Ayn Rand skrev:

Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go. (For The New Intellectual.)

Och:

The disintegration of philosophy in the nineteenth century and its collapse in the twentieth have led to a similar, though much slower and less obvious, process in the course of modern science.

Today’s frantic development in the field of technology has a quality reminiscient of the days preceding the economic crash of 1929: riding on the momentum of the past, on the unacknowledged remnants of an Aristotelian epistemology, it is a hectic, feverish expansion, heedless of the fact that its theoretical account is long since overdrawn – that in the field of scientific theory, unable to integrate or interpret their own date, scientists are abetting the resurgence of a primitive mysticism. (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)

Det senaste exemplet på detta fann min vän Per Nilsson:

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra ”hidden variables”. Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).

Berkeley skulle ha varit stolt. Per Nilssons kommentar: ”OK, nu har de UTTRYCKLIGEN kommit fram till the primacy of consciousness”.

(Om man vill ha lite bakgrund kan man alltid läsa Travis Norsens artikelserie här. Men ställa inga frågor till mig om detta, för jag är absolut ingen expert i detta avseende.)

Vill ni veta mer om hur ofattbart irrationell och absurd modern fysik är i övrigt, då bör ni se PBS:s dokumentär The Elegant Universe. Visst är det lite underligt hur modern filosofi kan ha ett så dåligt rykte (ofta avfärdat som ett ”flummigt ämne”), medan moderna fysiker tycks kunna komma undan med vad som helst.