Against Method, Outline of an Anarachistic Theory of Knowledge, Paul K. Feyerabend #
New Left Books (1975)
Against Method is pretty controversial as books in a (shrinking?) minority field like philosophy of science go. The two places I’d seen it mentioned before picking it up from the library were Luke Smith’s blog and a paper on viXra. I’ll get to Luke Smith in a minute. I first heard about viXra almost exactly two years ago while working on a DFT project in Trinity. One of the guys in the office (Eoin, PhD candidate in Quantum Information Theory) told this quite amazing story (better than I could, swivelled around in his office chair with his Crocs on, his desktop windows tiled and sufficiently managed, and his tahini tub waiting restlessly on the shelf above him):
There used to be a guy working in Dr. █████’s group who kept taking antibiotics, going off them before finishing them, and then going back on them when he got sick again. This was about ten years ago. Everyone told him look, you can’t keep doing this, you have to finish your course of antibiotics. This is why you keep getting sick again. Eventually he ended up in hospital with a strain of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. They had to lock down the whole physics department. This was well before Covid, so you can imagine: guys going around the ███ building in hazmat suits. Scary shit. So this guy is in hospital, and they had to give him the, like, extreme shit, and he went into a coma.
When he woke up he was convinced that spin, like the physical concept of spin, was a conspiracy theory invented by Niels Bohr, and he could prove mathematically that it didn’t really exist. He wrote I’d say about a dozen papers about how particles couldn’t have intrinsic angular momentum and was basically ignored because, well obviously. But this guy, so this guy was Indian, and it turned out that there was this Indian nationalist group in India who had found out about his work and, not really knowing anything about physics, integrated it into their ideology that this guy was a genius who was pushing the forefront of physics and was being silenced because the world was scared of Indian knowledge.
It caused an international incident. The Indian fucking ambassador had to come in and say to █████: give this guy a PhD so he can get out of the country as fast as possible. So that’s how this guy got his PhD by neglecting to take a whole course of antibiotics.