Lindley D. The Dream Universe. How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way

Penguin Random House LLC., 2020. — 240 p. — ISBN: 9780385543859.A vivid and captivating narrative about how modern science broke free of ancient philosophy, and how theoretical physics is returning to its unscientific roots.
In the early 17th century Galileo broke free from the hold of ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. He drastically changed the framework through which we view the natural world when he asserted that we should base our theory of reality on what we can observe rather than pure thought. In the process, he invented what we would come to call science. This set the table for all the breakthroughs that followed-from Kepler to Newton to Einstein.
But in the early twentieth century when quantum physics, with its deeply complex mathematics, entered into the picture, something began to change. Many physicists began looking to the equations first and physical reality second. As we investigate realms further and further from what we can see and what we can test, we must look to elegant, aesthetically-pleasing equations to develop our conception of what reality is. As a result, much of theoretical physics today is something more akin to the philosophy of Plato than the science to which the physicists are heirs. In The Dream Universe, Lindley asks what is science when it becomes completely untethered from measurable phenomena?HOW SCIENCE BEGAN
Galileo Invents Science
Copernicus Doesn’t Quite Invent Astronomy
That Old-Time Philosophy
The Holy Roman Empire Strikes Back
How Science Uses Mathematics
CLASSICAL SCIENCE REIGNS SUPREME
Mastery of Motion
The Language of Mathematics
The Limits of Pragmatism
FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS CHARTS ITS OWN COURSE
Dirac Invents Antimatter
Wigner’s Enigmatic Question
All This Useless Beauty
Science and Engineering
SCIENCE OR PHILOSOPHY?
The Last Problems
The Byte-Sized Universe
Is Math All There Is?
The Dream Universe