Physicists are the poets of the scientific world
Haha @ Graeber saying physicists are basically the poets, aka the anti-fundamentalists, of the scientific world, far more receptive to paradigm-shifting ideas. Ditto mathematicians? (*cough* Hofstadter, anyone?)
Curiously, it’s largely physicists who have proved receptive to such ideas. (Also mathematicians— perhaps unsurprisingly, since Peirce and Whitehead themselves both began their careers as mathematicians.) Physicists are more playful and less hidebound creatures than, say, biologists— partly, no doubt, because they rarely have to contend with religious fundamentalists challenging the laws of physics. They are the poets of the scientific world. If one is already willing to embrace thirteen-dimensional objects or an endless number of alternative universes, or to casually suggest that 95 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter and energy about whose properties we know nothing, it’s perhaps not too much of a leap to also contemplate the possibility that subatomic particles have “free will” or even experiences. And indeed, the existence of freedom on the subatomic level is currently a heated question of debate. —David Graeber, What’s the point if we can’t have fun?
Makes me think of Murray Gell-Mann naming quarks after the nonsensical word in the nonsensical phrase from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” Or how the force that “glues” quarks inside protons and neutrons are named gluons. (Rovelli says this is done by physicists with little sense of the ridiculous,1 but I rather think it’s done by physicists with a great and playful sense of the ridiculous.)
- see also: play is not an anomaly, but a principle that repeats over and over
- see also: play could be the basis of physical reality