BF2S Forums D&ST - Science

you do realise most philosophers use math and logic in their everyday arguments and proofs, right? i think your narrow academic bigotry makes you less of a human being. as you've said before - specialism is hardly a god-given gift, it's just a choice everyone must make nowadays; you can't be a polymath anymore. so i chose arts and philosophy instead of math or science. what's to say i couldn't have chosen either other path? or you, likewise? i'm not venerating philosophers over scientists at all... you're clearly not reading my posts. all i'm claiming is that plato is a bigger intellectual force (and influence) than hawking. that's hardly a controversial statement - and i explained my post quite clearly, which has little-to-nothing to do with my own personal 'intelligence' or ignorance of physics/maths.

Last edited by Uzique (2011-05-17 11:52:04)

Uzique wrote:

you do realise most philosophers use math and logic in their everyday arguments and proofs, right? i think your narrow academic bigotry makes you less of a human being. as you've said before - specialism is hardly a god-given gift, it's just a choice everyone must make nowadays; you can't be a polymath anymore. so i chose arts and philosophy instead of math or science. what's to say i couldn't have chosen either other path? or you, likewise? i'm not venerating philosophers over scientists at all... you're clearly not reading my posts. all i'm claiming is that plato is a bigger intellectual force (and influence) than hawkings. that's hardly a controversial statement - and i explained my post quite clearly, which has little-to-nothing to do with my own personal 'intelligence' or ignorance of physics/maths.

Sure, and people like you take it as gospel. Aristotle set the world back 1700 years mathematically with his false assumptions about gravity.

As for Plato being a bigger intellectual force, well, duh. He's been quoted for the past 2000 years. More work has been built upon his assumptions than Hawking can ever hope for. So what? Seriously I've never met someone as intellectually conservative as yourself. I don't understand your veneration of the old. Whether your talking about culture, or ideas, or whatever else, if it's not old, established, tradition, you wrinkle your nose at it. It's weird.

So... I hear M-Theory's a pretty cool guy.

the problem (as i criticise it in the example of hawking) is that there is an incongruity between the self-sure cockiness of science and its philosophical counterpart. faith in science has reached the fervour of religion. the problem of truth (as an epistemological quandary and an ontological conception) has been seeded in philosophy since classical antiquity; the search for universals and transcendent rules has always been problematic. philosophy from the 1800's onwards became fixated with the issue of 'truth' (or the lack thereof) and went down the intellectual downward spiral of relativism, subjectivism and... eventually... outright nihilism. at the same time you have to be aware that science was progressing and gaining ever more confidence in its abilities, reinforced by the 'progress' of the industrial revolution and of leaps forward in human knowledge. basically, whilst philosophy was questioning human understanding and exploring the limitations of empiricism, science and industry were utilising those very same aspects to great (material) gain. science was growing confident whilst philosophy was becoming anxious and self-reflexive. so nowadays you have scientists making huge sweeping statements (e.g. the atheist 'church') that just seem ludicrous and arrogant in the eyes of anyone philosophically minded. science has come a long way in the 21st century but claims such as hawking's completely contradict the current philosophical (and metaphysical) understanding of the world, which is full of uncertainty and ambiguity about the very same subjects.

that is, essentially, where my argument stems from: i'm not a disciple to the foot-stool of socrates and plato, i was merely demonstrating how other areas of human knowledge do not agree with the scientist's hubris. that's as clearly as i can explain my argument and its foundations. though, my girlfriend is a real skank... this much is true... hmm.

Last edited by Uzique (2011-05-17 12:24:00)

nah, you're the unfunny one.

yep, as i said... the most frustrating thing is the people that swallow the edicts of these celebrated 'public' academics without engaging in the discourse with any semblance of a critical mind themselves. it's retarding common human knowledge just as much as god-based religion did: mindless and unquestioning swallowing of a view and interpretation (which is always inherently limited, anyway) of the universe.

tl;dr fuck you hawking and the wheelchair you rode in on.

Uzique wrote:

yep, as i said... the most frustrating thing is the people that swallow the edicts of these celebrated 'public' academics without engaging in the discourse with any semblance of a critical mind themselves. it's retarding common human knowledge just as much as god-based religion did: mindless and unquestioning swallowing of a view and interpretation (which is always inherently limited, anyway) of the universe.

tl;dr fuck you hawking and the wheelchair you rode in on.

I think part of the problem is the education required to follow hawking's methods. It obviously requires some pretty advanced maths, so understandably people are content to just take what he (and others) say as gospel rather than spending years learning advanced maths.

I wonder what the pope thinks about black holes

probably thinks the existence of them hardly needs proving because he's seen a lot in his time in the backside of choir boys

Good article from NASA's chief Charles Bolden on American plans post-space shuttle program, why the Constellation program was canned and how America will work with Russia for LEO operations. Also mentions that the ultimate goal is to, of course, get Americans into deep space.

I always divide it into two things. One is access to space, access to Low Earth Orbit, and the other is exploration of space or exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit.

What will be significantly different from the way we've always done it before is that NASA will no longer procure vehicles and operate them for Low Earth Orbit activities. We are going to completely rely on our partners to do that work.

We'll still have oversight in terms of safety and engineering and the like, but we are not going to over-prescribe what they do and how they do it. They know that we want them to be able to carry humans and cargo to the International Space Station and other places, and we're just going to sit back and let them tell us when they need our help in determining how you do that.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/nasas-cha … d=13620479

nah, the problem with modern science is that too many people outside science have no fucking idea how science works.

nb: that was not a dig at uzique or anyone else, i haven't read the last few pages yet. i do think that this is kind of an irrelevancy though, i'm more concerned about things like whether the current system of peer reviewed journals is still the best way forward.

although i will say that high level abstract maths especially analysis ---> topology ---> DG/AT is insanely abstract to the point where it's arguable it's philosophy - you are taking a completely abstract notion (of a metric space, or a topological space, or an open set, or whatever) and using pure logic to develop it into bigger things. very useful, though.

i mean, take cardinality. infinity copies of infinity are still infinity? there are different "types" of infinity that are non-equivalent? how can there be different types of infinity, and what the fuck does it mean for infinities to be equivalent? none of this makes any pragmatic or practical - or common! - sense at all

edit: blue herring, not really. as i say i don't really care about the metaphysical/epistemological side of science, that's for philosophers and psychologists to worry about. if it works, sweet, use it. i do make some "hard" predictions that i think are quantitatively true (ie. we will never find a pre-planck time theory of the universe) but i could be proved wrong about that tomorrow and it would be no harder to convince me that i was wrong than it would be for any other theory anyone else has, and i'd happily accept that i was wrong.

What i was getting that was simply this - the problem with science is that people do not understand the fundamental processes of science - research, peer review, publication, citation. which means they can pull some obscure study which no one in their right minds has cited out of some shitty half-arsed journal which would publish anything to get a buck or a citation - and there are many, and a good scientist can tell the difference within about 30 seconds - and cite it as evidence that some well-established theory with huge amounts of backing is suddenly wrong.

Last edited by Spark (2011-05-17 23:16:57)

Thing is, this only really refers to physics and even then to fairly theoretical physics. in basically every bunch of science there are faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too many simplifications/assumptions made (i'm gonna pretend everything is a harmonic oscillator lol - hey, it works. every. single. time.) to even contemplate thinking about science as "the fundamental truth". i know I'm contradicting the quote in my sig but you have to understand "truth" to a (good) scientist and "truth" to a philosopher are different things. "truth" to a scientist means that your theory makes experimentally/observationally verified predictions that can be trusted to actually make real world decisions beyond any reasonable doubt. there are a whole bucketful of theories in that category. qed, qcd, and its other qft variants. qm more generally. general relativity. hell even classical mechanics and em is true in that the predictions that come from the theory are still incredibly accurate and can occasionally predict some really spooky things (read up on fabry-perot interferometers - seriously weird) that turn out to be exceptionally accurate in the real world.

but none of those theories are at all true in a philosophical sense, none of them are logically or experimentally complete, self-consistent and without contradiction. they are all in a philosophical sense untrue. does anyone care? well, the people who are fixing the holes and fall into the holes care obviously, but no one else. i don't stop using the GP equation to model stuff just because it relies on some really dodgy handwavey assumptions - it gives the experimental results to an excellent degree of accuracy, that's all i care about.

on a deeper level, though, i guess what you're asking is the simple question "Is mathematics an inherently complete description of the universe" - including maths not yet discovered, obviously. Will we ever reach some theory which, while perhaps useless without assumptions, gives a perfect model of the universe? Is the universe "based" on that model, or does the universe just happen to follow it by chance? For this argument is the fact that so many otherwise utterly unexplainable phenomena and results are only explained by pure mathematics. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one. Against is the fact that there are so many things in mathematics which we know, (within the current mathematical framework) to be utterly incontravertible but are just so patently physically nonsense. Banach Tarski is one.

I don't know the answer. I doubt anyone ever will. And for that reason, I don't really care tbh.