This is a response to a reddit post in r/philosphyofscience asking whether philosophy is dead because some physicists say so.
In my view, after 5 years of reverse engineering cosmology and physics to find the root cause false assumptions that have thrown those fields off track, I think science definitely needs philosophy, but philosophy has in my opinion also failed because the scientific method, which I believe is in the domain of philosophy, has serious flaws when it comes to proactive detection of errors in the ontology of those fields. Let me explain.
General relativity and quantum mechanics (and followons) are wonderfully accurate “effective theories,” meaning that those theories are able to match observations very well. However, neither GR or QM offers an implementation of nature. Why is that? Physics and cosmology are considered by some well known luminaries in those fields to be in crisis because of slow progress in solving nature (Penrose, Hossenfelder, Smolin, Rovelli, and more).
I think I have discovered the specific issue that resulted in the consensus that classical theories could not solve nature. This is in the circa 1900 work of Liénard and Wiechert on point charges and potential waves from their path history. Specifically these scientists only considered point charges with charge magnitudes equal to the electron and proton. Apparently no one ever closed the loop when fractional charges (quarks) were discovered decades later.
Now it turns out that if you instead make the assumptions that point charges have magnitudes |q| = |e/6| then everything changes. Now you realize that you need at least six point charges to make an electron. This entirely flips the ontology. Now the standard matter particles would be assemblies of point charges and besides matching the net charge of the particle, you may also have additional pairs of +q and -q in your assembly, because those pairs are neutral. You might also realize that the photon would necessarily be an assembly of point charges in this ontology. So now comes the crucial question : why would point charge speed be limited to the speed of a photon assembly? How could the assembly of point charges determine the point charge speed? It couldn’t! The ontology is flipped again.
So now we don’t know if there is a speed limit on point charges and this is where we can now do things neoclassically that do solve nature. One more thing we need to do is to dis-associate the speed of light c from the speed of the potential field of a point charge. Those are separate concepts. Anyway, by choosing the proper assumptions, one can fairly easily figure out how the standard model is implemented, how spacetime is implemented, the incorrect narratives in physics and cosmology, and the things physics and cosmology haven’t yet figured out. I’ll post a picture showing the situation and I’m happy to help guide anyone to the solution or show them the solution directly.
So, to get back to your question, if my findings are ever validated (which is a challenge because physicists get really upset by this line of thinking after 125 years of being off track in extremely difficult land of math), then there is a huge amount of new work to be done in philosophy. First, fall on the sword and accept that the scientific method was lacking in the ability to detect this issue and learn from this mistake and incorporate into the ongoing scientific method. Second, and much larger, philosophers will now be able to review all philosophy throughout history in the context of the solution to nature being a Euclidean void in time and space populated by energetic unit potential point charges. I only know enough about philosophy to realize that this will be a tsunami of a sea change and therefore a great time to be a philosopher.
p.s. these ideas seem to really upset a lot of people who try to get my posts removed. I’m no Einstein. I was just relentlessly skeptical about physics, guessed at the solution, and simplified it iteratively until I figured out how nature works and why physicists missed it. So this is how paradigm shifts happen — a completely different way of looking at the problem and in this case enabled by three very basic errors in the assumptions of Liénard and Wiechert.
J Mark Morris : Boston : Massachusetts
Neoclassical Physics and Quantum Gravity 