Re: Fundamental problems in Physics

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

Steve,

Re point#3: ...what happened to #3? :)

Re point#4: Another example is biology, and whether biology is simply a
subset of modern physics or if biology has some uniqueness that would
require physics to be altered (enlarged) in order to accomodate biology. The
biologist Ernst Mayr's latest book "What Makes Biology Unique?" (Cambridge
Univ. Press 2004) attempts to delineate biology as an autonomous science,
not reducible to modern physics; as well as discussions of teleology and
final causes, the historical conflation of analysis and reductionism, etc
The structure of his arguments are not identical to Rosen's but I find it
interesting that these are arguments that continue to be made in biology.

Re point #5: It is also something of a catch-22 situation: who will develop
further the Rosennean paradigm into this "trusty toolbox" if many of those
best-equipped to do so are first awaiting the existence of that trusty
toolbox prior to utilizing the paradigm?

Regards,
Tim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Steve
> Johnson
> Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2004 9:34 PM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: Fundamental problems in Physics
>
>
> I'm not qualified to wade in to this heated debate but
> I felt compelled to make a couple of comments.
>
> 1. I think Howard is definitely one of the top
> contributors to the quality of the discussion on this
> list and he clearly respects Rosen immensely as he
> seemingly knows all of his writings by heart. Based on
> several of Howard's papers I read on his site it's
> obvious that he is not a devotee of the machine
> metaphor. I can also certainly believe that physicists
> that Howard knows and communicates with are well aware
> of the limitations of the machine metaphor and as
> Howard put it "honestly strive to escape the
> limitations of the whatever abstractions happen to be
> popular" (quoting from memory). One would certainly
> expect this to be true if only due to (a)
> self-selection, and (b) due to education by Howard
> including references to Rosen, Hertz, his own and
> others' work.
>
> 2. However, from personal experience I can affirm that
> Physics as a discipline is definitely cartesian
> through and through if the way it teaches its young
> generation is any indicator. I'm not a scientist now
> so I cannot speak for how it is at the cutting edge
> but the way Physics (even Quantum Mechanics) is taught
> in the top academic institutions is definitely
> confined to the state-based  paradigm in the sense
> that Rosen criticized. Morever, epistimological
> critiques of the paradigm are never prominently
> offered (maybe as a study of Thomas Kuhn if you're
> lucky). I still have several friends in the PhD
> programs in Physics and Chemistry and what they do
> most of the time is measure observables and crunch
> various forms of differential rate equations on
> computers.
>
> 4. Physics is actually a mild case of this because, as
> Howard noted, in Physics there many areas where
> "traditional approach" is actually extremely effective
> in terms of commutativity of the modelling relation.
> It gets far more rediculous in Social Sciences and
> Econmics where people put themselves through bizzare
> contortions to apply the 19th century physcis toolbox
> of differential rate equations and various constraint
> optimization techniques to everything under the sun
> regardless of how much sense it makes.
>
> 5. I suspect that this is less due to a conspiracy to
> keep the Rosennean view out by vested interests but
> more due to the fact that regular working scientists
> (number crunching brains of burden) do not see
> immediate application of the Rosennean view to their
> daily lives even if they took the considerable effort
> to understand it. For those who did, I suspect, it is
> like a beautiful dream. After thinking about these
> matters a physicist may agree with Rosen and then sigh
> and think to himself: "Oh well, that's nice, but now I
> have to go and type my differential equation into
> Mathematica because I have this paper due and so on."
> The Rosennean philosophy will have to be developed by
> others to come up with a trusty toolbox before the
> regular Joe scientist will see its value.
>
> - Steve