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The Myth of the Boiling Point, Hasok Chang
- jfengel 6y agoHasok Chang does a lot of really good work unpicking the fundamentals of what it means to take a measurement in science. Even without quantum mechanics throwing a monkey wrench in things, seemingly objective notions like "mass" and "temperature" turn out to be "theory-laden"[1]. The types of things we choose to measure constrain the types of experiments we think to perform. Big advances in science come when we realize things like "mass is different from weight" and "temperature is different from heat content" -- things that seem so obvious once you've found them that it makes it hard to realize that they are, themselves, preconceptions that we'll one day ditch. This paper is quite old (2007) but I think it's a topic that doesn't get talked about enough outside of Philosophy of Science departments. A lot of the time, philosophy of science talk gets caught up in abstruse and seemingly meaningless battles, but this is a notion that scientists really should know and apply. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness