A Space & astronomy forum. SpaceBanter.com

Go Back   Home » SpaceBanter.com forum » Astronomy and Astrophysics » Astronomy Misc
Site Map Home Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

THE PROBLEM WITH DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old August 6th 13, 10:16 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 8,078
Default THE PROBLEM WITH DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink, Bluff your Way in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, p. 94: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is actually a RED HERRING."

Clearly Uffink does not accept the entropy-always-increases version of the second law of thermodynamics but the justification for non-acceptance is implausible: criticism involving "unargued statements", "bold claims" and "strained attempts" could only be relevant when some inductive science, e.g. the Darwinian theory of evolution, is dealt with. In DEDUCTIVE science there are only two errors that can be criticized:

1. A false premise (assumption)

2. An invalid argument (the conclusion does not follow from the premises)

The problem (with DEDUCTIVE science) is that the identification of the false premise or the invalid argument is devastating - you have a full-blooded theory before and dismal ruins after the identification. The scale of the disaster could be spectacular:

http://bourabai.narod.ru/wallace/farce05.htm
Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together. Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate farce! (...) The speed of light is c+v." [Note: Bryan Wallace wrote "The Farce of Physics" on his deathbed hence some imperfections in the text!]

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/pdf...09145525ca.pdf
Albert Einstein (1954): "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary physics."

Curiously, Uffink did refer to a possibly false premise (assumption) which leads to the entropy-always-increases version of the second law:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink, Bluff your Way in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, p.39: "A more important objection, it seems to me, is that Clausius bases his conclusion that the entropy increases in a nicht umkehrbar [irreversible] process on the assumption that such a process can be closed by an umkehrbar [reversible] process to become a cycle. This is essential for the definition of the entropy difference between the initial and final states. But the assumption is far from obvious for a system more complex than an ideal gas, or for states far from equilibrium, or for processes other than the simple exchange of heat and work. Thus, the generalisation to all transformations occurring in Nature is somewhat rash."

Pentcho Valev
  #2  
Old August 7th 13, 05:43 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 8,078
Default THE PROBLEM WITH DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE

In DEDUCTIVE science, a single false premise can ruin everything, including the career and business of high priests. Yet some time ago Einsteiniana's high priests did not know that and used to launch fierce attacks on Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physic.../dp/0618551050
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, p. 226: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate."

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ma...einsteinwrong/
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes using the word "relative." (...) "Perhaps relativity is too restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity," Dr. Magueijo said. "We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of light."

Nowadays Einsteiniana's priests somehow feel that Einstein's 1905 false light postulate should remain intact but are still unaware that, in DEDUCTIVE science, you cannot have a true premise (the light postulate) and false consequences (the relative time of special relativity). So they make career and money by fiercely attacking the relative time of special relativity while wholeheartedly defending the light postulate:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013...reality-review
"Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ.. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Cr.../dp/0547511728
"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

http://www.independent.com/news/2013...7/time-reborn/
QUESTION: Setting aside any other debates about relativity theory for the moment, why would the speed of light be absolute? No other speeds are absolute, that is, all other speeds do indeed change in relation to the speed of the observer, so it's always seemed a rather strange notion to me.
LEE SMOLIN: Special relativity works extremely well and the postulate of the invariance or universality of the speed of light is extremely well-tested. It might be wrong in the end but it is an extremely good approximation to reality.
QUESTION: So let me pick a bit more on Einstein and ask you this: You write (p. 56) that Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative. But the conclusion of the relativity of simultaneity flows necessarily from Einstein's postulates (that the speed of light is absolute and that the laws of nature are relative). So he didn't really show that simultaneity was relative - he assumed it. What do I have wrong here?
LEE SMOLIN: The relativity of simultaneity is a consequence of the two postulates that Einstein proposed and so it is deduced from the postulates. The postulates and their consequences are then checked experimentally and, so far, they hold remarkably well.

Pentcho Valev
  #3  
Old August 9th 13, 07:45 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 8,078
Default THE PROBLEM WITH DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE

There is a strange faith among theoreticians and philosophers of science: all theories, past, present and future, are false (pessimistic induction) but new theories are somehow less false than old ones:

http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/tho...%20science.pdf
W.H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, 1981, p. 14: "...all physical theories in the past have had their heyday and have eventually been rejected as false. Indeed, there is inductive support for a pessimistic induction: any theory will be discovered to be false within, say 200 years of being propounded. (...) Indeed the evidence might even be held to support the conclusion that no theory that will ever be discovered by the human race is strictly speaking true. (...) The rationalist (who is a realist) is likely to respond by positing an interim goal for the scientific enterprise. This is the goal of getting nearer the truth. In this case the inductive argument outlined above is accepted but its sting is removed. For accepting that argument is compatible with maintaining that CURRENT THEORIES, while strictly speaking false, ARE GETTING NEARER THE TRUTH."

The new-theories-are-less-false faith is incompatible with deductivism. Consider Einstein's 1905 speed-of-light (second) postulate:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
"...light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."

Let us assume that the first postulate, the principle of relativity, is true. Then we have the following situation related to the fact that the theory (special relativity) is deductive: If the speed-of-light (second) postulate is true, and if the arguments of the theory are valid, then all the propositions of the theory (which are consequences of the postulates) are true, and IN THIS SENSE the theory is absolutely true. No degrees of falsehood are allowed.

If Einstein's 1905 speed-of-light postulate is false, that is, if the speed of light does depend on the speed of the emitting body, then it is easy to show that the equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light and showing how the speed of light varies with v, the speed of the emitter relative to the observer, is true:

http://www.philoscience.unibe.ch/doc...S07/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation, has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late 19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised the greatest theoretician of the day."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann, p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of light; and he gave us the crucial insight that Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity. Even today, this point needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."

The respective Newtonian theory (validly deducible from the principle of relativity (first postulate) and the equation c'=c+v (second postulate) is absolutely true in the sense that all its propositions are true. Again, no degrees of falsehood are allowed.

Clearly in DEDUCTIVE science the new-theories-are-less-false faith is unjustified. The transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics was either a transition from absolutely false to absolutely true or a transition from absolutely true to absolutely false.

Pentcho Valev
 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
THE DEGENERATION OF DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE Pentcho Valev Astronomy Misc 9 June 11th 10 11:33 PM
THE FALSE START OF DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE Pentcho Valev Astronomy Misc 6 July 23rd 09 07:08 AM
DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE Pentcho Valev Astronomy Misc 0 March 23rd 09 08:02 AM
DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE: CRITERIA OF REFUTATION Pentcho Valev Astronomy Misc 12 January 26th 09 11:03 PM
DEDUCTIVE SCIENCE: VALEV REFUTED ukastronomy Astronomy Misc 0 January 12th 09 10:40 AM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 03:00 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 SpaceBanter.com.
The comments are property of their posters.