Lee Smolin explains: “To aspire to be a revolutionary in physics, I would claim, it is helpful to make contact with the tradition of past revolutionaries.  But the lessons of that tradition are maintained not in the communities of fashionable science, with their narrow education and outlook, but in the philosophical community and tradition.  And that is why I talk with philosophers and encourage my students to do so.”

Carlo Rovelli explains:  science is “a complex discipline that constantly critically rearranges its own assumptions” under the influence of philosophy, and “scientists who claim to do without philosophy are not really without philosophy; they hold a philosophical position without thinking and without being critical about it.”

Sean Carroll explains: “Science often gives us models of the world that are more than good enough, in terms of getting answers that fit the data within the error bars, even though they might not be completely coherent or well-defined. But that’s not really what drives us to do science in the first place. We shouldn’t be happy to do ‘well enough,’ or merely fit the data – we should be striving to understand how the world really works. Our best chance of achieving that outlandish ambition is for science and philosophy to work together.”