Part II of DemistifySci Podcast talking with Daniel Whiteson

See DemistifySci Podcast talking with Daniel Whiteson and IAI Interview with Àlex Gómez-Marín.

My comment:

7:41 on "the aether as an explanation for where the math comes from". I thought the math was just people talking to each other, so the whole exercise, whether you call it physics or philosophy or mathematics, rests on human beings sharing knowledge. And if you think you can reduce that whole thing to some material substance without specifying any particular condition in which that substance is in, then you're going to have to start with a substance that is very much more like thought itself than any material we think we can grasp.

1:04:09 I agree: this sociological component in the evolution of scientific thought is huge, and it is by far the larger part of the reason why  theories of mathematics and physics take the form they do. It's also economic: physical theory would not be as it is today without the huge investments in high-energy physics experiments like CERN, SLAC etc. So if the goal of "physics" were really simply to produce the best possible explanatory theory of observable physical material then it seems very unlikely that it would have concentrated on that. 

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