I had the privilege of meeting Carlo Rovelli (who attended university in my hometown, many years before me) in a public event targeting people that, like me, were at the time finishing high school and had to choose what to do with their lives.
We showed up already bored, waiting for the usual adults who would explain us why to study this and not that, what are the many possible career paths achievable by that, which economic sectors were growing and how, and so on. In fact, some of the speakers did mostly that.
On the contrary, Rovelli started to explain how he did not know what to do after school, and that he went to university initially because his family would have forced him to work as a plumber with his uncle if he decided not to go. He then advised us to choose to do only what we feel passionate about, and to distrust whoever, truth in hand, will explain us that by studying X we will be able to enter sector Y and achieve great success in life. It can seem trivial stuff, but when you are 18 and are being told those things by a humble but successful person, it really empowers you. He is also fairly easy to "approach", he himself came to speak to us after the event, joking about the fact we should not cut our hair "just to get a job" (I haven't since then, and I am 28 and working), hence I am not surprised he answers to people's comment on the interview, or that he is active on physics.stackexchange, for example.
I have studied computer science and got interested in physics and philosophy of science thanks to him, he kind of embodies my idea of science, and of civil responsibility, and I must say I have been a bit disappointed to see that also the academic world is full of "scientists" that underestimate the value of philosophy or other related subjects, or that teach students not to question "too much" what they are doing, preventing them to really see the "big picture" behind knowledge.
There seems to be a contradiction of his bashing of super-string theorists exploring "what if" theories disconnected from reality, and his elevation of philosophers who do the same. If anything, the super-string theorists are more like philosophers in the sense that they are working mainly with thought experiments, which they then try and reconcile with reality. If you read stuff written by cognitive philosophers on the mind, they do this all the time, proposing postulates and thought experiments, and then trying to rationalize them with the assumptions about the real world, often, with no reference to actual neuroscience.
Krauss et al's statements on philosophy are simply that when you build a particle accelerator, walk into a lab, or start working out mathematical theories, you don't start with philosophy of science. That's a backwards rationalization of how science is done, constructing it's underpinnings/justification after the fact. Most scientists who conducted experiments and proposed hypotheses throughout history did not start by first making sure what they were doing aligned with the Philosophy of Science. And indeed, children conduct scientific investigations all the time blissfully unaware of the philosophical underpinnings justifying it.
I'll go one further and say that the idea that you never need to do "what if" theories, but merely explore the existing ones to their ends, can lead to local optima. It is certainly possible you will run into the limits of the conceptual underpinning of the theory in which no iterative refinement can fix it in a way that leads to superior understanding.
Philosophy is useful, in the same way that logic and mathematics are useful, to explore formal systems, especially when the real world experiments are impossible or unethical to conduct. But the limits of philosophy are also born out in the assumptions used -- e.g. arguments about free will or consciousness, debates are artificial definitions that do not measurably or provably reflect the real nature of real things.
I read Lee Smolin's book on this debate (The Trouble with Physics). I think what happened in theoretical physics -- to the extent that it's spinning its wheels with untestable theories -- is largely that there are too many theoretical physicists and not enough hard experimental data to chase after. When there is nothing much interesting happening in a field, it's always going to be tempting to point the finger at whatever annoys you. But if there were important discoveries to be made, probably string theory would not prevent someone from making them.
1. On historical science. The process of science has changed drastically over the centuries. To discover the law of gravitation, a few people with telescopes had to tabulate a few thousand data points, do some manipulations and discover the law. For the search of the Higgs, eg. the statistical procedures to be used where established well in advance of data collection to avoid potential biases. The idea is that more advanced science requires more careful procedures and analysis. Rovelli is arguing that we need to change our method yet again towards being more careful and formal to make advances.
2. Your first paragraph is a strawman. There is much more to the philosophy of science than your examples. See [1]. Or consider that "what is probability?" does not have a good answer. This is a question that philosophy struggles with and that has deep relevance to physics - eg. the ontology of quantum mechanics.
> There is much more to the philosophy of science than your examples. See [1]. Or consider that "what is probability?" does not have a good answer. This is a question that philosophy struggles with and that has deep relevance to physics - eg. the ontology of quantum mechanics.
What is the relevance? We're able to make accurate experimental predictions about probability already - theorising about "what is probability?" could just be meaningless speculation unconnected to reality, which is exactly his problem with String Theory. No?
One cannot reasonably say that "what is a probability?" doesn't have a good answer without having read at least the first two chapters of "Probability Theory: the Logic of Science".
I don't want to enter a Frequentist/Bayesian debate, where I'm right and the Frequentists are insane. But the views presented on this book didn't really surprise or enlighten me¹. Instead, I was more like "of course, why the fuss?" Many of the claims in this book really did felt obvious.
"What is a probability?" does have a good answer. Anyone saying otherwise should probably look at it, and explain why it's not good. I personally don't expect strong counter-arguments. (And if one throws me the problem of priors again, I'll crush him under the sheer weight of the hidden priors we can find in Frequentist methods.)
[1] With one big exception: the consistency proofs. I didn't know we could derive Probability Theory from so few axioms.
I'm not sure you're on solid ground assuming that there is a "real nature of real things" beyond known time and space and sub-light speeds. As a passage in a recent piece I read on Schopenhauer pointed out:
Thus, for anything to be empirically real, it
must be spatial, temporal, and causal. Yet space,
time, and causality cannot be proven to be
empirically real themselves! If space is thought of
as an empirical entity, the insoluble problem arises
whether it is finite or infinite. In the first case,
there would have to be something 'outside' space, a
metaspace, which is an absurd notion; but in the
second case it could never be differentiated of
anything and would therefore have no identity. If
time is finite, there would have to be something
'before' and 'after' it, which again is absurd; but
if it is infinite, it would take an eternity to
arrive at the present moment, which therefore could
never come about. Finite causality would enhance an
unimaginable 'first cause' of all events in the
universe, while infinite causality poses, mutatis
mutandis, the same problem as infinite time.
Given that the very foundations of causal logic (cause --> event) assume our ability to differentiate in time and space, it does seem as if the most interesting aspects of physics are operating in areas where open-mindedness helps.
If someone random had written this, I would have just dismissed this as yet another pseudoscientific idiot.
Now, since it is written by Schopenhaur, I feel it is in order to say that same thing, but with more words.
>Thus, for anything to be empirically real, it must be spatial, temporal, and causal.
I disagree with this. Entanglement, while not causing a breakdown in causuality, doesn't really obey it either. I would still consider it very real.
>Yet space, time, and causality cannot be proven to be empirically real themselves!
Well ok, with you definition of "real" they may not be. So?
>In the first case, there would have to be something 'outside' space, a metaspace, which is an absurd notion;
Ok, first I disagree that there would have to be something outside. And second I disagree that that would be an absurd notion. And third I disagree that it really matters at all. A scientist would switch viewpoint depending on which would be most convinient for the task at hand. Same as people use a coordinate system based that makes a problem the easiest to solve.
>but in the second case it could never be differentiated of anything and would therefore have no identity.
I'm not really sure what he is saying here, but I note that I could differentiate a metaspace from an apple. I don't really see why the lack of an identity (whatever that means) would be a significant problem.
>If time is finite, there would have to be something 'before' and 'after' it,
Eh, just no.
>but if it is infinite, it would take an eternity to arrive at the present moment, which therefore could never come about.
This is a little bit tricky. There are two different notions of infinity we need to distinguish. The first is two points in time with an infinity distance between them. The second is a backwards infinite ray.
Ordinary coordinate systems have the second kind of infinity and work just fine. This is the kind Schopenhaur is talking about. The first type of infinity is more uncommon, but there is nothing in principle saying we can't have that either.
>Finite causality would enhance an unimaginable 'first cause'
That says more about his imagination than the it does about the universe.
> Entanglement, while not causing a breakdown in causuality, doesn't really obey it either.
If you think this, you don't understand entanglement (which is understandable because the popular press does an abysmal job of explaining it, as do many physicists).
Entanglement and measurement are the same phenomenon. Measurement is nothing more than macroscopic entanglement. See:
I'm not a philosopher and may be misinterpreting the quote in question. The philosopher is not claiming that infinite sequences can't have a distinct start. He is claiming that an infinite amount of time could not have elapsed before the present time, t. If it did then it would have taken an infinite amount of time to get to time t-1 and thus we'd never have gotten to time t since it'd require an eternity to get to t-1.
I'm no philosopher nor a physicist either, but I don't see why that would even be a problem. We know by now that time is relative. To a photon, all of our infinite time, if it is infinite, "happens" all at once, so why would it matter if it took an infinite amount of it to get here. If you could stop a photon and ask it, it would reply that we were always here.
Here we are having philosophical debates about it, but I suspect if we just stuck with the math -- regardless of our intuitions -- most of these kinds of arguments would turn out to be a distraction rather than a solution to the problem. That's kind of the point many empiricists like Krauss are trying to make.
I think the rub is in the, "if we could stop a photon...". We can't. From the photon's perspective there is no time elapse. The photon doesn't believe time has lasted forever. I imagine it would not even understand the concept.
I believe that it is not possible for an infinite amount of time to have elapsed before this moment in time. I think that is what the quote in question is attempting to state.
I mean stop it in the sense of the perspective of the photon. I don't know enough physics but I suspect that from the photon's perspective it hasn't stopped. This is because there is no time elapse from the photon's perspective. The other points in my previous post remain valid. I think!
Think of the real number line. We are at some point t that represents our current time. If time goes back forever, that is had no beginning then it means (-∞, t] represents all the time up to t. How did we get to t? I would take an eternity to get to t-1. Indeed, for each moment in time it took an eternity to get there. Hence time must have had a beginning.
Wow, this Schopenhauer quote is really painful to read. Given basic contemporary abstract thinking, it reads as completely naive.
This is not unique; I often feel this way when reading philosophy.
So I kind of understand where Hawking / Tyson / et al are coming from. I do think it is a mistake to single-handedly dismiss all of philosophy, and I agree with the sentiment in this article that physicists are following an implicit philosophy that they do not understand, so there's a contradiction there. At the same time, most philosophy is honestly pretty bad.
I'm schooled in Plato and Aristotle, and the quote above seems to me very like their way of thinking, and also seems both logical and intuitive. Can you recommend some authors or titles representative of the kind of "basic contemporary abstract thinking" you're referring to?
Just focus on the first two sentences. Take the notion of causality. It underlies all of empirical science, yet it is not something that can be proved empirically. It is a given, a built in part of how we perceive things. You can read more about this if you check out the work of David Hume or Immanuel Kant.
There is nothing naive about recognizing that human knowledge is limited by our knowing apparatus. What is truly naive is to mistake the models of science with "reality itself" (a nebulous term)
IMO philosophers get into trouble because they want to nail down what is "real" or "true". They try to work by pure logic, but alway get tied up by the limitations of spoken or written language. "Infinite" for example is a logically imprecise term; there are different flavors of mathematical infinity.
Perhaps a more valid way to phrase the same sentiment would be to say that science, because of its assumptions and methodologies, can only address phenomena that are spatial, temporal, and causal. There might be real things that have none of those attributes; science and philosophers would have difficulty studying them, but that difficulty does not rule out the possibility of their existence.
Which findings of Kurt Godel? Care to explain? Because for example this seems like it has nothing to do with the incompleteness theorems unless one doesn't understand the incompleteness theorems at all and is just hand-waving.
"Yet space, time, and causality cannot be proven to be empirically real themselves". This is akin to mathematical axioms that escape proof within a formal system. Of course one can debate whether the analogy applies for space and time as it does in arithmetic, but this is beside the point. My point was that Schopenhauer's quote was not even remotely close to being naive, especially considering when it was said (i.e. years before Godel and others proved similar conclusions).
>This is akin to mathematical axioms that escape proof within a formal system.
No it isn't. Unless you understand quantum gravity better than anyone else does, there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between the possible empirical reality of spacetime and causality, and Godel's description of mathematical incompleteness.
Spacetime is observable, not axiomatic. The whole point of theories like loop quantum gravity - and one of the main reasons that the string theories are poor relations - is that LQG theories take an explicit interest in possible mechanisms that explain the observed properties of spacetime and causality.
In the jargon, they are 'background independent.'
For example, take a look at Causal Dynamical Triangulation:
Its a relatively naive statement. What is 'before' and 'after' time is defining time in terms of time. While it does seem ridiculous to say something is 'before' time, it doesnt seem anywhere as ridiculous to say something is unrelated to time, beyond time, or independent from time.
The naivete is that a sophisticated philosopher would understand this, and at the very least not push forward a philosophical argument that really hinges on connotations of words instead of logical/philosophical pillars.
Anyways if the statement didnt have a famous philosophers name attached to it i doubt it would have gotten any response, its a pretty baseline/naive reaction to a complex scientific idea.
You can use Godel's proof to show that a physics model based on space, time and causality can not exmplain those. And that if there is one that explains those, it must be based on some other set of concepts, that it can not explain.
Yet, realism is in a completely different level. You can not reason about it using mathematical constructs. (Too bad that's the only tool we have.)
Can you really? Incompleteness doesn't necessarily say this. It makes certain statements about certain types of contradictions in certain types of systems. There is still a lot of work left to be done before you can apply it here.
You may be saying this has already been done elsewhere but without references u can't just throw this out there as a given.
To ask what's before beginning of time is akin to asking what is the point more southern point of earth than the Southern pole. Answer is there is none.
In a place where space doesn't exist you wouldn't notice it not existing. Probably because you wouldn't exist as well.
I hate to say it, but I have a feeling that the non-string-theory camp (Rovelli, Smolin etc.) have a fairly large (probably justifiable) chip on their shoulder regarding the amount of funding and support that string theory research has had over the last few decades, in comparison to "competing" theories.
It's a pity to see this come out in some of Rovelli's statements in this interview, because the rest of it is so wonderfully measured and thoughtful.
It needed to be said. Nowadays theoretical physicists are often working on theories 100 years ahead of even the chance of empirical validation. I for one would like to see a greater portion of funding going towards experimental physics.
Here is a startup analogy. One is having a dream about building google and writing a paper about it. How it might work, eg. 20% time, etc. The other is actually building google.
We're already spending vast amounts of money on high-energy experiment, and building ever-larger particle smashers seems to have limited payoff from here on out.
I don't know how to figure out quantum gravity. I don't even know how to do an experiment which could distinguish between different models of quantum gravity. But I do know there's plenty of other interesting stuff (much of which is actually useful) we don't know about physics at other scales which we can spend our time and money on.
> We're already spending vast amounts of money on high-energy experiment, and building ever-larger particle smashers seems to have limited payoff from here on out.
> But I do know there's plenty of other interesting stuff (much of which is actually useful) we don't know about physics at other scales which we can spend our time and money on.
Yes, true, but the low-level stuff only describes. Theory formation attempts to explain. Explanations are required for science.
True. If you count heads, there seems to be an equal number of theoretical and experimental physicists. But if you tally budgets and compare the cost of an accelerator versus the cost of a blackboard, experimental physics has a much higher cost.
I don't think there's a contradiction. Modern philosophy never claimed to be science, while modern Theoretical Physics (science) in many parts strongly resembles philosophy, as you said, while never acknowledging it. Theoretical Physics is supposed to be a complement to Experimental Physics, explaining or predicting things that could later be confirmed by the Experimental branch.
I think string theory as a theory of everything is an excellent example. From the outside at first it seemed promising, but nowadays looks more like a very complex mathematical chimera which we don't have a particular way of proving nor disproving. But string theorists insist that these aren't merely thought experiments, this is SCIENCE, even if we have to add dimensions and multiple universes we never experimentally detected to try to make it work. Maybe it works in a blackboard, ¿but how do we know it reflects reality?
Philosophy of Science should be useful to check if we are doing science right or are being carried away by beautiful math and thought experiments. Maybe a scientist doesn't need philosophy a priori to do science, as a doctor doesn't need philosophy to cure people, but both epistemology and ethics are useful to contemplate if we are doing it right or something should be improved. At least that's my opinion.
Some philosophy consists of the exploration of formal systems, and some of it consists of expressing opinions in a weird parody of the above. (Go read Socrates's arguments* and find all the logical flaws and fallacies that his conversants conveniently ignore. We may like some of his opinions, but to believe they're derived with rigor is laughable.) The problem with physicists getting into philosophy is that they're generally only doing the second, less useful thing.
* Of course it's just Plato relating what he says are Socrates's arguments, so there's that too.
OK, "Critical views of science in the news" is probably a useful avenue of "hard looking" and quality control for science. But I think it behooves us to be a little more critical in our choice of critics.
This struck me when the author, in his introduction, mentioned a previous Q&A with telepathy proponent Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake only gets a brief mention in this piece as a critic of science, and I hasten to add that I don't have any beef with the article from that point on.
For anyone who doesn't know, Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is real. To this end, he's done a series of experiments which had the kind of inconclusive results you'd expect, yet in spite of a dearth of convincing, published results, in spite of a global failure to replicate his results, he keeps badgering science to take him seriously. Having been met with apathy and mild derision, he now blames science on his failure to be taken seriously.
So yes, Sheldrake is a "science critic." So are many of the purveyors of homeopathy, of miracle cancer cures, of coffee enemas, of dowsing and of Intelligent Design. Science is empirical, and people without evidence like to call this a shortcoming of science.
So my question is: how much debunking, how much finger pointing and pantsless emperors is required before we can in good conscience exclude certain groups of people from discussions about the philosophy of science? Those discussions are important, no doubt - and this is why I think we should be wary of allowing them to be bogged down by the contributions of frauds and crackpots.
> Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is real. To this end, he's done a series of experiments which had the kind of inconclusive results you'd expect.
Note that I'm not saying telepathy exists. I'm discussing an experiment for which I have no sensible explanation. Is there some data/papers/methods I'm missing?
I am the one missing papers. Why didn't Sheldrake get this published under peer review? I don't feel qualified to judge his setup or analysis, so it would be that much more interesting to read about reactions from scientists who are.
By the rules of the game, if he's not participating in this exercise he's not doing science.
Thank you for pointing out that this paper of Sheldrake's was indeed peer reviewed. That paper also mentions that three independent scientists were invited to attempt to replicate Sheldrake's work.
In this paper by one of those scientists http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/psychicdogreply.pdf one of the scientists (Wiseman) reports that they were in fact not able to confirm Sheldrake's findings, that Sheldrake had criticized their criteria for measurement _after_ they had led to failure, and badgered them into arbitrarily establishing other criteria for success.
Wiseman also complains that he and his colleagues were badly misrepresented in Sheldrake's paper, and that Sheldrake tried to present excuses for the failed trials.
This post hoc selection of evaluation criteria is one way in which crackpots massage experimental data to substantiate their claims. Honest scientists usually do their best to avoid it.
In conclusion, in the one instance where an attempt was made to verify Sheldrake's strongest results, he was seen to be acting in a manner suspiciously characteristic of trying to introduce a bias in the direction he preferred.
Even if he isn't intentionally dishonest, this man is almost certainly a crackpot.
Thanks for the reference. I was unaware of Wiseman's replication. Here is Wiseman's peer reviewed paper, http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/petsBJP.pdf with most of the data at the end. Some data is missing like the time of departure, which could reveal other correlations. However, I would say, that with the information available in that paper it seems pretty random and doesn't suggest any unexplained phenomenon.
They have to keep the conversation lighthearted, or else there's a chance we might actually talk about all the real problems with taking a scientistic view of the world. That is, the crackpots are way less threatening than someone with real critiques.
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.
> You see: the scientists that talk philosophy down are simply superficial: they have a philosophy (usually some ill-digested mixture of Popper and Kuhn) and think that this is the “true” philosophy, and do not realize that this has limitations.
Hardly. What definition of "philosophy" is in use here? It sounds like he just means "beliefs" which, of course, everyone has. If "philosophy" means ideas that do not need facts, reason, or testability then it is just nonsense. Philosophy that requires these qualities is called "science."
> If "philosophy" means ideas that do not need facts, reason, or testability then it is just nonsense.
That's philosophy's territory, now that we have science. Philosophers don't have to, and feel no need to, reality-test their speculations. And I see I may be reflecting your views on this topic.
I really liked this article. The author gave real substantive answers to almost all the questions.
I would have liked to have more detail on his critique of the "guess and check" approach to science. My own opinion is that there is a very good reason why scientific progress follows the pattern he describes, of new theories being based on either new experiments, or in depth analysis of existing theories.
The reason is that science relies on belief in objective reality, and yet we don't know what objective reality is. So in order to reason about what the universe really is, the best and only starting point is our current model(s) of physics.
The moment we make an assumption about what reality is that isn't based in physical theory, we are liable to be wrong. For example, Newton was criticized for his theory of gravity, because people knew that reality was composed of little machine-like objects, interacting at a microscopic scale. There was no room in this worldview for Newton's "occult" force of gravity which acted at a distance.
I studied physics at the University of Maryland, one of the better (top 20) physics programs in the US. I was surprised at how often questions were answered with "that's for the philosophers to think about."
Granted, there's a lot of material to cover, I don't think that's an appropriate response–especially when delivered with contempt, as it typically was.
Coming from a professor, I, myself, would always presume that there was a worthwhile lesson in those kinds of short remarks. It sounds like they were possibly steering students away from questions that could not be resolved empirically, which would place them outside the scope of physics; those kinds of questions could also be debated endlessly and derail the class.
>He, like Thomas, would not follow the risen Christ unless he saw him himself
An extraordinary statement without evidence. People today have all kinds of beliefs without evidence. People also could lie, be pressured into belief by conformity, have hallucinations, etc. Not to mention people 2000 years ago didn't have todays strict standards delineating fact from beliefs.
There are numerous contradictions and discrepancies in these "accounts". The historicity of Jesus' resurrection is very much in doubt by the preeminent new testament scholars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHJE7cetkB4#t=81
And indeed the historical method can't be seriously compared to the scientific method, because it is vulnerable to errors in the accounts, falsification, forgery, intentional lying, biased interpretation. While science relies on repeatability.
You are completely missing the point. He didn't say that beliefs are disconnected from actual historical events, but that written down beliefs shouldn't be held as unquestionable truths.
For example, if the Bible says that God created the Universe as it is now in 6 days and we have lots of information confirming that it took way longer, then you have two sensible options: 1) You update the Bible so that it reflects what we know about the universe, 2) You leave the Bible as written but now you know that it doesn't reflect the truth about that at all. What you shouldn't do is leave it as it is and claim that's the truth, nobody except fanatics will take you seriously.
You know, religious texts were written a long time ago by people who didn't know many things that today we teach to kids in primary school. It's incomprehensible to take all these people said as unquestionable truth, makes us look dumb.
3) you update your methods for understanding the text, instead of relying on methods developed in the early 1900s [0]. Figure out what concept the original writing was really trying to communicate by studying the history of the origin of the text, the culture and surrounding cultures, etc. Recognize that certain things you take literally might potentially be part of some sort of metaphor or cultural reference which would be obvious to original readers but easily missed by modern ones. This method is called "Higher criticism" [1]. (Sometimes what "makes us look dumb" is reading ancient books without any historical insight, and expecting to understand them perfectly.)
In this specific case, you'll find something simple and enlightening: the Genesis creation account is a monotheistic response to the polytheistic Egyptian creation account [2]. It uses essentially the same style of storytelling and language of creation as the older Egyptian accounts, referring to many of the same types of events, but in ways that are insulting to the Egyptian pantheon. Ancient readers would not have necessarily viewed it as giving a timeline for creation, but rather as describing the relation of objects they could see to the divine. The Egyptian account describes some objects as divine (like the sun, moon, and certain bodies of water); the Genesis account describes the same objects as physical objects created by an unseen divine being (the sun and moon aren't even named; they're referred to as mere "lights".) The Egyptian account refers to gods of specific realms like day, night, and water; the Genesis account establishes a single God with power simultaneously in all realms. It should not be surprising that the first pages of the central text of a major monotheistic religion would be about there being One God rather than about how long the creation process was.
By the way, this is not at all a new viewpoint. I've seen it expressed by 2nd and 3rd century Christian scholars like Irenaeus and Origen [3].
[3] "Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars—the first day even without a sky? And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible and palpable tree of wood, so that anyone eating of it with bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil? No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it." - http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.vi.v.v.i.html section 16
I have studied computer science and got interested in physics and philosophy of science thanks to him, he kind of embodies my idea of science, and of civil responsibility, and I must say I have been a bit disappointed to see that also the academic world is full of "scientists" that underestimate the value of philosophy or other related subjects, or that teach students not to question "too much" what they are doing, preventing them to really see the "big picture" behind knowledge.