WHY SCIENCE IS NOT PART OF CULTURE
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From: Androcles on 31 Jul 2010 11:50 "Unified_Perspective" <agallist(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:55815ccb-2d38-4981-afe3-236cfc86c76d(a)d17g2000yqb.googlegroups.com... On Jul 29, 3:40 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > The problem is getting more and more pressing: > Science is a relatively small part of our culture, it is true, but - this has always been true. In fact I believe that science probably is held in higher regard now than at any prior time in human history, with the possible exceptions of the dawning of the age of enlightenment, circa 1700's and the dawn of the industrial revolution circa 1880. The challenge for those of use who love science is to make it more respectable, through the use of good humor and good manners, and to make it more comprehensible through the use of analogies and plain writing or speech. Einstein is not at fault here. ============================ Yes he is, he was never a scientist or mathematician and neither are you.
From: Hayek on 31 Jul 2010 18:40 Unified_Perspective wrote: > On Jul 29, 3:40 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: >> The problem is getting more and more pressing: >> > > Science is a relatively small part of our culture, it is true, but - > this has always been true. In fact I believe that science probably is > held in higher regard now than at any prior time in human history, > with the possible exceptions of the dawning of the age of > enlightenment, circa 1700's and the dawn of the industrial revolution > circa 1880. > > The challenge for those of use who love science is to make it more > respectable, through the use of good humor and good manners, and to > make it more comprehensible through the use of analogies and plain > writing or speech. > > Einstein is not at fault here. The material he presents and the > mathematics he CREATED are quite difficult topics. Einstein did not create the mathematics. Riemann did. Einstein genius was that he was able to apply the principle of relativity and conservation of energy in some highly creative thought experiments. These thought experiments led to Einstein's understanding of how GR worked, and then he went shopping for some mathematical model that would represent his ideas. This added a supreme level of obfuscation, so that even Einstein, who thought that he worked inertia into the equations, was disappointed to find that his equations did not describe inertia. Talk about a cat losing her kittens. Early in the 1990ies, GR specialists convened in Tubbingen, to discuss this point, is inertia, or Mach's principle included in the Einstein Field equations, and the answers were not quite unanimous. I think two things apply here : "It seems to me that the test of "Do we or do we not understand a particular point in physics" is, "Can we make a mechanical model of it:" " - lord Kelvin The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached. -- Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Quotations/Heisenberg.html Physicist and Scientist have been shying away from this, saying : the maths are the mechanics, we do not need to explain anything more, as they were UNABLE to explain anything more. Digging in my quotes file : P. A. M. Dirac wrote that: The rules of quantum mechanics are quite definite. People know how to calculate results and how to compare the results of their calculations with experiment. Everyone is agreed on the formalism. It works so well that nobody can afford to disagree with it. But still the picture that we are to set up behind this formalism is a subject of controversy. (Dirac: [R#7] p.47-8) And the answer was : "get rid of the picture behind the formalism, only keep the formalism, since we do not have the slightest clue how it looks like, say we do not need, and prevent smart-asses looking for it, they might find it and make us look like fools" And then they did this : "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. --Friedrich Nietzsche Uwe Hayek. > Those who are at > fault are those of lesser talent who try to hide this fact from others > through the use of techno-babble - my term for the arcane highly > specialized terminology that every scientific specialty seems to > employ these days. > > It seems to me that these individuals are fulfilling the great maxim - > "If you can, dazzle them with brilliance. If you can't, then baffle > them with bullshit.." > > Sincerely, > > Mr. Gee -- We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion : the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history. -- Ayn Rand I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. -- Thomas Jefferson. Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. -- Winston Churchill.
From: Pentcho Valev on 1 Aug 2010 05:31 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
From: Marvin the Martian on 4 Aug 2010 21:19 Science is unique to Western Culture. Sure, other cultures have made discoveries, but the scientific method, logic, and mathematics originated with the ancient Greeks and was inherited by the rest of the west. Given that, science is a subculture that is practiced by a small number of highly intelligent people. The bulk of the population still lacks the intelligence, lacks the desire to know the truth, and lacks the ability to prevent themselves from believing from what they want to believe. For example, T. Townsend Brown, who had the intelligence to do science, lacked in his desire to know the truth and had no ability to stop himself from believing what he wanted to believe. He thought that he had discovered a link between gravity and electromagnetism, when all he had really done is make simple ion engines and move things about with large currents in the earth's weak electromagnetic field. He stupidly rejected his own professors explanations of what his experiments demonstrated. The bulk of the population can't even correctly state the scientific method. To them, science is just dogma, a collection of facts that they don't understand and cannot begin to question.
From: Marvin the Martian on 4 Aug 2010 21:48
On Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:40:57 +0200, Hayek wrote: > Unified_Perspective wrote: >> On Jul 29, 3:40 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: >>> The problem is getting more and more pressing: >>> >>> >> Science is a relatively small part of our culture, it is true, but - >> this has always been true. In fact I believe that science probably is >> held in higher regard now than at any prior time in human history, with >> the possible exceptions of the dawning of the age of enlightenment, >> circa 1700's and the dawn of the industrial revolution circa 1880. >> >> The challenge for those of use who love science is to make it more >> respectable, through the use of good humor and good manners, and to >> make it more comprehensible through the use of analogies and plain >> writing or speech. >> >> Einstein is not at fault here. The material he presents and the >> mathematics he CREATED are quite difficult topics. > > Einstein did not create the mathematics. Riemann did. Einstein genius > was that he was able to apply the principle of relativity and > conservation of energy in some highly creative thought experiments. "Thought experiment" is an oxymoron, by the way. I suggests that science can be done a priori, which is bullshit and very much non-science. One of his thought experiments was the EPR paradox. which turned out to be a pile of bullcrap. Einstein's genius was taking Lorentz's work and calling it his own. |