Physics is Toy Science

Physics is Toy Science.

It is by far the science with the simplest phenomena and the richest bounty of simplification opportunities, yielding enormous results to the most basic tricks.

First, physical phenomena persist: they don’t change across time, always staying there for further exploration and reproduction. Whereas biological organisms, species, languages, cultures, social norms and the overwhelming majority of objects of study constantly shift and recompose themselves.

Then, physical phenomena are necessary: they don’t depend on many contingent historical details. Once again, most other objects of study exapt in constant feedback loops, straying of in highly historical and contingent paths requiring careful sifting.

Next, physical phenomena are indifferent: they don’t react to investigation, exploration, modelization. On the other hand, people resist and co-opt sociological theories, cancer cells adapt to therapies, and languages reflect and pervert their formalized usage rules.

Lastly, physical phenomena are simple: they don’t require massively complex models on first approximation, often yielding to the most basic mathematical guesses. While anything else, even as close to the physical hardware as chemistry or genetics, explodes in far more complex mathematization, if at all.

Physics amounts to shooting at a fixed target on a windless day while standing on firm ground, while most other sciences feel like aiming at an adversarial target in stormy quick sands.

What place does this leave for Physics in the descriptive and normative endeavors of epistemic infrastructure?

To answer this, we must look at what is left. For idealization cuts and simplifies only to better reveal the surviving parts. In physics, with no change, no contingency, no modelling complexity, and no adversariality, what is left is how to thrive despite computational intractability.

For physicists shoot in easier circumstances, but they still reach minuscule targets at impressive distances. In doing so, they demonstrate many methodological subtleties and epistemic stratagems to avoid tackling the issue that even with simple physical models, simulating everything is just impossible.

This places the value of physics squarely in the dirt of the practical tricks actually used by physicists, as opposed to the ideals dreamed by philosophers of science. Physics is not representative science; it cannot be, with its childish simplification of almost all difficulties tackled by real science. So it makes no sense to expect the approaches of physics to translate as is to the real world. And as expected, physicists outside of their ideal bubbles constantly demonstrate their impotence, blabbering on ridiculous models unmoored to reality.

But if we cleanly circumscribe the role of physics in our study of epistemic infrastructure, limiting it to the clarification of how and when we can avoid untractable computations, it promises a treasure of insights.

Maybe the best representative of this approach to the history and philosophy of physics is Physics Avoidance by Mark Wilson. Under cover of philosophy of language, Wilson digs in on the various strategies of physics avoidance, as he calls them, used by physicists to sidestep shaky and untractable computations, and instead exploit explanatory opportunities provided by Nature.

Following such a path, the history of physics will illuminate our options and limitations for dealing with our computational boundedness. For the rest of the epistemic infrastructure enterprise, let’s turn to science and engineering that actually grapples with the real, messy, shifting world.