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oh, what the hell, I'll argue with you. > vastly conceptually wrong Only for a useless definition of "wrong". Modeling reality well is an end in itself, and t

by sixo 1y ago

oh, what the hell, I'll argue with you. > vastly conceptually wrong Only for a useless definition of "wrong". Modeling reality well is an end in itself, and to the extent that model predicts well and "factors" reality cleanly into distinct mechanisms, it is conceptually right. This is all "conceptually right" needs to mean. You can not, as I'm sure you'll agree, even hope to explain the "root cause" of motion and time-evolution. at some point you have to base any theory on some postulate or assumption about why things happen at all. But the point of work like Newton's is to get things right above that level, and he was enormously successful at this. > mostly Newton played mathematical parlour tricks. Only for a useless definition of "parlour tricks". The hard part of new ideas (1) is getting to the point where you're posing the right problem and thinking about it the right way. Once you get that right, the predictions (2) hopefully fall out as simple tricks! Then they have to be validated (3) against data—also hard. Newton pulled off all three, the hard parts and the tricks. Not single-handedly, mind you, but almost. To bring such a big picture into view and fill out its details with credibility was a monumental task. I think of it as akin to evolution developing a new organ system—the genome usually has to find its way down on a very long limb to get there and to be stable enough to stay there. For a species this can happen over many generations, but for a human thinker it is has to happen by imagining and testing many subsequent ideas. Newton did an enormous amount of this on his own, over decades. > are often incommensurable Newton being absorbed into relativity is like the one case where they are commensurable. Newton is a clear limiting case! The "ways of thinking" about reality are perhaps not, but nobody (except cranks) is still stuck on Newtonianism at this point. > as some extension or modification Obviously it contains new math and new abstractions, as needed to match empirical reality on new data. Its content doesn't extent logically out of Newton, because how could it? The data wasn't there. But the conceptual gesture of devising a mathematical framework which can handle the data is the same one Newton used. Postscript: philosophy of science folks always like to show up in physics discourse ready to fight various tired, old battles which mostly mattered in the context of the particular ideological dispute of some decade or another. The matter in question is always how to generalize the success of physics by fitting various philsci "models" to the "data" of physics' history. This can be interesting, but they never contribute much to the physics itself, which has always proceeded by its own internally-coherent and immensely-successful logic.

d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
'Only for a useless definition of "wrong"....' The definition of wrong is given in the second part of the sentence you quote. Newton was usefully wrong in a scientific sense; His theory and ontology of time as immutably flowing from moment to moment is fine for beings in a relatively stable gravitational field but fails miserably anywhere else. GR is a theory that gets time less wrong, but entails completely different ontology wherein "forces" disappear. In your parlance, Newton put time below "that level" when he should have lifted it into that which must be reasoned about physically. This means he was wrong conceptually in taking something as an absolute when it was not so. 'Only for a useless definition of "parlour tricks".' If you look at Newton's work it amounts to little more than a first order approximations, rules to model linear portions of a nonlinear reality. I think you have a very romantic picture of Newton's work. Don't get me wrong, Newton was a giant in his time he had mastered linear curve fitting and to some extent I think he knew what he was doing and that it would be supplanted. I actually think if Newton stood here today he would disagree with you, side with me and take up GR straight away. "Newton being absorbed into relativity is like the one case where they are commensurable." Newton's theory was not absorbed, it was supplanted. One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. This is precisely what incommensurability means. "Obviously it contains new math and new abstractions..." It is not about the data, Newton was wrong because non-euclidian geometry wasn't there, "Postscript" I have degrees in electronic engineering and theoretical physics. I graduated number one in my class both times. I am not a philosophy interloper as you point out in your ad-hominid attack. IF you want to make progress in your understanding of physics you best heed the words and thoughts I have provided.
- sixo 1y ago
  uh oh we got a badass over here. The point of my argument was to express a "practical" epistemology in which Newton's successes represent exactly what they accomplished, instead of some failure to live up to an ideal "truth", a view which I consider useless and pedantic. > One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. Yeah you can, tho I never learned the specifics. IIRC, a force is a Lagrange multiplier representing a constraint on the extremization of action. When you extremize a joint system (two particles A and B interacting) you just get some exchange of momentum between them and no force appears. But if you extremize just A w.r.t to a known and fixed trajectory of B, B's influence on A appears as an "external force" term. This is actually all "forces" ever were—constraints relating dp_A/dt and dp_B/dt—but this fact is obscured in Newton because we typically think of systems with their external forces factored out, which of course lets us apply useful approximations for gravity, air resistance, friction, etc. You can certainly do the same operation in GR of isolating a subsystem of a joint system and you will find a "force" term, it has to be there just as a logical consequence of the extremization process. I thought this was well known. Or do you mean "one cannot absorb..." in some other sense? My mistake tagging you as a philsci person, tho. I regret the error!

by sixo 1y ago

d4rkn0d3z 1y ago

'Only for a useless definition of "wrong"....' The definition of wrong is given in the second part of the sentence you quote. Newton was usefully wrong in a scientific sense; His theory and ontology of time as immutably flowing from moment to moment is fine for beings in a relatively stable gravitational field but fails miserably anywhere else. GR is a theory that gets time less wrong, but entails completely different ontology wherein "forces" disappear. In your parlance, Newton put time below "that level" when he should have lifted it into that which must be reasoned about physically. This means he was wrong conceptually in taking something as an absolute when it was not so. 'Only for a useless definition of "parlour tricks".' If you look at Newton's work it amounts to little more than a first order approximations, rules to model linear portions of a nonlinear reality. I think you have a very romantic picture of Newton's work. Don't get me wrong, Newton was a giant in his time he had mastered linear curve fitting and to some extent I think he knew what he was doing and that it would be supplanted. I actually think if Newton stood here today he would disagree with you, side with me and take up GR straight away. "Newton being absorbed into relativity is like the one case where they are commensurable." Newton's theory was not absorbed, it was supplanted. One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. This is precisely what incommensurability means. "Obviously it contains new math and new abstractions..." It is not about the data, Newton was wrong because non-euclidian geometry wasn't there, "Postscript" I have degrees in electronic engineering and theoretical physics. I graduated number one in my class both times. I am not a philosophy interloper as you point out in your ad-hominid attack. IF you want to make progress in your understanding of physics you best heed the words and thoughts I have provided.

sixo 1y ago
uh oh we got a badass over here. The point of my argument was to express a "practical" epistemology in which Newton's successes represent exactly what they accomplished, instead of some failure to live up to an ideal "truth", a view which I consider useless and pedantic. > One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. Yeah you can, tho I never learned the specifics. IIRC, a force is a Lagrange multiplier representing a constraint on the extremization of action. When you extremize a joint system (two particles A and B interacting) you just get some exchange of momentum between them and no force appears. But if you extremize just A w.r.t to a known and fixed trajectory of B, B's influence on A appears as an "external force" term. This is actually all "forces" ever were—constraints relating dp_A/dt and dp_B/dt—but this fact is obscured in Newton because we typically think of systems with their external forces factored out, which of course lets us apply useful approximations for gravity, air resistance, friction, etc. You can certainly do the same operation in GR of isolating a subsystem of a joint system and you will find a "force" term, it has to be there just as a logical consequence of the extremization process. I thought this was well known. Or do you mean "one cannot absorb..." in some other sense? My mistake tagging you as a philsci person, tho. I regret the error!