----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, July 21, 2003 10:41 PM Subject: Re: Science and knowledge
> >> The purpose of science is not to help us understand reality; it is not > > about the truth. Indeed, one of my favorite statements about science is > > "the most important development in the history of science is when it was > > decided that it wasn't about the truth." > > I would argue that most scientists believe that their models are about reality. Truth is a somewhat trickier >notion. It implies finality while science is always more tentative. But, if this is true, then why did this statement achieve general acceptance among the professional scientists on sci.physics? There are a lot of different scientists with a lot of different viewpoints, who all agreed that science was about making models concerning observation. It had nothing to say about the validity of observation. It was the alternate thinkers who insisted that science must describe reality. > > > > Indeed, you find in a working group of scientists, a wide variety of > > metaphysical positions. To first order, they are all perfectly consistant > > with science. I've noticed that it is very easy for scientists to happily > > argue metaphysics over coffee and then drop their differences when they > > actually work. > My own experience is that scientists do not worry much about metaphysics. They believe or assume that the >world that they study is real. Thinking about this, its probably because we hang with different types of scientists. Biologists and biochemists can live with a 19th century classical view of science. People who have to deal with modern physics professionally cannot. Lets take a straightforward very well established theory of physics: QED. We see finiate charges. However, each one of these particles polarizes the vacume, creating additional observed charge. The only way to obtain the actual values for measured charge that we see is to have the origional electron and protons have just the right infinite value for charge to make everything work out. This is called renormalization. The answer to whether these particles really have infinite charges is "shut up and calculate". >The notion of modelling and predicting of what scientists do but most would find >it difficult to work if they did not believe in the reality of the things they were studying But, the physicists who made progress didn't worry about the reality. Those that did, got little done. I think that the dividing line is probably whether or not people have to deal with the questions of things like virtual particles, instead of actual particles doing all the interactions...with each real particle having a whole string of virtual particles hanging off of it in momentum space (the theory that best matched my experimental data), or QED, or the standard model, or quarks and glue, etc. Its also worth noting that QED is not really very esoteric. It is the basis for chemistry. IIRC, we already have enough computational to do first principals calculations for simple chemistry. So, we should be able to directly tie renormalization to chemistry, with each step calculated and proven. Finally, what happens when there are two models, with very different descriptions of reality, that both describe observations equally well. Are both real? Is neither real? > > > > The reason for this is that there is a general acceptance of the > > proposition that science is not about knowing what is real and true. > > I would argue that most scientists (not philosophers) would disagree with this. I know when this was stated on sci.physics, there was not a single professional that disagreed with that statement. Everyone agreed that science models what we observe. Now, it is also true that few scientists believe that observations have nothing to do with reality. Most idealists, for example, think there is a correlation between observation and reality. And, idealists do have a respected place among physicists: Wheeler was one. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
