Hidden Philosophical Foundations of Physics

Physicists claim to reveal the deepest hidden secrets of the universe but will never reveal the secret philosophical assumptions in the foundations of physics. Physicists will never let us know that their “physical” universe is a product of their secret assumptions. Instead, physicists claim that they discover properties of the world by conducting experiments. This is one of the greatest frauds in the history of science.

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Let’s start with this question:

Is a professional physicist qualified to write as an expert on a philosophical subject?

I have in mind this philosophical discourse written by Matt Strassler, an academic physicist.

Here are a few of the attributes defining an academic physicist:

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Is Strassler a qualified professional to write a philosophical commentary on one of the oldest philosophical topics, namely, the indivisible?

The answer is No. Even Strassler admits in his Rutgers website that he is an expert only in three academic fields: Particle physics, Quantum Field Theory and String Theory. Philosophy is not in this list.

Strassler is not a qualified professional who can lecture us as an expert on the indivisibility of the electron because the indivisibility is not a physics problem.

The question of indivisibility is a philosophical problem; it is not a problem that can be investigated or resolved by an application of legal physics equations. Here “philosophical” simply means “free of physics”.

Strassler is licensed to practice legal physics only on a very narrow field of academic physics; outside that narrow field Strassler is a layman like everybody else. He has no scientific authority outside his narrow specialty.

Furthermore, Strassler may call himself a “physicist” and define “physicist” as a synonym with “scientist” but he is really in the business of monetizing his absurdly long investment of time to learn the archaic methods of legal physics. The traditional method that Learned Doctors of all types have been using to monetize their academic learning is called the Professional Racket. What is Professional Racket? You know it very well, the method is used by all professional classes: Hide information wholesale, sell it retail:

Professional Racket == Hide information wholesale sell it retail

That’s why Learned Doctors are also called Professors of Secrets: they claim to “discover” knowledge they’ve hidden and sell it as absolute truth.

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Did Strassler study philosophy during his long physics education? No. On the contrary, he was indoctrinated to despise philosophy and history. For Strassler, physics sits above all other academic fields and physicists have the academic authority to overrule historical facts.

Strassler’s education consisted of learning how to shuffle legal physics equations and learning how to reduce data by using antiquated statistical methods canonized in the legal physics code. In academic physics “reducing data” means using statistical sophistry on some white noise to suggest statistical exceptions that will be said to prove a theoretical physics scenario sponsored by a global power using academic physics as a cover for its military research.

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Strassler is a fish in the legal sea of physics; the world outside the legal sea of physics does not exist for him. Unfortunately for us Strassler has the academic authority to enforce that the universe is limited to his sea of physics and that his sea of physics is the whole universe. This is yet another deception trademarked by Learned Doctors. These charlatans are masters of defining what they know as the only true knowledge. These charlatans don’t know the entirety of the universe, so they defined what they know as the entire universe.

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These are Strassler’s true areas of expertise:

– Shuffling legal physics equations
– Reducing data by statistical methods
– Teaching elementary physics to new recruits
– Saving the doctrine by casuistry

None of which gives him expertise to discuss philosophical topics. As a physicist Strassler enjoys the absolute authority to define new words and redefine and corrupt existing words. It is a simple matter for him to define his casuistry to be “physics”. And so he does. Strassler claims to decide the question of the indivisibility of the electron by physical arguments while all he does is sophistry.

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Strassler’s philosophical commentary on the divisibility of the electron is nothing more than propaganda in the service of the doctrine.

Therefore, not only Strassler is not qualified to write about a philosophical topic (which simply means a topic outside of legal physics) but he is incapable of analyzing properly a philosophical problem without corrupting it and turning it into casuistic, self-serving physics propaganda. This is proved by the article we referred to. We will expose Strassler’s polemical sophistry and casuistry by looking at his commentary sentence by sentence.

But how can Strassler get away with calling such blatant ideological physics propaganda a scientific argument? The answer is very clear. There is no independent authority in academic physics to check, inspect, audit, examine or supervise Strassler’s writings. He is a self-anointed Learned Doctor of Philosophy who claims to have absolute authority in everything he writes about, no matter what the subject is.

Strassler writes a philosophical commentary on a philosophical topic and presents it as physics. The deception is clear: Strassler claims that because he calls himself a physicist, and he defined the word “physicist” to be a synonym for the word “scientist”, everything he writes no matter what, must be considered scientific discourse.

But the contrary is actually true.

Nothing Strassler writes in the name of physics can pass the test of scientific logic, simply because Strassler is not bound by the scientific logic (i.e., Aristotelian logic) but he practices the legal logic of physics. Legal logic is the old art of casuistry based on the authoritative assertion that all contradictory meanings of a loaded word are true and false, case by case, as needed. The professional casuist decides which meaning is true in what context.

In legal logic there are no contradictions. For Strassler contradiction does not exist, that is why he can combine contradictory words such as “point particle” and use each of the contradictory terms casuistically and claim both meanings are true when he says so. That’s why he can call a wave a particle and write long casuistic polemics to justify why a wave is a particle… and why a wave is not a particle when Strassler says so.

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The funny thing is that Strassler is a philosopher by profession. His professional title is Doctor of Philosophy. His professional ancestors are the Doctors of Philosophy who would not look through Galileo’s telescope. But Strassler is a “philosopher” in the worst sense of the word; he is a polemical sophist serving the brotherhood of physics.

Strassler is the personification of sophistry: He is a philosopher who denies that he is a philosopher but makes his living by philosophizing and calls his philosophizing physics!

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Strassler’s writings are worth analyzing only because his writings are perfect specimens of casuistry and sophistry. Strassler’s posts read like material out of Aristotle’ On Sophistical Refutations. But there is nothing so special about Strassler’s writings, the same casuistry and sophistry is routinely used by all physicists. Here’s another good example. So what we say here applies to all academic physicists, not only to Strassler. He is more visible than the others and he’s been laying the groundwork to start a career as a Professor of Secrets to reveal the hidden secrets of the world supposedly by shuffling physics equations. This is the deception that needs to be exposed.

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One thought on “Hidden Philosophical Foundations of Physics

  1. Pingback: Physical sophistry | Densytics

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