S02:E05
Berkeley, late 1989. Paul Feyerabend is sixty-five, retired from the philosophy department where he taught for thirty-six years, and has sat down to write Conquest of Abundance -- the book he believes is his real work, even though Against Method sold a hundred thousand copies and earned him the title of the worst enemy of science. He walks with a cane. He has walked with a cane since 1945, when a Soviet bullet from the retreat off the Eastern Front entered his spine and left him in chronic pain he never escaped. After the war, in the ruins of Weimar, he studied opera -- singing, stage management, harmony, piano -- and attended theatre every night, because what he had survived made it intolerable to do anything that pretended to be serious. Then he went back to Vienna and learned physics, then history, then philosophy. He met Karl Popper at a summer seminar in a Tyrolean village called Alpbach in 1948. Years later he would write the book that destroyed Popper's programme from the inside.
Last week Born told Paula that the wave function gives only probability -- weights, not answers, and the longer you look, the more the certainty disappears. Every container leaks. Today Paula asks the question Feyerabend has been asking his whole life: were there ever any containers? Was there ever a method? Was there ever a set of rules science actually followed, or did we invent the rules after the fact and pretend they were there before?
Against Method, 1975. Three hundred pages of argument that no methodological rule has gone unviolated by successful science. Galileo used propaganda. Newton contradicted his own principles. Einstein cheated. The rules are fictions written after the discoveries by historians who wanted the discoveries to look orderly. The only principle that does not inhibit progress, Feyerabend wrote, is anything goes. He did not mean that science is irrational. He meant that science is rational in too many different ways for any single description to hold. Reason is plural. Method is local. The myth of a unified scientific method is what allows institutions to pretend they own truth.
Paula tells him what eighty years of cosmology look like. Inflation, dark matter, string theory, the multiverse. Most of it never tested in a laboratory. Most of its proponents would have failed a Popperian falsifiability test on day one. Feyerabend laughs. He says: of course. That is exactly how physics works. The myth that physics restricts itself to the falsifiable is told inside university lecture halls and nowhere else. The real history is wilder. Newton invented calculus because he needed it, not because Leibniz was wrong. Einstein refused to accept his own theory's prediction of gravitational waves for twenty years. Every step forward was somebody breaking the previous rule. Anything goes is not a slogan. It is a description.
The conversation turns personal. Feyerabend tells Paula about Conquest of Abundance, the book he is writing. The universe is richer than any framework can describe. Reality has more in it than reason can hold. He is writing for a friend who is dying -- he will dedicate the book to her -- and the book is, in the end, about the inadequacy of the very philosophical tradition he has spent his career practicing. The frameworks let reality down. The frameworks are necessary. Both true. Both Feyerabend.
The episode closes on Alpbach. Feyerabend tells Paula she should visit one day. A village of four hundred people in the Tyrolean Alps. The philosophy of science turned there in 1948 over coffee and mountain air. Erwin Schroedinger is buried in the churchyard, his wave equation carved into his gravestone, three doors down from a Konditorei where the strudel is exactly what strudel should be. There is no method in any of this, Feyerabend says. There is only this place, those people, this strudel, this question. Anything goes -- and from that anything, sometimes, comes something worth keeping.
