Theory in Fundamental Physics: The View from the Outside - a podcast by MCMP Team

Massimo Pigliucci (City College of New York) gives a talk at the Workshop on "Why trust a Theory?" (7-9 December, 2015) titled "Theory in Fundamental Physics: The View from the Outside". Abstract: Trouble, as explicitly hinted at in the title of a recent book by Lee Smolin, has been brewing for a while within the fundamental physics community. Ideas such as string theory and the multiverse have been both vehemently defended as sound science and widely criticized for being “not even wrong,” in the title of another book, by Peter Woit. Recently, George Ellis and Joe Silk have written a prominent op-ed piece in Nature, inviting their colleagues to defend the very integrity of physics. To which cosmologist Sean Carroll has responded that physics doesn’t need "the falsifiability police,” referring to the famous (and often misunderstood or badly applied) concept introduced by Karl Popper to demarcate science from pseudoscience. The debate isn’t just “for the heart and soul” of physics, it has spilled onto social media, newspapers and public radio. What is at stake is the public credibility of physics in particular and of science more generally — especially in an era of widespread science denial (of evolution and anthropogenic climate change) and rampant pseudoscience (antivax movement). Since philosophers of science have been invoked by both sides, it is time to take a look at the “physics wars” from a detached philosophical perspective, in my case informed also by my former career as an evolutionary biologist, a field that has peculiar similarities with what is going on in fundamental physics, both in terms of strong internal disputes and of perception by a significant portion of the general public.

Further episodes of MCMP

Further podcasts by MCMP Team

Website of MCMP Team