Posted by
glen ep ropella on
Jul 12, 2011; 3:04pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Philosophy-vs-science-tp6573103p6575422.html
Not surprisingly, I have an opinion about this too! ;-) I tend to think
that all progress, everywhere, in all cases, consists of tiny
transitions from prior state. Even the seemingly important or
paradigmatic shifts like Newton's or the fall of the Berlin Wall are
really the accumulation of many tiny tweaks. It's our thin corpus
collosi that delude us into thinking a single person or event is _the_
cause of some singular effect ... the assumption that causality is a
chain, rather than a mesh.
Bruce Sherwood wrote at 07/11/2011 05:09 PM:
> Without reading the paper, I can offer one way in which academic
> physics is exactly like the description of academic philosophy offered
> in earlier postings, namely that much research and scholarship are
> tweaks on prior work.
>
> Some years ago at a workshop we gave for physics faculty about our
> intro physics curriculum, we explained that we were trying to make our
> course more authentic to the activities of actual living contemporary
> physicists, namely that they take some fundamental principles as
> given, model complex situations on the basis of these principles by
> making approximations, simplifying assumptions, idealizations, etc.,
> and compare behavior of the models with observations. Seldom does any
> physicist discover a new fundamental principle; most physicists apply
> those principles that have proven durable.
>
> A young physicist said, "Oh, thank you! I had been very confused about
> the nature of the discipline! When I read my first physics journal
> article, I was very puzzled to get to the end of the paper without
> seeing any brand new physics. I thought that what physicists did was
> discover new principles, not apply existing ones to new situations."
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
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