And every sand becomes a gem Reflected in the beams divine Blown back they blind the mocking eye

Greene insists all that is — all that exists — consists only of particles and fields. Nothing but "Particles and fields … . To the depths of reality that we have so far plumbed, there is no evidence for anything else."

This passage quoting Brian Greene from the review I quoted shows exactly what I said, that materialism (whether you want to honestly admit that's what it is or under its aliases such as "physicalism" or "naturalism") is not only a closed system, denying the possibility of there being anything outside of it but insisting that they know that, its rule setting insists that things be rigged to come out with the conclusion their rules serve.  I might look at the book, but I wonder if this claim isn't Greene's attempt to come up with something as pithy as Sagan's "Cosmos" credo of pop materialism from his very uneven and way too influential PBS show.

Physics BY HUMAN INTENTION AND HUMAN DECISION, CONSCIOUSLY MADE deals with nothing but "particles and fields," and only those. Its rules and procedures, methods and habits could only find those because science is an artificial set of rules and methods and habits that are made to look at very limited possible areas of investigation. Those rules, applied to the best of human abilities for all times could find nothing except those things and their actions, they can't even tell you if there are other things about those very limited aspects of reality, particles and fields, that fall outside of the scope of what those can tell us about them. Modern physics has, on the contrary, given us every reason to believe that WE CAN NEVER KNOW THROUGH PHYSICS everything there is to know about any and every particle or certainly everything about every field. I would be surprised if they are not far worse at coming up with a theory of everything about fields which they know through the incomplete knowledge of particles in those fields than they do about the particles.

What materialism is is a particularly arrogant and stupid insistence that the entirety of reality or even a majority of it must conveniently fall within human perceptions and methods of knowing and within the methods and tools we contrive to extend those - which is an issue all in itself. After what modern physics has revealed to us more than ninety years ago shows that materialism is as antiquated a notion as some of the aspects of 17th and19th century physics that was discontinued with the rise of modern physics in the 20th century. But professional scientists and mathematicians are still insisting on their favored ideology being exempt from all of the inconvenient developments in their own fields.

That quote I used last night was from a poem by William Blake which I have to say I didn't understand adequately until I'd read a lot of Walter Brueggemann and the Old Testament under his and other theologians' influence.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;

Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!

You throw the sand against the wind,

And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a gem

Reflected in the beams divine;

Blown back they blind the mocking eye,

But still in Israel's paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus

And Newton's Particles of Light

Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,

Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

We all, Brian Greene, Peter Woit, you, me, all of us live in a reality as real AND I WOULD ASSERT MORE REAL, as subatomic particles and the forces that modern physics studies and reveals, though a lot of what was studied as promising theories didn't turn out that way - we're always supposed to just stop thinking about things that come up with nul results, though they were held to be credible enough to make the effort to study them at the time. Brian Greene's colleagues, the thousands and thousands of physicists who have spent the past 40 years on string theory - and its cousin theories, certainly most of the WRONG - have been banking on brilliantly devised theories that, if Woit is right, are little more than snakes that eat their own tails and will not even make it into future textbooks as failures. 

 

I say more real because the world of our daily experience is more known to us than even the findings of physics that are held by materialists to be the ground of all reality because the prerequisite beliefs that those findings are grounded in are, ultimately, our every day experience starting when we were infants.  The conceit of physicists of a materialistic bent that all of reality must bend to the most banal details of what they study insists on ignoring that it is their childhood experience of reality that those are governed by.  And the majority of their professional and personal lives prove that they don't really want to believe what they claim when it comes to what they value most. 

I'll bet every single one of them whether a post-doc or a fully tenured professor with a big income would have no problem if the institution that employs them forced them to do more work without compensation or otherwise upset their sense of their personal economic justice. They certainly would expend enormous amounts of effort on pursuing justice for themselves, certainly if their published ideas were worth money they would want to make certain that no one took the profit and, probably as important to them THE CREDIT for their property. But none of the arguments, none of the preexisting stands or rights or claims of justice to them which they would use to try to get what was due them could be found in Brian Greene's or any other materialists list of what was real in their realm of particles and forces. They would knowingly or unknowingly be making the same claims to those that are made by The Children of Israel, articulated for them by Aaron at the instruction of Moses all asserted to have been true because GOD WANTED IT THAT WAY. Maybe, in light of their claims of the exclusive nature of reality being bound by the limits of their professional activity, the administration that wants to screw them should demand that they justify their claims in equations using the limits of the methods of physics to do so. I don't see how they could complain about it in ways that would be consistent with their ideological claims.