Every time I think that physics is tremendously important and philosophy is not, I remind myself that physicists didn’t come up with democracy. From a recent Jim Holt piece in the New York Times:

“Last year at a Google ‘Zeitgeist conference’ in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was ‘dead.’ Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy ‘murky and inconsequential’ and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that ‘philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.’

Why do physicists have to be so churlish toward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science. ‘Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us,’ Voltaire wrote back in the 18th century. And in the last few decades, philosophers have come to see their enterprise as continuous with that of science.”