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Tim:
"... i have in recent years come to suspect that the laws of physics have a conceptual counter part that exists within the common human mind that are related to normal human life experience(snip)...the knowledge of the constancy of the speed of light would not be such an example but the understanding of relative motion would be. "
Hi Tim,
I am convinced that your ideas on this topic, however fanciful they might sound to
a strict specialist in physics, are not a misapplication of those ideas at all.
There is an interesting connection to everyday life, I venture, between relativity and the realms of mind.
1) A skeptical view might at first
say your statemetns are a trial-and-error attempt to show connections between sophisticated science AND unscientific, subjective perceptions of experience.
(btw, by definition, "sophisticated" does not
necessarily mean "better" at all.)
2) Another skeptical view is: without the math,
we are only talking with literary inexactness about something that is precisely mathematical, even with its uncertainty.
3) The idea is intriguing...certainly, having
good science become more common knowledge can help create a better way of thinking. Surely the absence of these concepts in one's toolbag of everyday life is NOT any
big help. Having uncertainty and relativity
properly translated to prose in mass-culture could be good. I do not think it is common discussion of science creates the danger
about which Dr. Hayek wrote: "Misapplication of the scientific method has laid the foundation for the modern totalitarian state."
Instead, I think it is the insistence on
authority as being the arbiter of ideas.
This forum has sometimes been an illustrative case Some posters do not discuss ideas on their merits (or expose their lack of merit), but instead politick
constantly. That was the stuff. If a little knowledge can be dangerous, a lot of knowledge in the hands of an intellectual tyrant, who is not concerned with the ideas but with the personal vindication he seeks, is even worse.
It makes him vindictive.
I must be about my business. I hope this topic will yield continuing relief for modern life,
and thank you for suggesting it.
Mike |
