Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in /home/paul/public_html/includes/router.php on line 325 Silent Philosophers of Science - Philosophy Forums
Not much to add because I have never given physics much thought, but we were taught that philosophers shouldn't have anything to say about science: let them get on with it sort of approach. Of course that's not to say that philosophy doesn't influence funding decisions [though some philosophers, maybe even the majority IDK, think it shouldn't] but it'll be just wrong to claim that expertise is no kind of aid to the sciences. No? It's almost the anti-thesis of Wittgenstein or something.
But is a theory of everything complete without a philosophical interpretation of it? I don't think so, I think that a philosophy of mind, e.g., is essential. Not that philosophy can ever predict the final results of science, though Kant's success at second guessing the future of the sciences makes the sorcerer in me a little on edge.
Actually leonard the post reminds me a little of climate deniers who don't understand the science but insist that only they do. Not meaning that insultingly
Edited to add: I meant the OP in my last comment!
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Actually leonard the post reminds me a little of climate deniers who don't understand the science but insist that only they do. Not meaning that insultingly
Please note: although no board code and smiley buttons are shown, they are still usable.
Well, I have a degree in Physics, had a course in Meterology, and worked
at the MIT/Lincoln Labs FAA weather group for a while. The Physicists,
even undergrads, mostly figured CO2 warming was plain obvious way before
the tree-huggers said yes or the miners said no.
To me....it simply is a characteristic of the atmosphere, like the
insulating gas in some windows. It was/is/will-be. (warming).
Not that there haven't been worse trends before...just good to
consider earnestly when trillions of dollars and some
lives are at stake. The earnest consideration is what's missing.
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www.lauralee.com/news/relativitychallenged.htm
Question: Jumping off a bandwagon is risky - surely you could have committed career suicide by suggesting something as radical as a variable speed of light?
Magueijo: That's true. Maybe I wouldn't have been so carefree if I hadn't had this Royal Society fellowship: it gives a safety net for 10 years. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want as long as you're productive.
Question: So you're free to be the angry young man of physics?
Magueijo: Maybe it comes across that I'm bitter and twisted, but if you're reading a book, the body language is lost. You're talking to me face to face: you can see I'm really playing with all this. I'm not an angry young man, I'm just being honest. There's no hard feelings. I may say offensive things, but everything is very good natured.
Question: So why should the speed of light vary?
Magueijo: It's more useful to turn that round. The issue is more why should the speed of light be constant? The constancy of the speed of light is the central thing in relativity but we have lots of problems in theoretical physics, and these probably result from assuming that relativity works all the time. Relativity must collapse at some point...
Like all Einsteinians, Magueijo is a practitioner of doublethink, that is, in his thoughts, the lie is "always one leap ahead of the truth":
www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-S...lation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo: "I am by profession a theoretical physicist. By every definition I am a fully credentialed scholar-graduate work and Ph.D. at Cambridge, followed by a very prestigious research fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge (Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam formerly held this fellowship), then a Royal Society research fellow. Now I'm a lecturer (the equivalent of a tenured professor in the United States) at Imperial College. (...) A missile fired from a plane moves faster than one fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the missile's speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its speed with respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus that of the train. You might think that the same should happen to light: Light flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what the Michelson-Morley experiments showed was that this was not the case: Light always moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that if I take a light ray and ask several observers moving with respect to each other to measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree on the same apparent speed!"
www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the less sane."
Pentcho wrote: You stand on the beach and the wavecrests hit your feet with frequency F and speed V. You know that
F=V/L
where L is the wavelength - the distance between the crests. Then you start wading against the waves with speed v. This means that the wavecrests now hit your feet with speed (V+v); the frequency increases accordingly:
F'=(V+v)/L ; F'>F
Not so, say Einsteinians knowing that, for light waves, (V+v) is to be replaced by (c+v): a replacement which, if officially admitted, would mark the end of Einsteiniana (the speed of light varies with the speed of the observer). Then Einsteinians advance the most blatant lie: the wavecrests continue to hit your feet with CONSTANT speed V while the increase in frequency is accompanied with an IDIOTIC decrease in wavelength:
F'=V/L' ; L'=LV/(V+v)
sampit.geol.sc.edu/Doppler.html
"Moving observer: A man is standing on the beach, watching the tide. The waves are washing into the shore and over his feet with a constant frequency and wavelength. However, if he begins walking out into the ocean, the waves will begin hitting him more frequently, leading him to perceive that the wavelength of the waves has decreased. Again, this phenomenon is due to the fact that the source and the observer are not the in the same frame of reference. Although the wavelength appears to have decreased to the man, the wavelength would appear constant to a jellyfish floating along with the tide."
www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/big_bang/index.html
John Norton: "Here's a light wave and an observer. If the observer were to hurry towards the source of the light, the observer would now pass wavecrests more frequently than the resting observer. That would mean that moving observer would find the frequency of the light to have increased (AND CORRESPONDINGLY FOR THE WAVELENGTH - THE DISTANCE BETWEEN CRESTS - TO HAVE DECREASED)."
All along believers invariably sing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity":
"YES WE ALL BELIEVE IN RELATIVITY, RELATIVITY, RELATIVITY"
www.lauralee.com/news/relativitychallenged.htm
Question: Jumping off a bandwagon is risky - surely you could have committed career suicide by suggesting something as radical as a variable speed of light?
Magueijo: That's true. Maybe I wouldn't have been so carefree if I hadn't had this Royal Society fellowship: it gives a safety net for 10 years. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want as long as you're productive.
Question: So you're free to be the angry young man of physics?
Magueijo: Maybe it comes across that I'm bitter and twisted, but if you're reading a book, the body language is lost. You're talking to me face to face: you can see I'm really playing with all this. I'm not an angry young man, I'm just being honest. There's no hard feelings. I may say offensive things, but everything is very good natured.
Question: So why should the speed of light vary?
Magueijo: It's more useful to turn that round. The issue is more why should the speed of light be constant? The constancy of the speed of light is the central thing in relativity but we have lots of problems in theoretical physics, and these probably result from assuming that relativity works all the time. Relativity must collapse at some point...
Like all Einsteinians, Magueijo is a practitioner of doublethink, that is, in his thoughts, the lie is "always one leap ahead of the truth":
www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-S...lation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo: "I am by profession a theoretical physicist. By every definition I am a fully credentialed scholar-graduate work and Ph.D. at Cambridge, followed by a very prestigious research fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge (Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam formerly held this fellowship), then a Royal Society research fellow. Now I'm a lecturer (the equivalent of a tenured professor in the United States) at Imperial College. (...) A missile fired from a plane moves faster than one fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the missile's speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its speed with respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus that of the train. You might think that the same should happen to light: Light flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what the Michelson-Morley experiments showed was that this was not the case: Light always moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that if I take a light ray and ask several observers moving with respect to each other to measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree on the same apparent speed!"
www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the less sane."
Other examples of temporary honesty in Einsteiniana:
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5538
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"
www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts
"A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book, Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as even stranger than we thought." AMONG THE IDEAS FACING REVISION IS EINSTEIN'S BELIEF THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT MUST ALWAYS BE THE SAME - 186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists."
www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/science/e-and...ems-is-relative.html
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes using the word "relative."......"Perhaps relativity is too restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity," Dr. Magueijo said. "WE NEED TO DROP A POSTULATE, PERHAPS THE CONSTANCY OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT."
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
www.mfo.de/programme/schedule/2006/08c/OWR_2006_10.pdf
Jean Eisenstaedt: "At the end of the 18th century, a natural extension of Newton's dynamics to light was developed but immediately forgotten. A body of works completed the Principia with a relativistic optics of moving bodies, the discovery of the Doppler-Fizeau effect some sixty years before Doppler, and many other effects and ideas which represent a fascinating preamble to Einstein relativities. It was simply supposed that 'a body-light', as Newton named it, was subject to the whole dynamics of the Principia in much the same way as were material particles; thus it was subject to the Galilean relativity and its velocity was supposed to be variable. Of course it was subject to the short range 'refringent' force of the corpuscular theory of light --which is part of the Principia-- but also to the long range force of gravitation which induces Newton's theory of gravitation. The fact that the 'mass' of a corpuscle of light was not known did not constitute a problem since it does not appear in the Newtonian (or Einsteinian) equations of motion. It was precisely what John Michell (1724-1793), Robert Blair (1748-1828), Johann G. von Soldner (1776-1833) and François Arago (1786-1853) were to do at the end of the 18th century and the beginning the 19th century in the context of Newton's dynamics. Actually this 'completed' Newtonian theory of light and material corpuscle seems to have been implicitly accepted at the time. In such a Newtonian context, not only Soldner's calculation of the deviation of light in a gravitational field was understood, but also dark bodies (cousins of black holes). A natural (Galilean and thus relativistic) optics of moving bodies was also developed which easily explained aberration and implied as well the essence of what we call today the Doppler effect. Moreover, at the same time the structure of -- but also the questions raised by-- the Michelson experiment was understood. Most of this corpus has long been forgotten. The Michell-Blair-Arago effect, prior to Doppler's effect, is entirely unknown to physicists and historians. As to the influence of gravitation on light, the story was very superficially known but had never been studied in any detail. Moreover, the existence of a theory dealing with light, relativity and gravitation, embedded in Newton's Principia was completely ignored by physicists and by historians as well. But it was a simple and natural way to deal with the question of light, relativity (and gravitation) in a Newtonian context."
Re:Silent Philosophers of Science 5 Months, 4 Weeks ago
Karma: -14
More doublethink in Einsteiniana:
John Norton, a subtle practitioner of doublethink, referring to the truth as "the consensus in physics":
www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831....e-universe-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity. Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."
The lie ("mass can stretch or shrink time") published in Nature:
www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/10/einst...elativity-confirmed/
"General relativity rocked the world of physics when Einstein first published his paper on the subject in 1915. The theory built on the traditional idea of gravity based on Isaac Newton's laws, but added fundamentally new concepts like the notion that mass deforms the shape of space-time. This means that objects and even light that move through space near a large mass will travel on a curved path. Furthermore, it means that mass can stretch or shrink time as well."
www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the less sane."
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