When Physics Forgot Its Mother
Or: How We Stopped Asking “Why?” and Learned to Love the Calculator
So much fun.🕯
The Setup
Two people walk into a podcast studio. One is an astrophysicist who makes the universe accessible to millions. The other is a philosopher of physics who wrote a book called The Einstein Paradox and has spent her career asking questions that make physicists uncomfortable.
The result? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elise Crull having a conversation that most physics departments would rather you didn’t hear.
Because here’s the thing: Physics used to be inseparable from philosophy. The same minds asking “How does this work?” were also asking “What does it mean?” Now we’ve got two separate buildings on campus, and they don’t share lunch anymore.
The Story Nobody Tells You
The 1700s: When Textbooks Made You Angry
There was a woman named Émilie du Châtelet. History mostly remembers her as “Voltaire’s mistress,” which is a bit like remembering Einstein as “that guy who played violin.”
Du Châtelet was teaching her son physics in the mid-1700s. She looked at the available textbooks. She found them inadequate. So she did what any reasonable person would do: She wrote her own. Called it Foundations of Physics.
But wait. There’s more.
Newton’s Principia was in Latin. Dense Latin. The kind of Latin that made even educated people go cross-eyed. Du Châtelet translated the whole thing into French. Not just translated it—she improved it. Added commentary. Filled in the gaps Newton left behind. Today, her translation is still the standard French version. I. Bernard Cohen, the Newton expert, used her translation to help write his English edition.
She died in 1749, shortly after completing this work. She was 42. And for centuries, her scientific contributions were overshadowed by gossip about her love life.
Leibniz and Newton: The Calculus Wars
Meanwhile, Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus. Independently. Around the same time.
Think about that for a moment. Two humans, on opposite ends of Europe, both arrived at the mathematical tool that would eventually help us split the atom and land on the moon. Neither copied the other. The universe was apparently ready for calculus.
Newton’s notation was practical. Get in, get the job done, get out. Leibniz’s was elegant. All those swoopy integral signs you see in physics? That’s Leibniz. Pure mathematics uses his system. Physics kept Newton’s.
But here’s what Elise Crull points out: Leibniz didn’t just give us calculus. He gave us a different way of understanding space itself. Newton said space was a thing—something that exists independently of matter. Leibniz said space was just the relationships between things.
That debate? Still relevant. Still unresolved.
The Three-Layer Framework
Layer 1: The Obvious Answer
What happened to physics?
It specialized. We learned more, so we divided the labor. Universities built departments. Funding followed applications. This is normal. This is progress.
Layer 2: What Are We Missing?
Here’s the part that will make you uncomfortable: We didn’t just specialize. We actively suppressed the philosophical questions.
After World War II, physics became a weapon. Literally. The Manhattan Project showed that physicists could change the course of history. Suddenly there was funding. Lots of it. But it came with strings attached: Get results.
David Mermin coined a phrase for what happened next: “Shut up and calculate.”
The classroom changed. Students flooded in. There wasn’t time for chin-scratching about the nature of reality. There were bombs to build, transistors to develop, enemies to outcompete. The Cold War had no patience for “But why does the wave function collapse?”
The result? Generations of physicists trained to solve equations without asking what they meant. Einstein called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics a “tranquilizing philosophy.” He lost that argument—not because he was wrong, but because the culture shifted away from caring.
James Conant, who was both president of Harvard and a chemist-physicist, fought against this. He built history and philosophy of science into Harvard’s physics program. He understood that you can’t do good science if you don’t understand why you’re asking the questions you’re asking.
He was swimming against the tide.
Layer 3: The Question We Should Be Asking
“What is the proper goal of science?”
This was Einstein’s question. It was Mach’s question. It was the question that guided every major breakthrough in physics until we stopped asking it.
Elise Crull drops this bomb in the conversation: There’s no reason the universe should care about our aesthetics. We prefer simple theories. We prefer elegant equations. But why should nature oblige?
The assumption that nature is uniform at all—that the laws here are the same as the laws a billion light-years away—is itself an untestable philosophical commitment. You have to believe it before science becomes worth doing.
So here’s the reframe: Physics without philosophy isn’t science. It’s engineering.
The Characters You Should Know
Elise Crull
Associate Professor of Philosophy at The City College of New York. Has a bachelor’s in Physics and Astronomy from Calvin University, a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Notre Dame. She wrote The Einstein Paradox (with Guido Bacciagaluppi), which digs into the famous 1935 EPR paper and the debates it sparked—debates that are still ongoing.
She’s also written about Grete Hermann, a German philosopher who in 1935 found a flaw in John von Neumann’s supposedly bulletproof proof that hidden variable theories were impossible. The physics community mostly ignored her. She turned out to be right.
Crull’s job is asking the questions that make physics better by making it less certain. The questions that say: “Yes, the math works, but what does it mean?”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You know him. Astrophysicist, science communicator, director of the Hayden Planetarium. He’s famous for making complex science accessible. What’s less discussed is that he’s willing to have conversations like this one—where the conclusion isn’t that physics has all the answers, but that physics might have forgotten some of the questions.
Chuck Nice
Comedian and co-host. The person in the room who asks what everyone is thinking. When Tyson and Crull start discussing whether space is a substance or a relation, Chuck’s there going, “I’m confused.” And honestly? Same.
Why This Matters
Crull tells a story about Ernst Mach, the physicist and philosopher. When Einstein wrote Mach’s obituary, he said something remarkable: One of the reasons I hold this person in such high esteem is because he kept asking about the proper goal of science.
Not the results. Not the equations. The goal.
That’s what guided Einstein. That’s what’s missing from most physics education today.
And it’s not just physics. Any field that walls itself off from “Why?” questions eventually becomes a set of procedures performed by people who’ve forgotten the purpose.
The liberal arts—the “useless” humanities—existed precisely to prevent this. They kept you loose. They kept you asking questions across domains. Crull points out that even through master’s degrees, people used to stay general. They learned everything.
Now? Hyper-specialization starts in high school. By the time you’re in graduate school, you might be the world expert on one particular kind of subatomic interaction—and completely unable to explain why anyone should care.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here’s what nobody wants to say: Sometimes the walls between fields aren’t about protecting rigor. They’re about protecting turf.
If philosophers can critique physics, physics loses some of its authority. If historians can point out that the “Copenhagen interpretation” was never actually a coherent single thing—that Bohr and Heisenberg disagreed about fundamental issues—then the textbook version becomes less certain.
And certainty is comfortable. Certainty gets funding. Certainty doesn’t require you to stay up at night wondering if you’ve spent your career on an incomplete picture of reality.
But here’s what Crull and Tyson agree on: The walls hurt everyone. Not just philosophy. Not just physics. Knowledge itself.
The Takeaway
Three things to hold:
Émilie du Châtelet wrote the book. Literally. The French foundation of Newtonian physics that’s still in use today. She deserves to be known for that, not for who she slept with.
“Shut up and calculate” was a choice. Not an inevitability. The Cold War made it a survival strategy. But the Cold War is over, and the philosophical questions are still there, waiting.
The proper goal of science is itself a philosophical question. You can’t escape it. You can only pretend you’re not answering it.
Where to Go From Here
Watch the full conversation: “How Quantum Physics Complicates Objective Truth, with Elise Crull” — StarTalk Radio
Read the book: The Einstein Paradox: The Debate on Nonlocality and Incompleteness in 1935 by Guido Bacciagaluppi and Elise Crull (Cambridge University Press)
And if you want to go deeper: Look up Grete Hermann. Another woman philosopher-physicist who was right decades before the field caught up.
The walls between disciplines aren’t natural features of the intellectual landscape. They’re construction projects. And construction projects can be demolished.
Sometimes the most radical act isn’t discovering something new. It’s remembering what we forgot to ask.
About this post: Based on conversations from StarTalk Radio featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Elise Crull, philosopher of physics at CUNY. The episode covers the relationship between physics and philosophy from Newton through the Cold War to today.
Source: StarTalk Radio — “How Quantum Physics Complicates Objective Truth, with Elise Crull” / “The Philosophy of Physics with Elise Crull”
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