I don’t completely agree with this statement. Sure you may lack religion but I don’t think you must logically have a “disbelief” in religion, especially for theoretical physics. The quirkiness of quantum mechanics for example is very strange and possibly unsettling, for instance Einstein’s quote “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. Quantum mechanics seems strange but is probably fairly accurate.

There are problems with disbelief due to science, namely science is always changing. I suppose one could have constantly changing beliefs but that seems strange to me, since beliefs are usually mostly constant. There are numerous examples throughout history where science was wrong and thinking that it won’t be wrong again is illogical. For example the idea of an Earth-centric universe, then corrected to a Sun-centric, then to a “relative” view.

A more recent example is the size of a proton. Recently it was discovered that the calculated size of proton (calculations due to QED) was off by a bit. This is significant because it inherently shows that there are problems with the theory. Additionally quantum mechanics has so far failed to explain gravity; thus far there is no Grand Theory of Everything. This was actually the topic of Steven Hawkins’ new book, who believes that it may not be possible for science to find such a theory. Hawkins suggests that we view reality as model dependent realism, i.e. some models work well in some circumstances, and others work in other circumstances.

Disbelief from science would require disprove, which is hard if not impossible for science. Non-belief is more rational than disbelief and is more likely the case for scientists.

I haven’t written a tumblr post in a while and this seemed like a good topic