19 November

Was watching the fawning over Brian Cox again last week, on one of his visits to Oz. He’s a lovely, smart bloke. But science is in a mess, and the wide-eyed gee whiz people give to Brian is a symptom of that mess. And it’s in a mess because it has contempt for philosophy. The two used to work together, because they have complementary functions. All the greatest historical scientists were also well versed in philosophy. Without that marriage, science has been unable to solve major issues like reconciling quantum and classical physics, the problem of consciousness and the problem of time. Most of the popular cosmology coming from the likes of Hawking and Cox is philosophical drivel, and is science’s attempt to fill the gap left by philosophy, a gap it either doesn’t even realise is there, or which it mocks. At the same time philosophy often tried to be its own science, to fill the gap left on its side of the fence.