A science without time
From past to present, into the future: the flow of time is central to human experience. Why isn’t it central to physics?
We lose sight of the fact that scientific theorising and storytelling are both, at heart, driven by a fear of dying and by an itch for the eternal.
After the Enlightenment, and after the separation of philosophy and science in the 19th century, a flurry of philosophers emerged, whom I diagnose as having suffered from science-envy. In an attempt to make the field more ‘credible’, these philosophers adopted scientific methods into their philosophy, butchering their words with numbers, symbols, and equations – and in the process, both science and philosophy somewhat lost their touch with humanity, only giving exception to sensory experience (empiricism).
Concentrations, specialisations, focalisation of expertise... call it what you want, but as long as people are talking about the world in their own narrow manner, and only with peers who think about the world in the same narrow manner, we will never truly understand the world. Gaps in the knowledge of a middle-schooler must be bridged; this goes the same for collective and shared academic knowledge that spans decades and countries.
It is not just science and philosophy that must unite on the frontier of the unknown, but every other discipline. We have spent so long trying to look at the world through one lens, one perspective; the one we work on and for. We have lost sight of what really defines humanity: Human experience.