Prev: CPA AFFILIATE NETWORKS AWESOME EARNINGS FROM YOUR HOME
Next: solutions manual
From: Pentcho Valev on 30 Jul 2010 10:15
More clues to the question "Why is science not part of culture?":

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3338512/Think-big-like-Einstein.html
Martin Rees: "Cynics have said that Einstein might as well have gone
fishing from 1920 onwards. Although there's something rather noble
about the way he persevered in his attempts to reach far beyond his
grasp, in some respects THE EINSTEIN CULT SENDS THE WRONG SIGNAL."

http://articles.courant.com/2009-03-26/news/thorson0326.art_1_science-education-theory-of-general-relativity-arthur-eddington
"Albert Einstein strengthened science through his contributions, but
he may have inadvertently crippled science education through his
example. This notion is supported by an editorial, "Redefining Science
Education," published in January by Bruce Alberts, editor in chief of
the journal Science. His main concern is that "many college-educated
adults in the United States," including teachers, "fail to understand
that science is a way of knowing completely different from mysticism,
tradition and faith." Science is based on "evidence that can be
logically and independently verified," rather than on personal
authority. Most of the public accepted Einstein's 1915 theory of
general relativity based on his authority, rather than on the evidence
presented."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/31/relativity-and-relativism/
Washington Times: "A frequently heard statement of cultural relativism
goes like this: "If it feels right for you, it's OK. Who is to say
you're wrong?" One individual's experience is as "valid" as another's.
There is no "preferred" or higher vantage point from which to judge
these things. Not just beauty, but right and wrong are in the eye of
the beholder. The "I" indeed is the "ultimate measure." The special
theory of relativity imposes on the physical world a claim that is
very similar to the one made by relativism. (...) So how come the
speed of light always stays the same? Einstein argued that when the
observer moves relative to an object, distance and time always adjust
themselves just enough to preserve light speed as a constant. Speed is
distance divided by time. So, Einstein argued, length contracts and
time dilates to just the extent needed to keep the speed of light ever
the same. Space and time are the alpha and omega of the physical
world. They are the stage within which everything happens. But if they
must trim and tarry whenever the observer moves, that puts "the
observer" in the driver's seat. Reality becomes observer-dependent.
Again, then, we find that the "I" is the ultimate measure. Pondering
this in Prague in the 1950s, Beckmann could not accept it. The
observer's function is to observe, he said, not to affect what's out
there. Relativity meant that two and two didn't quite add up any more
and elevated science into a priesthood of obscurity. Common sense
could no longer be trusted."

ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SISTA/markovsky/reports/06-46.pdf
"From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As
the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are
"riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes
that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an
elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this
confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6
of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854
(Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of
obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the
writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and
Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the
(thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational
Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)."

http://www.rsc.org/pdf/uchemed/papers/2002/p2_carson.pdf
"For many students, the study of thermodynamics presents problems; it
is seen as consisting almost entirely of equations which are not
understood and which have to be learned by rote in order to do
calculations and to pass examinations."

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/23682
"In 1929, when spectral analysis revealed a 'red shift' in distant
galaxies, astronomer Edwin Hubble speculated that this might be due to
acceleration away from Earth and a possible expanding universe. Before
he could reflect on other possible explanations, a radio interview
stumbled onto the phrase "Big Bang" and a run-away train left the
station. Dr Hubble was uncomfortable with both the concept and the
catchy nick-name, but he had a 'conflict of interest' on this issue.
In a Times magazine interview, on Dec 14, 1936, titled "Science: Shift
on Shift", Dr. Hubble made his opposition clear. One reason that he
was not more forceful was because he was begging the government for
funding of the Mount Palomar telescope."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757145,00.html
Monday, Dec. 14, 1936: "Other causes for the redshift were suggested,
such as cosmic dust or a change in the nature of light over great
stretches of space. Two years ago Dr. Hubble admitted that the
expanding universe might be an illusion, but implied that this was a
cautious and colorless view. Last week it was apparent that he had
shifted his position even further away from a literal interpretation
of the redshift, that he now regards the expanding universe as more
improbable than a non-expanding one."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev(a)yahoo.com
From: Pentcho Valev on 1 Aug 2010 05:40
More clues to the question "Why is science not part of culture?":

http://www.wellingtongrey.net/articles/archive/2007-06-07--open-letter-aqa.html
"I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is
still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in
physics, but that exam doesn't cover anything I recognize as physics.
Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board
changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced
it with... something else, something nebulous and ill defined. I worry
about this change. I worry about my pupils, I worry about the state of
science education in this country, and I worry about the future
physics teachers - if there will be any. (...) UPDATE 2009: After
much frustration I'm leaving teaching England in physics. I've
started a side business in time management and am taking a break from
the profession."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/may/22/highereducation.education
Harry Kroto: "The wrecking of British science....The scientific method
is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes
all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew
"belief", the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture
of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all,
curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that
it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and
it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion
of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit. Curiously, for
the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes
this capacity to disappear by adolescence.....Do I think there is any
hope for UK? I am really not sure."

L. McGlashan, Chemical thermodynamics, Academic Press, London (1979),
pp. 72-73: "For an infinitesimal change in the state of a phase alpha
we write
dU = T dS - p dV + SUM mu_B dn_B (1)
We regard equation (1) as an axiom and call it the fundamental
equation for a change of the state of a phase alpha. It is one half of
the second law of thermodynamics. We do not ask where it comes from.
Indeed we do not admit the existence of any more fundamental relations
from which it might have been derived. Nor shall we here enquire into
the history of its formulation, though that is a subject of great
interest to the historian of science. It is a starting point ; it must
be learnt by heart."

http://www.beilstein-institut.de/bozen2004/proceedings/CornishBowden/CornishBowden.pdf
Athel Cornish-Bowden: "The concept of entropy was introduced to
thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for
it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to
"energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same
to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked,
he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to
everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult
concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished
mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own
major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of
entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to
the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is
absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical
equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to
scientists who need the concept for their work."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/science/26essay.html
"The worrying continued. Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist from Arizona
State, said that most theories were wrong. "We get the notions they
are right because we keep talking about them," he said. Not only are
most theories wrong, he said, but most data are also wrong..."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/87150187.html
"Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe (...) "We have a
complete inventory of the universe," Sean Carroll, a California
Institute of Technology cosmologist, has said, "and it makes no
sense."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many
more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and
time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space
and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of
motion in space and and all other processes that unfold in them merely
reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in
spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this
spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But
a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be
found. There is no passage of time. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes. (...) I was, I
confess, a happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion.
It did bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how
the news of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness
in such rigid doses. (...) Now consider the passage of time. Is there
a comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss
it as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative
one. We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like
to preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have
captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by
the stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616
"Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of
"Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them.
Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian
statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged
to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate
stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to
the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of
these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev(a)yahoo.com
First  |  Prev  | 
Pages: 1 2
Prev: CPA AFFILIATE NETWORKS AWESOME EARNINGS FROM YOUR HOME
Next: solutions manual