Posted by
Bruce Sherwood on
Jul 12, 2011; 5:57pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Philosophy-vs-science-tp6573103p6576157.html
I agree totally. Everything is incremental, including biological
evolution, invention, etc.
You may be familiar with Rev. Paley's watchmaker argument in the early
1800s, that if you find a gold watch it is dishonest to pretend it
didn't have a watchmaker, and belongs to no one. Paley argued that
since biological organisms are even more complex than a watch, surely
there must be a Designer. Richard Dawkins acknowledges that Paley's
argument had much force before Darwin showed how evolution could
produce complex organisms, and Dawkins' book "The Blind Watchmaker"
discusses the issues in interesting detail.
My wife Ruth Chabay recently made an intriguing observation: the watch
does NOT have a Designer! The watch is the result of a very long
evolution through a very large number of very small innovations,
starting at least with mechanical clocks in the 1300s or earlier (see
for example the Salisbury Cathedral clock in Wikipedia).
Bruce
On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 9:04 AM, glen e. p. ropella
<
[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> 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,
http://tempusdictum.com>
>
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