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I can't speak about Oppenheimer, but I can speak to how we understand that scientific practice in antiquity worked as they themselves described it. Have you stu

I can't speak about Oppenheimer, but I can speak to how we understand that scientific practice in antiquity worked as they themselves described it. Have you studied the Pythagoreans through Plato? Or read Vitruvius? This is not oh, those capricious gods! stuff, this is "what can we think about?", "how do we know what we know?", and "how does it apply?" stuff. And, when you spend time reading them, it is pretty obvious that there is no need to backfit a just-so-story of a narrative. > Did they have the science to build aqueducts (and bridges, and buildings) that survived, or did they have some experience and some rules of thumb, and some of it was done well enough to survive 2 millenia? What do you think the iterative process of developing those rules of thumb is, if it isn't science? If it isn't literally how science has progressed since...well...antiquity? And if Aristotle being wrong about the observation rankles you, then Epicurus's canonics are right there, too.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
The Pythagoreans? The guys who couldn't separate their geometry from their mysticism? The guys who murdered the man who proved the existence of irrational numbers for (essentially) heresy? Whose "how do we know what we know" was at least sometimes "because mysticism"? They grappled with the question, I'll grant you. But their answer left a fair amount to be desired. > What do you think the iterative process of developing those rules of thumb is, if it isn't science? Well, it's technology. We observe that, if we want to build a bridge for an aqueduct, if it's higher than X feet, we have to build the bridge in layers, or else it will fall down. And we can't have more than Y layers, or it will fall down anyway. That's observation, and engineering, but it isn't science. To me, science is: 1) Systematic observation, 2) The search for regularities in the observations, 3) Proposing an explanation for the observed regularities, and 4) Testing the proposed explanation. Without that fourth step, it isn't science. And I don't think that "we can't build higher than Y layers" should be the end point of "proposing an explanation". > And if Aristotle being wrong about the observation rankles you... What rankles me isn't that Aristotle was wrong. It's that he never made the observation. He stated something that seemed obviously right (to him), but he never checked it in any way, even though he had the means to do so in his own house. (And no, I don't think Epicurus is the answer to what Aristotle did wrong.)

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

The Pythagoreans? The guys who couldn't separate their geometry from their mysticism? The guys who murdered the man who proved the existence of irrational numbers for (essentially) heresy? Whose "how do we know what we know" was at least sometimes "because mysticism"? They grappled with the question, I'll grant you. But their answer left a fair amount to be desired. > What do you think the iterative process of developing those rules of thumb is, if it isn't science? Well, it's technology. We observe that, if we want to build a bridge for an aqueduct, if it's higher than X feet, we have to build the bridge in layers, or else it will fall down. And we can't have more than Y layers, or it will fall down anyway. That's observation, and engineering, but it isn't science. To me, science is: 1) Systematic observation, 2) The search for regularities in the observations, 3) Proposing an explanation for the observed regularities, and 4) Testing the proposed explanation. Without that fourth step, it isn't science. And I don't think that "we can't build higher than Y layers" should be the end point of "proposing an explanation". > And if Aristotle being wrong about the observation rankles you... What rankles me isn't that Aristotle was wrong. It's that he never made the observation. He stated something that seemed obviously right (to him), but he never checked it in any way, even though he had the means to do so in his own house. (And no, I don't think Epicurus is the answer to what Aristotle did wrong.)