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http://www.gilder.com/americanspectatorarticles/carver.htm .Questions (in red) answered by Carver Mead And so mathematical description was
substituted for understanding? Absolutely. It’s conceptual nonsense. You can
calculate stuff with the theory, but the words people put around it don’t
make any sense. That had the effect of driving the more conceptually-oriented
students out of physics. We have ended up with more and more mathematicians
in the physics departments. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with
mathematics—it’s the language we use to express the precise relations of
physical law. But there is an increasing tendency to mistake the language for
the physics itself. Once we lose the conceptual foundations, the whole thing
becomes a shell game. There are very few conceptual workers left in the
field. Feynman was one of the last ones, and he wasn’t willing to take on the
Copenhagen clan. Nobody was, until we come to A. O. Barut, John Dowling, John
Cramer, and a few others. ………………………… Quantum uncertainty undermined faith
in science. I think Einstein was being a scientist in the truest
sense in his response to the Copenhagen interpretation. He said that none of
us would be scientists if deep down we didn’t believe there is a set of
regularities in the operation of physical law. That is a matter of faith. It
is not something anybody has proven, but none of us would be scientists if we
didn’t have that faith. What you’re saying is that in a rush
to declare science complete, Bohr & co. essentially defined away a key
assumption of science? Faith in physics was undermined. Generations of
students were basically driven out of physics because it was no longer
comprehensible. |
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Do you have any thoughts about
gravitation? Yes, I’ve been working on it quite actively. It’s
funny—the most common force, everyone experiences it, and we just have no
clue. It’s fascinating when you think about it. The two long-range forces
that we have in nature are the electromagnetic force and the gravitational
force. The first we understand better than anything in physics, and yet
gravity—we basically have no clue what it is. It doesn’t fit with any of the
other theories. It just gets pasted on. It’s really an acute embarrassment. |
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