Re: Universal grammar

In article <1162376279.310647.45360@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Franz
Gnaedinger" <frgn@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This was what the stepping out of 19th century positivism achieved: in
modern view, one develops models about reality which are distinct from
reality itself.

Why, then, do the schoolboks equate Darwin's theory of gradual
evolution with evolution per se?

You would probably have to ask those who wrote them. In general, it is
probably a bad idea learning from schoolbooks! :-)

If they said: Darwin was a great
biologist, his discoveries make us better understand many
features of life, even the human body, and this new knowledge
about ourselves helps us in medicine, allows new forms of
treatments and medicaments, which may one day save your life,
the life of a friend of yours, or the life of your parents ... Please
have respect for Darwin's work, and consider that he just
understood some aspects of evolution. Evolution is a far wider
phenomenon than any single person can grasp.

Yeah, Darwin only had some initial understanding of it.

For example
Darwin knew that many species persisted basically unchanged
for eons, but he was not able to integrate this paleontological
record into his very young theory. Stephen Jay Gould and Nils
Eldrege achieved this with their model of a punctuated equilibrium,
a very complicated term which can easily be understood when we
give the idea in simple words: a new species arises in a relatively
short period of time (punctuation) and can then persist basically
unchanged for eons (stasis). This comes very close to the act
of creation in the Bible. And consider that God created the world
step by step, not at once. This idea, a creation step by step,
is the basic insight of evolution. The Bible is a very wise book,
just read it the right way ... 

Or it does not make much sense. It is though not one book, but may bound
together.

If the schoolbooks would address
the children (and their parents) this way, we would be spared
the fundamentalistic mess we are going through now. But no,
the sciences are too narcissistic to admit a lack of knowledge,
they claim to know it all, behaving more fundamentalistic than
the late pope who at least accepted the idea of evolution.
Always the same mistake. The observable world is reduced
to a simple model, and when the model is successful, it is
proclaimed as truth - as the one and only and whole truth.
The mechanistic paradigm was most successful, and so
the cosmos was declared to be a giant clockwork, and
animals are nothing else than automata, unable of feeling.
Big Science never apologized for this grotesque error.

One thing Darwin didn't know about was the mutations. Species that
reproduce asexually evolve more slowly than those that do. And about 1% of
the human genes mutate. So not all genes come from the biological parents.

Not really: QM describes what is physically measurable. And if one cannot
distinguish things by physical measurement, how can it ever be practically
be done? Apart from creating theories, with no basis in reality, that is.

And only what we can measure exists.

No. Only what can be measured physically can be modeled in a physical theory.

The ancient Greeks
could not measure the impact of quarks, so quarks did not
exist in their time? And what a future generation will discover
does not already exist in our time?

So I guess this answers much of your question, except that quarks cannot
exist as free particles, so they only formally exist in the
physical modeling of QM phenomena.

It is another feature of any physical theory: that it cannot be proved, in
view of that one cannot cover all examples. A theory is considered valid
in the interim if the scope it can give predictions if no exceptions are
known. Taking this scope into account, there are no known exceptions to
NM, QM and GR, though most think that GR in the very large needs to be
augmented.

Every generation believes to have reached the top of the mesa,
from now on we will only spread, no longer climb higher, for there
is no more plateau of knowledge above us, we are on top, we rule.
Fukyiama announced the end of history, and John Maddox, former
editor-in-chief of The Scientific American, followed by announcing
the end of the sciences ... Quantum Theory is the most successful
theory ever, but incomplete. Why is the curious number alpha,
slightly smaller than 1/137, so very sensitive, so that any small
change of it's value would render life impossible? 

I doubt it - life would probably adapt, just becoming something unlike ours. :-)

It is like, why is everyone in the SF universe speaking English? - Ot is
because whenever a new species arises, the races already there are sending
out intergalactic linguists to steer the language that way. And the
intergalactic geneticists have already been there, make sure that most
major life become human-like. :-)

Why is gravity
so stubborn? There are many open questions, and more scientists
at work today than all scientists of previous ages together, so that
we can be sure the sciences will go on, and the world will see many
more revolutions of the magnitude of Newton's and Einstein's impact
on physics.

But note that I said there are no signs that say the foundations of QM
would be radically changed, not that won't. That is quite of a difference.

For example, there are no signs that anything physical can travel faster
than the speed of light in vacuum (i.e., the speed of photons everywhere),
but it would be nice if some such physical evidence would show up. It is
not hard to create theories to such an effect - just go to an SF-movie! :-

Well, these time reversal particles of his theory are just a computation
method; or that is at least one view of it.

Another view is that it is really so. If you don't find quantum
theory crazy, you are crazy (allegedly by Feynman).

Well, that will stand for him. :-)

QM is just very different from human daily experience, so if one tries to
apply that, seemingly crazy conclusions will arise. They did that a lot in
the early days of QM theory development.

In QM, every particle has a quantum field, which is sort of an invisible
fairy describing its behavior. These quantum fairies cannot be observed;
one just assumes their existence in the theoretical modeling. So a
physical theory describes relations between physically measurable
quantities, but in the process, it may assume quantities that cannot be
observed.

Fairies, that is interesting.

I think the quantum fairies popularizes well the role that the quantum
fields play in QM theory. Each particle has a fairy that cannot be seen or
observed. One can measure the particle, and the fairy will change by that,
but it still cannot be observed. And we already know why this
intergalactic life hasn't been discovered yet, because they evidently use
the invisible matter we recently have discovered to travel in
the hyperspace we haven't yet discovered. :-)

The foundations of QM is not expected to change much though, by such
progress.

I bet they will change, and the change will come by via
the insight that not only matter and energy are equivalent,
also information and energy are two forms of the same.

The problem is the none has yet come up with a physical definition of
information, and how to physically measure it. So, as long that has
happened, valid physical theories have no claim about information.

I guess these were the first important stepping stones of creating
systematic theories.

And QM is a stepping stone for later theories. We are climbing
a ladder with no end.

Since QM and GR haven't been unified yet, we have no yet seen the end. And
QM and GR are in themselves not finished - for example, GR has several,
non-unified matter models.

As I said above, no physical theory is considered final nowadays. But one
has not found any counterexamples to NM, QM and GR. In fact, the GPS
system even makes use of GR time corrections.

When young Max Planck told his teacher that he would like to study
physics, the man said: Oh no, physics has reached the final stage
of completion, there remain just a few minor problems to solve.

Yes, that was the view of 19th century, which I loosely associated with
positivism. One really though, that soon all physics foundations would
have been discovered.

Another funny story is that Alexander Grothendieck
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck> was told that all
important math problems had been solved, and so decided to become a math
teacher instead.

--
Hans Aberg
.