The foregoing is an example of what William James called the philosophy of “nothing but.” Its practitioners can be counted upon to reduce any phenomenon, however mysterious, to: “O, that is nothing but (blah blah, quack quack).”
Closer to home, Gell-Mann has recently opined that Bohr & Heisenberg “brainwashed” a generation of physicists into thinking QM was complete.
“The overcoming of naive realism has been relatively simple. In his introduction to his volume, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth, Russell has characterized this process in a marvellously pregnant fashion:
‘We all start from ‘naive realism,’ i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it means to be most objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will.′
Apart from their masterful formulation these lines say something which had never previously occurred to me.”
(Einstein)
“If you ask a physicist what is his idea of” yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.” (Schrodinger)
“It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form [...] I think it very likely, or at any rate quite possible, that in the long run Einstein will turn out to be correct.” (Dirac)
“Anyone dissatisfied with these ideas may feel free to assume that there are additional parameters not yet introduced into the theory which determine the individual event.” (Born)
The foregoing is an example of what William James called the philosophy of “nothing but.” Its practitioners can be counted upon to reduce any phenomenon, however mysterious, to: “O, that is nothing but (blah blah, quack quack).”
Closer to home, Gell-Mann has recently opined that Bohr & Heisenberg “brainwashed” a generation of physicists into thinking QM was complete.
“The overcoming of naive realism has been relatively simple. In his introduction to his volume, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth, Russell has characterized this process in a marvellously pregnant fashion:
‘We all start from ‘naive realism,’ i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it means to be most objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will.′
Apart from their masterful formulation these lines say something which had never previously occurred to me.” (Einstein)
“If you ask a physicist what is his idea of” yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.” (Schrodinger)
“It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form [...] I think it very likely, or at any rate quite possible, that in the long run Einstein will turn out to be correct.” (Dirac)
“Anyone dissatisfied with these ideas may feel free to assume that there are additional parameters not yet introduced into the theory which determine the individual event.” (Born)