Is Physics Turning Into Philosophy?
by Massimo Pigliucci Professor of Evolutionary Biology at SUNY–Stony Brook. Physics is, by most people’s–especially physicists’–accounts, the queen of the sciences. Philosophy is, according to some physicists (for example, Steven Weinberg, in his Dreams of a Final Theory), a useless, perhaps even dangerous, enterprise, because it can slow scientific progress. Yet, two essays published recently in Nature argue that physics is in danger of becoming “just” philosophy, or worse, indistinguishable from nonscientific notions such as the anthropic principle, the idea that the universe is fine-tuned to allow for the appearance of life. George Ellis, reviewing Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape (Nature 438: 739-740), says that “heavyweight physicists” are claiming to have proven the existence of parallel universes “even though there is no chance of observing them.” Michael Atiyah, commenting on Lawrence Krauss’s Hiding in the Mirror (Nature 438: 1081-1082), observes that there is a danger
