Lawrence Krauss: Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.
Neil Tyson DeGrasse: Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would be scientist but without a laboratory, right? And so what happens is, the 1920s come in, we learn about the expanding universe in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientists was rendered essentially obsolete, and that point, and I have yet to see a contribution — this will get me in trouble with all manner of philosophers — but call me later and correct me if you think I’ve missed somebody here. But, philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, the word physicist didn’t even exist in any important way back then. So, I’m disappointed because there is a lot of brainpower there, that might have otherwise contributed mightily, but today simply does not. It’s not that there can’t be other philosophical subjects, there is religious philosophy, and ethical philosophy, and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosophers to do, but the frontier of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.
>Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences
I think what changed was physics became much harder to understand. Pre Einstein it was fairly easy for someone without much physics training to grasp Newtonian stuff. With the advent of general relativity and quantum mechanics it became hard to understand without years of study of physics which most philosophers do not have which led to their work being not very useful to the physicists. However philosophical insights by people who do understand the physics can be good in my opinion.
And on that point, there are philosophers who do get the physics, and who are making material contributions. However they are significantly marginalized by their predecessors and often must directly compete with those who do not understand that physics for grant money, university resources and students. They are an unheard minority, quite unfortunately.
