"The New Physics"
Last update: 03 Oct 1994 12:02
First version:
There 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