> where one of the proposed solutions for the behavior of quanta is the rejection of free will

The attempts to involve quantum physics with free will are widely regarded as a great steaming pile, and are rarely proposed by anyone with an inkling as to what quantum physics actually is. It is far too often treated as a form of magic get-out-of-causality-free card, and peddled by woo-mongers precisely because so few people have any understanding of the matter.

So yeah, you probably got banned for promoting unscientific nonsense.

Then”we will be treated as liberators “ is a justification countries used for centuries and for some shocking reason it never holds up.

Science is absolutely dictated by the prevailing ideological currents of each era, far more so than History by virtue of the more considerable resources its earnest pursuit requires. There are countless scientific projects that could be pursued at any given moment, but they are not because political ideologies dictate those that are and those that are not given financial and institutional support. Science is in fact uniquely ill equipped to handle its own ideological embeddedness - largely because of fantasies of neutrality and objectivity displayed in your post. If you think that science is or ever has been pursued free from its historical moment, free from the politics of the moment, you ought to read some history.

You are asking two very different questions. In your headline, you ask if Che Guevara deserves credit but at the end of your text you ask if he gets any credit from a Cuban political perspective. I think the answers to those two questions is quite different, as it is in almost any sphere when asking about the person who created the ability to achieve, against the interests of a politician.

Part of the CIAs calculation was that the Castro regime was unpopular, and the landing would be greeted with enthusiasm. The marines were a backstop against pockets of die-hard resistance after the invasion had succeeded. As it happened, the local militia gave the invaders such a hard fight that it was obvious that any invasion would be prolonged and bloody. Hence Kennedy's call. Maybe Bush II should have read the memo?

Obviously science needs history. In the name of science people have done horrible things. Eugenics was considered real science that scientific community was so exited about. Science needs history so that eugenics never comes back.

If people don't know how we got here, they can be taken anywhere.

Imagine 20,000 years from now. Humanity has wiped most of itself off the map in a nuclear/biological Holocaust. But a few stragglers, a remote unknown tribe on some remote island remain, essentially untouched. They begin to repopulate the planet. They carry with them only the beliefs of their forefathers.

A few of them get inquisitive. They notice something in the stars, and begin to think on it.

Absent any prior known history of astronomy, they just might end up deducing that the sun does not travel round the earth, but that it is the other way around. They need know nothing of Kepler or Copernicus et al in order to reconstruct the current map of the Universe exactly as it exists today.

Having the history available prevents us from having to re-do all the work all the time, and that’s good. But in addressing the title question: no, science does not need history.

This is really misleading, although I thoroughly agree in general about the importance of intellectual history.

The Epicurean/Atomist hypothesis has everything to do with Greek philosophy of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, and has little bearing on 20th century physics. Platonism, Aristotelianism and specifically Averroism was much more influential on Renaissance science than Lucretius. The intellectual context of Renaissance and Enlightenment science was much more complex and pluralistic than the usual textbook narrative suggests.

i mean they dramatically outnumbered the invaders and still took more casualties while defending so idk, whoever logistically managed to create a larger army probably gets credit

It's more of a fuck up on America's part and who ever was standing on the other side doesn't really deserve credit for us tripping and falling at the start line.

The more important point is that what you're talking about is not what's called "History of Science".

The accumulated wealth of knowledge of a certain field is just "science": biology includes all the knowledge we have regarding biology, there's no separate field of study that consists merely of a list of biological discoveries and advancements. History of science instead is the discipline that covers the historical development of the sciences from Antiquity to the present. It doesn't strictly enumerate scientific discoveries (just like how history itself as a discipline isn't the pedantic recounting of past events), but rather how we came upon them and their effects on society and history.

>None of this is new, non of it was secret and in fact much

First off, I want to say that in many cases its like, European research from the 1980s and 1990s gets rediscovered in the USA now.

But second, I would say forced labor/slave labor was a non-issue in research and german public for a long time. It was very convenient that a large majority of slave workers came from Eastern Europe and were "silenced" due to the cold war.

The trials against the likes of Krupp only scratched the tip of the iceberg. At least from 1943 onward, slave labor was in use everywhere.

One logical problem was that denazification targeted the persons, but not the companies. Many businessmen had not to face special trials, but undergo the denazification process if they were party members. Later on, they could use their assets to defy the verdicts and get more favorable ones.

It would be good if already back then a damages funds would have been created where companies had to pay in. This was only done much later, in the year 2000, by the way of negotiation between the German state and major companies.

Unlike the Holocaust or the suppression of the opposition, slave labor was also a non-issue in public debate. On a local level, I feel in Germany even the narrative of the "benevolent employer" became very widespread, that some people had a heart of gold towards their foreigners, instead of all others who had slave workers.

You got your history a little off. Both Newton and Leibniz are credited with inventing calculus.

“Properties of the natural world” <> “all previous knowledge”.

Absent fossils, for example, we would lack knowledge of significant chunks of biology, zoology, etc including the entirety of evolutionary theory. Which is why I stipulated “depending on which branch”.

If science from 30 years ago is being forgotten, is that really a lack of 'history'? Or simply bad science? Part of being a good scientist is knowing the work done in your field, but that is not in my mind the same as a comprehensive history of it.

History needs science more than science needs history.

Science is resistant to cultural biases of the moment because ultimately, results matter. If you abandon the basic principles, you will fail in many sciences to achieve excellence. The history of science is important, but not critical. Quantum physics is still quantum physics without knowing the detailed history of it. I do not remember all the elements that the chemist Humphrey Davy discovered.

History is a different matter. People can write fictional history and be lauded as great historians and awarded prizes on occasion. History is very much subject to the political and cultural winds blowing in each moment. Applying scientific methods to history at least makes it more resistant to these winds.

Is your arguement "technically, it's possible to constantly recreate all past knowledge from the ground-up, given enough time"?

Because I would say that not only would that be obviously an undesirable state, it also fundamentally misunderstands what History of Science is as a discipline.

I remember a different (I believe also Jacobin) article on this book a while ago. It focused less on the postwar trials, but more about "Nazi Billionaires" in general. As a title, it is poignant and all, but as a concept it annoys me, because most of these families and companies already were rich. Quite a few were Monarchist Millionaires and rich families have a good shot at staying rich. Obviously many of them arranged themselves and with the regime and exploited the opportunities the Holocaust and the war created for them, ruthlessly and immorally. And I am sure most of them found Nazi ideology very agreeable, or at least easy enough to go along with.

I would consider that one of the least bad things the Nazis did. Every ruling clique that is not subject to oversight becomes corrupt and enriches themselves, that is almost universal.
But money was not enough in Nazi Germany, you needed power and influence. The "old guard" Nazis did often not come from wealth, they amassed it by bribes, plunder during the war and exploiting or confiscating Jewish assets. The "social" arm of the party withered after the Roehm and SA purge, but ruthless people still managed to rise in the party or SS by "merit" alone.
But of course most rich people aligned themselves with the Nazis and took up the opportunities the Holocaust and war gave them and got even richer. No one wanted to end up like Thyssen.

Doesn’t scientia mean knowledge in Latin? History is a science by itself.

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> It's such an obvious question to answer that I can't imagine the discussion being anything more than a three-second clip of the lady going "uh, duh?"

And yet watch the protests and groans when you tell a science major he needs to take three or four history classes. And witness the shrieks of terror when you tell a history major he needs to take three or four science classes.

So I'd say it ain't obvious at all.

So IIRC the question was about the ontological principle within the context of any paradigm of many worlds in Physics, and if there were perspectives in which there wasn't a 'beginning.'

I'm pretty sure I mentioned how Everett's doesn't address the origin of the universe at all as it begins at the same point as this 'branch' of the universe, and instead pointed OP to other current models of multiple worlds like Lee Smolin's fecund universes.

Adding context, I mentioned that the notion goes back a long way (so there's been many different ideas regarding it), at least 2,500 years.

Oh, and while the article is mostly concerned with the Epicurean view of infinite universes from infinite discrete matter in infinite space across infinite time resulting in other locations of physical worlds similar to our own, they were absolutely thinking of very similar ideas to the concept of parallel universes with how they described the notion that dreams were representations of other worlds leaking into ours immaterialy.

As for what they had to do with the wave function, the name of the aforementioned book The Swerve came from how they tried to answer the perceived paradox of free will and quantized matter:

They concluded that the quanta must have some sort of uncertainty to how they would move such that it could end up going in more than one place from an initial state, and referred to what would guide the result to one potentiality or another as "the swerve."

(This was over two millennia before Bell's paradox, the experimental evidence of which was now the most recent Physics Nobel and where one of the proposed solutions for the behavior of quanta is the rejection of free will.)

OP probably got banned after an argument due to trying to find vague connections to past philosophizing while presenting it as relevant towards understanding modern quantum mechanics interpretations with rigour.

The attitude that you're referring to I really don't think exists with any significant passion in the physics community.