Ok so you’re arrogantly practicing English writing now and producing little more than a philosophy that just zigs around to maintain your narrative.
“Debating physics” in academia is little more than reciting preferred symbolic logic. The map is not the terrain; to borrow from Feynman again, who says in his lectures it’s not good to get hung up on such stuff. So you’re just making this about rhetorical competition, boring gamesmanship. Which like I said, isn’t the point of engineering. Dialectics don’t ship, they keep professors employed though.
Whichever way it’s written, physics still seems to work. So the value of STEM is more about the application than the knowing.
You think the world has gotten dumber? By the numbers it’s smarter even if it’s unevenly distributed and less smart than people’s vain sense of cultural identity leads them to believe.
For example; ~15% in the US have earned more than a bachelor’s. While public polls show people believe close to 50% have a PhD. Close to 50% have a bachelors.
So the majority misunderstand ground truth but understand how to abstractly find the answer.
Seems better to have people know how to count their way out of a bag and miss some inane specific than everyone being actually uneducated.
I take the Feynman view here; vain memory tricks are not themselves net new production, so just look known things up in the book.
Appreciate the diversity in the effort, but engineering is making things people can use without having to know it all. Far more interesting endeavor than being a human Google search engine.