Modern science has found itself detached from common experience. It presents with a world view foreign to the one we encounter in our day to day lives, full of quarks, fields, entanglements and spacetime curvature. This detachment is concerning, as the very tool we used to make sense of the world around us has made the world foreign. In this essay, I recount the history of the experimentum crucis in Bacon, Newton and Goethe in order to suggest a way of reconnecting science and experience. My suggestion is that we should strive to look at science from an aesthetic perspective, looking to understand the experience that the scientific world view induces in us. Along these lines, I hope that we can imagine a new, better science, which takes the sucess of modern physics, and brings it back to the world of experience; science with a human face.
Science and Experience, or Science with a Human Face
Attay Kremer
<<What remains for us to do, is to take seriously the task of understanding these objects as mediators between the scientific theory and human experience. Our role models in this should be science popularizers, whose role in the scientific enterprise is often discounted. What a science popularizer does is to explain “in human terms” what complicated scientific theories mean, which must also involve the aestheticization that I’ve described. What we need is science with a human face.>>
Congratulations! An extremely deep essay with important ideas for the advancement of science.
It is obvious that if at the very beginning of the scientific revolution of the New Tim" there was a conscious constant financial support for at least three scientific programs (Newton, Descartes, Leibniz), then physics would not become Phenomenalist Physics, but would be Ontological Physics, i.e. physics "with human face." And television would have appeared in the 19th century. And today, theoretical physicists would not raise questions about the nature of space and time (Carlo Rovelli "Physics Needs Philosophy / Philosophy Needs Physics", 2017). Taking into account the urgent need to overcome the modern conceptual - paradigmatic crisis in the metaphysical / ontological basis of fundamental science, just as a "crisis of understanding" ("J. Horgan "The End of Science", Kopeikin K.V. "Souls" of atoms and "atoms" of the soul : Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, Carl Gustav Jung and "three great problems of physics"), Such support is also needed today for alternative scientific programs, for example, the scientific program of the Nobel Prize winner in physics, B. Josephson.
Yes, the role of popularizers of science is extremely important. I understand this as Open Science on a solid ontologically grounded basis.
Here we recall good philosophical testaments for theoretical physicists:
John A. Wheeler: “We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself."
"Philosophy is too important to be left to philosophers."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world."
A.N. Whitehead: “A precise language must await a completed metaphysical knowledge.”
Physicist, do not be afraid of metaphysics!
I agree with the proposed general direction of science evolution towards "science with a human face". I would also designate it as reality-based knowledge (which therefore will be naturally comprehensible in terms of "common sense"), as opposed to totally abstract ad hoc constructions dominating in the current fundamental science framework. Such different, causally complete kind of scientific knowledge with the necessary properties is quite real, unifying "human face" (intrinsic comprehensibility) with maximum consistency, where the proposed "aesthetic" elements will be naturally present in and creatively added to the main framework (as they are present in our everyday experience). By the way, that new, explicitly extended kind of knowledge provides a mathematically rigorous expression of aesthetic notions, without any loss of their content. I also appreciate well-chosen references in the essay from the history of science.