A thing is all of its characteristics, not whatever is observable at the moment. Your conventionalist Kantian-influenced epistemology of "models" cut off from "true" reality does not follow from the necessity of observing reality in order to understand it. You did not address anything I wrote and your posts show no understanding of Ayn Rand's Aristotelian philosophy.

True " The old Flat Earth geocentric cosmology is pretty much dead. However, for an architect laying out the plans for a house considering local geodesic curvature is an unnecessary complication."

But epicycles are not physics They are a heuristic model.

Thanks Mike, but it's "99% perspiration".

Harriman did not "substitute ideology for facts". His essay is about the widespread terrible philosophy being improperly tied to physics and spread as if physics had confirmed it. Insisting on rationality while rejecting irrational ideology promoted in the name of science is not "substituting ideology for facts". Some of us see the irony in that accusation.

He did not analyze Heisenberg's book because he chose to write about something else: an elementary description of a more widespread phenomenon.

?????? Harriman article was coherent. If 50% of you comments were coherent it would be improvement - this is not one.

No philosophy automatically produces new physics, and that is not required to discuss the fundamental principles or to reject nonsense falsely portrayed as a result of science. To denounce the Harriman article for not being something it was not intended to be, demanding that it be a detailed analysis of particular physicists and that it provide major results in physics, suggests a refusal to pay attention to what he did choose to write about as the prerequisite for, especially, developing and understanding scientific theory.

You can make up a fictional dialog any way you want to about some other subject, but it has nothing to do with the Harriman article. Harriman's illustration is based on the actual bad philosophical views promoted in the name of science and as part of it as if they had been experimentally confirmed by science itself. I previously described what parts of physics theory they came from, which perhaps you don't understand. It is not a "strawman". Harriman's background in both physics and the philosophy of science is far more than going to the library and looking at 8 books, and anyone who has studied the subject at a technical level has experienced these alleged explanations perpetrated in the name of science.

Heisenberg was not "just one guy". His views were prominent in the field and he is one example of many spreading them. He formulated the original matrix mechanics generalizing the older inadequate Bohr atom quantization -- by algebraically capturing patterns of observed atomic spectra for the first time in a manner mathematically equivalent to the subsequent Schrodinger equation. Heisenberg was famous in the field and extremely influential as part of the group of quantum physicists around Bohr developing the theory and their interpretations telling people how to think about it.

To dismiss Heisenberg as "Heisenberg Schmeisenberg just one guy strawman" shows a real lack of knowledge of the development of the theory of quantum physics and its intellectual influences.

Heisenberg originated (with Bohr's help) the uncertainty principle as a speculative doctrine for the meaning of quantum theory (in contrast to the "uncertainty principle" as the standard inequality between distributions which is also found in signal processing). It was part of their famous Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which quickly became the dominant interpretation. It remains so to this day, including in the standard text books where it undermines scientific understanding and serves to drive students interested in rational understanding of science out of the field. It grew in a philosophically sympathetic intellectual environment of bad European philosophy and is echoed over and over. Even scientists like Einstein who opposed the Copenhagen school could not stop it. It resulted in Feynman's much later famous statement that no one understands quantum mechanics. It makes an already difficult subject impenetrable to rational understanding. Yet in the 1970s the aging Heisenberg appeared at Harvard University where his talk -- invoking the same philosophical nonsense -- attracted a packed house of admirers from far beyond Harvard.

This kind of garbage being promoted in the name of science would be enough to justify denouncing it in common sense even if one had no good explicit philosophy and little understanding of the physics. The Harriman article is much better than that, showing the contrast with a philosophy of realism that is required as a rational basis of science in general, in contrast to the corrupt influences of Kant and Pragmatism that are so prevalent now that they are taken for granted -- to the point where they are used on this very thread to resentfully denounce a philosophy of realism as mere worthless "ideology". For those who are doing that: pot, meet kettle. The irony is apparent.

You might check that particles having a wavelike nature. No single particle has ever shown a wavelike nature. What is seen, is seen in distributions of ensembles of particles in experiments such as edge diffraction, two edge, interference, stop diffraction, two slit interference, etc.
What you get depends upon the experimental setup. In the two slit experiment, whether the experiment is either single slit or both slits, the probabilities of particles passing through the slit(s), making the interference pattern, add to 1 in any of the experiments, leaving no room for particles passing through a slit interfering with itself or going though both slits and interfering with itself.
Remember that concepts and in particular mathematics can not be reified, but are, objectively, mental patterns and not some kind of existing matter. I have said elsewhere many times that "those who reify mathematics live in fantasy worlds." Concepts, as patterns, are part of objective reality as are minds and their consciousnesses. There is nothing outside of it. No other dimensions with supernatural gods, angels, demons, etc.

So far as anyone knows only photons, electrons, and liquids exhibit the particle/wave diffraction behavior.

Do you agree that existence exists even if there is no observer to observe it?

You were quoting Heisenberg? I am not surprised. As I said, even Feynman's philosophy was flawed.

Thanks.

So perhaps the problem with understanding of quantum mechanics and astrophysics is because we can not truly sense or perceive items on these orders of magnitude, and are instead reduced to approximations via measurements and mathematical formulas. Thus we must not only question the answers, but the methods we are using to reach those answers. If that is the crux of the article, I now understand what it is after, even though I must question it's self-promotion.

Thanks.

And I agree that philosophy affects how we go about solving problems. I just think we have to be careful about approaching problems from an inherently philosophical standpoint rather than a scientific one. That's the same approach used by the Global Warming fanatics and the criticisms of their strategy are about how their ideology causes them to justify their results. I don't want us to get trapped into the same fallacy.

Unusually, it was not me

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary; and those that do not.

I was trying to identify the source of LibertyBelle's error in what she called "modular" arithmetic.

Drunk on bad philosophy.

All an outgrowth of a certain interpretation of the uncertainty principle.

A wave within a particle?
Particles traveling in waves?
Wasn't there a time when scientists were calling it "wavicles?"

"It is my firm belief that the last seven decades of the twentieth will be characterized in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics." Carver Mead

http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thomps...

Abstracting characteristics of characteristics is the opposite of "stealing" the concepts and treating the relationships space and time as if they were primary entities of the universe.

I am not sure what you question is. I absolutely agree that space and time have properties. The question is whether for instance time is dilated or this is a clock dilation.

I remember his saying that the bending of light is required in Einstein's theory because Einstein postulated that the speed of light is a constant, but I haven't seen Mead's own formulations.

As I see it, this article’s premises are at variance with its own conclusion. After granting that relativity’s predictions on time dilation are real, the article states, “Just so long as the satellites’ clocks remained synchronised with each other and the time-difference relative Earth’s clocks didn’t become too large, GPS receivers would continue to calculate their correct position.” Assuming this is true, there’s still the fact that the satellites’ clocks do not remain synchronized with each other and have to be re-synchronized on a regular basis, due in part to the differences in relativistic effects on each satellite’s internal clock. The satellites are not in perfectly circular orbits around a planet with a uniform gravitational field. Thus the relativistic forces acting on their clocks are constantly changing, affecting the degree of time dilation for each individual satellite’s clock and requiring periodic re-synchronization. Thus relativistic effects do have to be taken into account for the GPS to operate properly, even if it is not necessary for the satellites’ clocks to be perfectly synchronized with those on Earth.

For some reason there are people that hate the idea of relativity and will pursue any course to challenge it. The article is correct in that continuous compensation for timing errors is required for the GPS system to maintain its accuracy. If you look at the compensation process you will find that many of the adjustments necessary are consistent with the influence of relativity however, there are residuals that are the result of other influences. Most of these are the consequence of inhomogenieties in the gravitational field of the earth and the presence of the moon and the sun. Because the GPS satellites never follow exactly the same gravitational geodesic path twice the system requires constant calibration if accuracy is to be preserved.
For the past several years I have been working on a project to create a refined model of the geodesic path followed by the Earth-Moon system as it orbits the Sun. This project employs raw GPS data and pulse time of arrival from a number of pulsars as critical data components. Part of this project is to continuously determine the location of the gravitational barycenter of the Earth-Moon system to an accuracy of about 2 x10^13. As The location of the barycenter is constantly changing it must be recomputed at regular intervals. Time of arrival of pulsar signals is measured with an accuracy on the order of 1x 10^14 based on an atomic frequency standard. While the purpose of GPS is primarily navigation and position measurement analysis of the raw data from the satellites provides information about the location of each satellite in geocentric coordinates. The effect of all of this is a data set with accuracy on the order of 4x 10^12 or better. When measurements with this degree of precision are made relativistic effects are observable and must be included in the analysis. However, there are other influences present that have unidentified sources. So far I can see gravitational profiles in the Earth's geodesic that are consistent with the location and mass of several major planets; Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and possibly Saturn. Relativistic compensation is a critical part of this process.

A free on-line book containing classical alternatives to modern physics theory.

He seems to have accepted Heisenberg's epistemology. Theoretical concepts of entities and phenomena not directly perceivable require a very clear, systematic understanding of the epistemology of theory formation and of the hierarchy of high level abstractions based on abstractions to refer to inferred entities.

Before IOE there was no idea of how to do that, and all kinds of otherwise valid abstractions -- from atomic particles to EM waves to irrational numbers to 'infinity' and Hilbert's Formalism -- have foundered on ad hoc, anti-conceptual concoctions undermining the kind of understanding most scientists would like to have.

?????

Evolution is not just "Darwinian evolution." Everything adapts or dies. That adaptation is complex. We now have "epigenetics" to explain some inherited traits. Apparently, Lamarck was not entirely wrong, at least in his approach. He was wrong about the cause of the giraffe's long neck. It remains, however, that some acquired characteristics are inherited.

It is also true that the fossil evidence shows sudden changes, not gradual "evolution."

I grant that after a few tens of thousands of years of keeping to their own kind, animals of common ancestry become distinct gene pools that we call "species." But, even so, fertile hybrids are known across many "species."

I just read Origin of Species, as much as I could stand. It is a shallow book with an easy thesis. Not much is there to argue about. But it does not lead to much new knowledge, either.