Other articles

1. Post-Rev Theoretical Physics

   I was recently asked by two separate, presumably non-anarchist, entities if and how theoretical or high-energy physics would exist in an anarchist society. There are several implicit underlying questions in this basic question, and I will attempt to answer each in turn. I have been asked this question by other anarchists before, and my usual response is that nothing would change in my personal situation. I work odd jobs, find strange ways to pay for things when needed, garden and sometimes forage for food, and try to never spend money,  so that I can devote most of my time to research. While I believe that what I and other physicists are doing is for the ultimate good of humanity — trying to understand the seemingly chaotic patterns of our universe, which is fundamental to any correct understanding of anything else — we’re not exactly putting food in hungry mouths, ensuring shelters for the houseless, providing medical aid to the sick and old, or doing any of the number of things which are generally considered socially beneficial. As an anarchist, I do not believe it is society’s responsibility to support me in my research unless my research is directly assisting others in need. To believe contrary would be entirely selfish, not to mention entirely ignorant of context: the context here being that, while, yes, I am a unique individual with my own sets of needs and desires (namely, to sit around staring at sheets of equations all day, with a break to mix a heaping of vegan gluten-free protein powder into a glass of water), there is no such thing as a system in total isolation. Individualist anarchist as I may be, if I have learned anything from physics I know that one for a fact. Thus, I must take into account that if I am not contributing to the rest of society, then the rest of society owes nothing to me. And as much as I would like to discount the rest of human society, I still have to share air and soil and a few other things with them while I’m stuck on this stupid cosmic shitpile. Anyway, what this all boils down to is that there is very little opportunity for a physicist to only work on physics in an anarchist society.

   But this time the question is different. Non-anarchists have begun to ask the question, and now the answer must take a different form. As I mentioned, it entails other implicit underlying questions: What will the anarchist revolution look like? Will it be a series of bloody and dramatic confrontations with authorities in the streets? Will it be a gradualist or reformist shift in sociocultural perspectives? Will it be a total collapse of modern civilization and requisite technologies? Will “rogue” AIs or the emergence of trans-/post- humans enable us to cooperate efficiently en masse without ingrained hierarchies? Will someone finally hack the gibson and ‘;shutdown —? What will the nascent anarchist society look like, and what …

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2. Famous Physicists On Mysticism #1: “Scientific and Religious Truths” by Werner Heisenberg

   
   

   This is going to be an ongoing reprint series of mystical writings by famous physicists. The view expressed herein are presented merely for consideration and are not necessarily those of the blogger.

   [caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”280” caption=”Werner Heisenberg”][/caption]

   Scientific and Religious Truths

   By Werner Heisenberg

   In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point. In what follows, then, we shall first of all deal with the unassailability and value of scientific truth, and then with the much wider field of religion; finally—and this will be the hardest part to formulate—we shall speak of the relationship of the two truths.

   Of the beginnings of modern science, the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, it is usually said that the truth of religious revelation, laid down in the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers and dominant in the thought of the Middle Ages, was at that time supplemented by the reality of sensory experience, which could be checked by anyone in possession of his normal five senses and which—if enough care was taken—could, therefore, not in the end be doubted. But even this first approach to a description of the new way of thought is only half correct; it neglects decisive features without which its power cannot be understood. It is certainly no accident that the beginnings of modern science were associated with a turning away from Aristotle and a reversion to Plato. Even in antiquity, Aristotle, as an empiricist, had raised the objection—I cite more or less his own words—that the Pythagoreans (among whom Plato must be included) did not seek for explanations and theories to suit the facts, but distorted the facts to fit certain theories and favored opinions, and set themselves up, one might say, as co-arrangers of the universe. In fact, the new science led away from immediate experience in the manner criticized by Aristotle. Let us consider the understanding of the planetary motions. Immediate experience teaches that the earth is at rest and that the sun goes around it. In the more precise terms of our own day, we might even say that the word “rest” is defined by the statement that the earth is at rest, and that we call every body at rest that no longer moves relative to the earth. If …

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