On 05/27/2011 07:50 PM, Charles Hope wrote:
I suppose we are all somewhere on the conservative/crank spectrum. I think
physics is a difficult place for novel thought because the current models are
so excellent. Yet mysteries do remain. However I didn't know that Cooper pairs
was one of them.
But I see the difficulty in our communication. I take epistemic issue with the
idea that there can be a mathematical model without true understanding. If we
have a model, it behooves us to twist our minds into understanding that! There
is no understanding but the use of a valid model.
Exactly. And once you understood it, you stick with it because "it just
works". You almost never question it at the philosophical or
epistemological level. During most of the last century, there was a lot
of confusion, introduced by Relativity theory, about the concept of
time, by example.
The case of the aether is also paradigmatic: when the results of some
experiments were not the expected ones, the aether was disregarded, and
relativity theories appeared. Nobody, or almost nobody, took the time to
reflect at the philosophical level on what had happened, and as a
consequence, a lot of confusion ensued. What had happened was that the
mechanical model of the aether was found to be false by experiment. As a
replacement, purely mathematical models were quickly introduced, which
agreed with the experiments. But those models were now devoid of
physical meaning. Just the general idea of "relativity", and of "all is
relative" popped up, and stuck like a grand revelation. That happened
during most of the last century, and is still happening.
That philosophical thinking is still lacking, and it's coming from
outsiders like me, because "real scientists" are so busy trying to
understand the math first, and to apply for grants and publish later,
that they don't have time to really reflect and think.
Philosophy was disregarded(a big mistake) in the name of results and
predictive power. The other consequence of the increasing complexity and
the quest for results was super-specialization. You have to be an expert
to be able to talk with authority and understanding about something. And
when you finally study to be an expert in one field, you cannot talk
about anything else! Moreover: you mostly lost the ability to relate and
correlate knowledge from different fields of knowledge.
That is an unfortunate state of affairs, and we can say that a great
part of the decadence of the western culture we experience today is
related to our urge for control only from the mechanistic perspective.
Regards,
Mauro
