Marie Foster <mfos@ieway.com> wrote:
> > Newtonian physics was never designed to answer a question
> > about what the world IS; it just answers questions about
> > what the world DOES. (indeed, most of the sciences could
> > be described this way)
> Hmmm... I will have to take your word on that one until I dig
> out some of my old notes from many moons ago when I was a
> student... sigh..
Actually, I've been thinking about my statement. It's not entirely true.
Well, sort of. To give an example, Newton's second law is
F = ma
[Force = mass * acceleration]
It is a theory about the relation between two concepts -- if you apply a
net force to an object, it will accelerate, and IF you see an object
accelerating, there is a net force being applied to it. So, you see,
Newton's second law is a theory about what objects will DO in certain
circumstances. Similairly, things like hooks law (that the displacement of
a spring is proportional to the force applied to it) also describe what
things DO.
But there are examples of sciences which attempt to describe what things
*ARE*. e.g. quantum physics; some parts of chemistry.
I think the difference between these two types of science is small, in the
end. And I think that the reason I orginally said that the first kind
constitutes "most" of the sciences is that I'm an engineer. My courses
have always placed more emphasis on function than on form. Perhaps someone
in a pure science program would say the opposite.
> I think that this slight wrinkle does not really detract from
> the fact that we need to do a whole lot of unlearning before
> we can come up with an integrated view of quantum reality and
> Newtonian reality.
I'm really not sure why we would need to do this. The way I see the
difference is in levels of detail. Sure, we could try and modify the
Newtonian world view to include our knowledge of what happens at the pico
level, but why should we? What we have now works, and I doubt that any
small improvement we could get by modifying the physics would be worth the
new complexities we would have to include. (there is one hell of a lot of
molecules in any significant amount of matter!) To coin an analogy, I
don't think that the operators of a casino actually worry about every
little dice that is being thrown. As long as they know that the
probabilities favour them, in the long run, I suspect they are quite happy
to let God play dice with the universe... In the same way, I don't think
that we need to be particulairly concerned about the position or shape of
atoms: with so many of them, we are better off going with probabilities.
(as an aside, IT IS possible to "break" the second law of thermodynamics,
but it is simply satistically VERY unlikely becuase of the shear number of
atoms involved. For instance, the random movements of particles in a box
COULD, theoretically, end up with them all on one side. That state in one
with LESS entropy than the previous, and so the second law would be
broken. However, it is so unlikely as to be not worth considering. e.g. 1
KG of air = 31 mols = 1.9 x 10^25 atoms. The chance of each of them being
in only one half of the box is 1/2, so the actual probability is
(1/2)^(1.9x10^25)=zero on every calculator I own)
> That statement was a final futile retort... :)
<grin>. I wasn't aware you were fighting for something so important.
Could you perhaps explain to me why you think a Newtonian world view is so
"bad"?
ERiC