Biologists, and other scientists, as scientists, don’t care for things that don’t help them do their research better in a way they and their colleagues perceive as better. Physicists don’t care about much of maths, either. Einstein definitely didn’t have a broad knowledge of theoretical mathematics.
> Physicists don't care about much of maths "Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict natural phenomena."
Read again what I wrote. Yes, theoretical physics is mostly mathematics. But most of pure mathematics is not used in theoretical physics and theoretical physicists don’t care much about it - until somebody shows that some part of it can be useful for what they do.
Yes, there is an intersection between pure mathematics and theoretical physics, so they have something to talk about, but biology research doesn't intersect with either pure mathematics or theoretical physics. All the scientists in that group were biologists.
So is Carl, who started this discussion. What point are you trying to make?
During that time period, the logical positivism movement dominated in philosophy. Logical positivists thought only logic and science were useful, and prior philosophy was subjective bullshit that nobody could prove. Logical positivism is now considered debunked and dead in analytic philosophy.
Logical positivists were extremists and really into abstract math(s). It's not surprising that Russell enjoyed it but the four biologists from 1949 would find it useless. That says very little about whether philosophy of science, which found problems in logical positivism, would help science today.
In many ways, STEM bros who think only science and mathematics are useful—and philosophy is subjective bullshit—are logical positivists. And that's why some humanities education would help, especially philosophy of science.
This is laughable. Tech bros are nothing like logical positivists.Please read autobiographies by A. J. Ayer and others to see what they really thought about the world. The Vienna Circle members were leftists who actively opposed nationalism, fascism, and clerical conservatism.
Tech bros are a mixture of wannabe John Galts, longtermists (a “philosophy” with deep pseudoscientific roots), and more-or-less open authoritarians or worse. All scientists I know thoroughly despise their “philosophies”.
Also, the claim that logical positivists thoughts only science and mathematics were useful and philosophy a subjective BS is as wrong as it gets. They were philosophers doing philosophy, who had strong opinions how philosophy itself should be done. They only thought of metaphysics as meaningless.
I said "STEM bro", not tech bro, and I'm referring to the characteristic of most STEM people thinking that their topic of interest can be widely applied and solve problems in other fields, not their politics. I'm in tech, and even liberals are AI boosters who think generative AI can everyone's job.
I am a STEM person in STEM and I know of no other STEM people around me who think any of that, and I doubt that you do, either. It is only some (albeit too many) students who think AI can help them avoid learning without consequences.
Einstein cared. 'Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel". ... [The Gödel metric] would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory.'
Einstein cared about concrete solutions to his equations. That supports what I wrote above.