
Magic and the rise of science - benbreen
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1666588.ece
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benbreen
Relatedly - anyone interested in this topic should check out Keith Thomas's
_Religion and the Decline of Magic_ (1971), hands down one of my favorite
history books ever. Here's a recent essay about it by the novelist Hilary
Mantel:

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/magic-keith-
thoma...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/magic-keith-thomas/)

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sevenfive
Seems to be paywalled.

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sieveoferos
[http://www.fauxvictorianrag.com/2012/12/religion-and-the-
dec...](http://www.fauxvictorianrag.com/2012/12/religion-and-the-decline-of-
magic.html)

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danharaj
i believe the world is made up of excitations of quantum fields. Is this a
scientific belief?

i haven't done the experiments.

it would take me weeks to work through a single path integral from even the
best pedagogical textbook (I have Zee [1] in mind).

Why do I believe that? Because it makes 'sense'? 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?

i'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'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's what makes me laptop run, or so i've
been told.

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's no special rites that need to be observed
(though if you were to go to grad school, you'd say otherwise), there's no
purity that must be established. you don'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.

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.

[1]
[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9227.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9227.html)

~~~
bachback
absolutely right. how do you translate from the strings "excitations of
quantum fields" to "math with a lot of greek symbols"? Very illuminating is
the attempt to convert higher math into computer programs (Bertrand Russell
tried this 100 years ago). What is mathematics not reducable to programs, and
why isn't physics written in a logic language? It would look like this:
[http://us.metamath.org/nfegif/mmnf.html](http://us.metamath.org/nfegif/mmnf.html)

Ultimately you end with set theoretic axioms. But what about functions over
time? Category theory is more philosophic than one would think. The true
mystery to me is why unconventional thought is so rare. I guess it doesn't pay
well to think about things from scratch, certainly in business and also not in
science driven by peer-review.

~~~
sieveoferos
I'm still hoping for something like the "calculus of statement" described in
Heinlein's "Blowups Happen." I think that a plurality of axiomatic approaches
and formalisms is always better - consider the dialogue between those
advocating a change to category-theoretic axioms for modern math and those
that want to retain the set-theoretic ones. The debate is very productive.

So I think the world needs more thinkers-from-scratch. Shinichi Mochizuki is
one such, regarding his work on the "abc conjecture." But his case makes
obvious one other reason there's not more from-scratch unconventional thought:
it often requires Von Neumann-level intellect to pull off.

