Gods'? Gods went out with togas and chariots. I wrote that entry to highlight the distinction between philosophy and physics. They have some areas in common, but they're very different disciplines. — Wayfarer
It's kind of funny that on physics forums no one has offered such response on preons as you did! — Haglund
The question still remains who created matter and the laws it obeys to. — Haglund
Until the Greek Revival / Enlightenment gave scientists the courage to abandon the age-old all-purpose explanation --- that the omniscient-omnipotent-god-concept explains all philosophical mysteries --- most sages & scientists were forced by their ignorance of ultimate causes to postulate a hypothetical First Cause, as a catch-all non-explanation. — Gnomon
Quantum weirdness goes deeper: It implies that the logical foundations of classical science are violated in the quantum realm; and it opens up a glimpse of an unfamiliar and perhaps older aspect of nature that some call the implicate universe.
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/WritingScience/Ferris.htm
Note -- "Implicate" means implicit or inferred intentional meaning — Gnomon
Stop making shit up. I said space would be flat to the degree it ain’t curved and curved to the degree it ain’t flat. — apokrisis
The flatness of space is defined by the constancy of the ratio between a radius and a circumference. Only in flat space is this ratio a constant - pi. In curved space, it ranges from the 2pi of the sphere to the infinite pi of a hyperbolic geometry.
So only in flat space does some particular angle retain that value over all its scales of extension. And should you choose, instead of degrees, you can talk about angles using a more fundamental pi-based unit like radians. — apokrisis
The issue was how to measure the kind of space you might be embedded in. — apokrisis
That was your attempt to justify your earlier claim that space is both curved and flat. — Metaphysician Undercover
So I'll ask you again, the question I asked back then. — Metaphysician Undercover
Did you really ever ask this question? Or are you just papering over your knee jerk misunderstandings? — apokrisis
And as I said, to attribute both curved and uncurved to space, is contradiction, unless you can show how space changes from being curved to being uncurved or vise versa. — Metaphysician Undercover
Anyway, I’ve once more outlined the standard story and added the physical motivation. — apokrisis
You're an idiot. — apokrisis
I'm trying to find literature on Peirce's reaction to some of Hume's ideas. — Manuel
Logically speaking, Hume's method neglects the important role played in scientific inquiry by abduction.
With this in mind, Peirce suggests a better method than Hume's for the naturalist to investigate "miraculous" testimonies: searching for the best explanation for all given facts, including the testimonies themselves.
It is important to note here that Hume's argument relies on a miracle being a violation of the laws of nature as we believe them to be. Thus, as noted earlier, Hume does not live up to his “metaphysical” definition of miracles, and relies on a rather more "epistemic" one.
Check out http://www.commens.org/ — Wayfarer
Although Peirce was a staunch proponent of the view that human life and thought is continuous with the rest of nature, he rejected the idea that the science of inquiry is a natural science. Logic is "an a priori science of formal, universal, necessary norms that license metaphysical conclusions" (p. 23). Peirce believed that logical/mathematical proofs are independent of any results of the natural sciences and rely on what he called "diagrammatic reasoning," operations on symbolic relational constructions of a kind with the geometric diagrams Euclid used in proving his theorems of geometry. Diagrams put one in direct contact with the relations under investigation and facilitate observation and experimentation of a kind with inquiry in the natural sciences.
Yes, I skimmed that one, I suppose I'm more interested in the causation argument, — Manuel
Peirce’s theory of causality and causation is very valuable in many respects, and perhaps even revolutionary inasmuch as it is based upon one, and only one, coherent categoreal system; contrary to the received view today (which is caught between a substance ontology and a fact ontology (see Hulswit & Sowa, 2001), Peirce’s theory is based upon an event ontology in the strictest sense of the word.
Finally, there is the problem of Peirce’s place in the history of philosophy in respect of causation. Roth (1985) explicitly discusses the question “Did Peirce answer Hume on Necessary Connection?,” and Hookway (1992) provides some valuable insights into Peirce’s relationship to Hume, Kant and Russell.
Hulswit and Sowa (2001) situate Peirce’s theory within the context of the historical evolution of the concept of cause from Aristotle to the present discussions. The topic needs far more research, though.
What, they weren't skeptical? — apokrisis
And see it from my point of view. I'm interested in how a left-field proposition like preons might stack up against the Cern-approved party line of leptoquarks as the "missing physics" behind the muon dipole discrepancy. — apokrisis
And I've had quite enough of your misrepresentations. — apokrisis
Actually, there is continuing debate among physicists concerning this concept of relativistic mass. The debate is largely semantic: no-one doubts that the correct expression for the momentum of a particle having a rest mass m moving with velocity v→ is p→=m1−v2/c2√v→. But particle physicists especially, many of whom spend their lives measuring particle rest masses to great precision, are not keen on writing this as p→=mrelv→. They don’t like the idea of a variable mass. For one thing, it might give the impression that as it speeds up a particle balloons in size, or at least its internal structure somehow alters. In fact, a relativistic particle just undergoes Lorentz contraction along the direction of motion, like anything else. It goes from a spherical shape towards a disc like shape having the same transverse radius.
So how can this “mass increase” be understood? As usual, Einstein had it right: he remarked that every form of energy possesses inertia. The kinetic energy itself has inertia. Now “inertia” is a defining property of mass. The other fundamental property of mass is that it attracts gravitationally. Does this kinetic energy do that? To see the answer, consider a sphere filled with gas. It will generate a spherically symmetric gravitational field outside itself, of strength proportional to the total mass. If we now heat up the gas, the gas particles will have this increased (relativistic) mass, corresponding to their increased kinetic energy, and the external gravitational field will have increased proportionally. (No-one doubts this either.)
So the “relativistic mass” indeed has the two basic properties of mass: inertia and gravitational attraction. (As will become clear in the following lectures, this relativistic mass is nothing but the total energy, with the rest mass itself now seen as energy.)
On a more trivial level, some teachers object to introducing relativistic mass because they fear students will assume the kinetic energy of a relativistically moving particle is just 12mv→2 using the relativistic mass — it isn’t, as we shall see shortly.
Footnote: For anyone who might go on sometime to a more mathematically sophisticated treatment, it should be added that the rest mass plays an important role as an invariant on going from one frame of reference to another, but the "relativistic mass" used here is really just the first component (the energy) of the four dimensional energy-momentum vector of a particle, and so is not an invariant. — https://galileoandeinstein.phys.virginia.edu/lectures/mass_increase.html
We can't even begin on this question, until we first figure out what is matter. — Metaphysician Undercover
The problem is that the concept of "mass" which is principally a temporal concept, is fundamentally unintelligible under the principles employed in modern physics, relativity theory. The concept of time dilation makes the incoherency of "mass" in modern physics glaringly obvious. — Metaphysician Undercover
So only in the context of infinite experiments we could say something is truly random? — Haglund
On the other hand, if the rules of logic are understood to embody norms of conduct and linguistic representation, as opposed to embodying empirical contingencies, then the rules of logic do express lawfulness, namely the conduct and ethics of the logician.
It is the simultaneous presence of both types of meaning in science and logic that leads to the normative notion of "law" being misconstrued as an empirical matter of fact. — sime
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