Philosophy is already embedded in physics, whether physicists realize it or not — Curt Jaimungal and John Norton (Professor of Philosophy and Physics) argue that physicists routinely rely on unexamined philosophical assumptions about evidence, reality, simplicity, and induction, and that dismissing philosophy doesn’t free you from it; it just means your philosophical assumptions go unexamined and are likely mediocre or defective.
The “ornithology to birds” quip is self-defeating
The popular physicist jab — “Philosophy is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds” — misses the point: ornithologists aren’t trying to be useful to birds, and philosophy of physics isn’t trying to be useful to physicists in the narrow sense.
Norton’s sharper framing: philosophy of physics sets its own standards of success, just as no field should let another field define what counts as good work in its domain.
Dismissing philosophy for not being useful to science is like a fish dismissing oceanography because it doesn’t help it swim faster.
Physicists who deny they do philosophy are doing philosophy badly
When a physicist says “there’s no measurement problem, all that matters is predictions,” they’ve just endorsed an extreme form of instrumentalism — a position most philosophers abandoned decades ago for being logically untenable.
Norton’s key distinction: having philosophical assumptions is not the same as doing philosophy. Everyone has implicit views on what exists, what counts as evidence, and what makes a theory good. Philosophy is the systematic examination of those assumptions — making them explicit, testing their coherence, exploring their implications.
The analogy: the physicist who says “shut up and calculate” isn’t doing philosophy; they’re just refusing to examine their instrumentalist assumptions. This is the difference between speaking English and studying linguistics.
Elise Crull made this point directly to Neil deGrasse Tyson on his own StarTalk podcast: choosing to set aside certain questions in the name of neutrality is itself a philosophical position.
Concrete contributions of philosophy to physics
Philosophy of physics has produced citable, substantive results, not just vague inspiration:
Bell’s theorem — philosophical analysis of entanglement and locality directly shaped quantum foundations and experimental physics.
Decoherence theory — philosophical work helped clarify how classical behavior emerges from quantum mechanics.
The hole argument — used in loop quantum gravity to critique string theory.
Norton’s covariance principles — one of his most cited papers in a physics journal.
Landauer’s principle critique — forced proponents to actually think through their arguments rather than treating “information equals physical” as an unquestioned axiom.
Emily Adlam and Jacob Barandes have documented multiple cases where philosophers of physics directly aided mainstream physics.
Much of this work was done by people with other official jobs or who suffered career consequences for working on ideas considered too philosophical for mainstream physics.
Curt’s argument: if you want the biggest bang for your buck in contributing to physics, investing more in philosophy of physics is a strong candidate.
Norton’s demolition of “it from bit”
John Wheeler’s famous phrase — “it from bit,” the idea that reality is fundamentally information — has become a rallying cry for a certain style of speculation.
Norton draws a sharp distinction between two types of philosophy:
Professional philosophy: takes something perplexing and analyzes it until it becomes clear why the confusion existed in the first place.
Coffee table philosophy: produces acroamatic wisdom that sounds clever precisely because it is meaningless.
“It from bit” falls squarely in category two. Norton’s verdict: “It is on the face simply nonsense to say the real world is information.”
Using information as a calculational tool is entirely legitimate — Shannon himself rejected any deep connection between information and thermodynamic entropy. The problem is elevating a useful tool into an ontological claim about what fundamentally exists.
The analogy: saying “hammers are useful, therefore the universe is made of Home Depot.”
For philosophers, “it from bit” is a literal ontological claim (about what exists). For many physicists, it functions as a heuristic prompt to generate new research directions.
Norton’s assessment: this obsession with information as fundamental has failed to produce good physics and has instead produced an endlessly inflating volume of ever more improbable speculation.
The etymological irony of “empiricist”
Physicists love to declare their work empirical, but the term “empiricist” has a loaded history: the empiricists were a marginal medical sect in antiquity, and by the 1700s, “empirics” were routinely derided as medical quacks.
Every time a physicist proudly calls themselves an empiricist while dismissing philosophy, there’s a certain historical irony they’re unaware of.
The broader lesson
Norton’s critique isn’t that physicists should become philosophers, but that they should recognize they’re already operating within philosophical frameworks — and that refusing to examine those frameworks doesn’t make them disappear, it just makes them worse.
The full episode also covers Norton’s systematic critiques of the simulation hypothesis and other cases of poor thinking in physics.
