This made me think about an aside during a lecture made by a well-known physicist and educator (not only as a college professor but as the author of textbooks, including a standard textbooks used to teach quantum mechanics to beginning graduate students and sometimes advanced undergraduates). For context: This quote and the lecture whence it comes are part of a two-semester course on modern physics designed for non-physics majors (and is thus able to cover more than is generally possible in courses for physics majors).
The quote comes from a lecture on special relativity, and concerns what drove Einstein to his postulates (a fuller quote taken from the transcript is included below) :
Transcript (the link for which may be found
here) :
“[Einstein] believed that natural phenomena will just follow either the principle of relativity or they won’t. And that is something you should think about. Because that was the only reason he had. He just said, ‘I don’t believe chapters 1 through 10 in our book obey relativity and chapters 20 through 30 where we do E&M doesn’t.’ These are all natural phenomena that will obey the same principle…
Now, that’s really based on a lot of faith and even though scientists generally are opposed to intelligent design, we all have some bias about the way natural laws were designed; there’s no question about it. Y
ou can talk to any practicing physicist. We have a faith that underlying laws of nature will have a certain elegance and a certain beauty and a certain uniformity across all of natural phenomena. That is a faith that we have. It’s not a religious issue; otherwise, I wouldn’t bring it up in the classroom, but it is certainly the credo of all scientists, at least all physicists, that there is some elegance in the laws of nature and we put a lot of money on that faith, that the laws of nature will do this and will not do this. Who are we to say that?” (emphases added)
It seems of particular relevance that Shankar states, on record (in a classroom) something that is well known to all physicists: faith, beliefs, aesthetics, and a great deal of other subjective judgments play a much larger role than the public seems to generally be aware of. But, as Shankar also notes, this doesn't make it a religious issue.
More generally, and across sciences, evidence is never enough in practice or principle, because evidence is always interpreted within a theoretical framework that is also used to formulate hypotheses as well as the observations and experiments used to test these. And different scientists have differing degrees of "faith" in particular theories or theoretical frameworks that bias us in different ways and make sometimes more inclined to accept certain observations or experimental results as evidence for a particular conclusion or less so (or not at all).
