"The New Physics"
03 Oct 1994 12:02There seems to be a new "new physics", in the popular mind, every few decades since the end of the nineteenth century. And it's always used for religious apologetics and peddling superstition, and always about how we're finally getting away from mechanistic materialism.
- See:
- Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment [A monument to sanity]
- Fritojf Capra, The Tao of Physics [An awful example of just how bad human thought can be.]
- Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines [Post-structuralism (Deleuze + Guattari sub-species) meets the New Physics (chaos species). Ugly, but not so bad as Capra, if only because it will do less damage.]
- Gross and Levitt, The Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science [Has a very good section on chaotophilia. (The authors are, themselves, academics and leftists, but not that sort of academic leftist.)]
- L. Susan Stebbing, Philosophy and Physicists [A lovely example of "thinking to some purpose", namely deflating Mr. Capra's unacknowledged, and far more formidable, predecessors, Eddington and Jeans.]
- Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory
- To read:
- Denise Albanese, New Science, New World
- Jennifer Burwell, Quantum Language and the Migration of Scientific Concepts
- Sal P. Restivo, Social Relations of Physics, Mysticism and Mathematics
