Those wanting to realign science with our democratic and ethical ideals often challenge the view that physics has some unique status among the sciences, rejecting the claim that it is fundamental. The thought is that the privileging of certain theories as fundamental grants them a status that then allows them a free pass to funding, even in the absence of inductive support. I argue that properly construed, the claim that physics, or some part of physics, occupies a fundamental status is both theoretically reasonable and ethically defensible. However, a plausible understanding of the fundamentality of physics must move beyond interpretations of fundamentality as a kind of explanatory completeness. No present physical theory explains everything, nor is there a good argument to support the claim that any future physical theory will. Nonetheless, there is a significant kind of explanatory power we can claim even for our current physical theories, and this yields the sense in which they are fundamental. This notion I propose of fundamentality as explanatory maximality underwrites two compelling arguments for the continued support and development of research projects in physics, demonstrating that the claim that physics constitutes a fundamental science should be an important element of a vision for twenty-first century science.
Alyssa Ney