Philosophy Of Science

[steve_bank]

The method is more of an outline than a procedure or guide.

The metfhod...

1. Hypothesis
2 Test hypothesis.
3. Accept hypothesis, done.
3 Adjust hypothesis.
4. Go to #1.

What is human creativity and inspiration.

tI can't be reduced to a philosophy or a method beyond generalities.

Read Descartes' book. I read it early on.

Discourse on the Method - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (French: Discours de la Méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences) is a philosophical and autobiographical treatise published by René Descartes in 1637. It is best known as the source of the famous quotation "Je pense, donc je suis" ("I think, therefore I am", or "I am thinking, therefore I exist"),[1] which occurs in Part IV of the work. A similar argument without this precise wording is found in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), and a Latin version of the same statement, "Cogito, ergo sum", is found in Principles of Philosophy (1644).

Paraphrasing 'apply yourself to pproblems which can solved, leave the rest to the astrologers'. Astrology was a way mathematicians made an income.

 

[Shadowy Man]

I disagree that relativity falsified Newtonian mechanics.

It didn't. It falsified Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation.

I don’t believe it did. In fact, GR reduces to Newton’s law in the non-relativistic limit. Einstein ensured that it would, assuming his theory had to. Maybe you are using a different definition of “false” than I am.

 

[pood]

Newton was wrong, and so was Einstein

We can never prove anything to be true.

 

[pood]

I disagree that relativity falsified Newtonian mechanics. Use of terms.

Newtonian mechanics is the main system used in science and engineering. Relativity has little practical value in comparison.

Nuclear power and GPS, to name two off the top of my head.

 

[pood]

Here, the (atheist) philosopher of science Brad Monton critiques the Kitzmiller decision ruling intelligent design “not science.” He, correctly in my view, said that the judge had no business solving the demarcation problem by judicial fiat. His point was that you can’t say ID is not science. What you CAN say, for the time being, is that it is unevidenced science, but that is no reason to leave it out as a topic for discussion in a science class. As to the worry of TEACHING it as science, there is no worry, because, currently, there is nothing to teach. As Lakatos would have it, ID has no research program. Maybe that will change. In his paper, Monton also adduces ways supernaturalism could become part of a research program.

To the bolded: Not so. Not at all.

There is an equivocation here between science the methodology that produces and tests theory; And science the body of work - the set of theories that that methodology has tested, and not yet demonstrated to be false.

Teaching of science, at least up to the high school level, is generally focussed on teaching the body of work. And it is taught (unsurprisingly, given that schooling started out as a religious activity) as something to be believed. A set of unquestionable facts about reality, which you must memorise and regurgitate if you wish to pass your examinations.

It is trivially easy to add to the syllabus a set of claims that have not withstood the methodological process of doing science. ID has no research program; But then, nobody is researching the charge on the electron, or the speed of light in a vacuum, or the electronegativity of Oxygen, either.

We are told that these things have been measured; And we are told what the results are. The difference between a well established fact that nobody is bothering to question as no new data has been seen that casts doubt on it, and an unsupported faith based claim, is very clear - to people who have a solid grounding in science as a methodology. That group does NOT include school students, nor does it include many of their teachers.

Hmm, but this is kind of my point. The charge on the electron, the speed of light in a vacuum, the electronegativity of oxygen are well-established facts from prior research programs. Nothing of the kind is true for ID creationism.

Certainly at least at the college level, it seems to me, discussion of ID is unavoidable and perhaps beneficial to bring out the difference between well-established and productive research programs and those that are not established at all.

If you tried to teach ID as a research program there would be nothing to teach.

 

[pood]

Newton resorted to the god of the gaps. People like Newton were not imple black and white figures when it cones to religion and science, still true today.

The majority of major European science contributors were Christian. Galileo. As the Mid East declined economically science and math passed form Persia and the Arabs to Europe. Newton used Persian astronomical data.

From a documentary on the topic, 'science always follows the money'. There has to be enough excess wealth to sopport it.

No, Isaac Newton was not a creationist in the modern sense; instead, he was a devout, but non-Trinitarian, Christian who believed in a God that actively created and sustained the universe
. His theological views, including a rejection of the Trinity and an emphasis on studying nature as a path to understanding God, were considered heretical by many of his contemporaries and were often kept private.

His main contribution was the notional system of calculus which he used to develop his mechanics. It set the stage for modern science and technology. Calculus as it evolved and Newtonian mechanics remain mainstays of science and engineering.

He is the granddaddy of modern physical science. Einstein was important but not nearly as important as Newton. Equal to Newton in importance was Maxwell and his synthesis of electromagnets.

History of calculus - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Calculus, originally called infinitesimal calculus, is a mathematical discipline focused on limits, continuity, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. Many elements of calculus appeared in ancient Greece, then in China and the Middle East, and still later again in medieval Europe and in India. Infinitesimal calculus was developed in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently of each other. An argument over priority led to the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy which continued until the death of Leibniz in 1716. The development of calculus and its uses within the sciences have continued to the present.

Newton believed that God was the lawgiver and that he and others were uncovering the laws that God handed down.

Today the “laws of physics” or of nature are a hangover of this view. But a better way to look at it IMO is that there are no “laws” at all, but rather, in accordance with the correspondence or Tarskian theory of truth, true descriptions of what happens in the world. Some. “laws” describe exceptionless regularities (gravity), some statistical regularities (thermodynamics) and some inherently random processes (nuclear decay). On this view there are an enormous number of laws, including a “law” describing what color shirt I put on in the morning. Norman Swartz discusses this at length in a number of essays and one of his books.

But as mentioned earlier, Newton worried about what kind of “force” gravity could possibly be.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Newton was wrong, and so was Einstein

Not useful to get hung up on “right” and “wrong” in these arenas.
https://medium.com/@deepbreadth/newton-was-wrong-so-was-einstein-and-thats-okay-a5ad4dedfe26

We can never prove anything to be true.

Prove it.

 

[pood]

Newton was wrong, and so was Einstein

Not useful to get hung up on “right” and “wrong” in these arenas.

We can never prove anything to be true.

Prove it.

Can’t. Cuz we can’t prove anything to be true.

 

[steve_bank]

I disagree that relativity falsified Newtonian mechanics. Use of terms.

Newtonian mechanics is the main system used in science and engineering. Relativity has little practical value in comparison.

Nuclear power and GPS, to name two off the top of my head.

Newtonian mechanics, QM, and Maxwell's electromagnets are the primary foundations for modern technology. Outside of GPS I do not know any major application for reactivity.

Controlled fission was the result of a number of people, not just AE. He was part of a team. The Manhattan Project. He was kicked off the project because of security concerns.

Albert Einstein was never officially part of the Manhattan Project because U.S. Army Intelligence considered him a security risk due to his left-leaning political views and pacifism, leading to him being denied the necessary security clearance in 1940. Intelligence officials also barred other project scientists from consulting with him. While he was not involved in the project's development, he played an indirect role by signing a letter to President Roosevelt that prompted the project's creation, though he later expressed regret for this action.

AE's main contribution and what got him noticed was his paper The Photo Electric Effect which experimentally demonstrated that light was quantized.

Chicago Pile-1 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the first artificial nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1 during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi. The secret development of the reactor was the first major technical achievement for the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to create nuclear weapons during World War II. Developed by the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, CP-1 was built under the west viewing stands of the original Stagg Field. Although the project's civilian and military leaders had misgivings about the possibility of a disastrous runaway reaction, they trusted Fermi's safety calculations and decided they could carry out the experiment in a densely populated area. Fermi described the reactor as "a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers".[4]

 

[pood]

I disagree that relativity falsified Newtonian mechanics. Use of terms.

Newtonian mechanics is the main system used in science and engineering. Relativity has little practical value in comparison.

Nuclear power and GPS, to name two off the top of my head.

Newtonian mechanics, QM, and Maxwell's electromagnets are the primary foundations for modern technology. Outside of GPS I do not know any major application for reactivity.

Controlled fission was the result of a number of people, not just AE. He was part of a team. The Manhattan Project. He was kicked off the project because of security concerns.

Albert Einstein was never officially part of the Manhattan Project because U.S. Army Intelligence considered him a security risk due to his left-leaning political views and pacifism, leading to him being denied the necessary security clearance in 1940. Intelligence officials also barred other project scientists from consulting with him. While he was not involved in the project's development, he played an indirect role by signing a letter to President Roosevelt that prompted the project's creation, though he later expressed regret for this action.

AE's main contribution and what got him noticed was his paper The Photo Electric Effect which experimentally demonstrated that light was quantized.

Chicago Pile-1 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the first artificial nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1 during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi. The secret development of the reactor was the first major technical achievement for the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to create nuclear weapons during World War II. Developed by the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, CP-1 was built under the west viewing stands of the original Stagg Field. Although the project's civilian and military leaders had misgivings about the possibility of a disastrous runaway reaction, they trusted Fermi's safety calculations and decided they could carry out the experiment in a densely populated area. Fermi described the reactor as "a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers".[4]

I realize Einstein wasn’t part of the Manhattan project, but nuclear power and nuclear bombs were impossible without his discoveries.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

Also Einstein wrote a letter to the president which kick-started the Manhattan Project.

 

[pood]

Also Einstein wrote a letter to the president which kick-started the Manhattan Project.

The movie Oppenheimer covers all this history brilliantly.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Controlled fission was the result of a number of people, not just AE. He was part of a team. The Manhattan Project. He was kicked off the project because of security concerns.

this is interesting. Can you give more detail on how Einstein was part of the Manhattan Project team and the circumstances around him getting kicked off?

Also Einstein wrote a letter to the president which kick-started the Manhattan Project.

basically Leo Szilard wrote the letter but needed Einstein’s popularity to get the attention of the US government

 

[pood]

And Einstein said he never would have dreamed up relativity except for David Hume (philosopher). It should also be recalled that Hume offered a philosophical argument against intelligent design centuries before Darwin.

Philosophy, as always baking bread that science eats.

 

[steve_bank]

In the 70s I picked up 'the map is not the countryside' from General Semantics.

Through use we tend to take the words we use to describe reality as reality itself. A map allowss us to navigate reality, but is not reality.

The idea helped e out when I started working. Science is a symbolic map of reality. It may or may not reflect actual reality.

So I prefer the word model over theory. A model is predictive using the instruments we have. Within stated bounds. A model is neither true nor false, it is predictive within stated limits andacuraciess in terms of experiments.

Electric current is quantized, by Miiliken's oil drop experimnts.

When the number of elections flowing are high enough current becomes a macro Newtonian scale measurement. When it is measured with a meter it is treated as a continuous function infinitely divisible mathematically even though it is quantized. As number of electrons go down it becomes WM.

Same with mass. Mass is quantized by atoms. When we measure mass for Newtonian scale objects we treat it mathematically as infinitely divisible.


According to relativity there are no straight lines in the prescience of gravity. So there is no such thing as a true right triangle. The effect of relativity on a small triangle is not measurable.

Does relativity disprove Euclidean geometry? Or are they different models with different uses?

So the case of Newtonian gravity verses relativity is not unique.

 

[pood]

Einstein was not ever part of the Manhattan project. He signed the letter to FDR even though he was a pacifist because he feared Germany getting the bomb.

 

[Shadowy Man]

If everything is “wrong” then nothing is “wrong” and the word/concept of “wrong” loses any utility in this context. So best not to worry about whether “Einstein proved Newton wrong”.

 

[pood]

If everything is “wrong” then nothing is “wrong” and the word/concept of “wrong” loses any utility in this context. So best not to worry about whether “Einstein proved Newton wrong”.

I don’t think Einstein proved Newton wrong. Newton works fine for everyday stuff. He just showed that Newton’s gravity failed at a certain domain.

 

[steve_bank]

And Einstein said he never would have dreamed up relativity except for David Hume (philosopher). It should also be recalled that Hume offered a philosophical argument against intelligent design centuries before Darwin.

Philosophy, as always baking bread that science eats.

I started the thread to antagonize you .....

We would not want you to get bored.

 

[steve_bank]

If everything is “wrong” then nothing is “wrong” and the word/concept of “wrong” loses any utility in this context. So best not to worry about whether “Einstein proved Newton wrong”.

The joys of phi-loopy.