![]() ![]() He kept jumping up from his chair to forage for books or articles that could buttress a point. ![]() “Physics,” he exclaimed, grabbing a book from a table and slamming it down, “is that!” “Subjectivism” has no place in physics, quantum or otherwise, he informed me. “I don’t believe a word of it,” he declared in a German-accented growl. He brandished an article I had written for Scientific American about how quantum mechanics is raising questions about the objectivity of physics. Yet he was as kinetic as a bantamweight boxer. I had assumed the author of such autocratic prose would be tall. I was trying to lower my expectations when Popper made his entrance. I should expect to speak to him for only an hour at the most. He had endured many interviews and congratulations brought on by his 90th birthday last month, and he had been toiling over an acceptance speech for the Kyoto Prize, known as Japan's Nobel. As she led me into the house, she told me that Sir Karl was tired. Mew was only slightly less forbidding in person than over the telephone. He knew the street on which Popper lived, however, and we found Popper's home, a two-story cottage surrounded by neatly trimmed lawn and shrubs, with little difficulty.Ī tall, handsome woman with short dark hair, wearing black pants and shirt, answered the door. Sir Karl Popper? The famous philosopher? Never heard of him, the driver said. “Sir Karl Popper's house, please,” I said as I climbed into a cab at the train station. Mew assured me that all the cab drivers knew where Sir Karl lived. When I asked for directions from a nearby train station, Mrs. After numerous faxes and calls, she set a date. She gave me a list of a dozen or so books by Sir Karl that I should read before the meeting. Mew, housekeeper and assistant to “Sir Karl.” Before he would see me, I had to send her a sample of my writings. When I called, a woman with an imperious, German-accented voice answered. A secretary said he generally worked at his home in a London suburb. To arrange an interview, I telephoned the London School of Economics, where Popper had taught since the late 1940s. There was an old joke about Popper: The Open Society and its Enemies should have been titled The Open Society by One of its Enemies. Everyone said this opponent of dogmatism was almost pathologically dogmatic. Queries of this kind usually elicit dull, generic praise, but not in Popper’s case. I began to discern the paradox lurking at the heart of Karl Popper's career when, prior to interviewing him in 1992, I asked other philosophers about him. And if you like this style of journalism, keep an eye out for my new book Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are, which I plan to publish soon for free at. Please also check out my profiles of two other great philosophers of science, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. Defenders of strings and multiverses deride critics as “Popperazzi.” Given the abiding interest in this complex thinker, I am posting an edited version of my profile of Popper in The End of Science. Popper’s falsification principle has been used to attack string and multiverse theories, which cannot be empirically tested. Open Society has been invoked lately by those concerned about the rise of anti-democratic forces. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, Popper asserted that politics, even more than science, must avoid dogmatism, which inevitably fosters repression. Observations can only disprove a theory, or falsify it. But scientists can never prove a theory to be true, Popper insisted, because the next test might contradict all that preceded it. The latter, Popper pointed out, make predictions that can be empirically tested. He is best-known for the principle of falsification, a means of distinguishing pseudo-scientific theories, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis, from genuine ones, like quantum mechanics and general relativity. Popper, 1902-1994, railed against dogmatism in all forms. The world has been paying lots of attention to philosopher Karl Popper lately, although surely not as much as he would think he deserves. ![]()
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