Quoting "Pedro C. Marijuan" <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>:
> First, following Gould's arguments on "replaying life's tape", what
> would happen if we could replay the sciences' tape? Would we obtain a
> similar map of the sciences? Would we finally obtain the same ways of
> thinking & visions of the world? I do not think so. Historically, we
> could have had a very different system of the sciences... when the East
> and the West discovered each other before the scientific revolution
> (medieval travels of Marco Polo and Ruiz de Clavijo) and later on during
> the Enlightenment, there was a curious situation of alternative paths
> followed by each World. Joseph Needham's work summarizes the respective
> stronger and weaker points. The point is that scientific trajectories
> have to be re-examined along the different epochs, motivated either by
> external happenstances or just by the inner dynamics. And this is a
> problem of our time concerning the massive social experiment with
> accelerated information flows. We lack scientific guidance on important
> parts of the process ---not just the technological wizard.
Dear Pedro,
I heartily concur! Folks have been concerned with the contingent
nature of science for a while now. One of the most prominent was John
A. Wheeler, who dreamed up a metaphor for the development of science
that I have included in several of my publications:
******************************
The development of science is like a game played by a number of guests
at a dinner party. Waiting for dinner to be served, the guests elect
to play the game 20 Questions the object of which is to guess a
word. In Wheelers version, one individual is sent out of the room,
while those who remain are to decide upon a particular word. It is
explained to the delegated person that upon returning, he/she will
question each of the group in turn and the responses must take the
form of a simple, unadorned yes or no until the questioner guesses
the word. After the designated player leaves the room, one of the
guests suggests that the group not choose a word. Rather, when the
subject returns and poses the first question, the initial respondent
is completely free to answer yes or no on unfettered whimsy.
Similarly, the second person is at liberty to make either reply. The
only condition upon the second person is that his/her response may not
contradict the first reply. The restriction upon the third respondent
is that that individuals reply must not be dissonant with either of
the first two answers, and so forth. The game ends when the subject
asks, Is the word XXXXX? and the only response coherent with all
previous replies is Yes.
After Wheeler, John A. 1980. Beyond the black hole. Pp. 341-375 In: H.
Woolf (Ed.) Some Strangeness in the Proportion. Reading, PA:
Addison-Wesley.
******************************
Now for a recent and more radical turn in this direction, I direct
your attention to the work of historian of science, Ed Dellian
<http://www.neutonus-reformatus.com/frameset.html>. Ed recently
translated Principia from the Latin into German and discovered that
most of the contemporary renditions of Newton's second law don't
correspond to Newton's narrative. In particular, we generally quote
his second law as f=ma. Newton, however, left off with a geometric and
discrete version of the second law of the form (f/mv)=c, a constant.
The continuous, algebraic versions of mechanical laws trace rather to
Liebnitz and Euler as what Dellian calls "Berliner Mechanik". Newton
argued strenuously against this direction! Dellian further contends
that by remaining with Newton's geometric stance one could have
avoided the necessity of creating the separate disciplines of
thermodynamics and quantum physics, so that physics would have
remained a more unified whole.
Ed's assertions caught my attention, because I have always been
suspicious about the first law of thermodynamics (See p23ff in
<http://people.biology.ufl.edu/ulan/pubs/EcolAsc.htm>.) I have since
come to the conclusion that when the continuum assumption is valid,
the classical algebraic laws perform brilliantly. When they do not,
they become useless, if not misleading. In particular, Elsasser warned
us of their inapplicability in the face of heterogeneity
<http://www.vordenker.de/elsasser/we_logic-biol.pdf>.
I have come to the conclusion that much of contemporary physics is
dealing with la-la land and not reality. Take quantum entanglement,
for example. Physicists would have us believe that an electron can be
present in our lab or halfway across the universe, and will be
resolved instantaneously upon measurement. Well, I can swallow
entanglement within a space of say, 1,000 radii of an electron. But at
macroscopic dimensions? Anyone who believes that fairy tale has never
encountered the Buckingham-Pi Theorem (as most physicists haven't)!
The foundations, they are a trembling!
Peace,
Bob
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