Magic and the rise of science
i believe the world is made up of excitations of quantum fields. Is this a scientific belief?<p>i haven&#x27;t done the experiments.<p>it would take me weeks to work through a single path integral from even the best pedagogical textbook (I have Zee [1] in mind).<p>Why do I believe that? Because it makes &#x27;sense&#x27;? QFT as physicists do it is mathematically inconsistent. can i interpret the immense amount of accumulated experimental data from bubble chambers to the LHC with any reasonable chance of saying something sensible?<p>i&#x27;m not a scientist; how could my beliefs be scientific? what exactly are people saying about their beliefs when they say that they hew to rationality and science? it doesn&#x27;t seem materially much different from magical beliefs in how the world works. it just so happens, yeah, the world is probably a bunch of excited quantum fields because that&#x27;s what makes me laptop run, or so i&#x27;ve been told.<p>ultimately, most of us are trusting an authority, and the strength of science always must be that there is no central authority: that all that is true is freely observable by anyone. there&#x27;s no special rites that need to be observed (though if you were to go to grad school, you&#x27;d say otherwise), there&#x27;s no purity that must be established. you don&#x27;t have to be a man, or white, pharaoh or a priest. science is defined by this egalitarian radically free epistemology, and it is important not to take that for granted because it is constantly under assault by those who would seek to claim exclusive authority over truth.<p>the idea of science can easily be used to smuggle in magical ideas. science itself is defined not by its rhetoric, its jargon, its sociopolitical structure, whose paying for it, all the property rights and patents that enable it to be hoarded, etc. but by the ability to observe an experiment and ask another human being to reproduce it. science is mutual trust, good faith, and cooperation in the search for truth.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.princeton.edu&#x2F;titles&#x2F;9227.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.princeton.edu&#x2F;titles&#x2F;9227.html</a>