Philosophy of science in todays curriculum of physicists is all but gone.
It seems that the philosophical approach is the exception rather than the rule. Physicists of today see thousands of trees but no forests.
The independence which is created by philosophical insight is the difference between the artisan and the seeker of truth.
Logical empiricism changes science into engineering whereas creative free thinking cannot be replaced by algorithms for building and testing theories.
Einstein believed that when theories are tested they should be tested as a whole and not by fixing one of the variables as this makes the variable selection arbitrary.
Logical empiricism soon turns to orthodoxy which leads to a Kantian revival.
The basis of this is in
1. Critique of Pure Reason
2. Critique of Practical Reason
3. Critique of Judgement.
Kant believed that Euclidean geometry was true a priori to our organisation of our experience of external objects.
On the other side the philosophical approach has some of it's basis in the following works.
1. Critique of Pure Experience....Richard Avenarius
2. What are the numbers and what should the numbers be...Richard Dedekind
3. Treatise of Human Nature....David Hume
4. Analysis of Sensations and the relation of the physical to the psychical....Ernst Mach
5. A System of Logic....John Stuart Mill
6. The Grammar of Science....Karl Pearson
7. Science and Hypothesis.....Henri Poincare
When Einstein, his wife and Hubble went to Mt Wilson, Einsteins wife asked Hubble what the telescope was used for, she was to that it was to determine the shape of the universe. She replied " My husband does that on the back of an old envelope"
Years before Hubble detected cosmic expansion Einstein had developed General Relativity which could explain cosmic expansion. General Relativity describes the birth, expansion, life and death of the universe and therein lies the difference
