Ooooh, Clayton asked for someone to quote a specific claim so that they can actually debate. I can just tell that Clayton is frothing at the mouth with rage!
Clayton: human geometry is Euclidean
This is simply wrong. Gravitational physicists, who are human beings, often employ and think about non-Euclidean geometry.
Even nuclear physicists must employ the non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometry of special relativity and its Minkowski metric.
Sailors need to use non-Euclidean geometry: https://sites.google.com/site/hendricksphysics/where-is-our-destination/non-euclidean-geometry-for-sailors
I have used non-Euclidean geometry with my friends when playing “cylindrical chess”.
Again I refer you to von Mises: “Present-day epistemology looks upon [the assumptions of Euclid] as freely chosen postulates, the starting point of a hypothetical chain of reasoning”.
Do you think Mises errs? Presumably he was referring to human epistemology, not alien epistemology.
Clayton: what we are ultimately describing are not the phenomena “way out there” or the phenomena “way down there”… we are describing the numbers on the screen. That’s it
So do you think that a piece of bread is a real thing, or is it merely a conceptual trick used to summarize visual, taste, olfactory, and tactile sensations and a means of staving off death?
Are the people you are conversing with real, or are they abstractions? Is economics a science of the imaginary?
Here’s a great article on Less Wrong discussing a lot of the issues we are.
Clayton -
None of which are perceptual space, that is, space-as-we-experience it. The physics of gravitation do not present themselves to my senses. Spherical and cylindrical geometries do have Euclidean representations, which is why we can easily visualize them.
It appears you may have misunderstood me when I said “human geometry” - I don’t mean “any geometry humans can construct” but the geometry that humans don’t need to construct. The geometry that’s “built-in” to our brains and our language. That geometry is Euclidean. Exclusively so.
Yes.
Clayton -
The principle of relativity does i.e. all laws and physical constants are invariants. This is a metaphysical principle without which physics becomes meaningless. The mathematics of SR can be deduced from radiation being spherical in all frames (which is a consequence of vacuum permeability and permitivity being fundamental constants).
In context, I would say that this is circular reasoning. What is the speed of sound? Surely, it is either a physical constant as you say or physics is meaningless?
Again, this is circular, since assigning permeability and permittivity a status as “fundamental constants” is one and the same as assuming that there is no aether and that the speed of light is, thus, some kind of universal constant.
Let’s keep in mind that if the luminiferous aether were to be detected by an experiment, all the mathematics of relativity would still work just fine. The difference would be that the speed of light could vary from place to place and could possibly even become arbitrarily large under the right physical conditions.
Clayton -
>Clayton: Spherical and cylindrical geometries do have Euclidean representations
Non-Euclidean manifolds can be envisaged as lying in a Euclidean manifold with a greater number of dimensions. But this involves introducing additional assumptions and is of little practical value in relativity.
>Clayton: which is why we can easily visualize them.
I’m not sure what you can visualize. I have had some success in visualizing four-dimensional objects.
>Clayton: The physics of gravitation do not present themselves to my senses.
It is the same with economic phenomena. Fortunately, one equipped with a brain can contend with “that which is not seen”.
>Clayton: I would say that this is circular reasoning.
Relativity is not “circular reasoning”. It’s empirically backed up.
Again I refer you to von Mises:
“A tautology must ex definitione be the tautology - restatement - of something said already previously. If we qualify Euclidian geometry as a hierarchical system of tautologies, we may say: The theorem of Pythagoras is tautological as it expresses merely something that is already implied in the definition of a right-angled triangle… But the question is: How did we get the first - the basic - proposition of which the second - the derived - proposition is merely a tautology? In the case of the various geometries the answers given today are either (a) by an arbitrary choice or (b) on account of its convenience or suitability.” - Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science p. 17
I would say inane philosophical hand-wringing is “circular”, because it gets you nowhere. I doubt philosophical e-peen measuring contests will assuage your jealousy of the hard sciences.
The point is that cylinders and spheres are part of ordinary perceptual space. The artwork on a baseball, soccer-ball or basketball is easily visualized in the mind. Thus, we may use visual reasoning to supplement verbal reasoning to great advantage in these geometries, something that we cannot do with many non-Euclidean geometries.
That only goes to prove my point - ordinary perceptual space occupies a privileged place in human knowledge. To visualize a 4D cube, for example, you need to use some kind of metaphor, or you have to depict particular aspects of the cube such as the topological arrangement of its edges and vertices but in no case can any human being “visualize” a 4D cube because visualization is, by definition, 3-dimensional and 3 != 4.
I didn’t say “relativity is circular reasoning” and I gave an argument which you did not answer. Try again.
A tautology is not circular reasoning unless the person positing the tautology is attempting to deny that it is, in fact, tautologous. Circular reasoning is fallacious because it presents itself as an argument when it is actually a tautology.
The “hard sciences” are just another subject of philosophy. Basic philosophical errors - such as the petitio principii implicit in the many-universes interpretation, which I explained in an earlier post - mitigate against the possibility of doing hard science. Stated another way, you can’t do advanced philosophy very well (which is what the hard sciences really are) if you are making amateur mistakes in basic philosophy.
Clayton -
Clayton, I’m not a fan of MWI (Many Worlds Interpretation) either. It is arbitrary, extremely weighty metaphysical baggage which has no scientific value. But I have trouble seeing the “petitio principii” fallacy there as you claim to. I simply see it as a ridiculous axiom that can be adopted at almost any time to sweep any kind of scientific ignorance under the rug. For example, before “F=ma” was discovered, we could have said the universe splits into an infinity of copies each time an object is pushed, and the object moves at a different velocity in each of the new universes.
The “ensemble” interpretation of quantum mechanics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_interpretation) is far more humble and satisfying. It is silent regarding the possibility of a deeper “(nonlocal) hidden variables” explanation. Per Einstein: “unnatural theoretical interpretations… become immediately unnecessary if one accepts the interpretation that the description refers to ensembles of systems and not to individual systems.”
There are also many other interpretations of QM besides MWI.
Precisely. The point of a theory is to explain the phenomena. To explain phenomena is to rule out all possibilities but those that comply with some regularity (law). Thus, to invoke all possibilities to explain a phenomenon is not to explain it since no possibilities have been ruled out. Thus, the many-worlds or “all possibilities” explanation is not an explanation at all, it’s just a tautology masquerading as an explanation. Which is the definition of petitio principii.
QED
Clayton -
In any case we can agree that physicists generally suck at philosophy. Something like 58% of physcists adopt MWI. But MWI has no known measurable consequences.
I still choose to rely on the experimentation that reveals the 4D hyperbolic geometry of the universe, again and again, rather than what my feeble eyes perceive.
Yeah, I think MWI is reeeeediculous.
False dichotomy. Go back to my post on the human brain as a telescope/microscope.
Clayton -
Sorry for the delay, Anenome.
Well that’s at least potentially a physical hypothesis, if you mean that there are actually little objects (balls?) existing at higher or lower densities and it is these balls that collide with the clock hands and slow them down. That would be a rational (=visualizable) theory. However, I am not sure that the rest of physics can be done with such little balls.
If “space” actually means “a bunch of objects floating in space,” this - at the very least - is a puzzling use of language.
“Study up on this”? If the language used is incoherent, no amount of additional words will make a difference - unless those are clarification of the definition. I’m going to have to ask you to define “time” before I can assess whether it is possible for time to slow down, because the only way I can see to define it, it cannot do so.
This is the problem: these “laws” are not theories, they are just summaries of the observed patterns. Newton never claimed to have a hypothesis, he just found a simple equation that describes the motion of planets, etc. That is nifty, but it tells us nothing about the physical mechanism of attraction or why planets attract each other rather than, say, repelling each other. Why be satisfied with this?
If you asked a scientist how a volcano worked and he just gave you an equation that predicted eruption times and amounts, extrapolating from past eruption data, would you be satisfied with such a “theory”? What if you wanted to know if pouring buckets of ice into the volcano would be an effective way of stopping it from erupting? Would he just tell you to try it out (run an experiment) and report back? Then create some new, better equations (“theories”)? Isn’t there something more than this?
Math is not physical theory. Math can be used to describe and summarize what we already know in a more useful form, but it doesn’t explain the underlying physical mechanisms that produced the observed phenomena.
As for “energy,” that doesn’t sound like a physical object at all. Definition?
Regarding the points made by others about relativity, if it is merely a measurement effect and says nothing about what is actually going on from a purely physical perspective, it may be useful for engineering, but what use does it have for theorizing? What we have here is a strange delineation of terms, wherein observing, data-gathering, curve-fitting, equation-making, extrapolation, experimenting, and testing are all mixed together with theorizing, which is imagining what could be going on “under the hood” to produce the phenomena we can detect. This just makes a mess of the terminology.
I found a quote by Feynman on this along with a discussion about tangible things and constructed things.
Another interesting page asking what energy really is, pointing out the inconsistencies in common definitions.