens is, the 1920s come in, we learn about the expanding universe in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientists was rendered essentially obsolete, and that point, and I have yet to see a contribution — this will get me in trouble with all manner of philosophers — but call me later and correct me if you think I’ve missed somebody here. But, philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, the word physicist didn’t even exist in any important way back then. So, I’m disappointed because there is a lot of brainpower there, that might have otherwise contributed mightily, but today simply does not. It’s not that there can’t be other philosophical subjects, there is religious philosophy, and ethical philosophy, and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosophers to do, but the frontier of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.