Re: The Quest for Scientific Objectivity

[John M <***>]

Please read after the 'alternate version' below the copied post.
John

----- Original Message -----
From: Howard Pattee \
To: ***
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2005 1:06 AM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Inequivalence of models

Judith,
Your response, "Sure I can,"  does not alter the truth of my statement:

>You will not find it possible to
>explain these values [of Nature's constants] as mere human mental
creations.

Let me ask it another way: Do you think you can in any imaginable way alter
or "taint" the speed of light or the charge of an electron? I might add that
historically great physicists and philosophers have tried to imagine
alternatives and failed.

Howard
-----------------------------------------
JM:
In the form you asked, it is dead-sure that you are right.
Asking different questions in common sense, will 'change' the situation into
more involvement of the 'human mind' and its interpretations into the
fundamental 'facts' of physics (and everything else):

(to your alternate question): what is 'light'? what its 'speed'? what is a
'charge'? what is an 'electron'? and so on, if we don't continue with  those
same ancient explanations upon observations of ununderstood phenomena from
the times when the human mind started to think.
Would we have more sophisticated versions without those primitive ones?
Didn't the human mind first imagine the Flat Earth before recent cosmology?
Wasn't it the 'awe' upon throwing a stone that implied a notion of a force?
Or detecting the difference of dark and light?

Our science is a contimuation of earlier phases, all of them explained at
the level THEN achieved in the epistemic enrichment of our species.
Later it was further developed, into concepts like energy (a postulate),
motion (did we solve its paradox? what does the point 'do' between the two
adjacent positions?) etc., mathematics came to the rescue and a complete
religious(!) belief evolved in the scientific sense, now taught (ie.
brainwashed) at the early age into emotionally accepting  minds.
(I.e. to believe what the professor teaches without reproducing all those
basic experiments). Most of us CANNOT even think in other terms and accepts
the "edifice" of the (scientific) nature as a given we live in.

Just as there would be no retrograde cosmological calculation towards a Big
Bang(?) without accepting Hubble's ingenious idea to associate the observed
redshift with Dopler's sound phenomenon into an expanding universe. Now it
is a "fact", because thousands of well planed slanted measurements produced
theory-laden calculations as ample base for explanation of the theory (in
RR's word: "speculation").

I - for one - am a lucky utilizer of such (reductionistic?) connotations in
our advanced technological world yet find it only a good alternative that
works. The marvels of the human mind. From day one. Thanks.

Nothing pejorative, just accepting the *possibility* of an alternately
thinking open mind. (a 'Maybe').
I have no alternate solution (and got my 1st Ph.D. in conventional physical
science).

Regards

John M