(b)logophile

Benjamin Rosenbaum is a smart guy.

[T]here may come a time when our scientific models of today seem just as quaint as Bronze Age ones do now; that just as we look at a metaphysic in which an angry, jealous king orders the world by punishment and reward, after fashioning it with his hands, as archaic products of a particular socio-technological moment — kings, shepherds, potters — so may people in a couple of thousand years look at our notions of universally obtaining intelligible physical laws, constants and symmetries, emergent processes and predictive causalities — or whatever else — and be struck by how quaintly that was all about written language, markets and hierarchies as forms of social organization, short single-bodied life spans, computers, and so on. —Benjamin Rosenbaum