<story><title>Quantum Gravity Expert Says &quot;Philosophical Superficiality&quot; Has Harmed Physics</title><url>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/08/21/quantum-gravity-expert-says-philosophical-superficiality-has-harmed-physics/?-k</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>winterismute</author><text>I had the privilege of meeting Carlo Rovelli (who attended university in my hometown, many years before me) in a public event targeting people that, like me, were at the time finishing high school and had to choose what to do with their lives.
We showed up already bored, waiting for the usual adults who would explain us why to study this and not that, what are the many possible career paths achievable by that, which economic sectors were growing and how, and so on. In fact, some of the speakers did mostly that.
On the contrary, Rovelli started to explain how he did not know what to do after school, and that he went to university initially because his family would have forced him to work as a plumber with his uncle if he decided not to go. He then advised us to choose to do only what we feel passionate about, and to distrust whoever, truth in hand, will explain us that by studying X we will be able to enter sector Y and achieve great success in life. It can seem trivial stuff, but when you are 18 and are being told those things by a humble but successful person, it really empowers you. He is also fairly easy to &amp;quot;approach&amp;quot;, he himself came to speak to us after the event, joking about the fact we should not cut our hair &amp;quot;just to get a job&amp;quot; (I haven&amp;#x27;t since then, and I am 28 and working), hence I am not surprised he answers to people&amp;#x27;s comment on the interview, or that he is active on physics.stackexchange, for example.&lt;p&gt;I have studied computer science and got interested in physics and philosophy of science thanks to him, he kind of embodies my idea of science, and of civil responsibility, and I must say I have been a bit disappointed to see that also the academic world is full of &amp;quot;scientists&amp;quot; that underestimate the value of philosophy or other related subjects, or that teach students not to question &amp;quot;too much&amp;quot; what they are doing, preventing them to really see the &amp;quot;big picture&amp;quot; behind knowledge.</text></comment>
<story><title>Quantum Gravity Expert Says &quot;Philosophical Superficiality&quot; Has Harmed Physics</title><url>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/08/21/quantum-gravity-expert-says-philosophical-superficiality-has-harmed-physics/?-k</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Elrac</author><text>OK, &amp;quot;Critical views of science in the news&amp;quot; is probably a useful avenue of &amp;quot;hard looking&amp;quot; and quality control for science. But I think it behooves us to be a little more critical in our choice of critics.&lt;p&gt;This struck me when the author, in his introduction, mentioned a previous Q&amp;amp;A with telepathy proponent Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake only gets a brief mention in this piece as a critic of science, and I hasten to add that I don&amp;#x27;t have any beef with the article from that point on.&lt;p&gt;For anyone who doesn&amp;#x27;t know, Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is real. To this end, he&amp;#x27;s done a series of experiments which had the kind of inconclusive results you&amp;#x27;d expect, yet in spite of a dearth of convincing, published results, in spite of a global failure to replicate his results, he keeps badgering science to take him seriously. Having been met with apathy and mild derision, he now blames science on his failure to be taken seriously.&lt;p&gt;So yes, Sheldrake is a &amp;quot;science critic.&amp;quot; So are many of the purveyors of homeopathy, of miracle cancer cures, of coffee enemas, of dowsing and of Intelligent Design. Science is empirical, and people without evidence like to call this a shortcoming of science.&lt;p&gt;So my question is: how much debunking, how much finger pointing and pantsless emperors is required before we can in good conscience exclude certain groups of people from discussions about the philosophy of science? Those discussions are important, no doubt - and this is why I think we should be wary of allowing them to be bogged down by the contributions of frauds and crackpots.</text></comment>