Physics vs. philosophy: a brief NYT article

This is pretty good, and not very long. It starts with a brief comment on an attack by a physicist on the views of a philosopher (who himself has a Ph.D in physics!) who had reviewed the physicist's book.

And then goes on from there with a brief and breezy commentary on the relationship between science and philosophy.

Physicists say they do not need any help from philosophers. But sometimes physicists are, whether they realize it or not, actually engaging in philosophy themselves.

Mr. Weinberg has attacked philosophical doctrines like “positivism” (which says that science should concern itself only with things that can actually be observed). But positivism happens to be a mantle in which Mr. Hawking proudly wraps himself; he has declared that he is “a positivist who believes that physical theories are just mathematical models we construct, and that it is meaningless to ask if they correspond to reality.” Is Mr. Hawking’s positivism the same positivism that Mr. Weinberg decries? That, one supposes, would be an issue for philosophical discussion.

The physicist Sir Roger Penrose is certainly not a positivist. He is a self-avowed “Platonist,” since he believes (like Plato) that mathematical ideas have an objective existence. The disagreement between Mr. Hawking the positivist and Mr. Penrose the Platonist — a philosophical one! — has hard scientific consequences: because of it, they take radically opposed views of what is going on when a quantum measurement is made. Is one of them guilty of philosophical naïveté? Are they both?

Good short read – hit the link forthe whole thing.