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Humans are very peculiar animals, for whom science is not a normal activity. An accident of evolution - the irrational motivation and content of cultural conservatism - prevented science, until the psychotic breakdown of the prevailing religion in the 16th century, and a loss of centralized power over a mobile elite, allowed thinkers and observers the freedom needed for progress. This freedom is atypical, and seems to be ending now in academic physics. The filtering of students for their tolerance of authority and orthodoxy is too severe. And, the mournful watchword is that not everyone who claims the title of scientist is a scientist.
So, it happens that academic physics can be effectively criticized from the outside. One need not be uninformed, dogmatic, obsessed, intoxicated, dreaming, or mystically opposed to logic to disagree with the undue triumphalism. One need only examine and discuss critically topics which are not normally treated with skepticism. This may seem impolite (and, certainly, physicists who care to comment take offense). But, it is a sad necessity to deal explicitly with the all-too-human outbreak of cultural dishonesty in physics.
Unfortunately, simple issues such as vectors are misused by physicists just as loyalty tests are used by other dogmatic cultures. (Given the compensating errors required for their use, vectors are not much superior to epicycles in their potential to elucidate nature.) There are a number of these explicit errors which remain uncriticized by physicists - a gap in the scientific method. This gap in method is an implicit error, yet harder to see or correct until it is pointed out to an impartial observer. But, with proper briefing, the blind spots of physicists can become as readily apparent as a post-hypnotic suggestion or neurotic symptom would be.
Physicists, when pressed, will attempt to abandon even logic. Niels Bohr set the precedent here. But, there is a naivete among physicists about the consequences of working without logic. There is something very post-modern about Bohr's treatment of logic, and it is not at all explicitly authoritarian, but a close reading of Bohr's position on, say, EPR and molecular biology reveals a trenchant opposition to further progress in science.
Magnetic monopoles are misunderstood and undercriticized by physicists (due in large part to the misunderstanding of electromagnetic theory caused by vector notation). In claiming a general logical concordance with good theory and epistemology, they have overlooked the need to prove the general case, since monopoles destroy the electromagnetic potential everywhere, and make impossible the writing of the wave function for a test charge.
Spinoza discusses the role of science as an inextricable part of the totality of knowledge required to form ethics and public policy. Academic physicists are loath to acknowledge this purpose of physics or the effect their explicit and implicit errors have on ethics. Neither can advances in science be driven merely by new data. It is progress in philosophy which makes fresh observations desirable and meaningful.
Something so seemingly outrageous as pressing a training psychoanalysis for theoretical physicists would actually be an effective antithesis for academic moribundity. But, one may need to settle for a measure of open review as advocated by Paul K. Feyerabend in "Science in a Free Society". The intellectual exercises posed by Robert Anton Wilson in "The New Inquisition" are excellent training for a new open reviewer. The purpose is to see what still stands after the most ruthless "deconstruction".
When confusion is cleared away, and physics is restored to its proper context - no longer isolated from the rest of philosophy and even ethics, then novel hypotheses are much easier to generate and more likely to be evaluated on proper grounds.
--
Michael J. Burns http://kyoto.cool.ne.jp/mburns/
Contradiction resolution is the stuff of the universe.
Observers fulfill the a priori need for fallibility.
Some additional topics could be covered here. But, this will never be much more than an argument by declaration. My highly independent readers would not want me to impede their own creative investigation by providing more than the necessary minimum of observations and proofs. The brevity also spares any reluctant readers exposure to repugnant evidence.