I recently had John Norton on the podcast. He’s the philosopher of physics who’s spent decades showing physicists where they’ve gone philosophically astray. Afterward, he watched my interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson where I was on the side of defending philosophy, and Norton and I had an email exchange that was so jolly that I had to share it (with his permission, of course).
You know that tired quip (some) physicists love to bruit? “Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
Norton’s rejoinder is keen:
“Ornithologists aren’t trying to be useful to birds.”
Done.
The Unexamined Instrumentalism Is Not Worth Having
Most physicists are already engaging in (assuming?) philosophy. They just don’t know it.
Take the physicist who claims there’s no measurement problem in quantum mechanics because “all that matters is predictions.” Congratulations… you’ve just endorsed an extreme form of instrumentalism that most philosophers abandoned decades ago for being logically untenable.
Norton watched this happen in real-time during my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
To Norton, the physicist who pays no attention to philosophy of science is likely the victim of one mediocre philosophy.
Think about it. Almost every scientist has views about:
What counts as evidence
What makes a theory “good”
What it means for something to be real
Whether nature is fundamentally simple or complex
If there’s uniformity in nature enough for science to get started / problem of induction to go away
They may say, “But Curt, I don’t have philosophical positions on these things. I just do science, bro.”
That is a philosophical position, bro. And to Norton, likely a defective one.
This was actually pointed out by Elise Crull on StarTalk itself.
PS: If you ask what the philosophy of probability is behind that “likely” statement, then good. That’s the type of sharp interrogating we’re talking about. ;)
The Standards Game
Norton makes a point that should be tattooed on every physics department wall: Philosophy of physics sets its own standards of success.
“What field allows another to set its standards?” Norton asks. Imagine if ornithologists let birds determine what counted as good ornithology. Or if historians let the dead judge their work.
Actually, that last one may improve things.
When physicists dismiss philosophy for not being “useful” to them, it’s the intellectual equivalent of a fish dismissing oceanography because it doesn’t help them swim faster.
From the Hole to the Whole
Philosophy of physics has actually contributed to physics. Not in some hand-wavy “it makes you think deep, man” way, but in concrete, citable contributions.
Norton’s hole argument? Used by loop quantum gravity researchers to critique string theory. His review on covariance principles? One of his most cited papers—in a physics journal. His critique of Landauer’s principle (which I’ve written about before) forced its proponents to actually think through their arguments instead of just assuming “information = physical” like some anagogic incantation.
Adlam and Barandes outline several cases, such as decoherence, Bell’s theorem, and more, where philosophers of physics directly aided vanilla physics.
By the way, you wanna know who else does philosophy of physics? Every physicist who’s ever “debunked” a theory!
When Neil dismisses perpetual motion machines or free energy devices, he’s applying standards of good science. Where do those standards come from?
The answer starts with “phil” and ends with Neil getting defensive.
Coffee Table Epistemology
Now we get to the toothsome part… Norton’s demolition of “It from Bit.” Norton would like to put the letters “ullsh” after the B.
Wheeler’s famous phrase has become the banzai for a certain type of speculation. The idea that reality is fundamentally information (i.e., that bits somehow “generate” its) Norton’s verdict is that it’s “Coffee table philosophy.”
He distinguishes between two types of philosophy:
Professional philosophy: Takes something perplexing and analyzes it until it becomes so clear you wonder why anyone thought differently
Coffee table philosophy: Produces acroamatic wisdoms that sound clever precisely because they’re meaningless
“It from bit” falls squarely in Category 2. As Norton puts it: “It is, on its face, simply nonsense to say that the real world is information.”
“But Shannon! But quantum information theory! But AdS/CFT!” says the learned rampageous defender.
Shannon himself rejected any connection between information and thermodynamic entropy. Using information as a calculational tool is fine. Next they’ll tell us consciousness is just spicy computation… Oh wait, they already do.
The Heuristic Hustle
For philosophers, “it from bit” is a literal claim about ontology (what exists). For physicists, it’s (often) just a heuristic prompt. In other words, it’s a way to generate new research directions.
The real test is whether it produces good physics.
Norton’s assessment: “My impression of the information obsession is that it has failed at this. Instead, it seems to produce an endlessly inflating volume of ever more improbable speculation.”
The Empirical Irony
Physicists love to declare their work “empirical,” but do they know where that term comes from?
The empiricists were a marginal medical sect in antiquity. By the 18th century, “empirics” were routinely derided as medical quacks.
Every time a physicist proudly declares themselves an empiricist while dismissing philosophy, somewhere in the multiverse a Jacob Barandes loses his wave function.
— Curt Jaimungal
PS: This article is based on email exchanges with John Norton following our podcast conversation. If you want to hear him systematically demolish poor thinking in physics (including The Simulation Hypothesis), check out the full episode.
PPS: Note that the critique isn’t of information as a tool but of “information” as a fundamental substance. It’s like saying hammers are useful, therefore the universe is made of Home Depot.
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Hello Curt, nice post. From your conversation with Neil De Grasse Tyson, I recall that he not only dismissed philosophy of science as useless, but earlier in the conversation, when you started to talk about Chaitin’s incompleteness theorem, NDT dismissed it as just a distraction that would potentially even have distracted astrophysicists from making great progress for the past 50 years if they had wasted time thinking about such issues. This brings me to something strongly related which is highly relevant to your show: The root cause of the 50 year stagnation of is essentially physicists not having studied Kolmogorov complexity enough. This is explained in this new paper which also mentions Chaitin’s incompleteness theorem somewhere: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23194
Hi Curt. Excellent post!