The Unspoken Dogma: A Philosophical Critique of the Foundational Axioms of Modern Physics

 J. Rogers, SE Ohio

Abstract

For the better part of a century, the field of fundamental physics has operated under an explicitly pragmatic, anti-philosophical banner. This paper contends that this "philosophy of no philosophy" is a façade, masking a rigid and unexamined set of foundational axioms. We will first list these unspoken axioms, which collectively form the implicit dogma of the field. We will then subject them to a rigorous philosophical critique, drawing a direct and unsettling parallel to the predictively successful but foundationally false Ptolemaic system of epicycles. We will argue that this axiomatic framework, while responsible for the field's immense predictive success, has created an intellectual prison that actively prevents the kind of paradigm-shifting inquiry necessary for genuine progress. The current stagnation in fundamental physics, we conclude, is not a result of reaching experimental limits, but a direct consequence of the philosophical poverty of its own unwritten constitution.

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1. Introduction: The Philosophy of No Philosophy

The dominant culture in modern theoretical physics is one of profound and often proud disinterest in philosophy. The physicist's task, according to this view, is not to ponder the metaphysical nature of reality, but to construct mathematical models that produce experimentally verifiable predictions. This instrumentalist approach has been staggeringly successful, yielding the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the theory of General Relativity.

However, this success has come at a cost. The public rejection of philosophy has not led to a philosophy-free science. Instead, it has allowed a specific, highly conservative, and largely unexamined philosophy to become entrenched as unquestionable dogma. The purpose of this paper is to make this implicit philosophy explicit by formally listing its core axioms and subjecting them to the kind of philosophical scrutiny the discipline itself forbids.

2. The Unwritten Constitution

The following seven axioms constitute the unspoken, yet rigidly enforced, philosophical foundation of modern physics:

Axiom 1: You cannot talk about philosophy.
Axiom 2: You cannot talk about philosophy.
Axiom 3: The meter, the kilogram, the second, and the Ampere are the real, objective framework of reality. (Ontological Realism of the SI chart).
Axiom 4: The fundamental constants (c, h, e, etc.) are irreducible, "God-given" properties of the universe whose values we must measure. (Ontological Realism of the Constants).
Axiom 5: An explanation is a mathematical model that correctly predicts the outcomes of measurements. (Instrumentalism).
Axiom 6: Questions about the reality of entities that cannot be directly measured (like the "meaning" of a wavefunction or the "reality of a virtual particle) are ill-posed and unscientific.
Axiom 7: The goal of physics is to complete this model by finding all the necessary inputs (particle masses, coupling constants) and the final equations.

3. A Philosophical Critique

The first two axioms form a self-sealing firewall against critique. The statement "we have no philosophy" is itself a philosophical statement—a performative contradiction. It is an attempt to place one's own foundational beliefs outside the domain of rational inquiry, a move that is fundamentally anti-intellectual and serves to enforce conformity.

These axioms represent a form of Naive Realism, mistaking the map for the territory. To grant ontological status to the meter—a convention that has changed definition multiple times, each time tracking our evolving understanding—reverses the actual epistemic order. This dogma treats the necessary correction factors of our flawed coordinate system (the constants) as fundamental properties of nature, a category error of the highest order.

This instrumentalist standard, which equates explanation with prediction, has a notorious precedent. The Ptolemaic epicycle system was predictively successful for fourteen centuries—longer than modern physics has even existed. It was defended not just by argument but by the stake and the pyre. And it was utterly, foundationally wrong. Its predictive success came not from truth but from sufficient parameterization. The lesson of history is clear: a model can "work" for centuries and still be mapping the wrong territory entirely. Axiom 6, a fossil of the long-dead philosophy of Logical Positivism, serves as the enforcement mechanism for this view, declaring the deepest causal questions to be "unscientific."

This final axiom defines physics as what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science"—a puzzle-solving activity. It is a recipe for refining the epicycles, not for seeking the sun-centered truth. It explicitly forbids the revolutionary questioning that is the true engine of scientific progress.

4. The Practical Consequences: Suppressed Avenues of Inquiry

This is not mere philosophical fussiness. This axiomatic cage has real consequences, closing off entire avenues of inquiry by pre-judging them as invalid. The following "heretical" questions, which should be at the heart of physics, are rendered illegitimate by the current dogma:

• What if the fundamental constants are not fundamental? What if they are merely the artifacts of a flawed assumption of independent measurement axes, as the identity 8πG/c⁴ = 8π/F_P strongly suggests?

• What if inertia is not an intrinsic property of mass, but a relational property arising from an object's coupling to the rest of the universe, as a mechanistic reading of Mach's Principle would demand?

• What is the physical mechanism of wavefunction collapse or quantum entanglement? Axiom 6 dismisses this as a meaningless question, forcing physics to remain content with a probabilistic description rather than a causal explanation.

• What if "dark energy" is not a new substance, but a phantom created by our false assumption that the rate of cosmic time is constant?

5. A Prescription for a Post-Positivist Physics

The cure for this stagnation is not a new experiment, but a new philosophy. A post-positivist physics would be founded on a different set of principles:

1. The Primacy of Mechanism: The goal is not merely to predict, but to explain. A valid theory must provide a coherent, causal mechanism for the phenomena it describes, not just a mathematical black box.

2. The Scrutiny of Axioms: Foundational assumptions, especially regarding the nature of space, time, and measurement, are not to be taken for granted. They are to be treated as the most critical and vulnerable points of any theory.

3. The Pursuit of Conceptual Simplicity: A theory that requires dozens of unexplained free parameters (like the Standard Model) is a sign of a flawed paradigm, not a complete one. The goal is to find the simpler, underlying principle from which complexity emerges, not to merely catalog the complexity.

6. Conclusion: Escaping the Golden Cage

The unwritten constitution of modern physics is a patchwork of philosophical dogmas that has built a golden cage: a framework that is predictively powerful but conceptually sterile. Like the Ptolemaic astronomers before them, physicists have become masters at refining the epicycles of a model whose foundational premise may be wrong.

Progress will not come from fulfilling Axiom 7 and finding the next decimal point. It will come from the heretical act of violating Axioms 1 and 2 and daring to ask the foundational questions that have been declared illegal. To find a new physics, we must first have the courage to admit that the old one has a philosophy—and that this philosophy has led us astray.