Fissix

F is six

in ancient Greek,
and "fissix" sounds like physics,
and the external physical world is perceived in six basic ways:

Looking at it with our eyes,
hearing it with our ears,
smelling it with our noses,
tasting it with our tongues,
feeling it with our skins, and
knowing which way is up, via our inner ears.

People tend to forget about that sixth way of perceiving the external physical world because people tend to think of the sixth sense as being an ability to see spirits, or some vague sense of impending doom, or a sense of being stared at. Is there a sense of being stared at? Would that be a seventh way of perceiving the external physical world? Or a way of perceiving the external mental world? Are ghosts ectoplasmic, or psychic? I suppose that if psychologists demonstrated that there is a sense of being stared at, and if they got a good materialistic theory of how it worked (involving, say, the nature of quantum-mechanical collapses), then philosophers would say that that was indeed a seventh way of perceiving the external physical world. That is all very iffy though.

What about the sixth way of perceiving the external physical world with our inner ears? Well, "going up in the world," people say, and "feeling a bit down." People naturally associate up with good and down with bad. But physics came of age when the heavens fell under its laws, in the seventeenth century, thanks to Newton.

By pursuing empirical truth, instead of the next epicycle, Britain began the industrial revolution and built the biggest empire the world had ever seen. And the other sciences followed in the footsteps of physics. In the eighteenth century chemistry emerged from alchemy, in the nineteenth century biology became Darwinian, and in the twentieth century physics became Einsteinian. But the twentieth century was a century of cultural wars, as well as actual wars that got bigger than wars had ever been. Soviet biologists doubted the Darwinian foundation of biology. A few mathematicians even doubted the set-theoretical foundation of twentieth-century mathematics. Still, no one doubted the quantum-mechanical foundation of chemistry. And no one doubted the Einsteinian foundation of high-energy physics, which was a little odd because quantum mechanics all but refuted the four-dimensionalism of Einsteinian spacetime.

Almost all of the physical evidence supported the equations of quantum mechanics and Newton's equations, and the rest of it was evidence that could only be perceived by physicists who were assuming Einstein's equations and making very expensive observations, funded by those with the funds to fund the military, observations that could hardly be independently verified.

Physicists are still pursuing the next dark object at the cutting-edge of high-energy physics, and inventing ever more elaborate Einsteinian theories; and philosophers are still giving "empirical truth" new definitions. But if you could choose between appearing professional and being able to learn, which would you choose?