For example. The American philosopher Brand Blanshard wrote the eloquent Reason & Analysis (1962). At page 265 he wrote: "A priori truths may be recognized not only without the assistance of language, but without any traceable reference to it." Steven Pinker, in his 2000 book, The Language Instinct, puts it this way: "Grammar offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses" (p. 117). The contrary view was taken by David Hume over 200 years earlier: “Tis impossible for us to carry on our inferences ad infinitum; and the only thing, that can stop them, is an impression of the memory or senses, beyond which there is no room for doubt or enquiry” (Book I, Part III, Section IV). Does the development of physics require empiricism?
You might look at this article:
Paul Feyerabend, "Science without Experience", The Journal of Philosophy, 66: 22 (20 November 1969), 791-794
(Apparently Ayn Rand had something uncomplimentary to say about it.)
Also, much of string theory is ostensibly unverifiable or unfalsifiable. Some would describe it as more of a fundamental conceptual framework, in which case it would be akin to metaphysics.
From an epistemological point of view, physics is closest to empiricism. However, the physics of the twentieth century forced many conclusions against empirical appearances. I think physics can change the standards of empiricism, forcing a new Weltanschauung
The idea was to describe reality hard ware, especially parts where technical instruments are involved, so now it is a pretty broad field.
DS> "I think physics can change the standards of empiricism, forcing a new Weltanschauung"
Dear Daniela,
Yes indeed! Only a new Weltanschauung can rescue both physics and philosophy from the present “dark age” and the doom of miserable mysticism that the resurrection of Platonic mathematical idealism by Albert Einstein has brought on!
But a vital anti-Platonic Weltanschauung already existed (even before Plato) in the brilliant dialectics of Heraclitus. Only the requirements of partisan class-rule of society never allowed the flourishing of that brilliant stem cell; because dialectics denies the stability or the permanence of what exists.
The encyclopedic works of G.W.F. Hegel, the revolutionary developments in biology (the theory of evolution) and physics (quantum dynamics) has brought vindication of immortal Heraclitus and brought home the fact that in the evolution of of the universe, Nature, life, history and of human thought, development, change, or progress makes its appearance by the negation or destruction of what exists. Only by adopting the dialectics of Heraclitus can physics and humanity come out of the present misery! Please see the on-going RG forum: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_Any_Effective_Refutation_of_Einsteins_Theories_of_Relativity_Possible
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Shour & readers,
I suspect that your question has more to do with what to count as "empiricism."
The older versions, down to Hume and most of the positivists, perhaps, is that "all our ideas derive (or arise from) from the senses" --in an extended sense. (Often an "inner sense" was part of the account of the senses.) What can't be traced back to sense impressions must therefore be nonsense--or something to that effect.
A more up-to-date version holds that (wherever our ideas may come from), they must be put to the test of experience--and basically, this means experimental testing so far as physics is concerned. The expectation is that new ideas (or theories) in physics, must bring along some new prediction in order to be confirmed or generally accepted.
What is "built in" to the mind, as I think Pinker would agree, need not be true. Evolution is not perfect, after all; and neither are living creatures perfectly adapted to their environments. They need only be better adapted than the going competition. For example, it seems plausible that our perception of the world involves something of a "built in" Euclidean geometry. Notice that geometry was just about the first fully developed science; and a more or less Euclidean take on the world might have been quite useful well back into the evolution of the mammals --if not before. It would not follow, of course, that the spacetime of physics must be Euclidean. Nonetheless we have difficulties picturing non-Euclidean space.
Empiricism is now about testing, not about the origin of our ideas.
H.G. Callaway
---you asked---
Is physics necessarily empiricist?
Steven Pinker, in his 2000 book, The Language Instinct, puts it this way: "Grammar offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses" (p. 117). The contrary view was taken by David Hume over 200 years earlier: “Tis impossible for us to carry on our inferences ad infinitum; and the only thing, that can stop them, is an impression of the memory or senses, beyond which there is no room for doubt or enquiry” (Book I, Part III, Section IV). Does the development of physics require empiricism?
this link is useful
http://web.mit.edu/dvp/www/Work/8.225/dvp-8.225-paper-1.pdf
regards
Philosophers have a way of wrapping themselves around the axle, if that term is clear. That should not prevent anyone from coming to logical conclusions.
Mathematics is not empiricist. Physics is. Engineering goes beyond just empiricist, and becomes pragmatic.
If physics cannot describe, quantify, and predict, a natural phenomenon, then the physics is incorrect. If math cannot be applied to a known natural phenomenon, then wait until tomorrow. Maybe it can, by then.
I think that Christian and Daniela make an important point. However, I would say, if the physics theory cannot match empirical evidence, it is not merely irrelevant. It is actually wrong.
Cold fusion did not ultimately match empirical evidence. It became wrong, at least as it was described. Some physics, such as classical physics, turns out to be accurate only within a limited framework. That may ultimately be the case for relativity theory too.
It's still imperative, not just tangential, for physics to be proven out in experiments. Failing that, the theory remains questionable, possibly nothing more than the fruit of a physicist's vivid imagination, otherwise known as fantasy.
Physics saw its formal beginning with Aristotle, who in direct contradiction and opposition to his Master and Mentor Plato, made natural philosophy to focus attention back towards the (material) Mother Earth. This was brilliantly depicted by Raphael in his work, “The School of Athens” where the central figures – an old and uncertain Plato points up towards the heavens and a young and confident Aristotle gestures down towards the earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens#/media/File:Sanzio_01_Plato_Aristotle.jpg
Physics made phenomenal achievements during the following centuries until Albert Einstein, frightened by the capricious and evil Quanta; took physics in the direction pointed at by Plato and riding on the magic carpet of his mathematics, to the misty world of fantasy. But a mature and wise Einstein near the end of his life (1954) had the following to say (and I agree with) in a letter to his friend Michelle Besso, “I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the field concept, i.e., continuous structure. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included, (and of) the rest of modern physics” A. Pais, Subtle is the Lord …” The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein”, Oxford University Press, (1982) 467,
Thank you to Dr. Hassan Nima above for linking to the article on Rationalism and Empiricism by Dennis Perepelitsa (2006). Interesting. The article contrasts 'mechanists' (who advocate empirical methods) and 'rationalists' who use mathematics. But suppose mathematics itself can be characterized as the collective effort of millions of people over hundreds of generations using empirical means to fashion mathematical concepts --- which are then used by the 'rationalists' to "deduce" laws of nature. Similar issues are in a RG article I posted Mathematics knows things about physics that we don’t (as yet). The follow up question to the article by Perepelitsa is: did society develop rationalism without empiricism?
Thank you again for the interesting article.
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Shour & readers,
It seems clear in contrast to your remark below that empiricists in physics also make use of mathematics; nor does it seem plausible that an empiricist commitment to experimental testing --and the testing of new predictions in particular--need be "mechanistic."
Mathematics is crucial in running out the detailed predictions of particular theories, and in that way, it facilitates testing of the consequences of theory.
Right?
H.G. Callaway
---you wrote---
The article contrasts 'mechanists' (who advocate empirical methods) and 'rationalists' who use mathematics.
I wonder is the principle of conservation of energy is something physical language necessarily assume as an a priori truth or if it is something that may eventually be changed and thus of empirical nature.
Empiricism is always an important numerical part on the leading edge of science where the natural laws have not all been discovered and expressed symbolically.
Scientists joke with each other and with engineers about the excesses of Empiricism and Reductionism. A balance is preferred, but it must be dynamic.
Experiments and observations feed empirical data into theoretical productions, and make tests of predictions from theories. In Physics there is much of the theoretical that discounts the value of the empirical. Mathematical consistency is offered instead of empirical evidence.
Very often I hear a no answer, but I tend to associate with the yes answers.
Most of the sciences came up with empirical theories so they are basically experiments at first.
LB> "I wonder is the principle of conservation of energy is something physical language necessarily assume as an a priori truth or if it is something that may eventually be changed and thus of empirical nature".
The conservation laws (of energy/mass) in physics and thermodynamics, including "Ex nihilo nihil fit" of philosophy are assumed a priori truths, but these are only valid at macroscopic scale.
Nature at quantum level is fundamentally uncertain – it is not a statistical aberration – but a fact and a phenomena ascertained by Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED). The law of the conservation of mass/energy of thermodynamics and physics breaks down at quantum level and creation “ex nihilo” is practically feasible! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/something-from-nothing-vacuum-can-yield-flashes-of-light/
The quantum vaccum is full of ghostly "virtual particle/antiparticle pairs" that continuously pop in and out of existence and their effect on the spectral lines of atoms known as the "Lamb Shift" can be very accurately measured. This effect can also be measured as the Casimir force with much less efficiency. The "virtual particles" can become "real particles" if sufficient energy equivalent to compensate for their mass is available. There is also a finite probability that a "virtual particle" can become "real" (even without sufficient energy for mass equivalence) through a phenomena known as "quantum tunnelling", it is as if the particle passes through a wall (energy barrier) through a non-existing tunnell!
Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” is not just a statistical problem as is commonly assumed; but much more than that. This fact has both scientific and philosophical foundation:
Scientific: "Are you certain Mr. Heisenberg"?
https://phys.org/news/2012-01-heisenberg-deepen-quantum-uncertainty.html
https://www.tuwien.ac.at/aktuelles/news_detail/article/7357/ http://www.nature.com/articles/nphys2194
Philosophical: The quantum vacuum, the "virtual particles and their transformation to "real particles" may be understood in terms of the "Being-Nothing-Becoming" of Hegel's ontological triad : "The Philosophy of Space-Time: Whence Cometh Matter and Motion?":
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Space-Time-Whence-Cometh-Matter/dp/984041884X
In fact it is possible that this spontaneous creation (ex nihilo) of fundamental particles from the quantum vacuum (and not through the Big Bang) is how the galaxies (along with all other things) evolve, “come into being and pass out of existence” and maintained throughout this infinite and eternal universe as asserted by dialectics: "Ambartsumian, Arp and the Breeding Galaxies" :Article Ambartsumian, Arp and the Breeding Galaxies*
Note: It is not for nothing that Einstein and many philosophers expressed dismay and outrage against the quantum phenomena. In Einstein‘s own words: “Many physicists maintain - and there are weighty arguments in their favour – that in the face of these facts (quantum mechanical), not merely the differential law, but the law of causation itself - hitherto the ultimate basic postulate of all natural science – has collapsed” A. Einstein, “Essays in Science”, p. 38-39 (1934)
The American mathematician and philosopher P.W. Bridgman lamented with a heavy heart, "the quantum principle means nothing more nor less than that the law of cause and effect must be given up, the world is not a world of reason, understandable by the intellect of man”. Quoted in C. Suplee Ed., “Physics in the 20th Century”, N.H. Adams Inc. N.Y., p. 88 (1999).
Added note:
It is also possible to conceive an explanation of the wave/particle duality of the quantum phenomena on the basis of the "Virtual Particles" of the quantum vacuum:
Article Real/Virtual Exchange of Quantum Particles as a Basis for th...
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Brassard & readers,
It is all fine and good to "wonder" about the conservation of energy. But wondering about it hardly proves it "a priori."
Surely, very high level generalizations tend to be conserved, since they play a central role in explanation and in the unification and unity of theory. It makes good sense to aim to conserve them, making other changes preferentially in adaptation of theory to evidence.
I notice that you give no account of what the supposed "a priori" status is supposed to amount to in this connection. How about this: given everything else known in physics, conservation of energy is an extremely robust principle in summing things up.
Here a robust sense of what is worthy of conserving in physical principles substitutes for the old-fashion, inarticulate concept of the a priori--presumably known by pure reason alone?
Notice in particular that there is, historically, not just one principle of the conservation of energy. Conservation of energy was held in a form which came before the knowledge of nuclear physics. Subsequently, we get something more general: conservation of mass-energy; and this was a modification on empirical grounds.
H.G. Callaway
---you wrote---
I wonder is the principle of conservation of energy is something physical language necessarily assume as an a priori truth or if it is something that may eventually be changed and thus of empirical nature.
I wonder how particles becomes so concrete to many. What could appear ought to be some parts of surfaces, or other structures depending on how you measure. Also, what are your opinion of the size of a differential compared with a quantum size?
See addendum above: Notice in particular that there is, historically, not just one principle of the conservation of energy. Conservation of energy was held in a form which came before the knowledge of nuclear physics. Subsequently, we get something more general: conservation of mass-energy; and this was a modification on empirical grounds.
Dear All,
'''Origin of Mathematical Physics.—Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset that the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways. First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton''
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37157/37157-pdf.pdf . , p. 195
SCIENCE AND HYPOTHESIS BY H. POINCARÉ,
I may be wrong and correct me if it is the case but as soon as we have done this assumption, we will have the invariance of the laws relative to time and this is mathematically equivalent to the conservation of energy (Noether's theorem ).
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Baumgarten & readers,
I sympathize with your reply, however, I think it advisable to do without the notion of the "a priori." This is not to suggest in the least that conservation of energy is somehow in peril. Quite the contrary. But a de novo redefinition of the "a priori" will only muddy the waters. Better to make do with varieties or degrees of standing and conservatism regarding accepted high-level principles. Obviously, some things are given up only with very great reluctance and justly so.
It seems much to the point of the present question to take seriously the shift from "conservation of energy" to conservation of mass-energy--and the empirical grounds of the shift. That's an empirically motivate shift in the claim--allowing, e.g., that energy in certain interactions may "disappear," to be replaced by or converted into an equivalent mass, according to the Einstein formula E = Mc2. This kind of conversion was clearly not foreseen in earlier formulations. Its not the same principle--though closely related, historically.
While we do not expect perpetual motion machines, any more now than before, we have to note the shift in meaning of physical principle and its changed comprehension of physical facts --some unknown to the older formulations.
I see no sufficient grounds for talk of the a priori in Brassard"s suggestion.
H.G. Callaway
“the idea that QM allows to violate the principle of energy conservation is a myth”.
Dear Dr. Christian Baumgarten,
This will entail a very long (already going on for more than a century) debate; because this depends on the interpretation of the quantum phenomena and I am not sure it can properly be done here. What I have done in my comment is to give references to my unique and relatively unheard of (even if published in physics journals) interpretation of the quantum phenomena and my preliminary (tentative) published works in this area, based on materialist dialectics; which is in direct contradiction and opposition to the generally accepted view based on causality. This was meant to be in relation to the question of "new Weltanschauung" raised by Daniela, to inform her and others (interested) that such a Weltanschauung (even if rudimentary) exists. I also provided references to some experimental works done by others that supports my views. These are fundamental issues and I would definitely welcome criticism of these preliminary works both in public forums and in published scientific papers.
But to make a response to your post briefly: with this statement of yours, we move away from epistemology to ontology; from the material realm of human existence to the realm of thought, of mathematics and of theology; to God’s physicist spokemen’s proclamation that “Matter is a Myth”; from the materialist dialectical assertion that “there is no leap in Nature, precisely because Nature is made entirely of (micro) leaps”, to the mighty leap of Big Bang creation by the God of theology etc. etc.!
If the uncertainty principle allows the violation of energy conservation at quantum level and allows virtual particles to become real particle and vice versa, then only almighty God can allow the mega violation of energy conversation in the universe. Only the hand of God can create all the matter/energy from nothing, pack all these up in an atom and then willy-nilly trigger a mighty bang to create this universe without the violation of energy conservation!
I know, the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg (violation of energy conservation, virtual particles etc., that goes against the holy principle of ex nihilo) is a bone in the throat of official physics that could not be denied but that must now somehow be explained away. Bohr tried this with Berkeleyan positivism and more or less forced Heisenberg to accept it (and abundon discontinuous matrix mechanics); as Heisenberg was dangerously verging towards dialectical materialism that was in fashion at that time; the allied force that kignapped Heisenberg (along with others), completed the rest. The “philosopher” apologist (ex-Marxist!) Karl Popper (of the Vienna Circle) - an ideological tool of monopoly capitalism boldly banished quantum uncertainty and indeterminism in physics by proclaiming “uncertainty” as only a measurement problem that can be fixed with proper statistical method and quantum phenomena did not abolish the revered certaity in the world.
Ernst Mach (also a member of the Vienna Circle) and the prophet Einstein including his teacher Minkowski joined the fray to drown/bury the evil quanta (the Virtual Particles") once and for all, submerged under the continuous “spacetime field”, which contained no matter (mass) and motion. But the conundrum that “mass” and “motion” never-the-less still exist; made the official physicist (the disciples of Einstein) think long and hard. Finally other additional “fields” (the more well known Higgs) – a sticky one this time had to be invented to grant the evil quanta to gain some mass from the God Particle and to swim through the sticky “Higgs Field” at various speed and so to allow some motion at all.
The discovery of the God Particle made Tsunamis around the world. But this humble me have argued (even in some RG forums) that the claim of the discovery of the God Particle is contrived (may even be a deception, like the claims of the other mega-projects of official physics). Even if this is real, the God Particle has nothing to do with the so called Higgs or quantum or any “field” at all, it could just be a “Virtual boson”, made real through the high energy equivalent of its mass.
Now, coming back to the “myth” of your statement, pray tell how and who created the “Spacetime”, “Higgs”, “Quantum” etc., ad nauseum, fields to start with and if these fields contain energy/mass, how were these possible without the violation of the conservation law? Unless of course all these were done by our well known omnipotent and omniscient God, who is capable of doing anything possible or impossible in heaven and earth!
So, before coming back to me swinging your big club of "virtual particle myth"; may I humbly remind you about the debates on the (field based; matter myth) theories of relativity we are having in other RG forums and also of Einstein's "Castle in the Air" that I mentioned above. Thanks.
There are a number of different views on this question, but I think the answer must acknowledge that physics has an empirical basis. There are constructs that humans use to organise the world around us. These constructs are expressed in language. It is a matter of debate how many of the constructs are physical principles in their own right. The most common class of organisational principles that seem to give rise to physical principles are the principles of geometry (and the associated structures of number theory and analysis). Personally I think that mathematics is part of a class of necessary empirical truths (following the arguments in Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity), but other positions include Kant's transcendental idealism (where the organisational principles determine the physical world as we know it) and basic empricism (where the organisational principles are abstracted or generalised from experience), which often comes with an instrumentalist attitude to the choice of mathematical framework that can be used to explain phenomena.
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Baumgarten & readers,
I am somewhat unsure how to take your comment below, made in reply to Malek. But the claim you make does have much to do with the concept of theoretical postulates in theory. If Feynman doubted of virtual exchange particles, then we want to know his reasons for this, and not simply that he regarded it as "a figure of speech." No one is ever going to observe, say, the center of the sun, but few doubt that it exists and that various processes go on there--described by theoretical physics. The physicists long doubted of atoms, while the chemists were quite convinced --and they turned out right.
The idea of virtual particles is intimately connected with the idea of quantum fluctuations of fields, and indeterminacy, and beyond that with difficulties of predictions, renormalization, etc. One of the best reasons for postulating unobserved entities, of course, is that doing so makes theoretical predictions come out right. It is not, of course, that this can never go wrong. But the evaluations go case by case.
In the best case, the experiments which "confirm" the postulation of theoretical entities are the ones in which the predictions, based on theory including the postulation, comes out right.
Can you amplify Feynman's doubts?
H.G. Callaway
---you wrote---
To my knowledge, nobody ever observed "virtual particles" in the wilderness. So, unless this changes by conclusive future experiments, I prefer to avoid romantic reifications that mainly serve speculative purposes.
Christian Baumgarten
Yes indeed, Dr. Baumgarten! The virtual particles "are romantic reifications". But “Path Integral Formulation” of quantum mechanics by Richard Feynman, where the integration over an infinity of possible trajectories is used to compute a “quantum amplitude” [Feynman R.P., Hibbs A.R., and Styer D.F. Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals. Dover Publications], where one arbitrary set of “infinities” are used to cancel another arbitrary set of “infinities” to get a a “precise” finite result and which Paul Dirac called “sweeping the infinities under the rug” etc are far from “romantic reifications” - oh poor irony! The richer irony is that “a working class physicist” can disparage materialist dialectics with impunity!
But the mother of all ironies is that physicists would deny creation/annihilation of insignificant matter/energy as a quantum fluctuation; while they would seek the help of the omnipresent, omniscient, and the “unmoved mover” to break all conservation laws and to create a whole universe from nothing through a mighty bang! And these coming from “atheist” physicists! To rephrase Shakespeare, "Irony! thy name is official physics"!
CB> “To my knowledge, nobody ever observed "virtual particles" in the wilderness.”
If ‘observation’ means seeing through human eyes, then it is true. But otherwise this statement represent patent falsehood or pure ignorance. I mentioned widely recognized “Lamb Shift” and “Casimir Force “in my comment above and gave reference to the historic works of Lamb and co-workers, in my article. The Lamb Shift measurements remain unsurpassed in accuracy than any others in modern physics!
Physics without an experiment is the same as astronomy without sky observations and whiskey without alcohol. It entirely misses what physics , astronomy and whiskey means.
Abdul, who says the big bang "came from nothing"? No one says that.
I think you are turning the discussion about physics being an empirical science into something religious, or at least, overly complicated. Leaving religion totally out of the discussion, physics simply won't address what can't be verified, or if not verifiable right this minute, due to limits of current technology, what can't be "ultimately verified."
Sure, Albert Einstein used some very clever math, that held together well, to come up with theories that could not yet be verified, at that time. But no one then, and certainly no one today, is compelled to believe that these theories are totally valid, sound physics. Not until they are verified! Somehow, this concept is missing, from the common vernacular. No one in physics is expected to "just believe." You might not want to re-create every single experiment in your own lab, but you have to either go by the published literature on those experiments, or you have to allow for the possibility that some of those unverified theories are going to fall apart.
In fact, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics, are constantly under attack nowadays. Plenty of evidence right here in RG. If empiricism (experimentation) shows the theories do not match reality, they will be scrapped. Or parts of them will be scrapped, as necessary. What is scrapped would be ejected from the field of physics.
Researchers have observed pairs of particles and antiparticles being created out of intense EM field energy. This is well known and published. It is the empirical basis of theoretical work.
The pair production is swift, but not instantaneous. A concept of virtual particles derives from possible mechanisms by which the pair is produced.
To become real the particle pair must separate by more than one wave length equivalent of their energy. This means that they are virtual particles during the brief time interval when they are less than one wave length apart. It is a potential that is soon realized as particle pairs.
When the EM field is slightly deficient in Electric Volts Per Meter or Magnetic Volt Seconds Per Meter Square, the real particles are not created, but the potential is there in the form of virtual particles.
Fields of EM energy in space are seldom completely constant. They fluctuate giving rise to real particle pairs that separate and other potentials of virtual pairs that form and coalesce. Most of the potentials are not realized.
Other empirical evidence of x-ray sources around black holes leads to additional theories that strong gravitational energy gradients also produce particle pairs. This system also applies to real particles and to virtual potentials that are not realized.
Anywhere in space where there are fields, essentially everywhere, there are potentials to form particles, but mostly the potentials are not realized as free particles.
Virtual pairs are connected together through fundamental forces where the perturbing of fields causes the virtual pair to vibrate. This is the physical representation of the ZPE and the vibrational energy in vacuum on a small scale that comprises the fabric of space time.
Planck units are calculated from dimensional analysis on empirical data about the properties of space. Since Paul Dirac and possibly before with less known researchers, the Planck units have been used to compute the energy density, average vibration frequency, and wave length of vacuum space. Casimir experiments of empirical data tend to agree with the theoretical predictions.
A long standing disagreement of GRT and QM can be resolved by requiring the vacuum energy of vibration to be divided into different types related to the four forces. Nearly half of the energy tends to bend space concave to the source like gravity while the other types tend to bend space convex to the source. The result of energy partition creates additional equations sufficient to show that the total vacuum energy is large but finite while the cosmological constant is small.
Not everyone will agree with this representation although it is constructed on empirical data and testing of theories. A great many researchers accept the occurrence of virtual potentials, while others don't and probably never will.
With virtual potentials there is possibility to discover new science.
PS to my former answer. Physics, and Science in general, without experiments is called Metaphysics and Metascience. Examples: String theory , Brane theory, expanding Universe, dark energy . Metaphysics and Metascience were common in dark ages 1000 years ago. People who practice Metaphysics and Metascience are called charlatans or shamans. Example: charlatans advocating string theory are unable to propose even "in principle experiment" to prove ( or disprove) their ill fantasies. Would you believe a physician ( doctor) who would prescribe you a drug which has not been experimentally tested , tested and retested again and finally approved to treat your condition ? I hope no . Thus, why you have to believe charlatans who sits on high level positions at Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and MIT and tell us that accordingly to string theory a cow has 10 legs , ( but we see only 4) and the Universe accelerates on weekends and de-accelerates on weekdays?
I wonder about the ease with which some people assert that virtual particles, or rather virtual pairs of particles and anti-particles, have been experimentally verified (by vacuum polarization, Lamb shift, ...). I personally prefer a more cautious view: Note that only observables and relations between them - in the context of certain experimental set-ups (preparations) - are accessible by measurements. Virtual particles are not observable, but are detectable at best indirectly.
In such cases - i.e. that a physical entity cannot be directly identified with one specific observable - one may run into ambigiuties when theoretical terms should be mapped to physical entities. In general one needs an interpretation of a theory for that. This is well known e.g. in quantum mechanics and less well known (but nevertheless true) in the context of the Higgs mechanism. Possibly, other examples may be instanced appropriately.
BTW: An interpretation of a theory is in fact metaphysics in a certain sense. However, it is metaphysics that you need in order to make physical theories empirically testable.
Regarding interpretation of Higgs particle. See it that way. LHC CERN accelerator =5 billion dollars. Number of people associated 15000. Every year budged 1.5 billion dollars. From its construction this monster consumed 50 to 100 billion dollars. What those money produced so far? If answer is NOTHING , then CERN and LHC have to be shut down . That way those folks had have to find SOMETHING to justify their own "food source" . Thus we have the Higgs boson. No "ambiguities" gentlemen, when it comes to big money . Higgs mechanism = $$$$$$.
Albert Manfredi
AM> "Abdul, who says the big bang "came from nothing"? No one says that. I think you are turning the discussion about physics being an empirical science into something religious, or at least, overly complicated."
Albert,
I am sorry to say that I reject both your evaluation of me and your view of the status of modern theoretical physics vis-à-vis theology. While the evaluation of me is of no consequence, because I am a very obscure person of no significance, the second point of your comment is very important for the well being and the future of natural science, particularly physics and for discussion by any concerned scientists including the ones in this forum.
It is true as you say that “special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics, are constantly under attack nowadays”; but to what effect? These theories (in fact the ruling ones) have been proved for the nth time, starting from the “proof” of GR from the bending of starlight by the sun (Arthur Eddington and still counting!) and each of them became successful “with flying colours”! Any employed scientists opposing these theories are sent back home packing and to certain obscurity; I personally know a few, the one with the highest profile is Halton (Chip) Arp. So, what do you mean by saying that the theories of modern physics are “under attack”? Please see the RG forum Initiated by me at the following link: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_Any_Effective_Refutation_of_Einsteins_Theories_of_Relativity_Possible
Your accusation that I am, “turning the discussion about physics being an empirical science into something religious, or at least, overly complicated” unfortunately shows how ill informed you are and also dialectically shows how sensitive these issues are to official science that you probably represent! It is monopoly capitalism in collaboration with some established high profile physicists, numerous theological groups including the Vatican are trying hard to make physics preach theology! Enormous human, natural and financial resources are poured into high value mega project that are of vested interest for their sponsors, to “prove” the esoteric theories of physics that has implication for theology and God; but provide no possibility or value for social practice, the way the old theories of classical physics were! Lure of fame, fortune and funds are behind the contrived “proofs” of these theories!
Physics no longer have the free thinkers, the passionate and creative giants (inspired by the then revolutionary bourgeoisie), who pursued their profession for the mere thirst of knowledge under the most severe conditions and more often under the threat of persecution and death. They are now replaced by troops of conformed scientist serfs (to borrow an expression from the Bengali poet Rabibdranath Tagore); who are totally dependent on monopoly capital for their livelihood, career and crafts and who toil mightily to bring out only expected and acceptable results.
Sir, you show the temerity to accuse an insignificant person like me of a crime while being totally oblivious to the fact that the theology groups Wilton Park –( a global forum set up by none other than Winston Churchill), the Templeton foundation, the Vatican and some independent theologists etc,. are parts of science policy formulation group at CERN where the "God Particle" was “discovered”! https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19997789
The Big Bang theory itself was adopted as an official scientific theory in a conference at the Vatican, that excluded the major physicists of the time who were opposed to that theory; as the following statement from Geoffrey Burbidge would testify: “By 1982, when a conference on cosmology was held at the Vatican, a new approach was taken. The radicals around, such as F. Hoyle, V. Ambartsuminan and this speaker (to mention a few) were not even invited. The conference was confined completely to Big Bang cosmology and its proponents. In fact in the introduction to the published volume of the proceedings of the meeting (Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 1982) it was emphasized that only believers (in the Big Bang) were present; and that there was clearly a deliberate decision of the organizers” : G Burbidge, In “The Universe at Large: Key Issues in Astronomy and Cosmology.
In my opinion, all the science hypotheses are empirical one! when they turn nonempirical one only during development of null hypotheses.
Regards
Dr. Kamath Madhusudhana
So the general idea of spontaneity is a pure H_0 for the whole science: it is high time for quantum physics to be concerned about enviable prospects in the realm of connectivity.
Empirical posterior truths contradicted by analysis of a priori formal ones. Those in turn contradicted by their unity; fortiori for speculative ones.
Check this link maybe helpful
http://web.mit.edu/dvp/www/Work/8.225/dvp-8.225-paper-1.pdf
regards
CB> “But since you are known on RG as a persevere critic of special (and general) relativity and expressed repeatedly your wish to replace them by Newtonian physics, I wonder how you manage to unite Newtonian physics with QED/QFT. I would not know how do that”
Dr. Christian Baumgarten,
Sir, It seems that you not only did not correctly understand my views on the different aspects of physics (after lengthy discussion in various RG forums for couple of years; in which both of us participated); you are not capable of appreciating the nature and the essence of the historical (and dialectical) evolution and development of physics. I doubt any further discussion between us would be meaningful. I would humbly suggest that you go through those discussions once again (if you so wish) before any further discussion.
Dear all,
There is an interesting tension between Pinker's and Hume's statements. Hume talks about how we can know the truth of propositions and he argues that our knowledge of the external world can only come from memory and the senses. Knowledge of grammar on the other hand is evidently of a different kind, no one can state the rules of grammar (all that the existence of grammar shows is that the mind is not a “blank state”). Hume is not concerned with competence (the capacity to use language) but rather with performances: Given what we know about us and the world, can we expect to get insight into reality beyond what can be observed?
Hume was impressed with Newton's discovery of universal gravitation and he clearly recognized that this discovery destroyed the view that the world works in an intuitively obvious way, i. e. the Mechanical Philosophy:
“While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.” (Hume; The History Of Great Britain; Vol. 2; 1759)
One can argue that Hume's insight that nature is obscure for our intuitive understanding plays a role in the above linked article by Dennis V. Perepelitsa Transitions of Physics: Rationalism and Empiricism. Perepelitsa observes that the classicists at the turn of the last century were, as he puts it “crippled by an insistence on empiricism, a distaste of pure, contextless mathematics, and the desire that physical phenomena be explained in ways intuitive to human beings.” The condition that “physical phenomena [are to] be explained in ways intuitive to human beings” is the defining feature of the Mechanical Philosophy. One can argue that physics finally abandoned the Mechanical Philosophy with the advent of General Relativity and Quantum mechanics, about two centuries after Hume. To indicate this, let us consider Einstein as an example for a rationalist:
Einstein gives the following definition of a theory:
“A complete system of theoretical physics consists of concepts and basic laws to interrelate those concepts and of consequences to be derived by logical deduction.” (Einstein; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; 1936)
Einstein separates the concepts and basic laws from the consequences. Reason is concerned with the former, empirical evidence with the later:
“Reason gives the structure to the system; the data of experience and their mutual relations are to correspond exactly to consequences in the theory. On the possibility alone of such a correspondence rests the value and the justification of the whole system, and especially of its fundamental concepts and basic laws.” (ibid.)
Thus, Einstein rejects the idea that the world is intuitively ineligible, all that he relies on is reasoning and evidence. In other words, Einstein lowers the explanatory standards of the sciences: from an intelligible world to ineligible theories.
To conclude: If Einstein formulates rationalism and if contemporary physics follows Einstein, then physics presupposes rationalism. The interesting point is that this version of rationalism does not conflict with Hume's empiricism: On the contrary: Hume was concerned with the truth of propositions about the external world (the “Matters of Fact” as opposed to “Relations of Ideas”) and all that we can do is to rely on experience in order to determine whether or not they are true. This is rather similar to Einstein's dictum that the correspondence between the “data of experience” and the consequences is the sole criterion for the evaluation of the “basic concepts” and “fundamental laws”. If this is correct, then one can argue that reasoning by Einstein is what Hume calls the “Relations of Ideas”. Thus, both formulate essentially the same view.
To return to the Pinker/Hume relation: there is an interesting question about how we can develop concepts in the first place, or more generally: what allows us to reason in the first place? There is a possibility that we must rely on “tacit knowledge” (as in the grammar case) in order to construct theories in the first place. If so, this would hardly be surprising and it wouldn't surprise Hume, who explicitly wants to understand the “secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations” (Hume; E I.I5). Given that we have the capacity to do science, there must be some fixed components in the way the mind/brain is structured, but what and how exactly is an empirical question. Still, it is conceivable that we develop our theories by relying on intuitions and “a priory” knowledge and these intuitions and knowledge comes from principles that we cannot escape from and thus would restrict us in our ability to develop concepts and to reason. In that sense, it might turn out to be the case that we have no knowledge about true propositions about the external world beyond what we can experience, but the range of knowable propositions is restricted by our capacity to reason. This would mean that "a priory" (tacit) knowledge plays necessarily a role in developing theories.
Best,
Sven Beecken
Golly, Abdul, I didn't "accuse" anyone of anything. "Accuse" implies a crime was committed. I merely said that you are trying to introduce religious "belief" into the question of whether physics is an empirical science, or not. And by bringing up what the Vatican is trying to do with physics, you only strengthened the point.
In short, it does not matter, to the field of physics, what the Vatican might, or might not, be attempting to do. If a religion wants to strengthen its belief structure, by demonstrating that its teachings do not contradict today's science, more power to them. The Vatican finally did accept that the universe does not revolve around planet earth, did it not? And yet, that had no bearing on whether or not celestial mechanics is a credible field of physics. It was credible, whether the Vatican wanted it to be or not. Said another way, it was not the Vatican that validated the field of celestial mechanics. If anything, by accepting verified physics, the Vatican succeeded in adjusting its own teachings.
The only point of value here is that it would be smart for any religion to accept physical reality, as far as we know it to be, rather than pursue fairy tales that might sound increasingly like fantasy. Which has nothing to do with the question posed in this thread.
@ J. G. von Brzeski: Just to avoid misunderstandings: I wrote about interpretation (in the context) of the Higgs mechanism - not about interpretation of the Higgs particle (as you quoted). This is a big difference, since the discussion about the interpretation of the Higgs mechanism refers to the question whether the Higgs mechanism exists as a physical process and whether the Higgs field should be regarded as a physical entity. Depending on the choice of the interpretation of the Standard Model, different options exist, i.e. different ontologies can meet the very same physical theory (here: the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics).
For the Higgs particle (Higgs boson) the situation is different: it is needed to get the Standard Model straight and it is experimentally verified, too - if one trusts the publications of the CERN research groups, of course.
I understood that you do not trust them. However, your arguments seem to be rather of a political or sociological than of a physical or philosophical nature. If you really think that each and every one (including scientists) will sell his soul (or his ideals and honor) as soon as enough money comes into play, how can you state anything about contemporary science? Whom can you trust at all? Even if the scientists at CERN are under pressure to publish certain stuff, this may - if you think this way - increase doubts concerning their publications, but will be no proof of the non-existence of the Higgs particle.
AM> "The only point of value here is that it would be smart for any religion to accept physical reality, as far as we know it to be, rather than pursue fairy tales that might sound increasingly like fantasy".
Dear Albert,
I am not sure if someone else in this forum will respond to your comment (I can see some recommends); but “The only point of value” in my initial response to you is that you are shooting at the messenger with regard to the relation between theology to physics!
Unfortunately for you, I don’t think many in this forum would be convinced of the rosy picture you have drawn about the relation of physics and theology; about who is smarter than whom; or who is following whose fairy tales etc., when scientific disputes has to be settled at the Vatican!
Please read the report of George Smoot of COBE fame, who found the “face of God” in his picture of the cosmos and the “fingers” of the geometrical distribution of the galaxies pointing to the earth and making it the centre of the universe again!
Also, in addition to the BBC report that I provided links to earlier, please see another one below see who is lecturing who; theologians even reprimand and scold Stephan Hawking (who was at the Vatican Conference that Burbidge refereed to) for saying that there is no God!
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19870036
In any case good luck and more power to you on your wishful thinking!
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Manfredi & readers,
The thesis that the universe came from nothing has been put forward by Lawrence Krauss, and is closely connected with skepticism concerning virtual particles.
See the review, from the NYTimes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html
H.G. Callaway
---you wrote---
Abdul, who says the big bang "came from nothing"? No one says that.
“I think physics can change the standards of empiricism, forcing a new Weltanschauung.”
This statement by Daniela Sorea represents a profound intuition and a point of departure both for physics and empiricism. Physics with its quantitative method can increase the precision of materialist empirical truths in a dialectical relation with each other. A proper Weltanschauung, namely dialectics, as an effective method for acquiring positive knowledge of the world already exists and was first conceived long ago by the great Greek thinker Heraclitus; which went far beyond and was a qualitative leap from the conventional method based on causality of everyday life experience – an evolutionary (common to all life forms) empirical inheritance of men.
Historically, physics remained tenuously empirical until Albert Einstein; and as long as it gave priority of Matter over Thought, Nature over Spirit; and followed the general criteria that “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness”. Physics was impaired all along because of its dependence on the world view (Weltanschauung) of causality; but which became practically inadequate with further development of physics itself; specially with the recognition of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The world view of causality broke down completely with the recognition of the quantum phenomena that made physics (in the person of Einstein) to retreat back to the cozy world of myth, mystery and fantasies of Greek idealism.
The quantum phenomena demonstrated to physics that its world view of causality is only approximately valid, only in the macroscopic scale and in the very narrow range of the objective reality of everyday life experience, where the cause and its effect can be clearly identified and (preferably) quantified. Also, causality (in an iterative way) always leads to a “first cause”, which is the “effect” of a “cause” that is unknown or unknowable and hence a mystery (the theological God). So; in the final analysis and on the ontological questions of objective reality, causality only leads to mysteries but no positive knowledge, as the mighty thinker Immanuel Kant so clearly demonstrated!
The quantum phenomena demonstrated very clearly that the dynamics of objective reality in general is mediated not by cause and effect, but by dialectical chance and necessity. The causality of human scale reflects the crude short-term congregation of gross and averaged out innumerable quantum processes that form the inner strata of all tangible matter. Only a recognition of the quantum dynamical and the dialectical character of objective reality and the following criteria of positive knowledge expressed by Karl Marx can “force a new Weltanschauung” on empiricism as Daniela suggested and thereby overcome the mysticism brought on by Albert Einstein! : “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the “this-sidedness” of his thinking.. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”. Theses on Fauerbach.
It is possible for physics to take such a fruitful quantum dynamical and dialectical approach:
The Dialectical Universe: Some Reflections on Cosmology: https://www.amazon.ca/Dialectical-Universe-Some-Reflections-Cosmology/dp/9840414445
"The Einsteinian Universe? A Dialectical Perspective of Modern Theoretical Physics and Cosmology":
https://www.amazon.de/Einsteinian-Universe-Dialectical-Perspective-Theoretical/dp/B01HCASNJK
@ Prof. H.G. Callaway,
HGC> “The thesis that the universe came from nothing has been put forward by Lawrence Krauss, and is closely connected with skepticism concerning virtual particles”.
This is the irreconcilable contradiction that causality and mathematical idealism based official theoretical physicists now face after the recognition of the quantum phenomena; Prof. Krauss just innocently blurted it out; the others take resort to hypocrisy and try to explain things away!
This is also the reason why the “consistency of mathematics” is their proud slogan; are pompously looking for a “Theory of Everything” and to hide their bankruptcy they disparage philosophy at every turn as being "imprecise"! They even deny “matter”; which was the greatest merit of classical materialism and Newtonian physics! For them “matter it is a myth”! They claim absolute certainty, continuity, determinism etc. of their theories and allow no “free will”, (that even theology to its credit permits in a limited sense), because the human content has no meaning for their mathematics!
The “atheist” crusader and ideologue Richard Dawkins (following La Mettrie, Jacques Monod, Karl Popper et al.) goes even one step further in declaring absolute determinism in biological evolution!
Abdul, when you say this, I simply ask, "Says who?"
"I don’t think many in this forum would be convinced of the rosy picture you have drawn about the relation of physics and theology; about who is smarter than whom; or who is following whose fairy tales etc., when scientific disputes has to be settled at the Vatican!"
What leads you to believe that the Vatican has to settle anything at all, except for what observing Roman Catholics are taught in church or in parochial schools? It is simply not credible that the field of physics is waiting for such proclamations from the Vatican! The Vatican only speaks for the Roman Catholic Church. In these matters, it lags behind science.
Think of it like this. For the longest time, the Vatican was insisting that the universe revolved around planet earth. More and more Catholics were getting fed up with this nonsense, as the evidence said otherwise. So, intelligently, the Vatican decided maybe it was time to get up to speed, or they were going to lose members. That's how it works. There was no credible religious reason to keep insisting on pure ignorance, so they stopped. At long last. Good thinking!
"Please read the report of George Smoot of COBE fame, who found the “face of God” in his picture of the cosmos and the “fingers” of the geometrical distribution of the galaxies pointing to the earth and making it the centre of the universe again!"
And that carries no weight. The ancients saw all sorts of shapes up there, when looking at the stars, and named constellations that way. This matters little to astrophysics.
Same with theologians who might feel compelled to scold Stephen Hawking. No one need care less. Their reasons for scolding, if not for demonstrable scientific reasons, are just a side show.
In short, you are making a mountain of a molehill. More exactly, you are putting the cart in front of the horse. Some religious people are still terrified by evolution, others have finally gotten past such phobias. Science cannot be held back by superstitious beliefs, and it isn't. Science leads, religion can either follow, gaining knowledge, or they can become increasingly irrelevant.
AM> “What leads you to believe that the Vatican has to settle anything at all”
Albert, unfortunately, this first sentence of your whole thesis is enough to dismiss it totally and also all what you have to say!. There is no “belief” but only facts in my comment. I only stated the facts with source and references; these are even not my opinions!
If you construe my comments as siding with theology, you are absolutely wrong also! For me, absolutely anything at all, is better than determinism and mathematical idealism in physics. I fully agree with what (the first truely dialectical materialist) The Great Epicurus (384 - 270 B.C.) had to say even without knowing our modern official physicists: “It is better to follow the myth about the gods than to be a slave of the "fate" (determinism, A.M.) of the physicists!"
@ J. G. von Brzeski
Your characterization of the modern high-flying official theoretical physicists as “Charlatans” is entirely appropriate in light of the facts available now, especially in light of the experimental results claimed so far from the LHC.
Abdul, quoting you: "Albert, unfortunately, this first sentence of your whole thesis is enough to dismiss it totally and also all what you have to say!. There is no “belief” but only facts in my comment. I only stated the facts with source and references; these are even not my opinions!"
Abdul, you misunderstand what I'm saying. I dismiss totally your premise, that religious opinions (what you call "facts") hold sway over science. Quoting what the Vatican might have commented about quantum mechanics is of no importance to physics. Scientific disputes are not settled by the Vatican, except perhaps for what they will willingly teach in their own parochial schools!
I don't know what leads to think otherwise. If you have your own experimental results, that dispute QM or relativity, those experiments would be far more important than any religious opinion. Conversely, if your opinions are no more founded on experimentation, and sound math, than the religious opinions, then they would also have little credibility.
"The Great Epicurus (384 - 270 B.C.) had to say even without knowing our modern official physicists: “It is better to follow the myth about the gods than to be a slave of the "fate" (determinism, A.M.) of the physicists!'"
Other than as a historical note, why should anyone care what Epicurus said about physics, Abdul? Again, your quote might be spot on, but it is of no scientific importance. And I don't know where you get this "determinism" point either.
There is nothing credible you can quote that shows the Vatican, or the head of any other religion, must settle scientific disputes. This is my only point.
Theories in physics must be proven, verified, through actual experimentation. Not religious fervor, not clever turns of phrase, not copious prose. If experimentation cannot confirm the theory, then that theory could be just fantasy.
Albert, we are totally out of sync with each other and this discussion is really meaningless. I am pointing out what is happening in reality; while you are making a moral judgement of what should or should not happen!
I agree with you completely that the Vatican should not, must not, cannot and have no business at all, in setting any agenda for research in physics. I am just simply pointing out (as the quote from Geoffrey Burbidge shows) that the Vatican did it in reality (about the Big Bang theory) through that conference at the Vatican, which Burbidge spoke about. And as the BBC report shows , they are doing the same with the LHC and the God Particle (The Higgs boson) as well.
Lets call this discussion a quit! Thanks for the chat! Best regards and good night! Abdul
We first must realize that physics qua "physics" is a human invention. It is we who have come up with its concepts and laws in order to describe what we perceive to be happening within the environment we occupy. Hence physics is necessarily empirical not only in developing the fundamental concepts and laws of physics but in testing our generalizations and extensions of physics into realms beyond the laboratory like black holes, quantum mechanics, cosmology and more. The Universe is what it is and does what it does without cognition of any rules of engagement - it is we who provide them by observation, interpetation and experiment in the scientific discipline we call "physics".
DW> "We first must realize that physics qua "physics" is a human invention. It is we who have come up with its concepts and laws in order to describe what we perceive to be happening within the environment we occupy".
This is a veritable materialist view and also a dialectical materialist view; if the validity of the concepts of physics are judged by the criteria of "human/social practice" and not by subjective and contrived "proofs"!
This view negates all idealism, positivism etc., including the much trumpeted mathematical idealism of the theories of relativity and other "field" (namely Quantum, Higgs etc.,fields - "Matter is a Myth"!) -based theories of physics.
Abdul Malek is what used to be called a 'dogmatic Marxist'. (As opposed to the kind that really has studied the history of Western philosophy.) In this context: he's utterly convinced that the analysis of objective reality (in this case: the physical universe) 'proves' his tiresome 'dialectical weltanschauung'. He holds the 'Theses on Feuerbach' (which he misspells as 'Fauerbach') as gospel truth, derives his entire world view from this. (His miss-spelling seems to suggest an unfamiliarity with the sources, perhaps his reading is based entirely on translations.) He seems not to have noticed that the 'werttheorie' - which was the basis for the original argument that economic crises need only to be analysed from their *objective* side, has long since been made untenable by the impossibility of measuring the 'living labour' component of prices. (This doctrine doesn't really even come from Marx - it comes from Engels, and then from Lenin.)
Frederik van Gelder
So! Here comes a reincarnation of Herr Eugen Dȗhring - “the kind that really has studied the history of Western philosophy”, claiming authority of all knowledge not only of the past but of the present and the future as well. This new reincarnation, namely Herr Frederik van Gelder has kindly descended to this lowly RG forum (probably out of boredom of his pristine philosophy) to throw a fresh challenge to 'dialectical weltanschauung' in a forum dealing with the subject matter of physics.
But what is his highly potent arsenal? - A "miss-spelling" (“His miss-spelling seems to suggest an unfamiliarity with the sources, perhaps his reading is based entirely on translations”.); which is enough of a weapon for our mighty Herr van Gelder to demolish his opponents, not only poor Abdul Malek, but also Marx, Engels, Lenin and all the rest of history, who does not agree with our new Herr Dȗhring!
Herr van Gelder seems to be blissfully oblivious to the fact that there are other credible and formally recognized philosophers in this forum such as Prof. H.G. Callaway (to name only one) who are making positive and very useful contributions to this forum and our mighty new philosopher has contributed absolutely nothing.
This clearly shows that Herr van Gelder is far from an all-knowing “philosopher “(or scientist) but a crude ideologue and presented himself in this forum for the purpose of pure propaganda. But Herr van Gelder must know that he is not alone in RG, I have seen few of them off (in defence of 'dialectical weltanschauung') so far, including one in the following forum:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_Any_Effective_Refutation_of_Einsteins_Theories_of_Relativity_Possible?view=5b3f4524cbdfd464ab4c9763
Does RG have have some kind of moderation, or must one just suffer the true believers? It's an old Marxist trick: polemicise, shout down, denunciate, threaten, insult... Discussion isn't possible under these conditions, but then that's the point, shut it down ...
Philadelphia, PA
Dear van Gelder,
I'd suggest going on with what you see as positive on the thread and passing over what you see as less helpful for purposes of the question.
That's usually a good approach in extended discussions. Focus on the question and perhaps less on participants?
H.G. Callaway
I appreciate that. Thank you.
i) I take it there’s some agreement on this list that the point of contention is whether modern physics has put paid to the notion of ‘a priori truths’ - a widespread view -, and that the only alternative then still available is the argument that “the development of physics require[s] empiricism”. The opposite view is that this is not the case at all, and that analytic philosophy from the later Wittgenstein onwards - Searle, speech-act theory, Von Wright, Piaget, a great deal else -, has brought to light epistemological ‘stances’ which every native speaker of a language must presuppose for any sentence whatsoever (‘p’) to be ‘successful’, i.e. be intelligible for one or more listeners to that ‘p’. (I’m aware also that that starts to impinge on the Chomsky debates on ‘deep structure’ but don’t want to go there here.) ‘Stances’ which, when one analyses them, are the equivalent of those Kantian ‘a prioris’, and which lie much deeper in the evolution of language and the evolution of the human race than the attitude called ‘empiricism’.
ii) These two positions are not just antithetical, there’s also a very wide gap, in ‘discipline-specific’ assumptions, between physicists and philosophers: a gap corresponding more or less to the old natural science/humanities division with very different skills sets in each. The effect has been of course that physicists (but also natural science people from other directions, especially biology) don’t really talk much to ‘transcendental philosophers’ and vice versa.
iii) If one isn’t content to simply shrug one’s shoulders about this mutual incomprehension (leaving out of account the whole debate about motivations for wanting some kind of ‘agreement’ or some way of dealing with these contradictions) it raises the question of how then to proceed. One possibility is to say: o.k., when was the last time that physicists and philosophers still talked to one another, and do a ‘review of the literature’, trying to get a grip on the directions these debates have taken since. That’s the approach I’m taking here. If someone has a better idea that would no doubt be part of the discussion. So here goes:
iv) Can one learn something by going back to that famous Moritz Schlick review of Cassirer’s book on Einstein (including a discussion of Reichenbach and Born), and at the very least try to provide some of the lines of argumentation that have been advanced in the intervening century. (The literature is after all huge, in many languages, so presumably that would be a service which some people could appreciate.) (I can’t find the English translation of that paper, so I'll quote from the German.)
v) The power of the Kantian response to Hume has been, for centuries, that we can neither perceive space/time/causation in any ‘empirical’ sense nor is reliable knowledge conceivable without ‘presupposing’ them. Hence: they’re ‘a priori’, ‘conditions for the possibility of knowledge’, with a status that can’t be compared to say advances in a specific field. (They seem to mark the ‘bounds of sense’, in a famous Strawson title, and can’t be compared to positive knowledge in any ordinary sense.)
vi) The argument between Cassirer and Schlick (this is how Schlick himself sees it too) revolves around the question whether or not Kant’s own position was based on *Newtonian* physics - is hence invalidated by Einstein’s advances - or not. Today’s physicists, as far as I (very much a non-physicist) can tell, are convinced that Schlick very definitely won that argument and that there’s nothing a physicist (or e.g. a biologist) can learn from ‘transcendental philosophy’ today. If one tries to get some order into this huge literature one has to identity a couple of positions that have been influential over the years, and just what the controversies were.
vii) To my knowledge, the last time there *was* common ground was during the 1930’s in the debate between logical positivism and what then would come to be called ‘critical theory’. The best documentation I know is Hans-Joachim Dahms (1994): *Positivismusstreit: die Auseinandersetzungen der Frankfurter Schule mit dem logischen Positivismus, dem amerikanischen Pragmatismus und dem kritischen Rationalismus.* To this day, in the literature on the relationship of the ‘real world’ to our perceptions and ‘ideas’ concerning this, these are the schools one has to contend with: logical positivism, pragmatism (in the US sense), critical rationalism, critical theory. (Anyone knowing the literature will immediately be able to put the names to these positions.) As a preliminary characterisation, for purposes of discussion, I define them as follows:
(a) Logical positivism is the doctrine (for a time almost synonymous with analytic philosophy and ‘empiricism’) that sense certainty is ‘identical’ with both the concepts we use to describe this and that ‘true sentences’ are those that follow the rules of formal logic.
(b) Critical rationalism is the doctrine that logical positivism gets it all wrong: at the *subjective* side (context of ‘discovery’, for Popper) one dreams up, by a process that can’t be analysed, ‘hypotheses’ that are then subjected to a process of verification. (Or falsification, depending on which phase of Popper’s career one focusses on.)
(c) American pragmatism is usually associated with John Dewey, but there’s been a lot of attention paid to the advances in logic made by C.S. Peirce, but also to Rorty and the Pittsburgh Hegelians. It’s probably unfair to associate it with Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes’ ideas.
(d) Critical theory is the school that says: if you want to take the term ‘dialectics’ seriously (i.e. the [millenium-year old] ‘dialectic’ between the ‘without’ and the ‘within’ of things) then start off with a *critique* of Marxism.
viii) If one takes all of these together it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that what Einstein was doing was really to follow through on a conviction widely held by the neo-Kantians before WWI: that the problem of the relationship between the ‘within’ and the ‘without’ of things is unsolved. In that sense I’d not be surprised to find in the Einstein literature somewhere a statement by Einstein himself, to this effect. (‘I’m a Kantian’.)
ix) Schlick’s position in the above paper already anticipates the direction in which the postwar literature would be heading: when we say that scientific progress is based on the ‘critique’ of *past* paradigms (e.g. Einstein against Newton), is there an ambiguity in the use of that word ‘critique’? (That's also the Thomas Kuhn direction.)
x) Schlick’s paper on Cassirer’s Einstein-book appeared, appropriately enough, in the *Kantstudien*, and he heads directly for the central question therein discussed: „ob die Theorie in ihrem Ursprung und ihrer Entwicklung als Beleg und Zeugnis für den kritischen oder als Zeugnis für den sensualistischen Erfahrungsbegriff zu gelten hat" (p. 26). I.e. precisely the question which I assume is being addressed in this discussion here on this list. He presents it as an ‘either/or’: either Einstein’s physics is “Beleg und Zeugnis” (confirmation and proof) of the *critical* (Kantian) theory of experience, or it’s confirmation and proof of the *sensualistic* (i.e. ‘empiricist’) theory of experience. Though he adds right away that perhaps this ‘tertium non datur’ approach could itself be the problem, since perhaps it’s this ‘either/or’ approach that’s leading us astray:
"Wenn also gezeigt wird (und das ist wohl nicht schwer), daß die Relativitätstheorie aus rein sensualistischen Prämissen nicht zu verstehen ist, so wird hierdurch allein weder die Notwendigkeit noch auch die Zulässigkeit der kritizistischen Interpretation der Theorie bewiesen, es sei denn, man faßte den Begriff des logischen Idealismus so weit, daß jene Alternative eben erlaubt wird."
The theory of relativity - Schlick says here - is not intelligible on a *sensualistic*, on a ‘sense experience’ basis: we can’t see electrons, we can’t see space/time - the terms going beyond Newton - and yet that critique of Newtonian physics is pretty much irrefutable. So ‘electrons’, ‘space/time’ can be neither be denied nor are they, in an empirical sense, ‘palpable’. So are they ‘a priories’ in the sense of Kant? Schlick here adumbrates what would later be pursued in the Von Wright ‘understanding/explanation’ literature, in the post-Wittgensteinian ‘language-game’ discussions, and then in the ‘truth versus method’ literature from Gadamer onwards. (Though there’s also a rather similar thread in the Parsons/General Systems Theory/Max Weber literature):
"Jeder Versuch, Einstein mit Kant zu versöhnen, muß in der Relativitätslehre synthetisch-apriorische Prinzipien aufdecken; sonst ist er von vornherein als gescheitert zu betrachten, weil er nicht einmal zu der richtigen Problemstellung vorgedrungen ist."
Schlick here is insisting on what to my mind is really compelling: to pursue the line of argumentation that says, “time, space, causation - without these terms scientific progress is impossible, though at the same time we’re forced to concede that they’re not in the least ‘provable’ through ‘scientific method’ conventionally construed.”
Here too the literature is too large even to summarise. The key term is of course ‘historicisation’, though that’s probably too evocative of Popper’s polemic *The Poverty of Historicism* to be of much use. (Which was aimed, by the way, at the selfsame ‘bootcamp-Leninism’ trying to shut down this discussion.) One line goes from Max Weber to Lukács. But another one goes further back, beyond Kant, to Descartes and beyond. Is sense perception ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’, or is there, in some sense, a ‘dialectic’ between the two? This line of inquiry marks the origins of what would later be called ‘critical’ theory, in a book nowadays almost entirely forgotten: Franz Borkenau’s *Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild* of 1937. It probes exactly what Schlick is discussing: natural science is not possible without presupposing the ‘unity of nature’. But where’s the proof *for that*? It leads straight to Descartes, and the question why it’s so difficult to even think of scientific progress without presupposing the difference between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. So the question becomes, is there a form of ‘macro-’history capable of probing ‘the species as a whole’, i.e. that is so broad in scope that it is capable even of dealing with the *pre-history* of that necessary subjective/objective distinction itself? Does this ‘stance’ we call empiricism *itself* have a history? What other conceivable ‘stances’ would there be?
xi) One potential candidate is language. Habermas’s *Theory of Communicative Competence* does exactly that: it probes the ‘deep structure’ of language from the point of view of the ‘epistemological presuppositions’ that are necessary before we can ‘successfully’ speak (i.e. utter a sentence that is accepted as ‘true’ by everyone else) at all. It turns out: to probe the ‘opposite’ of empiricism we have to try to understand something we’re all capable of doing but take for granted: to ‘narrate’ something. Narrative is doubtlessly more ancient than all science - phylogenetically narrative (‘myth’) precedes logic and science.
(will have to break off here. Where this is heading is the redefinition of the term 'critical' during the 1930s.)
best, fvg
I believe, Frederik, that the real problem in having philosophers and physicists communicate is that philosophers have a way of making false premises, which leads them to false conclusions. But they do so in their own vernacular, frequently very verbose, so it becomes tedious to straighten it all out.
Also, a clever turn of phrase might hold sway in philosophy, but in physics, people will be happy to make that clever phrase irrelevant, as fast as they can. Create an experiment, prove out your clever words. If you cannot, with a correctly designed experiment, then your theories are, at the very best, still in question. And frequently, disproven flat out.
Here's an example of incorrect premises:
"The theory of relativity - Schlick says here - is not intelligible on a *sensualistic*, on a ‘sense experience’ basis: we can’t see electrons, we can’t see space/time - the terms going beyond Newton - and yet that critique of Newtonian physics is pretty much irrefutable. So ‘electrons’, ‘space/time’ can be neither be denied nor are they, in an empirical sense, ‘palpable’."
The premise is mostly false. Electrons, and relativity, are needed to explain effects that we can see. They didn't just pop out of someone's vivid imagination, nor is anyone forced to "just accept." This is not religion. Even if electrons and relativity are not exactly as we explain them today, and can't be seen explicitly with our own eyes. it doesn't mean that they aren't "sensualistic." Of course they are, or rather, their effects are.
For example, atomic clocks are already accurate enough to measure time dilation in fast-moving platforms, so how can anyone claim that relativity is not "sensualistic"? Similarly, you can build up and measure electrostatic charge, you can design batteries to operate in certain exact ways, you can combine elements and predict, and then see, how molecules will form, you can measure the charge of ions, you can see how long unstable particles exist, at different speeds.
All of these perfectly "sensualistic" experiences are tied together, in a precisely quantifiable ways. None of this is just "faith" or trial and error. It turns out, so far, Einstein's theories have been demonstrated to be quite robust, in actual experiments, thank you very much. But everyone's out there trying to disprove them, at least under certain conditions.
At the same time, Newtonian (classical) mechanics is not flat out wrong. You can prove it with any number of simple experiments. You'd better hope it's correct enough, next time you cross a bridge, take an elevator, drive a car, or walk into a building. Classical mechanics was used to make all of these objects work. And they do work. Similarly, the Bohr model of atoms is good to explain many phenomena, but eventually we discovered that reality wasn't quite so simple. We got instruments good enough to see that the electron orbitals are not so round and tidy after all. But we can still measure that electron orbitals are at different energy levels, and some electrons can be dislodged much more easily than others. Add this much energy, out pops an electron. Add more, out goes another. It's not make-believe. The energy required can be measured, charge remaining can be measured.
The more our instruments advance, the better will be physics. Not clever words, not even just clever math, but instruments. If it cannot be proven, it remains in serious doubt.
Philadelphia, PA
Dear van Gelder & readers,
I suspect that you have put out there more philosophy than anyone was wanting to hear. But, be that as it may, the chief point would seem to be that according to Kant, space and time were regarded as "a priori forms of intuition," in the usual English translation of the Kantian phrase.
This was usually taken to imply that, say, Euclidean geometry was known a prior, that is, independent of sense experience. Kant's "a priori forms of intuition," were postulated to govern all possible sensory experience. But according to Einstein, space and time, aspects of spacetime, are physical and capable of change, as the slogan goes, "mass-energy tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells mass-energy how to move." This makes it extremely implausible to view space and time as "a priori forms of intuition" --imposed on all possible experience.
It appears, then, that Einstein's advances in physics refuted a classical theory of the "a priori." The friends of the "a priori," then went on to alternative philosophical accounts of what was supposed to be known completely independent of experience. I suspect the physicists mostly got bored at that point.
Others in philosophy have simply dropped the classical notion of the a priori. If anyone wants to defend it, then they owe us an account of what it is supposed to be. Personally, I doubt that many physicists are much concerned with that sort of question. They are content with physics as an empirical science, for the most part--whatever the higher reaches of theory and mathematics that may become involved. The successful test is still the chief prize; and even the most theoretically inclined theoretical physicists still have to answer to the experimentalists. The experimentalists are much inclined to say something like, "Well,' that is a really beautiful, clever theory. How in the world do you propose to test that?"
H.G. Callaway
HG Callaway et al., not being schooled in the finer points of philosophy, I'm not sure I can say anything useful about this a priori truths concept. I'll give it a shot anyway.
I'm not convinced. I think that what we claim to be a priori truths are merely learned truths, using knowledge we have accumulated so far.
Example: to spear a fish swimming under water, fishermen had to learn about light refraction. That was learned. Later, that was precisely explained by physics. It was no a priori anything.
Space-time is exactly the same thing. It is something that will become totally intuitive, once we have made high speed travel possible. One way to get a hint of how space gets warped is to think of what happens to you as you're traveling at relativistic speeds, i.e., speeds close to c, when time dilates inside that space capsule. You will travel huge distances in a short time, but you can never go back where you came from, until far in the future. Something totally weird happened to space, much like that spear that appeared to bend as it goes into the water.
Eventually, philosophers will claim that space-time is an a priori truth, and we'll be off exploring other unknowns.
Albert,
I've come to realise, over the years, that the emphasis on 'empiricism' may also simply mean: stick to dispassionate debate, simply enjoy the experience of exchanging views with someone somewhere else (even on a different continent - possible now, with media like this), someone who has different experiences from your own. I approach this discussion with such a collegial spirit in mind and know that without it one neither learns anything nor shares anything. O.k. I seem to be defending the 'philosophy' corner:
i) Re: your "Electrons, and relativity, are needed to explain effects that we can see. They didn't just pop out of someone's vivid imagination, nor is anyone force to 'just accept'."
I think you're saying: "you can't just pick and choose with regard to which terms you decide are 'palpable' (accessible to us via sensory experience), and which are *not* part of 'empiricism', if by that is meant reliance on experience." Those atomic clocks, that molecular physics on which battery design is based, the other things you mention: bridges, cars, buildings, *that's* experience. "Not clever words, not even just clever math, but instruments. If it cannot be proven, it remains in serious doubt."
ii) But the bone of contention between the physicists and the philosophers - for at least the last century - revolves around an equivocation in that word 'proof' in the above sentence, associated as it is with both axiomatic-deductive replicability and experimental verifiability. You seem to be suggesting that 'critical philosophy' in the sense of Cassirer or 'critical rationalism' in the sense of Popper are in some way a 'denial' of the atomic clocks, batteries, bridges and elevators - that are only conceivable on the basis of the acceptance of the theoretical concepts that went into their design and then production. What the philosophers insist on (for reasons I'll try to return to at some point) is something that physicists and natural scientists don't *need* to worry about: the *history* of science, not to mention history altogether. What Cassirer and the neo-Kantians - then the 'critical theorists' - are interested in are the reasons why such 'paradigms' have changed historically over time: in this case, from Newton to Einstein. That's a bit of history of science, not the imposition of some extraneous dogma coming from somewhere else. That the conception of causation has changed fundamentally since Descartes - say -, is simply a universally accepted fact of history of science, whether or not physicists find this of interest or not. (And it's not a change that was the result of 'better instruments' - the time-scale the philosophers are interested in is really very long-term, say, since the beginning of modernity, or the last millennium.)
iii) That is, your own formulations seem to me to equivocate between 'empiricism' in the sense of experience and sense certainty, and empiricism in the sense of the acceptance of the laws of logic and the rules according to which symbol systems are organised. That the *history* of Euclidean geometry was associated with a straightforwardly positivist notion of experience (a 'identity'-theory of truth, in today's philosophical terminology) was probably one of the stimuli behind late-medieval statics - it gave us the great cathedrals, so no-one is complaining. But by the time we get to Einstein this positivism is completely rejected. (In this he's retracing Kant's steps, who'd insisted on exactly this already in response to Hume's 'realist' notion of causation a couple of centuries earlier.) Einstein, no different to Hegel and then Cassirer, insisted that logical systems (i.e. symbol-systems and the rules which organise them) stand in a relation to sense-experience that we can *recapitulate* by looking back over our collective shoulder (in the 'history-of-science' mode), but shouldn't be confused with naive notions of empiricism and realism. All we know with certainty is our own paradigm, the one we're living in - there's no 'ontological' correspondence between symbol systems and 'the real world'.
iv) i.e. I'm surprised a bit that that 'clocks/batteries/bridges/cars' argument you make sounds like a defence of the very logical positivism that Einstein explicitly *rejected* a century ago. We're capable of arranging our experiences "within a (temporal/spatial/causal) conceptual framework" Einstein says. "Is that the source of what science denotes as 'real'?" [1]
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol14-trans/352
He's doubtful: just like Hegel half a century earlier, Einstein comes to the conclusion that "concepts cannot be logically derived from sensory experiences" (p. 323), and that it has not "been successfully shown that the Aristotelian principle of categories does not correctly reflect the relationship between concepts". "Logic generally only relates to the concepts and their mutual relations; and in this area the Aristotelian approach does not appear to me persuasively refuted".
- "In general, it seems to be the weakness of positivists that the logical independence of concepts from sensory experience is not clearly brought to the fore, while idealists like to forget that the dignity of concepts ultimately rests solely on the fact that they connect sensory experiences". (ibid.)
This single sentence of Einstein could serve as a summary of Hegel's *Logik*; he's completely in agreement with *Hegel's* critique of Kant, which said exactly the same thing. The whole point of the *Phenomenology of Mind* had been that - at a certain level of analysis - there *are* no 'external relations', only 'internal' ones. (Which in turn are not comprehensible without a non-abstract 'first-person' narrative and chronology, of either the individual or collective kind.) "In my view, Kant influenced developments unfavourably in that he granted a special place to spatio-temporal concepts and their relations compared to other concepts". (326)
Einstein sums up his review with a 'gloss' of Elsbach's position, which can count both as his own, as well as a summary of where the discussion had landed, a century ago:
- "Contrary to other representatives of critical epistemology, he advocates the view that the latter could neither contradict a physical theory, nor anticipate one. In the last two chapters of the book, which endorse Cassirer but in essential parts contain the the authors's independent arguments, criticism is directed against representatives of critical philosophy who had earlier worked on the relation between philosophy and relativity theory. On the basis of philosophical arguments, they arrive partly at a rejection of relativity theory, partly at the result that the latter was merely an implementation of Kantian thought. In both cases the error supposedly arose out of different usages of words in philosophy and in physics. A philosopher calls space 'absolute' in the sense that the spatial concepts do not emerge logically out of observation; rather, they are taken as the foundation of science. When, on the other hand, a physicist calls space 'absolute', he means 'in its properties independent and codeterminate of the phenomena'. When a philosopher speaks of the ideality of space, he does not think of the equivalence of the coordinate systems; nor can the latter be concluded from the former. In what follows, the empiricist theory of space is rejected, following Cassirer; this reviewer must comment, however, that not enough light is shed on the relation between the logical system and experiences."
This is a powerful statement on the 'state' of philosophy a century ago, and everything that has happened since then can be understood as an analysis of - Einstein's words - "the relation between the logical system and experience".
v) I can see no basis for the argument that Einstein was an empiricist in the usual sense of the word, or that he can be turned into an advocate of the 'copy theory of truth'. Quite the contrary. He was as good in physics as he was in philosophy. There's something about those clocks/batteries/bridges/cars that's 'relative' to something else...
best,
fvg
----------------
([1] Einstein: "Review of Alfred C. Elsbach *Kant and Einstein*". (Elsbach's book was *Kant and Einstein. Analysis on the Relation between Modern Epistemology and Relativity Theory*, Utrecht 1924.)
----------------
Robert Shour and Daniela Sorea
Dear Robert and Daniela,
The question of the relation of “Empiricism” and Physics is very relevant not only on the question of the quantum phenomena, as we discussed above, but also with regards to modern cosmology and particularly on the question of the Infinite, as it has gained renewed significance both for the microcosm and the macrocosm that concerns modern physics.
Empiricism (both materialist and idealist (positivism, solipsism etc.) of physics in particular, traditionally dealt with only the “finite” (the terrestrial realm) and the world view of causality (“The view of understanding” as opposed to “dialectical view” for Hegel) was the main tool of enquiry. But for physics, causality as a tool of epistemology is very crude and limited to simple systems and processes of everyday terrestrial life, simple mechanics or at best for Newtonian physics etc., and naturally leads to confusion and mysteries in the enormously complicated systems like biological and the quantum processes.
In my view causality based empiricism and official physics has another major and fatal limitation and that is on the question of the Infinite. The causality based world view is capable of dealing only with what Hegel called the “spurious” or “bad Infinity); it cannot deal with the “Real” or the “True” Infinite. As a result they are compelled to deny the Infinite altogether. The well known Harvard physicist Max Tegmark proposes to “retire” the word “Infinity” from physics! https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/12/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement-edge-org
The causality based world view of the Infinite always was problematic for physics, mathematics, theology and philosophy throughout history and continues till today. For physics and mathematics this problem arose with what is known as Galileo’s paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%27s_paradox
“Galileo concluded that the ideas of less, equal, and greater apply to (what we would now call) finite sets, but not to infinite set". Georg Cantor drove himself to insanity in his quest to understand the Infinite! The Inquisition burnt Giordano Bruno alive on the Stake for insisting that the universe is Infinite!
Physics, mathematics, theology and philosophy came to impasse to deal with the Infinite, because they all were dealing with the Spurious infinite and not the “True Infinite”. “The spurious infinite” according to Hegel , “…seems to superficial reflection something very grand, the greatest possible. … When time and space for example are spoken of as infinite, it is in the first place the infinite progression on which our thoughts fasten … the infinity of which has formed the theme of barren declamation to astronomers with a talent for edification. In an attempt to contemplate such an infinite our thought, we are commonly informed, must sink exhausted. It is true indeed that we must abandon the unending contemplation, not however because the occupation is too sublime, but because it is too tedious … the same thing is constantly recurring. We lay down a limit: then pass it: next we have a limit once more, and so forever.”
For Hegel's dialectical view of the "True Infinite" please see my article : Article The Infinite - As a Hegelian Philosophical Category and Its ...
Modern physics is in crisis with regards to the Infinite, because, our relativists and the worshipers of Albert Einstein know only the axioms, postulates, principles etc., of Einstein, related to SR and GR, but they never think of the mother of all axioms of Einstein - the fact that he started his physics with the debilitating and irrational (without reason) assumption (axiom) that the universe must be finite! Einstein started his work on GR with the declaration : “Only the closed-ness of the universe can get rid of this dilemma” . Please see science historian Helge Kragh’ s book : "Cosmology & Controversy", Princeton Univ. Press, 1996, pp.07
The reason why Albert Einstein chose a finite and closed universe as opposed to the open ones was not only to make his equations meaningful and/or because of his love for simplicity and aesthetics, as reductionist ideologues and worshipers of symmetry would have us believe, but also because of his sober realization that his Machean-philosophy based cosmology collapses in an infinite universe. If Mach’s principle is followed, then an Infinite universe means that the inertia and the mass of atoms etc. also become infinite. To keep the world as we see it now (inertia, mass, etc.); all Mach based cosmologies must have the universe started at a finite past and also must have a finite extension. So this way the contradiction of infinity is not solved!
I have dealt with these problems of physics in my booklet, “The Dialectical Universe” –Some Reflections on Cosmology”
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dialectical-Universe-Some-Reflections-Cosmology/dp/9840414445
I don't know about others on this list, but I have no interest in a shouting match over whether or not Einstein was a capitalist stooge and that the final word on philosophy is Lenin. That's simply indecent, an insult to the intelligence. Is there no way of getting a moderator in?
Philadelphia, PA
Dear van Gelder & readers,
Fortunately or unfortunately, we have no moderators on RG. The best substitute is if the author of the particular question should try to chime in, but this doesn't always work to keep things in reasonable order. The authors are often unwilling to try --or unable to keep up.
In consequence, my best judgement is that it is up to the participants to attend to matters relevant and of interest for the question at hand. Otherwise, one can always go on to another question--or start a new one of your own. This is more or less how things work on RG --in my experience.
As the proverb goes, "Its better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness."
H.G. Callaway
Hi Frederik,
It's certainly true that physicists such as Einstein, by sheer supercharged intuition, and math that held together well, go beyond the immediately verifiable physics. My contention is quite simply, what they postulate has to be based on real phenomena as their foundation, and has to be demonstrated empirically, before it has any credibility. For some reason, today's philosophers seem to imply otherwise, as if what Einstein postulated was out of the blue. Everything he theorized that was not then-verifiable could potentially have been proven false. He says so himself.
We are beyond that point now, where everything about relativity can be rejected, at least as much as classical physics is beyond being thrown into the dustbin completely. Some of Einstein's theories have been shown to be right on point, quantitatively, through actual experiments that he could not perform at the time. (But people have not given up trying to disprove. That's what physics is all about.)
You say,
I'm surprised a bit that that 'clocks/batteries/bridges/cars' argument you make sounds like a defence of the very logical positivism that Einstein explicitly *rejected* a century ago.
These are demonstrations of physical laws being verifiable, as opposed to make-believe. As we shall see, Einstein also says this. What follows are Einstein's own words. I get the impression that precise articulation of ideas is becoming a major issue:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Time,_Space,_and_Gravitation
THEORIES OF PRINCIPLE
But in addition to this most weighty group of theories, there is another group consisting of what I call theories of principle. These employ the analytic, not the synthetic method. Their starting-point and foundation are not hypothetical constituents, but empirically observed general properties of phenomena, principles from which mathematical formula are deduced of such a kind that they apply to every case which presents itself.
So, in this case, Einstein is making the case that theories in physics can start with empirically observed phenomena, which are then expressed mathematically, and what's more, the math can be applied to other experiments. He goes on to explain how existing theories had to be expanded, in order for everything to hang together. Notice the importance on verified theories of the time:
The second principle on which the special relativity theory rests is that of the constancy of the velocity of light in a vacuum. Light in a vacuum has a definite and constant velocity, independent of the velocity of its source. Physicists owe their confidence in this proposition to the Maxwell-Lorentz theory of electro-dynamics. The two principles which I have mentioned have received strong experimental confirmation, but do not seem to be logically compatible.
Then, the importance of the verified older laws. Again, he places a lot of emphasis on empiricism:
Thus the new theory of gravitation diverges widely from that of Newton with respect to its basal principle. But in practical application the two agree so closely that it has been difficult to find cases in which the actual differences could be subjected to observation.
Einstein fully accepts that classical mechanics is very close to accurate, within its limits. Observation is key. Hardly irrelevant. At the same time, beyond those limits, classical physics falls apart. But he is acknowledging that his new theories, at least at that time, were difficult to prove out.
And yet, he lists some relativistic effects that had been demonstrated through observations. Notice the continued importance of empiricism:
1. The distortion of the oval orbits of planets round the sun (confirmed in the case of the planet Mercury).
2. The deviation of light-rays in a gravitational field (confirmed by the English Solar Eclipse expedition).
3. The shifting of spectral lines towards the red end of the spectrum in the case of light coming to us from stars of appreciable mass (not yet confirmed).
Nothing in there hints that flights of fantasy are sufficient for today's physics. No hints that in modern physics, the senses can be ignored, or even anything fundamentally different from what was done previously, in physics. He clearly states what has been empirically confirmed. Otherwise, anything he claimed would be debunked.
The great attraction of the theory is its logical consistency. If any deduction from it should prove untenable, it must be given up.
And by untenable, I think it's clear, he is talking about not being able to verify the theory through observations (empiricism). If you cannot, it is not physics anymore.
No one must think that Newton's great creation can be overthrown in any real sense by this or by any other theory. His clear and wide ideas will for ever retain their significance as the foundation on which our modern conceptions of physics have been built.
Exactly. This is because classical mechanics works, within its limits. It's not just make-believe. And by extension, special and general relativity may itself become the "foundation" for something far beyond.
My answer is very concise and perhaps a bit too simplistic. But sometimes, very simple and schematic answers work. The principle of the conservation of energy is an axiom at the base of all "classical" physics. As a principle or axiom it is not necessary and can not be demonstrated. However, with the equivalence between mass and energy a wider and general reformulation is necessary. All that is "physics" before was "philosophy". Philosophy and physics have the same objectives. Explain how it is done and how the universe works. I really like the definition that philosophy is pure thinking. Therefore, philosophical theories explain how it is done and how the universe works as pure thought. Physical theories explain how it is done and how the universe works according to the laws of: reproducibility, verifiability and falsifiability. Therefore, physics is by definition experimental.
Some steps towards a transcendental deduction of quantum mechanics
Michel Bitbol
http://michel.bitbol.pagesperso-orange.fr/transcendental.html
Abstract
The two major options on which the current debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics relies, namely realism and empiricism, are far from being exhaustive. There is at least one more position available, which is metaphysically as agnostic as empiricism, but which shares with realism a committment to considering the structure of theories as highly significant. The latter position has been named transcendentalism after Kant. In this paper, a generalized version of Kant's method is used. This yields a reasoning that one is entitled to call a transcendental deduction of some major formal features of quantum mechanics.
''a theory can be much less than a description of reality, without its being reducible to a unified summary of efficient predictive recipes. In more positive terms, it says that one may provide a theory with much stronger justifications than mere a posteriori empirical adequacy, without invoking the slightest degree of isomorphism between this theory and the elusive things out there. Such an intermediate attitude, which is metaphysically as agnostic as empiricism, but which shares with realism a committment to considering the structure of theories as highly significant, has been named transcendentalism after Kant. ''
Albert,
A scientific theory that has been judged as such by the scientific community (or part of) in their best judgement in the light of empirical evidences at their disposal is not going to be later demonstrated to be absolutly wrong but it is expected as so many to be replaced entirely or partially in the practice of engineers and scientists. This in itself disqualified the realists which hold the theorie to be a description of reality and supports the empiricist attitude taking the theory as tool of interaction that can be discarded later. But the empiricist attitude is too extreme in the sense that later, the old tool can still be used in many circumstances and when we examine the structure of the new theory and the old theory, they share some common structure. To speak like Poincare, scientific theories contains a lot of arbitrary elements which later as expected get discarded but the later conceptions also have a lot of arbitrary elements as it will always be the case. We can take the classical metaphor of drawing a curve for approximating the data point, a lot of such curve can be drawned. Intelligent choices are made to do that which later are changed given the new circumstances. Some like to look at the models as if they are looking at reality, this is what the engineers like to do because they are busy using the models. But their behavior is totally empiristic while they are realists in a naive way. Theoretical physicists cannot be realists in a naive way because their job is not about us crafting new tools and so they have to look at what the imperfect tools pointed to, focusing a lot of their problems and on their similarities.
I tend to see science like engineering but an engineering whose focus of attention is different. While the engineers focus of attention is building machinery for different human purposes, hard science focus of attention is to proving hooking interfacing machinery with reality out there. Both in in the machinery building business and the engineers can for any practical purpose naively take the hooking machinery as reality while the scientist have to see it as an interface with reality and such interface is necessarily contrainted by reality although far from a unique way.
Regards
Philosophy in the conventional sense of the term came to an end with G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectics; the quantum phenomenon is its obituary and the Final Testament!
If the aim of all previous philosophy was to unveil the absolute truth of the world, Hegel through his dialectics and in spite of his “Absolute Idea” proved (although unwittingly) the futility of searching for such eternal and absolute truth; which was the aim of all previous philosophy. If everything in this world is a process in eternal change and not a ready-made or a finished product given once for all, as dialectics suggests; then no final and absolute truth is ever to be found. Article The Infinite - As a Hegelian Philosophical Category and Its ...
All knowledge is necessarily limited and conditioned by the circumstances and the time of history in which it was acquired. As F. Engels put it, “One leaves alone absolute truth which is unattainable along this path or by any single individual; instead, one pursues attainable, relative truths along the path of the positive sciences, and the summation of these results by means of dialectical thinking.”
But what’s of post-Hegelian philosophy? If natural science, in spite of its phenomenal achievements now finds itself begging at the door of theology, it has the satisfaction of seeing “philosophy” sink lower still. Modern official philosophy maintains (as Engels put it) “a pseudo existence in the state appointed academia, where, position-hunting, cobweb-spinning eclectic flea-crackers occupy the chairs of philosophy". Instead of looking for profound truths in the wide world of nature and human society like their predecessors, these namesakes either work openly as the apologists of monopoly capitalism or look inwards to “self” (existentialism), or the “mind” (psychoanalysis) or to “language” (linguistic philosophy) etc. ad nauseam to hunt for absolute truth.
Stephen Hawking is absolutely right when he says: “In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, ‘The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.’ What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!”, S. Hawking, “A Brief History of Time”, Bantam Books, p. 174-175 (1990)
But it is modern natural science that is hiding its bankruptcy and confusion under the mystery of mathematics and like an ostrich is burying its head in the sand of causality and determinism! The dialectics of Heraclitus, Epicurus, Spinoza, Hegel and Marx means nothing to it. Modern natural science, has come under total subjugation of monopoly capital, and has dishonoured the great tradition set by Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. A natural science, which was once inspired by the revolutionary bourgeoisie and created these giants of science, has now become a lap dog of reactionary and decadent monopoly capitalism. Modern natural science wants to bring back the absolutist and obscurantist science of feudalism to serve the interest of moribund monopoly capital. It is churning up a “complete theory” of exquisite mathematical beauty and it’s absolute validity for all eternity. Like modern official philosophy, present day natural science has reduced its scope to mere application of the absolute truth of the theories of relativity it has attained in the realm of nature. Only those facts that conform to this truth are of interest to science, those that do not, remains in the realms of the Creator or at best are Kantian “thing in itself”. Thus we have not only a “comedown from the great tradition of philosophy” but a comedown from the great tradition of natural science too.
@Albert Manfredi,
Thank you for the time and effort you put into that.
That 'clocks/batteries/bridges/cars' argument. The more I think about it, the more I think we're led astray by the original formulation: whether the theories that once went into the invention/construction of those things "are necessarily empiricist". If I were to try to summarise the 'history/methodology of science' literature since WWII, it's pretty clear that what motivates a large chunk of this debate isn't really about physics.
You say:
- "We are beyond that point now, where everything about relativity can be rejected, at least as much as classical physics is beyond being thrown into the dustbin completely. Some of Einstein's theories have been shown to be right on point, quantitatively, through actual experiments that he could not perform at the time. (But people have not given up trying to disprove. That's what physics is all about.)"
I'd put it in the form of a 'thesis':
i) The impulse behind the huge 'history/philosophy of science' literature of the last half century isn't physics per se, but the question of the applicability of methodological procedures/epistemological presuppositions/testing setups coming from that direction for the social sciences. For that's what happened in psychology, anthropology, historiography, economics, linguistics, sociology, all the rest. The unstated premiss is always: the methodological foundations of the natural sciences can do service for the social sciences just as well. It's for this reason that people like me (philosophy/history of science) start to talk about 'logical positivism'. If that's how engineers think when they're constructing all those goodies we're all dependent on, that's just great, we can all go and have a beer. But if you think that's an adequate basis for understanding the economy, Napoleon, your wife or the Middle East, you're in trouble. It's this 'unified science' notion that's done so much damage. It's not really about Physics - its about the 'methodological colonialism' coming from that direction, that's so badly skewed the social sciences. (Though I'll say right away that postmodernism/Marxism of the popular types, the identity politics, seem to be a kind of warning of where not to go.)
best,
fvg
Dear Frederik,
poleon . Yes positivism, scientism, materialism whatever one call this pathology is armfull not only for the humanities. We are off topic but here is a good reply to Pinker on this theme by Iain McGilghrist.
http://artandmind.org/can-this-couple-work-it-out/
A question is posed "Is physics necessarily empiricist?" and from it follows a linear thread of answers and comments that frequently wind and twist and range over topics not directly related to the original question. The result may be educational, stimulating and lengthy but may never arrive at an answer to the original question. Sometimes this is because the question as framed and/or the author's elaboration of the question's rationale contain undefined terms whose alternative interpretations create differences and perhaps confusion among the proferred responses. This seems to be so in the present case where answers and comments have ranged over a number of topics at various distances from the original question. Some threads to some questions continue on and on until they finally sputter out without final resolution rather like an intellectual Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
To the question at hand: There is nothing given a priori in our development of physics if that means we had inklings of aspects of physics before experience led us to develop physics as a science. We founded physics on empirical observation, experimentation and analysis. We generalized physics to extend to realms beyond our direct experience (e.g., quantum mehanics and string theory) and labeled this "theoretical physics" the validity of whose products, however, required empirical testing. So, yes, physics is empiricist at heart; it always ties back to observation and experimentation.
The preceding discussion seems to reveal something of a divide between philosophy and physics. I did not see any mention in the preceding about atomism. In a history of early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, the idea of atoms is attributed to Leucippus (which he spells as Leukippos), spread by his student Democritus (which he spells as Demokritos). When Leucippus formulated the atom concept was he doing philosophy or physics or both? If physics or if both physics and philosophy, does the history of atomism undermine an argument that physics is necessarily empiricist? Does philosophy sometimes fill in the gaps before empiricist physics catches up?
The mechanistic physics of Descartes is the challenging point according to this question. Cartesians made although rough distinction between sciences based on experience and those established by enumerations but then cinfirmed by experiments. In other words, there are sciences found on perceptions and those which found on rational, or a priori, hypothesis. you could see one of the illustrious examples in Port Royal Logic.
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Hoxie & readers,
As I see the thread, the question has already been answered several times over--substantially as you answer it as well.
The anomaly, or part of it, is that the opening suggestion to the contrary remains the most "popular" contribution on the thread. This likely reflects some sort of bias toward "rationalism," but no one has articulated much on that kind of perspective. Contemporary quasi-rationalisms do exist, some event among physicists, and the related themes have been discussed on other threads.
This thread then wanders on with newcomers? I'm sure it may be helpful for some, at an elementary level.
H.G. Callaway
Dear Robert Shour
Is physics necessarily empiricist?
Although I am a newcomer to posting on this thread, I have followed it for some time. What I feel most people overlook, is that humans make up the rules. So if the prevailing requirement (made by humans) says that physics needs to be empirical, that is what it is now. However through consensus involving a paradigm shift that also involves method, this requirement could be changed.
Warm regards Tina
@Robert Shour: What's so remarkable about your paper on morality ("Thermodynamic advantages of morality") is that there's nothing in it whatsoever about morality - either discussion or references. I wondered if that had anything to do with the formulation you choose for this thread: "Is physics necessarily empiricist?" For that is of course the point about everything that cannot be decided on the basis of experiment. Morality/ethics/law: there's nothing there that's subject to experimental verification of the kind physicists and engineers - all the natural science disciplines - take for granted. As far as epistemology is concerned: your "Thermodynamics..." isn't so much reductionist, in the usual sense of allowing only discussion about facts/objects/processes, as that it's a sort of 'try-out': 'just how far is it possible to go in that direction'. Can one pretend, 'scientifically', that morality/ethics/law doesn't exist at all? You seem to be asking: 'is there a Darwinist/objective explanation for morality?' (I've personally been involved, peripherally, in those Tomasello debates, have studied that literature closely.)
Allow me a comment on your sentence: there's "... something of a divide between philosophy and physics..."
i) I started off quite early on, on this thread, saying that philosophers distinguish between logical positivism, pragmatism, critical rationalism, critical theory. No-one took me up on that, you don't either, even though physicists delving into that Einstein/Cassirer correspondence have no choice but to 'classify' types of argumentation in some way, since that's exactly what's going on there. From the point onward at which one discovers, for oneself (for one's discipline), that the 'identity theory of truth' is dead (i.e. abandonment of the idea of a 'correspondence' between the word 'yellow' and the sense experience that invoked it's choice; the abandonment i.e. of Russell's theory of denotation) one of the ways to proceed from there is to start classifying the theories people have developed over the centuries to describe that 'a'=a relationship. ('a' standing for the word, the other side of the equation standing for the sense perception.) Those are the most influential 'positions' on that 'a'=a relationship of the last century or so: Russell (logical positivism), Dewey/Peirce (pragmatism) critical rationalism (Popper), critical theory (Habermas). That's just the abc of philosophy; its what every competent philosophy department teaches: object constancy is dead, the certitudes of 'ordinary language' are dead. Why is it that the engineers and natural sciences people on this list find it so difficult to accept something where Einstein after all had led the way?
ii) You yourself choose a different tack: you take those Cartesian abstractions time/space/causality for granted, and then ask after something that greatly occupied the Functionalists of a generation ago: what are the mechanisms of social integration within different species (say: between the higher primates and ourselves, as Tomasello is doing), as a way of approaching something which in our own species is obviously going hay-wire.
iii) You don't seem to be interested in Tomasello's publications on language, which is where the 'a priori' kind of discussions of the Cassirer/Einstein type of a century ago have now landed.
iv) Why doesn't this interest you: i.e. whether 'empiricism' - in the sense of a 'stance' that's absolutely necessary if we're going to be able to manipulate objects and processes in the 'external environment' - isn't embedded in the language we speak, as it were the result of a long process of adaptation within language?
v) That word 'yellow'. If one accepts - here a point of agreement between Kant, the 'Idealists', the 'ontologists', the 'dialecticians', those taking their departure from the later Wittgenstein (not to mention Cassirer/Einstein) - that the 'copy theory of truth' can only be taken seriously by dunces. What's your argument against the approach that says: terms like that are universally true, in the sense that no human communication is possible without a consensus on their meaning. In this sense 'yellow' is objectively true. At the same time 'yellow' - all of the 'language-games' we're permanently engaged in containing 'foundational terms' of that sort - is embedded in a language that has itself undergone evolution, from those ancient precursors that Tomasello is interested in to a Physicist describing the result of an experiment. In that sense: the word 'yellow' is part of a pragmatic adaptation of our language use over millennia, to the point that it's been stripped of the Aristotelian connotations that all 'attribute' words had up to the period of Gallileo and Descartes. 'Yellow': it's 'objectively true' in the sense that it's universally intelligible to human beings (only the colour-blind don't know 'what it means'); at the same time, examining its characteristics as a symbol, it's the result of a pragmatic process of language-evolution in its ability to deal with objects/processes, and their potential manipulability. (Other languages have other conventions: 'Gelb,' [German], 'geel' [Dutch], so on.) The word 'yellow' has universal and pragmatic aspects to it, both at once. (Chimps have no problem in perceiving yellow, their problem is they can't communicate that perception - unless they've been taught one of those nifty sign languages -, but most of all they can't make the subjective/objective distinction, they don't read Descartes as much as they should...)
vi) That's just been my short gloss - inevitably inadequate, on a medium such as this - of the epistemology behind the Tomasello/Habermas exchanges: "Universal Pragmatics". It's an interesting question whether that wasn't already there - 'avant la lettre' - in the Einstein/Cassirer correspondence ... That would make a really great paper. (Though you'd have to learn to 'bracket' your Cartesianism, as the phenomenologists say, if you'll allow me that comment.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_pragmatics
best,
fvg
Hello Robert Shour and all: Recent advances in theoretical computer science, topology, and in type theory, offer a different view than what I could see, non-exhaustively, expressed here.
Briefly, reality is not one. We can have abstract, subjective, intersubjective, objective, and myriad of other views, numbered to infinity. According to each view, which may be locked in place by prior physics, maths, or just by bias, as conventionalisms, religion (as Einstein was in many cases, including his Cosmological "Constant"), philosophical grounds, moral issues of the time (Chinese medicine excluded human dissection, or cutting the skin), ethics, errors, or ANY human reason, including Freudian "expessive reasons" and Jung archetypes, physics may be 100 percent based on empiricism, all the way to, yes, 0 percent.
We can see this currently, but the future seems to be moving more towards 0 percent. Today, this is a minority view. But there is a valid physical reason, necessary, which I am discussing in my home page, still as a draft.
Cheers, Ed Gerck
Frederik, you make an important point, and I have to say, I laughed out loud:
If that's how engineers think when they're constructing all those goodies we're all dependent on, that's just great, we can all go and have a beer. But if you think that's an adequate basis for understanding the economy, Napoleon, your wife or the Middle East, you're in trouble.
First point, at the risk of sounding defensive, this has to be how engineers construct things. Otherwise, these things don't work! Or worse, they'd be deadly.
Second point, and this is at the bottom of the debate, it is very true that we cannot (yet!) apply empiricism the same way to economics, Middle East politics, or the emotions of one's spouse, as one must do in physics. But this does not mean that such strict empiricism will never be able to be applied to these other fields. It only means that we are far too ignorant of the mechanisms working under the hood, today, to know how to apply the strict methods. So instead, we allow people to make guesses that sound okay, to make arguments that sound intuitive, logical, and bounded, if someone's guesses sound good enough we quote them frequently1, and then we call it quits. But what these folk say might be dead wrong. No one is obliged to believe a word of it.
Economics, being so steeped in psychology, is therefore not a hard science. It tries to be, it uses the same words many times, but we aren't there yet. This does not mean we cannot ever make economics into a hard science. Eventually, we'll get there. For now, Keynesian ideas in macroeconomics can easily be dead wrong. Some people "believe," other people say hell no, and that's about the best we can do.
Just like, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, machines would frequently fail in catastrophic ways. Wheels would fly apart. Boilers would explode. The science, and consequently the engineering, were not yet up to it. Machines were still being built "intuitively," as philosophical arguments are built. (Not to say that machines never fail now, but we are way beyond "design by intuition." Most failures now are caused either by wear or by undetected material defects. In very new products, yes, sometimes the calculations were wrong too.)
My contention is, those who haven't stressed out having to study relativity and quantum mechanics, have the impression that these newer sciences are more like philosophy (or economics) than like strictly rational physics. And I dispute that idea.
I actually think Robert Shour asked the right question:
Does philosophy sometimes fill in the gaps before empiricist physics catches up?
Yes! Let intuition and well-formulated arguments be your guide, until science can address the problem. We used to think that "the elements" with which everything else is built were air, earth, fire, and water. Until someone said nonsense, let's look a little closer, instead of just "believing."
1 Speaking of quoting people, Ed Gerck, in a separate topic, mentions the futility of quoting someone, in science. This also goes to the heart of the matter. If I want to show a design to be valid, I would have to do the math. Not quote some luminary. I'd write down the math, so that an expert can validate it, and then we're good. In philosophy, we quote philosophers, a lot, and that's the best we can do as "proof."
Albert, that's what philosophy's for: handling those areas in our lives where empiricism doesn't work. Or rather: from Kant onwards, it says: beware of the fallacious use of empiricism, in those areas in our lives where it only seems to be working, when in fact we're permanently 'projecting', without even being aware of it. Knowing we're 'projecting' is at least a help in getting those subjective factors under control, it's a way to start. Mebbe that's what we mean under 'methodology', or 'critique' - they stand for institutionalised ways of seeing to it that subjective caprice, our 'ego', doesn't get in the way of establishing knowledge that's halfway reliable.
best,
fvg
Re:
Empiricism and sense certainty. This is a little reminder that these issues go well beyond questions of scientific method. I'll know in a couple of days whether the New York Times publishes this:
-
'Did the snake speak in paradise?' - Brett Kavanaugh and 'New Originalism' in Constitutional Law
The author Geert Mak, known to American audiences for his In America, Travels with John Steinbeck, refers in a recent interview[1] to a Protestant controversy before the war in Holland that probably saved his life. His father, a 'dominee' (minister), fled one of those interminable controversies that have never stopped shaking Dutch Protestantism by taking a job as missionary in what today is Indonesia. Hence he was spared German occupation and the fate of so many who resisted it. "Did the snake speak in Paradise?" - the question that caused the schism in his own congregation in the thirties - was of the type that has roiled the Protestant North of Europe from the transubstantiation quarrel dividing the Church at 'Dort' in 1618: are biblical texts to be interpreted literally or metaphorically? Who decides? Catholicism's solution had worked for a millennium: the Pope's infallible, what he says goes - the Jesuits never even aimed at consent by scholars, obedience was sufficient. (That's as old as Molina.) With Protestants it's different. William the 'Silent' - modern constitutional lawyers could do worse than immerse themselves in his career - earned his moniker by remaining silent on questions of faith, hence the clause establishing 'freedom of religion' in the 'Plakaat van Verlaatinghen' of 1581, precursor to all secular constitutions from then onward, most especially the one the 'Federalists' would be arguing about two hundred years later. (To this day the citizens of Zaandam, north of Amsterdam, are proud that the American Declaration of Independence was printed on paper their ancestors produced right there in one of the wind-mills.)
For that's what the word 'secular' means: you maintain an attitude of doubt, on all matters of faith, at least with respect to public affairs and governance. 'Laïcité' the French would call it. It would be the basis for 'Cartesianism' in science and then for the Spinoza tradition of 'critical bible studies' - you 'bracket' what it says there, in those canonic texts, introduce instead the notion of 'historical contextualisation'. Later it would be called 'hermeneutics', and it's a venerable tradition from Schleiermacher to Gadamer. (Rabbinic Judaism had been doing exactly that for a thousand years.) Canonic texts can only be interpreted, their original meaning escapes us. If you think different, go read the Torah. Good luck.
Something akin to that 'Did the Snake Speak?' controversy seems now to be gripping US Constitutional Law. What does the Constitution really say? What did the Founders really mean? The deep Protestant roots in the US have something to do with that decision at Dordrecht in 1618: 'we don't need the Roman Curia and the Pope, we can decide for ourselves what it says there. 'Everyman' is capable of reading the scripture, can tell us what it says, how we're to derive binding precepts from those texts for ethics and positive law. Never mind that the history of Constitutional amendments fills libraries, that the arguments for those amendments may have reflected realities and imperatives that the founding fathers may not have known or not found pressing. In Kavanaugh something of those age-old Protestant dilemmas is once again surfacing: I know what it says there, to hell with everyone else. My soul, my intuitions, they're sacrosanct, that's my conscience, that's no-one else's business, that's holy ground. Just me, my God, and what I can see in the mirror.
Well, if you're a Supreme Court Justice, your soul, your intuitions are everyone's business, for if you haven't learnt to distinguish between personal opinion and the interpretation of law then you didn't pay attention at Law School. 'Hermeneutics' isn't just some esoteric topic in philosophy, it defines what Supreme Court Justices do. They interpret the Constitution; everything else is that Dutch dominee with his finger raised to heaven in righteous wrath: 'but it says here: the snake speaks'. If Kavenaugh thinks Roe v Wade can be reversed because 'that's what it says there', if he thinks the Scalia judgement banning gun control laws is justified 'because that's what it says there', the John Yoo judgement legalising water-boarding and 'enhanced interrogation techniques' can be justified because 'that's what it says there', we're all in for a rough ride. 'New Originalism' isn't a 'philosophy', it's evidence of a terrifying parochialism that says there's no such thing as philosophy - or history, or institutionalised safeguards against individual caprice, or entirely new threats on the horizon of a type the Federalists could not have imagined possible. It's the legal equivalent of phlogiston. (That's what 'objectivity' means, in science and in law: adherence to a 'methodology' that saves you from your own ego; helps you make sure it doesn't take over, floods everything else, like the Protestant holy-men of long ago.)
Dutch Constitutional Law from William 'the Silent' in the 16th to Thorbecke in the 19th Century is not so difficult to understand: the stability of the Nation depends on a 'balance of power' between three societal forces: the Monarchy, the citizenry, business. Without the first there's no defence against external threat, without the citizenry (and the Churches) no popular support, without business no money to pay for the military. (Henry Kissinger's lifelong fascination with 'Westphalia' has something to do with this: it's been an unstable construct from the start, even more so when it's supposed to be a relationship between autonomous nation-states.) Lose that 'balance', and democracy dies: in the case of Weimar Germany, it was an alliance of business with Prussian Absolutism that did it in; in the US today it could be an alliance of business with the machinery of public opinion. (Or rather: the new danger that if you have enough money you simply pay some Cambridge Analytics clone to shift it in your own favour. It wasn't the Russians who figured that one out.) In each case that essential safety mechanism is bypassed that was already deemed essential by the Federalists: an informed citizenry, a free press. The founding fathers did not live in a world in which accumulated wealth by itself posed a threat to the other factors in that 'William the Silent' equation: that it could one day destroy governance and an informed citizenry both at once, through the 'engineering' of election-victories and voter support.
The problem with that 'Did the snake speak in paradise?' is that today's popular literalism, the ubiquitous conviction that science and technology 'proves reality', the premium on the autonomy of the individual, provides all of us with the powerful suggestion that questions are always answerable, like in school physics class. That modernity, a secular society, the Dutch, then the US Constitution was based on the principle that public debate must be silent on religion (the only way of keeping that Pandora's box locked-down), that in each of us there's this powerful need to 'project' our own prejudices and peccadillo's onto whatever we're doing, is an insight that seems not to have reached the advocates of 'New Originalism'.
Originalism in law (new or otherwise) is akin to the 'copy' theory of truth in epistemology: it's an appeal to sense certainty. What does 'yellow' mean, what does 'the cat sat on the mat' mean? In the natural sciences that works fine. All the law has however is tradition, not 'sense certainty'. Though come to think of it one could do worse than take another look at those Federalist Papers. In the last of them Hamilton offers "a lesson of moderation to all sincere lovers of the Union" ... admonishing them to stay on their guard "against hazarding anarchy, civil war, a perpetual alienation of the States from each other, and perhaps the military despotism of a successful demagogue". That may be just a Google-quote done by a layman and non-lawyer, but it doesn't sound such a bad place to start ...
Saul Cornell argues[2] that Originalism is a 'constitutional scam'. I think he's missing something as old as Calvinism versus Arminianism: in a situation of 'interpretation overload', so typical for all Protestant theology, an alliance is always in the offing between state security and those capable of clamping down on the proliferation of fundamentalist 'essentialisms'. (First the Calvinists, then the 'Patriotten'. The Anabaptists of the 17th century were no less pesty than today's 'essentialists'.) As soon as the inevitability of war can be made plausible (on whatever logic; you could always start one), so do the claims that national unity is the precondition for military victory. That the word 'traitor' is coming from the Oval Office is not encouraging, nor that these 'traitors' are ostensibly embedded in a 'deep state' hidden in government institutions and the Press. (Joe McCarthy anyone?) Cornell is missing something buried deep in US history: what Jonathan Israel in his magisterial volumes calls the conflict between 'radical' and 'moderate' enlightenment.
-------------------------------------------
[1] Aanspraak, Leiden, Sept. 2018.
[2] Saul Cornell: "New Originalism: A Constitutional Scam" in: Dissent, May 3 2011.
[email protected] http://www.amsterdam-adorno.net/
"The founding fathers did not live in a world in which accumulated wealth by itself posed a threat to the other factors in that 'William the Silent' equation: that it could one day destroy governance and an informed citizenry both at once, through the 'engineering' of election-victories and voter support."
This is the current situation in a nutshell. The question is why? What is their urgency?
My guess is fear of eventual socialism and the required taxation to support it, evidenced by various experiments with "Basic Income".
For, at this moment, we stand at the knee of the power curve of profound technological and thus social change. power by the compounding of applied Science and Technology, progressing at a pace unlike anything prior in human history, a geometric rate of change that is about to ascend to overdrive. Consequently, there will be profound disruption followed by massive structural unemployment.
https://youtu.be/9dH_Me3dJk8
https://youtu.be/xUCixKr-PZo?t=1h18m1s
Therefore, there must be a social safety net, below which, none may fall, or a totalitarian police state. As people won't long stomach just "eating cake".
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Philosophy
- Philosophy Of Science
- Reasoning