shh wrote:Why?

Have a sense of humour. Blithely demanding of someone to "connect the dots" is intellectual mediocrity and snarkiness at its internet forum finest. If that's what you prefer... "Bend a spoon" is just a snarky way of saying, "Shut up and calculate".

Why not quote something from Kant showing that his treatment of space and time as preconditions (of thinking, man!) has anything to do with the aggregation of space and time metrics into a single manifold for the purposes of doing relativistic dynamics?

All the "conceptual physics" acrobatics you can wave around above everybody's noses like a stick of incense is not worth one short, sweet sheet of calculations, which is the spoon-bending way of deciding whether or not you've connected any dots.

Or are you just connecting some 'dots' by following a hyperlink from a wikipedia article on Kant to a wikipedia article on spacetime? Is that what is informing you that Einstein had to understand Kant before he could work out relativity? Quote us something from Einstein, too, where he pays his debt to Kant. I'd be interested.

Incidentally, that wikipedia article on spacetime mentions D'Alembert and Lagrange. Maybe they pay their debt to Kant, as well, somewhere in print, since they are doing the math more or less as contemporaries of Kant, who wasn't doing any math. What philosophers typically do with physics is try to explain physics to other philosophers, and the trickle-down result is absurd little threads like this one, where once in awhile, somebody like Thommo makes a valiant effort to impart a little learning. What does he get for his trouble? An imperious, "Connect the dots."

If you're going arrogantly to tell somebody like Thommo, who knows some physics, to "connect the dots", expect to be asked to do the same. The dots apparently go right back to the latter half of the 18th Century. Or maybe you think off-the-cuff scholarship (aka yanking each other's chain in an online forum) is enough to get us an understanding of how science works. It works by shutting up and calculating, that's how it works.

Cito di Pense wrote:Or are you just connecting some 'dots' by following a hyperlink from a wikipedia article on Kant to a wikipedia article on spacetime? Is that what is informing you that Einstein had to understand Kant before he could work out relativity? Quote us something from Einstein, too, where he pays his debt to Kant. I'd be interested.

I'd be interested too, but I didn't want to flog the horse.

There is a nice page on the history of relativity, and a nice page on Kant, but sadly no mention in either one of the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... relativity

(that latter article particularly I found an enjoyable read)

Thommo wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:Or are you just connecting some 'dots' by following a hyperlink from a wikipedia article on Kant to a wikipedia article on spacetime? Is that what is informing you that Einstein had to understand Kant before he could work out relativity? Quote us something from Einstein, too, where he pays his debt to Kant. I'd be interested.

I'd be interested too, but I didn't want to flog the horse.

What I'd recommend to the hermeneuticists in this thread is to bend a spoon so as to follow the pattern of dots, so they can remember from one thread to another what the pattern of connected dots added up to. But no. They like to start from scratch every time, and revisit the notion that space and time are preconditions for "thought". It sounds so good to say it.

Apparently the pattern of spoonless dots is the breadcrumb trail leading to the debt owed philosophy by science, a grim fairy tale.

Peter Galison wrote a book with a title something like "Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré's Sky" about the state of the art and attendant problems in synchronising clocks as telegraphy developed in the late 19th Century. It has lots of juicy stuff for historians and philosophers of science about the ways culture impinges on the direction taken by scientists by looking at one particular area of investigation.

The book imagines Einstein pondering the states of clocks in railway stations around Switzerland while he was working in Berne.

UndercoverElephant wrote:All human beings construct, both consciously and unconsciously, complex systems of beliefs about reality. This construction process is primarily linguistic: we think using words, we have debates with other people using words and the main planks of our belief systems consist of sets of natural language propositions we think of as being true (or likely to be true.)

I think we have a problem right at the start. I disagree that our construction process is primarily linguistic. We don't necessarily think using words - maybe not even primarily. In fact, almost certainly not primarily. Our primary experiences are not linguistic. Our descriptions of them may be. But if someone punches me in the nose, it hurts. I don't rely on words to know that I'm in pain. That's an easy example, but I think the vast majority of our constructions of beliefs about reality are non-linguistic.

I'm not sure what that means for the OP question; I'm going to sleep now, and I'll think more about this tomorrow.

I think we can use science working to be certain that there ARE patterns that make science work.

Cito di Pense wrote:

shh wrote:Connect the dots.

Bend a spoon.

I have an engineering solution to do that.

Brain -> EEG sensors or maybe fMRI and suitable electrical interface -> Powered press with spoon in jaws.

actually you could just pick up the spoon and bend it as that is the same but cheaper.

SpeedOfSound wrote:I think we can use science working to be certain that there ARE patterns that make science work.

Science pretty much works by definition; if something doesn't work it's no longer considered to be science.

This does rather serve to shift the boundaries between science, metaphysics and things that are just plain wrong over time though.

Cito di Pense wrote:

shh wrote:Why?

Have a sense of humour. Blithely demanding of someone to "connect the dots" is intellectual mediocrity and snarkiness at its internet forum finest. If that's what you prefer... "Bend a spoon" is just a snarky way of saying, "Shut up and calculate".

Yeah and asking why bend a spoon is just a metaphoric way of asking calculate what? You want me to calculate history? I think you're over estimating what calculation is capable of.

Why not quote something from Kant showing that his treatment of space and time as preconditions (of thinking, man!) has anything to do with the aggregation of space and time metrics into a single manifold for the purposes of doing relativistic dynamics?

"For time and space, taken together, are pure forms of sensible intuition, and thereby make synthetic propositions possible a priori. But precisely thereby (ie., by being merely conditions of sensibility), these a priori sources of cognition determine their own bounds; viz., they determine that they apply to objects merely insofar as thedse are regarded as appearances, but do not exhibit things in themselves."

All the "conceptual physics" acrobatics you can wave around above everybody's noses like a stick of incense is not worth one short, sweet sheet of calculations, which is the spoon-bending way of deciding whether or not you've connected any dots.

You've lost me, Einstein didn't "shut up and calculate", Einstein imagined himself sitting on a beam of light. That's not calculating, and iirc, Einstein didn't even solve his equations. And seriously, wtf should I be calculating here? Frankly this thread has nothing to do with calculation, there's no possible way to calculate anything here, so really you're just saying "shut up".
I'll say "no".

Or are you just connecting some 'dots' by following a hyperlink from a wikipedia article on Kant to a wikipedia article on spacetime? Is that what is informing you that Einstein had to understand Kant before he could work out relativity? Quote us something from Einstein, too, where he pays his debt to Kant. I'd be interested.

No I'm saying "that space and time aren't absolute is known because of Kant". Whether Einstein could or couldn't have worked it out had Kant not written the Critique is irrelevant, he did. Kant proved that space and time weren't absolute, Einstein knew it, everyone knows it, it's not controversial. Einstein was aware of Kant, and seems to have had a good understanding of the arguments. Connect the dots.
And since I'm well aware neither you nor Thommo is ever going to actually read the Critique, I'll not bother going any further than wiki. You could just go back and read the essay Jef quoted, by Einstein, rejecting "shut up and calculate" and agreeing with Kant.

Incidentally, that wikipedia article on spacetime mentions D'Alembert and Lagrange. Maybe they pay their debt to Kant, as well, somewhere in print, since they are doing the math more or less as contemporaries of Kant, who wasn't doing any math. What philosophers typically do with physics is try to explain physics to other philosophers, and the trickle-down result is absurd little threads like this one, where once in awhile, somebody like Thommo makes a valiant effort to impart a little learning. What does he get for his trouble? An imperious, "Connect the dots."

Very little learning. I said Kant's thinking was responsible for the difference between space and time viewed as absolute, and space and time viewed as relative Thommo pointed out that there had previously been Galilean relativity, but so fucking what? There had been people who objected to Newtonian concepts of space and time too, the fact is, Kant ended that argument.

If you're going arrogantly to tell somebody like Thommo, who knows some physics, to "connect the dots", expect to be asked to do the same. The dots apparently go right back to the latter half of the 18th Century. Or maybe you think off-the-cuff scholarship (aka yanking each other's chain in an online forum) is enough to get us an understanding of how science works. It works by shutting up and calculating, that's how it works.

Lol, how arrogant of me to argue with someone who allegedly knows some physics eh? But by that standard, it's pretty arrogant of you to argue with Einstein, when he says "shut up and calculate" is a crap idea. Darwin didn't calculate either. And iirc, nor did Poincare. Newton might as well have gotten his idea from being hit with an apple; "After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea [sic], under the shade of some apple trees," Stukeley wrote. "[H]e told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…"
To quote Stephen Hawking "I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was able to reason".

shh wrote:You've lost me, Einstein didn't "shut up and calculate", Einstein imagined himself sitting on a beam of light. That's not calculating, and iirc, Einstein didn't even solve his equations. And seriously, wtf should I be calculating here? Frankly this thread has nothing to do with calculation, there's no possible way to calculate anything here, so really you're just saying "shut up".

Of course I've lost you, because you're evidently committed to the holiness of acts of imagination to the exclusion of everything else. I've seen your ideas on Zen koans. If Einstein had not actually managed eventually to write down some physics (that is, some equations, which is what I mean by calculating) he would just be another unremembered schmuck philosopher in the science community.

Einstein is noted for lots of other work as well, including seminal contributions to photoelectrics and the analysis of brownian motion, all of which involved writing down equations, which are objects people can check to see if they work.

Einstein could afford to engage in a little woo in his spare time precisely because he managed to write down some physics first. Anybody can wibble a little woo. Among physicists, Einstein's wibbling is not unanimously respected, but everybody respects the work for which Einstein won his Nobels. The filosofeazers OTOH, man, they love that imagination shit. In philosophy if even so few as two people love an idea, well, you have a discourse. Loving wibbling is an acquired taste. Wake me when it's spoon-bending time.

For time and space, taken together, are pure forms of sensible intuition, and thereby make synthetic propositions possible a priori. But precisely thereby (ie., by being merely conditions of sensibility), these a priori sources of cognition determine their own bounds; viz., they determine that they apply to objects merely insofar as thedse are regarded as appearances, but do not exhibit things in themselves.

This doesn't say anything, shh, but I bet it appeals to people who really-o truly-o want to believe that their corporeal existence is not the be-all. It's full of wonderful possibilities for woo-heads. This wibble of Kant's is entirely off the deep end, trying desperately to think about thinking from the outside, and saying nothing at all.

shh wrote:It was clear that there were problems to investigate to Newton. "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."

Nonetheless, action-at-a-distance was Newton's theory. The Vorticists (taking their cue from Descartes) didn't like it and insisted that all force had to be transmited by direct contact but there was no scientific or philosophical reason why this had to be so. So Newton's view was soon pretty universally accepted.

This problem...

There was no problem until much later.

...was resolved by the introduction of space-time as opposed to space and time, until Kant space and time were considered absolute, after, they were a-priori conceptions.

What did Kant have to do with space-time? Einstein didn't think ideas of space and time were a priori, though Newton might well have. In fact General Relativity shows that spacetime is a part of the physical world as much as the matter it contains with features that can be studied empirically and actually turns out to be quite unlike our a priori notions of it. It contradicts Kant in saying that spacetime is real and "out there", and not something we project onto the world.

It's not like no-one thought there were problems until Einstein's time, the notion that the problems had only been noticed by then is nonsense.

It's not nonsense. In fact that's exactly the way it happened. Newton's conception of space and time was unproblematic scientifically and philosophically until the discovery of electromagnetic waves that seemed to require for their propagation a medium that could not be detected (the Ether). Einstein's bold move was to assume there was no Ether and rethink our notion of space and time in order to explain the experimental facts.

Einstein had a good understanding of Kant. Connect the dots.

Most educated Germans of the period would have read some Kant. Why does that mean his theory was influenced by Kant? Relativity is usually taken to refute Kant because it showed that our a priori intuitions about space and time were wrong (e.g. non-euclidian geometry).

shh wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

shh wrote:Why?

Have a sense of humour. Blithely demanding of someone to "connect the dots" is intellectual mediocrity and snarkiness at its internet forum finest. If that's what you prefer... "Bend a spoon" is just a snarky way of saying, "Shut up and calculate".

Yeah and asking why bend a spoon is just a metaphoric way of asking calculate what? You want me to calculate history? I think you're over estimating what calculation is capable of.

The calculations were made by S.W.Hawking & Thomas Hertog back in 2006, unless I'm misreading history?

page 17 wrote:The top down approach we have described leads to a profoundly different view of cosmology, and the relation between cause and effect. Top down cosmology is a framework in which one essentially traces the histories backwards, from a spacelike surface at the present time. The no boundary histories of the universe thus depend on what is being observed, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has a unique, observer independent history.

newolder wrote:
The calculations were made by S.W.Hawking & Thomas Hertog back in 2006, unless I'm misreading history?

Of course, this isn't the only paper ever written on cosmology. The reason for this is that it was written in response to some other paper on cosmology that was written in a way that invited a response of that form. I admit this isn't saying much.

What's valuable here is that it supplies mathematical support for the notion that history is always already being added to, so that cosmology is also always already being added to, whereas philosophy is always already being addled, too.

Cito di Pense wrote:...
Of course, this isn't the only paper ever written on cosmology. The reason for this is that it was written in response to some other paper on cosmology that was written in a way that invited a response of that form. I admit this isn't saying much.

What's valuable here is that it supplies mathematical support for the notion that history is always already being added to, so that cosmology is also always already being added to, whereas philosophy is always already being addled, too.

Cosmology with testable, dare I write real?, numbers papers are a rarity, even in the arxivs, in my trawling experiences.

... I admit this isn't saying much.

You write sufficiently, as usual.

If I 'ad an addle for every wibble I've read, I'd be well over-addled, by now.

29 posts.

The problem really is of common sense versus "reality". We should be careful not to put our own taught or otherwise preconceptions of reality onto our observations when exercising the scientific method. Science explains the behaviour of that which we observe in an ultimately purely mathematical manner, but this really says nothing about our existence at all.

Newton observed that mass exerts force on every other mass. In our reality we imagine a pulling or pushing sensation, which is purely a human experience. In scientific reality forces are merely a concept used to describe an observed behaviour between two masses. There may as well be no such thing as "force" - I believe that everything in science can boil down to mathematical representations, hence why Quantum Mechanics is so bizarre.