Why Tim Maudlin has such a high community rating

in his fqxi essay

The reason is similar to the case of Philp Gibbs previously discussed: he is also a rather good compromise between scientism and obscurantism.

He is fond of maths and many of his ideas on Relativity are not bad (I have rather similar ideas myself). However he is a materialist, member of the Bohmian mechanics community. And he is a philosopher, more than a physicist.

In this interview, he defends academic philosophy in this way.


If he is talking about disputes on the interpretations of quantum physics, then of course there are disputes among those who dispute it. However they are mainly disputes of philosophy, not so much of science (even if hidden variable theories and spontaneous collapse theories also have mathematical aspects) ; most physicists develop physics, and in particular quantum theory, as a clear mathematical theory that is very successful, rather clear with rather clear predictions, without any such dispute. Physicists involved in these disputes of "quantum foundations" are a small minority. They might forget this.

He has a good statement of intent to be a scientist :


This declaration seems to come in contrast with so much of academic philosophy which develops metaphysics without respect to the information from physics.
However he actually cannot put this into practice as long as the lessons from physics hurt his philosophical prejudices : 

"Sometimes it is difficult to make the dispute clear, but one clue is that many physicists and philosophers like to say that the passage of time is an “illusion”. In my account of things, it is not at all illusory: time passes from past to future by its intrinsic nature. (...)

The problem then, which he neglects, is to know where this intrinsic nature of time comes from, since the laws of physics could not discover it ; and to explain the actual inability of physics to make sense of time (as I did in my essay, explaining that the flow of time has a non-physical origin). Instead, his solution is to just make up a mathematical formalism supposed to write the time orientation as a fundamental physical reality, no matter whether such a formalism is of any use for physics.


His materialism is also symbolically manifested in his precise approach to mathematics, as appears in the opposition of views between he and I in the comments to his essay:

So generally, he defends an ant's worldview, while I prefer a bird's worldview. This is a way I see to express the difference between materialism and idealism.
And generally of course, his sort of claim that his new theory is going to overturn current physics, is very pleasant in the ears of many. The more chaos there is in science, the happiest are obscurantists who want to believe that all ideas are equal and that no idea is any more valid than any other idea. In hope that from such a democratic soup of chaos a Brave New World will sooner or later emerge.

But let us leave him the words of conclusion, from his above interview:


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