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Science And Metaphysics
I read from, 'Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in Vier Bänden', a biography of the Berlin German woman poet; Mascha Kaléko, that in 1952 she sent one of her poems to Albert Einstein, the opening line was; "Time stands still. It is us who are passing away".
Einstein replied: "I think your poem is very beautiful and rich in meaning. It touches upon a deep metaphysical problem that has become relevant through physics".
What do you think he meant by that?
Einstein replied: "I think your poem is very beautiful and rich in meaning. It touches upon a deep metaphysical problem that has become relevant through physics".
What do you think he meant by that?
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All that is needed to understand the full picture, or all that is needed to be a scientist. At any rate, that the simple explanation is the full explanation. My main point, really, is that it's not. That won't stop me explaining things in the way that, I hope, is closer to jomifl's orange-and-biro approach than the "em omega cross vee" approach.
jim360... nice essay. An update post-LHC results of last year would be great. As an (unimportant) aside, it could be good to refer to the effect on the thrower of the ball as well as the catcher. A similar analogy used elsewhere is two skaters on ice exchanging a moderately heavy ball.
I think that this discussion has strayed into a semantic one of what it means to understand. That said, I can still demonstrate quite a bit about particle physics without recourse to mathematics!
I think that this discussion has strayed into a semantic one of what it means to understand. That said, I can still demonstrate quite a bit about particle physics without recourse to mathematics!
Thanks for that feedback silence -- always welcome. Yes, I suppose I should have mentioned some idea of recall acting on the thrower. I think I stole that analogy from somewhere, where it also goes on to say that the ball-throwing problem has its problems because it can't really deal with attractive forces that are governed by the same exchange rules.
Anyway, I hope that I'll get around to finishing an updated (and also longer) version at some point. Either way, I hope that the essay above serves to illustrate that I do explain things in a clear, maths-free way. It's just that I don't think that such explanations can ever be complete. But I'll still keep trying.
Anyway, I hope that I'll get around to finishing an updated (and also longer) version at some point. Either way, I hope that the essay above serves to illustrate that I do explain things in a clear, maths-free way. It's just that I don't think that such explanations can ever be complete. But I'll still keep trying.
Jake, agreed, a lot of science has been done with little or no maths, just the use of observation and reason. I believe Einstein only got his wife to do the maths to support his theories after he had had the original insight at a non mathematical level. Some branches of science are maths dependant, others a lot less so.
Are you about to pursue the "Einstein couldn't do maths" falsehood?
As much as Einstein's insights were brilliant, maths played a major role in his thought -- specifically, the wonderful thought experiment that spawned his version of the Theory of relativity runs as follows:
What happens if you are travelling alongside a beam of light at the same speed? It should appear stationary, presumably. But Maxwell's equations do not allow this.
The thought experiment then heavily relies on mathematics. Without Maxwell's equations, he would have got nowhere, and then without his abilities at maths, he would not have been able to develop that thought into a full theory.
As much as Einstein's insights were brilliant, maths played a major role in his thought -- specifically, the wonderful thought experiment that spawned his version of the Theory of relativity runs as follows:
What happens if you are travelling alongside a beam of light at the same speed? It should appear stationary, presumably. But Maxwell's equations do not allow this.
The thought experiment then heavily relies on mathematics. Without Maxwell's equations, he would have got nowhere, and then without his abilities at maths, he would not have been able to develop that thought into a full theory.
But wasn't simply asking the question the act of genius, a top-down rather than a bottom-up leap, which allowed for the nuts and bolts to be then formulated? Perhaps that's why he said;
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
It might have been a top-down approach -- probably was, in fact. But the starting point from where he leaped had more mathematics than most people seem to realise.
As to the balance between imagination and knowledge -- tough one. At the risk of being seen to argue with Einstein, I think he's wrong to place one ahead of the other. Knowledge is certainly not more important than imagination (he that knows all, but imagines nothing, would be a pretty boring person); and you need to be able to imagine to solve problems, so I suppose that's the line he's taking. But I'd say that you need knowledge to know what the problems are that you have to imagine the solutions to. So aren't they both as important as each other, in their own different ways? Both contributing to our progress, the one letting us know where we have been, the other allowing us to scout ahead.
As to the balance between imagination and knowledge -- tough one. At the risk of being seen to argue with Einstein, I think he's wrong to place one ahead of the other. Knowledge is certainly not more important than imagination (he that knows all, but imagines nothing, would be a pretty boring person); and you need to be able to imagine to solve problems, so I suppose that's the line he's taking. But I'd say that you need knowledge to know what the problems are that you have to imagine the solutions to. So aren't they both as important as each other, in their own different ways? Both contributing to our progress, the one letting us know where we have been, the other allowing us to scout ahead.
When Eratosthenes determined the circumfrence of the Earth he didn't just gather a lot of data then discover from it that the Earth is a sphere of a particular circumfrence. He deduced from observation that it was a sphere then set about determining its circumfrence by gathering data and applying some maths. The question always precedes the maths otherwise there is no maths.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
I think Einstein meant exactly what he said - and he was right. Rather than allow the possibility of imagination to cloud ‘knowledge’, 'Scientists' all too often dismiss ideas that fall outside current thinking simply because they think they know better.
Interestingly I was watching Stargazing Live last night on the subject of the Northern Lights and the experiment conducted in 1908 by Kristian Birkeland which proved that the phenomena is produced as a result of protons and electrons, carried on solar winds, hitting the earth’s atmosphere. His research was ridiculed and dismissed for 60 years.
This from here: http://
//His [Birkeland’s) theory was disputed and ridiculed at the time as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists,[1][7] most notoriously by the eminent British geophysicist and mathematician Sydney Chapman who argued the mainstream view that currents could not cross the vacuum of space and therefore the currents had to be generated by the Earth. Birkeland's theory of the aurora continued to be dismissed by mainstream astrophysicists after his death in 1917. It was notably championed by the Swedish plasma scientist Hannes Alfvén,[8] but Alfvén's work in turn was also disputed by Chapman.[9]
Proof of Birkeland's theory of the aurora only came in 1967 after a probe was sent into space. The crucial results were obtained from U.S. Navy satellite 1963-38C, launched in 1963 and carrying a magnetometer above the ionosphere.[10] Magnetic disturbances were observed on nearly every pass over the high-latitude regions of the Earth. These were originally interpreted as hydromagnetic waves, but on later analysis it was realized that they were due to field-aligned or Birkeland currents.//
What Birkeland had was imagination that went beyond mainstream science. Einstein knew what he was talking about.
I think Einstein meant exactly what he said - and he was right. Rather than allow the possibility of imagination to cloud ‘knowledge’, 'Scientists' all too often dismiss ideas that fall outside current thinking simply because they think they know better.
Interestingly I was watching Stargazing Live last night on the subject of the Northern Lights and the experiment conducted in 1908 by Kristian Birkeland which proved that the phenomena is produced as a result of protons and electrons, carried on solar winds, hitting the earth’s atmosphere. His research was ridiculed and dismissed for 60 years.
This from here: http://
//His [Birkeland’s) theory was disputed and ridiculed at the time as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists,[1][7] most notoriously by the eminent British geophysicist and mathematician Sydney Chapman who argued the mainstream view that currents could not cross the vacuum of space and therefore the currents had to be generated by the Earth. Birkeland's theory of the aurora continued to be dismissed by mainstream astrophysicists after his death in 1917. It was notably championed by the Swedish plasma scientist Hannes Alfvén,[8] but Alfvén's work in turn was also disputed by Chapman.[9]
Proof of Birkeland's theory of the aurora only came in 1967 after a probe was sent into space. The crucial results were obtained from U.S. Navy satellite 1963-38C, launched in 1963 and carrying a magnetometer above the ionosphere.[10] Magnetic disturbances were observed on nearly every pass over the high-latitude regions of the Earth. These were originally interpreted as hydromagnetic waves, but on later analysis it was realized that they were due to field-aligned or Birkeland currents.//
What Birkeland had was imagination that went beyond mainstream science. Einstein knew what he was talking about.
As a rough guess, though, how many people have "imagined" theories that turned out to be complete and utter rubbish? Rather a lot more often than the reverse, anyway. And Birkeland's initial imaginations were based on the knowledge of how to conduct an experiment, of the recent discovery of the existence of cathode rays, etc. Again, this is not to say that knowledge is more important than imagination -- merely that they both play their part, and it seems to me that placing one ahead of the other risks creating a false impression: either that you only need to read books to become a brilliant scientist, or that you needn't waste your time with such rubbish so long as you let your imagination run wild. Neither is true; a balance should be found.
There is this guide to a PhD that exists, that serves just as well for illustrating how human knowledge advances:
http://
I think you could argue that the "circle picture" misses a subtlety that sometimes the circle is incomplete, so there is always the case for going back over and checking what we've done. But, by and large, the overwhelming majority of knowledge at any particular point in (certainly recent) human history proceeds on to the next point largely unchanged. Major revisions become scarcer -- at least one reason for this being that the number of scientists has increased significantly over time, so you have even more people around these days to check the work of everyone else.
Again, I'm not saying that imagination is unimportant -- merely that knowledge isn't unimportant either. The exact weighting between the two is surely impossible to estimate because, when trying to track a chain of reasoning, the precise starting point is usually debatable. In Birkeland's case, you might take the starting point to be when he imagined the idea of beams of cathode rays travelling from the sun to the Earth; I think it began earlier, when he set up the experiment that would go on to provide the origin of his imagination.
TL;DR -- isn't knowledge just as important really?
There is this guide to a PhD that exists, that serves just as well for illustrating how human knowledge advances:
http://
I think you could argue that the "circle picture" misses a subtlety that sometimes the circle is incomplete, so there is always the case for going back over and checking what we've done. But, by and large, the overwhelming majority of knowledge at any particular point in (certainly recent) human history proceeds on to the next point largely unchanged. Major revisions become scarcer -- at least one reason for this being that the number of scientists has increased significantly over time, so you have even more people around these days to check the work of everyone else.
Again, I'm not saying that imagination is unimportant -- merely that knowledge isn't unimportant either. The exact weighting between the two is surely impossible to estimate because, when trying to track a chain of reasoning, the precise starting point is usually debatable. In Birkeland's case, you might take the starting point to be when he imagined the idea of beams of cathode rays travelling from the sun to the Earth; I think it began earlier, when he set up the experiment that would go on to provide the origin of his imagination.
TL;DR -- isn't knowledge just as important really?
And another thing: The job of a "scientist" is to imagine solutions to problems that most people never even knew that they existed. So that's another thing that knowledge does: it helps you know where to look. Another picture I've seen somewhere before: if ignorance is a wall between us and the great unknown, then knowledge is the ladder to help you climb that wall -- and imagination is the ability to see beyond it.* Again, both have a role to play in progress.
*I suppose, in this picture, Birkeland is the man who found a gap somewhere. But most people who try to look through the wall without climbing it won't find gaps!
*I suppose, in this picture, Birkeland is the man who found a gap somewhere. But most people who try to look through the wall without climbing it won't find gaps!
Jim, //how many people have "imagined" theories that turned out to be complete and utter rubbish?//
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, when he looked at Birkeland's theory, eminent geophysicist and mathematician Sydney Chapman thought precisely that - as did the rest of mainstream science. Like you, he allowed his 'knowledge' to restrict his intellect. Knowledge can be acquired by anyone, so it's really nothing special - but imagination takes imagination – and that can neither be taught - or learned.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, when he looked at Birkeland's theory, eminent geophysicist and mathematician Sydney Chapman thought precisely that - as did the rest of mainstream science. Like you, he allowed his 'knowledge' to restrict his intellect. Knowledge can be acquired by anyone, so it's really nothing special - but imagination takes imagination – and that can neither be taught - or learned.
An uneducated brain can be incredibly imaginative. I can invent spirits, theologies and fanciful notions of all kinds. When you are unconstrained by awareness of the huge body of scientific knowledge hard won by the efforts of scientists you can conjure up all kinds of wonders, and even, by making yourself into some kind of guru or cult leader, you can become rich.
The best philosophers, artists, even theologians, are people who recognise the need to study science. I have often been surprised by how much they have strived to learn about science, and at the same time reassured that their art (especially Dali) deserves respect and admiration.
The best philosophers, artists, even theologians, are people who recognise the need to study science. I have often been surprised by how much they have strived to learn about science, and at the same time reassured that their art (especially Dali) deserves respect and admiration.
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