(July 19, 2025 at 7:09 am)Belacqua Wrote:(July 18, 2025 at 12:05 pm)Alan V Wrote: scientists can do their own philosophy when necessary to develop their hypotheses.
Can you give me an example of a scientist doing this? I don't understand how it would work.
Philosophical methods are often about challenging assumptions so people can assess new possibilities. The great scientific thinkers were able to do that, people like Einstein who challenged traditional notions of time and space.
In the book The Origin of Time, the author Thomas Hertog described how Stephen Hawking challenged certain scientific assumptions in his later work. For instance, Hawking thought that too many scientists were committed to the idea that the laws of physics existed somehow beyond our specific universe, similar to how Plato conceived of them. He didn't like how that idea led to multiverse cosmology, which he considered unscientific because it was too speculative. He was trying to understand how the laws of the universe could have evolved within the first split second of the big bang, when the range of temperatures may have been wide enough to enable such an evolution.
Anyhow, that is one example, and perhaps a good one considering that you would have to be another scientist to understand such a line of thinking in detail. Although the book simplifies a lot for a lay audience, much is still based on mathematics and cutting edge discoveries.
