On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > >> Feynman showed that virtual particles must exist, particles that can > violate the law of conservation of mass-energy, at least for a short time. > Feynman showed that when a particle moves from point X to point Y it can do > so by any path with various degrees of probability, and when you add up all > the infinite (and not just very large) number of paths you get the path we > observe the particle to be moving at, and he showed us how to add up these > infinite number of things in a finite amount of time and get numbers out of > them. These profound philosophical discoveries dwarf anything Popper found, > assuming he found anything at all. And Feynman wasn't the only one, Darwin > showed how multicellular life such as ourselves came to be, Godel found > that some things are true but can't be proved, Turing showed that some > things are deterministic but not predictable, Cantor proved that there are > degrees of infinity, Hubble found that the universe was expanding, and > Watson and Crick showed how heredity works at the most fundamental level. > None of these huge philosophical discoveries were made by somebody who > called himself a philosopher, and that's why I say that philosophers no > longer do philosophy. > > > > That's natural philosophy, >
Natural philosopher is the old term for scientist and I wish it was still used, the word "scientist" was only invented in 1834 and it was decades after that before it became popular. Just one year later in 1835 philosopher Auguste Comte determined from his pure philosophical studies that human beings would never find out what the stars are made of. In 1850 natural philosopher (scientist) Gustav Kirchhoff found out what the stars are made of. I am certain that Comte read Plato and Aristotle, and I am even more certain that Kirchhoff never read Popper. > but today we call that physics, biology, biochemistry. > That's why some people say philosophy has accomplished nothing. Today philosophy is for areas of thought where ignorance is king where everybody is certain but nobody is correct. Forget finding the answers, philosophy is for where you don't even know what the correct questions to ask are. Philosophy has everything to do with taste and opinion and nothing to do with facts. At one time physics and astronomy and biology and even meteorology were philosophical subjects, but they graduated. > > Popper made clear what science is all about, which was already clear for > good scientists, > Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. > but which is still ignored by most professional philosopher > I would say that professional philosophers are the ONLY ones who don't ignore Popper, the general public certainly does and most working scientists probably couldn't even tell you who the hell Popper was, they have better things to do with their time than read him. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
