(Changing the Subject by request so years from now when people are doing a search they have an idea what’s being discussed)
> On Dec 7, 2016, at 10:04 AM, John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net > <mailto:s...@bestweb.net>> wrote: > > Clark and Jerry, > > Every branch of science has four kinds of developers: (1) naturalists, > (2) experimenters, (3) theoreticians, and (4) engineers. They often > disagree, but they need each other. Many of them play two or more > roles at different times. Peirce played all four roles in his various > work in science and engineering. I should note I was being somewhat tongue in cheek with my comments. I definitely agree with the above. Although I do think there is a different type of bias and type of thinking for those doing more theoretical work. > > Naturalists gather data as they find it. For millennia, biology was > dominated by naturalists who gathered and classified data about plants > and animals. Most of the experiments were done by farmers who were > and still are biological engineers. Which brings us back to Rutherford’s old joke about all science being physics or stamp collecting. > In biology, Aristotle was mostly a naturalist, but he also proposed > theories and did some experiments (with the help of his students). > Aristotle's writing on embryology (supported by experiments with > chicken eggs) was a paradigm of how to do science. It’s interesting how Aristotle came to be viewed as the opposite of science and pure theory unencumbered by experiment. As you note this is far from the truth despite some weak areas in his thought. I heard a lot in school the false myth that Aristotle made a pronouncement on the number of teeth men and women had (and how they differed) while refusing to count them. I’ve no idea where these ideas developed. > It's not possible to do detailed experiments without some theory. > The theory of phlogiston, for example, was the basis for precise > measurements, which led to the 19th c. theories of thermodynamics, > which led to Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, which led to Planck's > theory of radiation, which led to Einstein's 1905 version of quantum > mechanics. Even those who claim to be doing pure phenomenology (in the physics sense of the term not the Kant/Husserl sense) require vague theories. Indeed things like the original more phenomenological conception of entropy still was a kind of theory. Indeed one can see in thermodynamics a great example of Peirce’s logic of vagueness in many ways. > CG >> Theoretical chemists are physicists. <grin> > > JLRC >> As you probably expect, my views of “theoretical chemists” are >> radically different. <grin> > > Chemistry and physics developed together. The chemists were about > a century ahead of the physicists in developing theories of atoms > and molecules. Even in the early 20th century, Ernst Mach refused > to admit any theories about unobservable atoms. Despite my joke I fully agree with this. To the point that I think distinguishing chemistry from physics is very misleading. Most chemists take quantum mechanics that doesn’t differ in the least from what physics teaches. Indeed in many colleges (including my own) they’re taught in the physics department. It’s not until grad classes that you tend to get QM taught purely from a more chemist perspective. While I’ve not taken a class in the chemistry department, from what my friends who are chemistry professors tell me it’s really just a different in application. (Physics classes emphasize quantum field theory a bit more and various more theoretical and often idealized aspects) With regards to Mach, I think this is an old conflict that has always been part of the hard sciences. Some figures are simply far more skeptical about unobservables or how removed unobservables are. You see the same in Feynman where he introduced a slew of in principle unobservables with his virtual particles. For his instrumentalism this didn’t matter but for those adopting either idealisms of the classic empiricist sort or more realist perspectives these things become more problematic. Indeed I think how to deal with Feynman virtual particles is a huge issue for classic realism. Of course when one rethinks what one means by realism and adopts a more Peircean perspective that distinguishes between realism and actual existents the problem disappears. With the more typical nominalist conceptions of science though they are far more of a problem. And nominalism is so widespread in science that most don’t even notice it as an assumption. (Which is interesting since most physicists allow for the ultimate laws of physics separate from individual things — but as I noted coherence in metaphysics is rare for those scientists who haven’t studied philosophy) > Mach's constant denunciations about theories of atoms made life > extremely unpleasant for Boltzmann in Vienna. In the summer of > 1905, Boltzmann and his family were on vacation in Italy. When > they were preparing to return, Boltzmann hanged himself. I’d never studied Boltzmann’s life. That’s tragic. Was the suicide primarily due to Mach’s persecution? > JLRC >> From roughly 1913 (Rutherford/Moseley papers on the structure >> of atoms) until roughly 1970, your assertion is reasonable in that >> the physics community provided the rational for chemical reasoning. > > For most of the 20th century, hydrogen was the only atom that > physicists could explain by working out the math. For all other > atoms and molecules, physicists depended on *chemical reasoning*. > > Even today, physicists start with chemical data and reasoning for > guidelines and insights about which phenomena are worth pursuing > with detailed computations. Yeah. I had a friend at LANL when I worked there who was working on the attempt to model Helium with supercomputers. I was surprised how difficult it was, although increasing computing power around that time helped tremendously. I’d add that ‘chemical reasoning’ broadly applied (i.e. going beyond chemistry) is really part and parcel of physics. The one thing rarely taught in college but essential to learn if you want to be successful are rules of thumb and tricks you can use. Sometimes these are qualitative and other times practical mathematics. What’s so interesting is that it appears these are regularly taught in chemistry but I don’t know too many physicists who are taught such tricks formally. They seem something you pick up socially from other physicists. That seems a big problem in terms of physics pedagogy. And some universities almost certainly do better than others — I remember our Dean by popular student request teaching a tensor analysis class that was more or less nothing but practical tricks for using tensors and metrics to find easy ways of solving problems. Great class that really helped in other ways. Made even classical mechanical problems much easier to solve. In a certain way many aspects of chemistry (or at least the parts I took) were either just pure physics with more applied emphasis or else were these tricks codified and taught formally for certain problems. And of course there was more of that ‘naturalism’ taxonomy and tables that were used in chemistry. (By analogy an engineer using statics is using codified physics in a fairly route way)
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