Magic and the rise of science

i believe the world is made up of excitations of quantum fields. Is this a scientific belief?

i haven't done the experiments.

it would take me weeks to work through a single path integral from even the best pedagogical textbook (I have Zee [1] in mind).

Why do I believe that? Because it makes 'sense'? QFT as physicists do it is mathematically inconsistent. can i interpret the immense amount of accumulated experimental data from bubble chambers to the LHC with any reasonable chance of saying something sensible?

i'm not a scientist; how could my beliefs be scientific? what exactly are people saying about their beliefs when they say that they hew to rationality and science? it doesn't seem materially much different from magical beliefs in how the world works. it just so happens, yeah, the world is probably a bunch of excited quantum fields because that's what makes me laptop run, or so i've been told.

ultimately, most of us are trusting an authority, and the strength of science always must be that there is no central authority: that all that is true is freely observable by anyone. there's no special rites that need to be observed (though if you were to go to grad school, you'd say otherwise), there's no purity that must be established. you don't have to be a man, or white, pharaoh or a priest. science is defined by this egalitarian radically free epistemology, and it is important not to take that for granted because it is constantly under assault by those who would seek to claim exclusive authority over truth.

the idea of science can easily be used to smuggle in magical ideas. science itself is defined not by its rhetoric, its jargon, its sociopolitical structure, whose paying for it, all the property rights and patents that enable it to be hoarded, etc. but by the ability to observe an experiment and ask another human being to reproduce it. science is mutual trust, good faith, and cooperation in the search for truth.

[1] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9227.html

Seems to be paywalled.

This comment is largely a variant on the usual "science is just another belief like religion". It really isn't. The far fringes of science that you need lots of eduction and tools to work with, sure, you need to take those on faith. But you don't have to "believe" them, don't have to take them on faith. Your life is not changed one iota if you personally believe in quantum mechanics or not.

Meanwhile, the bulk of science is in the human scale - you can do a ton of scientific experiments with the stuff in your house right now. There's this misconception that 'science=theoretical physics' and it's just not so. You don't need to trust that gravitational acceleration on earth is 9.8m/s/s, you can determine that yourself, easily. You don't even have to use meters or seconds - use your own units. You will find that it works out the same anyway.

You can work out science from first principles and get a long way - the difference here with religion is that in religion, the first principles are not accessible to anyone. "This book is holy because I was told it was holy". There's no way to verify the initial state and work through from there.

Trying to paint science as this thing that exists only in our heads and investigating only the really tiny (quantum mechanics) or the really large (astrophysics) misses the vast bulk of the science we use as humans - the stuff that's been tested again and again through use. The edge of science is where you'll find conjecture, and hence a lot of trappings that sound like religion, but that's not the whole of science, not by a long shot.

> You can work out science from first principles and get a long way - the difference here with religion is that in religion, the first principles are not accessible to anyone.

i think that's exactly the point i made, actually.