tomfop wrote to me:
>I have characterised this elsewhere as “the perverse extension of uncontroversial science”. Do you agree?
Yeah, I think I do.
Some people on this thread have made unjustified, negative comments about physicists based on their own ignorance of science.
But, yes, there is a tendency for physicists — especially not very good ones — to over-reach. (This is, incidentally, much, much less true of the brightest physicists I have known personally — e.g., Dick Feynman and Luis Alvarez.)
We physicists have good reason to believe that we know all of the underlying laws that describe the behavior of the everyday physical world (I exclude consciousness, which I, at least, certainly do not understand!). When we take classes, we do homework/exam problems in which the situation is very well-defined, in which extraneous influences can be ignored, and in which we can make “reasonable” assumptions (ignore the mass of the string, the friction of the pulley, etc.).
There is an understandable tendency for many physicists to treat the real world as if ti were an exam problem: just assume solar forcing does not matter, or that the simplest models for cloud formation are acceptable, etc.
We learn these enormously powerful techniques in class, and, well, most of us have some sense of humility. But, the urge to misapply these tools to try to something “important” in the real world is understandable, even if the results stray so far from the scientific method as to start to slide from science into pseudo-science.
I’d bet it is less politics than just guys who want to be important (there is a Youtube video of Feynman discussing this point, by the way — he is very critical of wanting to be important versus just honestly seeking understanding).
Dave