There’s something slightly awkward about being a philosopher in a room full of cosmologists. Of course, the other students in this 500-level physics course know I’m a foreigner; they don’t see me in lab meetings, or walking the corridors of Jadwin Hall with a piece of chalk tucked behind my ear and a metric perturbation problem deep behind my eyes. Some of them know I hail from the philosophy building up the hill. Every once in a while, I catch a look across the classroom that seems to say: “We have to be here. But what are you doing here?”
The question is a variation on an old theme: Why does philosophy of physics matter? I’ve answered it at least a dozen times, in a dozen different ways. None of my past responses seems quite satisfactory on its own. So here’s another attempt at an answer, now that I’m a year into my graduate studies.
The most recent time I was faced with the question was a few months ago, in a conversation with an engineering graduate student. I had asked him about partition functions, and, baffled at my familiarity with the rules of thermodynamic “insider baseball,” he asked what exactly makes my work different than that of a scientist’s. My response: “Scientists are primarily concerned with deriving testable results and then using those results. Philosophers are more concerned with probing what’s possible. So philosophers care about which assumptions physical theories are predicated on—and whether these assumptions are justified and consistent. This can have important consequences for future theory development.”
Sleek? Sure. Satisfactory? Not really.
For one thing, I’ve met several proper theorists who carry the philosophical spirit of “probing the possible” into their research. My cosmology professor is one of them. Once, during office hours, we had a two-hour-long chat about the viability of multiverse theories: cosmological models that evolve into infinite causally disconnected regions, across which all possible physical conditions and constants (and perhaps even laws) obtain. His distaste for such theories—motivated by philosophical considerations—directly impacts his day-to-day research. He certainly doesn’t need a philosophy degree to think about these issues.
For another, philosophers of physics aren’t really in the game for the goal of influencing scientific theorizing. My philosophy professors never walk down to Jadwin, and with good reason. Most of the questions philosophers worry about are distantly removed from the gritty, approximation-riddled realities of scientific research. (Also: physicists don’t like being told what to do by philosophers.)
The more I thought about the shortcomings of my response to the engineer, the more I worried that the question might not have a good answer. Maybe philosophers of physics are simply duping universities across the country into funding their work by giving it a sheen of extraphilosophical significance. After all, researchers have not waited on a solution to the long-standing quantum measurement problem to start building functional qubits. But the philosophy of quantum mechanics has probably benefited, at least a little, from the rhetoric of the current quantum fever gripping the DOE.
Then I signed up for this cosmology class. I remember reaching out to the professor for the first time, seized by a question having to do with the explanatory virtues of different cosmological models, and shyly admitting I was a “spy” from the philosophy department. He replied: “I knew you were a spy. But a good kind of spy, since science generally, and cosmology in particular, can benefit a lot from philosophy.” His response teased a point of contact between the philosophical idea space and the laboratory.
As I turned all this over in my head in class one day, I started recounting the reasons I was even in the room, voluntarily subjecting myself to three credit hours of cosmology. That answer is easy: I like physics for the breathless beauty of it. I like knowing more about our universe, chock-full of all sorts of wacky phenomena, of chaos coalescing into strange degrees of order, of scales of staggering smallness and largeness. Glimpsing the inner gears of the natural world never fails to fill me with wonder.
This is, of course, a different question than “Why does philosophy of physics matter?” But I realize now how closely the two are entwined.
So here’s another stab at an answer: Philosophers really are, at core, practitioners of wonder. For what it’s worth, Plato agrees. “Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher,” he writes in the Theaetetus, “and philosophy begins in wonder.” Driven by this wonder, philosophers are constantly articulating new questions and curiosities and fascinations, both within our word processors and in conversation with others. In the case of philosophy of physics, this practice shovels coals into the scientific engine.
I don’t know if this is what my cosmology professor had in mind when he said that science can benefit from philosophy. Maybe he’s more optimistic about the practical significance of philosophy for physical theories, a return to the good old days when the fields of physics and natural philosophy were one and the same.
I’m not so optimistic: my writing on multiverses and fine-tuning will probably never cross the desk of any cosmologist as a source for serious recommendations regarding theory-building. But I did spend two hours across from one such desk, engaged in a lively conversation about the future of the field, as my professor’s many spirited ideas bubbled to the surface. Among them was the strong opinion that today’s young scholars need to be more inquisitive and bolder with their questions.
Back to the classroom. There’s something slightly awkward about being a philosopher in a room full of cosmologists. But when the lecture pauses for questions, I raise my hand—propelled not by the necessities of research, but by wonder, by the simple desire to know—and I remember why I do what I do.
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