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Behridudnfbrnbdnd t1_j5grf4y wrote

Should physics be forgiven?

Never have humans ever had so much capacity to destroy. Physics has put the world into a state of moral decay, where threatening others with nuclear holocaust is seen as a necessary evil for a ruler. Nuclear war seems imminent, and nobody seems to blame the people who dedicated their lives to create it. Physics has paradoxically made it impossible to fully understand the universe: the nuclear bomb has put a hard limit on how long humans can experience and study the cosmos.
Everyone who spent their lives in dedication to this practice has lived in vein. The end result of finding out about our cosmos is about to end civilization.
Scientists like to see themselves and their work as morally neutral, at worst. But I don't understand how science can forgive itself. Even medicine, for all its life-affirming pursuits, could put the tools of bioweapons in the hands of every man evil enough to cause mass death.
How will the histories (that will never be created, due to the true destruction of the nuclear bomb) judge our pursuit of knowledge about the universe? Will they see physicists as wonderers about our cosmos, or will they see the secrets of life and death as a morally questionable pursuit?
If God does exist, hopefully he can find solace in knowing humans can understand the cosmos as we work to destroy it.

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Maximus_En_Minimus t1_j5iw15m wrote

I think you’ve been playing a little too much fallout mate.

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There’s a lot of assumptions here and conclusions which do not follow from their premises:

  • Nuclear war does not entail extinction of either humanity or civilisation; there has been heavy investment in counter nuclear arsenals capable of intercepting warheads - while a war itself may be reserved to a few nation states or battlefields. The effects would be devastating, but humanity could recover.

  • Nukes do not entail that nukes will be used, only that the option is now available and, thus, the probability of usage has increased.

  • Saying physics has put the world into a state of decay is kind of silly; if anything, we have corrupted physics to meet the needs of our own sickened nature. If by ‘evil ruler’ you are referring to Putin and Kim Jong Un, then both only threaten nuclear war defensively in case of invasion.

  • “the end result of finding out about the cosmos is about to end civilisation”, it does not follow that nukes are or were - given we have advanced since their invention - the ‘end result’ of physics. Nor does it follow they will end civilisation.

  • medicine does not involve itself in the creation of bioweapons. Some specifically amoral experts of the fields of biology, pharmacology, virology and bio-chemistry might, for a lot of cash and their research projects being funded, research and produce bio-weapons. However the majority of medicine focuses on either practice or research into stopping cancer, Alzheimers, Huntingtons, etc.

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Some of your conclusions may be solid if you re-evaluate them and give well argued premises or evidence for their support.

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