5 ms·

Ok, so I'm trying to get my head around what you mean by a fact. You've said: > Michelson and Morley had a particular experimental setup and procedure and re

Ok, so I'm trying to get my head around what you mean by a fact. You've said: > Michelson and Morley had a particular experimental setup and procedure and recorded particular numbers when they ran the experiment. I believe that the facts you're referring to must be on page 685 of this document: http://www.orgonelab.org/EtherDrift/MorleyMiller1905.pdf http://www.orgonelab.org/EtherDrift/MorleyMiller1905.pdf Can sense be made of it without first embracing the theory, for example, which indicates that light is made up of waves?

pdonis 8y ago
> I believe that the facts you're referring to must be on page 685 of this document The azimuths and wavelengths at the top of that page are facts, yes. Also, the description on the preceding pages of how the experiment was conducted contains plenty of facts. The rest of p. 685 after the azimuths and wavelengths is all interpretation using a theoretical model.
- __MatrixMan__ 8y ago
  I would call the first half of the page facts of optics, and the second half of the page facts of aether flow theory. The former are only true if you already accept some theory with sufficient machinery to map the device readout to a number corresponding with the concept 'wavelength'. And the latter are only true if you accept both optics and the aether theory that was popular at the time. I see that you're trying to get something to stand on, some objective and unchanging reality to hold constant while new theories come and go--and I don't deny you its existence, but I don't see how statements about it can be encoded without making reference the theories in use by the experimenter. Suppose that later these results need to be translated into the language of a new theory in order for them to be communicated with future generations (who may not know what a wavelength is). Once translated, would they not be new facts, made of new words and new numbers and true in a new theory? There are alternatives, but they seem awfully problematic to me.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > I would call the first half of the page facts of optics, and the second half of the page facts of aether flow theory. There is no such thing as "facts of a theory". Theories are not facts. I don't understand why you persist in talking about these two different things as if they were the same. > I don't see how statements about it can be encoded without making reference the theories in use by the experimenter. Huh? The portions I already referred to as giving facts do just that. You don't have to have any particular theory to understand what those portions are describing. What's the problem? > Suppose that later these results need to be translated into the language of a new theory in order for them to be communicated with future generations (who may not know what a wavelength is). The word "wavelength" doesn't occur anywhere in the description of how the experimental apparatus was set up, how the observations were made, and what the observations were (as opposed to theoretical model-based descriptions). I think you're making this a lot harder than it needs to be by refusing to distinguish between factual descriptions of an experiment and theoretical interpretations of the results.
    - __MatrixMan__ 8y ago
      Right below the word "results" is a table which correlates asmuths to "wavelengths" which I believe is a measure of how out-of-phase the arms of the interferometer were. Yes, it's simpler to just assume that reality as you see it is full of facts that can be made sense of directly, but that's what prompted Planck's university adviser to claim that there was essentially nothing new to discover in physics. If you allow things to be "just true" without taking into account the things that make them true, you'll never take the kind of creative step that we see in Copernicus, Einstein, or Planck (despite his adviser's recommendations). Scientific advancement happens when somebody faces a set of immutable facts and decides which one needs to become mutable in order for the rest to become more useful. If facts are flattened down to primitives, there is no underlying structure to aid in that decision. And if course there is such a thing as "a fact of". '2 + 2 = 4' is a fact of arithmetic, 'things fall towards massive other things' is a fact of gravity, and 'Harry Potter is a Wizard' is a fact of that particular universe. The dangerous notion that I'm trying to dispel is that there is any other sort--a raw fact that is portable across contexts. You yourself seem like a pretty smart cookie, so I don't worry about you, but generally speaking I find that people who prefer to deal in absolutes are susceptible to manipulation by relativists such as myself. If I can manufacture a fact and insert it into your universe, you're kind of stuck with it because you treat them as out-of-scope for reconsideration. If we allow science and authority to become synonymous--which the author of this article would have us do, we commit a similarly permanent act--one which shuts the door on advancement of the sort I've described to above. I'm not trying to convince you that you are wrong. I'm trying to show you that your faith in the persistent and portable utility of facts is unjustified and represents both a creativity damper and an unnecessary attack surface--attack surface that would be exploited by maintainers of the status quo. Or I would try to convince you of that, if I could get us past the unjustified part.

pdonis 8y ago

> I believe that the facts you're referring to must be on page 685 of this document The azimuths and wavelengths at the top of that page are facts, yes. Also, the description on the preceding pages of how the experiment was conducted contains plenty of facts. The rest of p. 685 after the azimuths and wavelengths is all interpretation using a theoretical model.

__MatrixMan__ 8y ago
I would call the first half of the page facts of optics, and the second half of the page facts of aether flow theory. The former are only true if you already accept some theory with sufficient machinery to map the device readout to a number corresponding with the concept 'wavelength'. And the latter are only true if you accept both optics and the aether theory that was popular at the time. I see that you're trying to get something to stand on, some objective and unchanging reality to hold constant while new theories come and go--and I don't deny you its existence, but I don't see how statements about it can be encoded without making reference the theories in use by the experimenter. Suppose that later these results need to be translated into the language of a new theory in order for them to be communicated with future generations (who may not know what a wavelength is). Once translated, would they not be new facts, made of new words and new numbers and true in a new theory? There are alternatives, but they seem awfully problematic to me.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > I would call the first half of the page facts of optics, and the second half of the page facts of aether flow theory. There is no such thing as "facts of a theory". Theories are not facts. I don't understand why you persist in talking about these two different things as if they were the same. > I don't see how statements about it can be encoded without making reference the theories in use by the experimenter. Huh? The portions I already referred to as giving facts do just that. You don't have to have any particular theory to understand what those portions are describing. What's the problem? > Suppose that later these results need to be translated into the language of a new theory in order for them to be communicated with future generations (who may not know what a wavelength is). The word "wavelength" doesn't occur anywhere in the description of how the experimental apparatus was set up, how the observations were made, and what the observations were (as opposed to theoretical model-based descriptions). I think you're making this a lot harder than it needs to be by refusing to distinguish between factual descriptions of an experiment and theoretical interpretations of the results.
  - __MatrixMan__ 8y ago
    Right below the word "results" is a table which correlates asmuths to "wavelengths" which I believe is a measure of how out-of-phase the arms of the interferometer were. Yes, it's simpler to just assume that reality as you see it is full of facts that can be made sense of directly, but that's what prompted Planck's university adviser to claim that there was essentially nothing new to discover in physics. If you allow things to be "just true" without taking into account the things that make them true, you'll never take the kind of creative step that we see in Copernicus, Einstein, or Planck (despite his adviser's recommendations). Scientific advancement happens when somebody faces a set of immutable facts and decides which one needs to become mutable in order for the rest to become more useful. If facts are flattened down to primitives, there is no underlying structure to aid in that decision. And if course there is such a thing as "a fact of". '2 + 2 = 4' is a fact of arithmetic, 'things fall towards massive other things' is a fact of gravity, and 'Harry Potter is a Wizard' is a fact of that particular universe. The dangerous notion that I'm trying to dispel is that there is any other sort--a raw fact that is portable across contexts. You yourself seem like a pretty smart cookie, so I don't worry about you, but generally speaking I find that people who prefer to deal in absolutes are susceptible to manipulation by relativists such as myself. If I can manufacture a fact and insert it into your universe, you're kind of stuck with it because you treat them as out-of-scope for reconsideration. If we allow science and authority to become synonymous--which the author of this article would have us do, we commit a similarly permanent act--one which shuts the door on advancement of the sort I've described to above. I'm not trying to convince you that you are wrong. I'm trying to show you that your faith in the persistent and portable utility of facts is unjustified and represents both a creativity damper and an unnecessary attack surface--attack surface that would be exploited by maintainers of the status quo. Or I would try to convince you of that, if I could get us past the unjustified part.