Aurino,
I haven't posted much lately as I don't feel I have an audience here; however, I do still read all the posts to counterbalance.org, astronomy.net and the relativity site on mailgate.org. In particular, I have no arguments with you to speak of; it's just that you are not interested in the aspects of this that I feel need examination (I would like a serious, competent examination of my logic before I die as I seen no major errors and yet everyone disagrees with me).
At any rate, I have posted this time because I think you have misunderstood me!
>>>My second, and most serious, source of cynicism is the way Dick presents his ideas. Maybe that is not what he's really thinking but he does give the impression that physics can advance without empiricism, without the need to run experiments, because all we have to do is come up with new definitions which are consistent with existing ones and do the math. In a sense he's right, but I strongly disagree that it's always possible to come up with proper definitions by thinking alone, for the simple reason that we have no idea what we're dealing with. Sometimes we do, most often we don't. So it's easy for Dick to look at the current body of physics and say, look, this stuff which took you centuries to do is all math, all you had to do was add the numbers, no need for experiments and theories, it's all a consequence of your definitions. It's easy to say that because the experiments have been done, most bad theories discarded, and we're left with proper definitions. It's not so easy to come up with good, consistent definitions in the first place. >> : how do they know that the observed evolution is not the result of the order that is embedded in the computer itself? |