Re: Painful but inevitable resignation
From: Eckard Blumschein (blumschein_at_et.uni-magdeburg.de)
Date: 12/01/04
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Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 07:39:13 +0100
On 12/1/2004 6:23 AM, Andr? Michaud wrote:
>> I cannot reveal any restriction to just elapsed time.
>> On the contrary: "le phenomène qui doit se produire à l'instant t+dt"
>> clearly indicates the traditional time-scale.
>
> Yes. But you must interprete it in light of what he states at the
> beginning of Chapter XI
>
> (free translation)
>
> SCIENCE AND REALITY
>
> 5. - Contingencies and determinism.
>
> "I do not intend to treat here the question of the contingency of
> teh laws of nature, which is obviously insoluble, and about which
> so much has been written already.
>
> I wish only to draw attention to the various meanings that were
> given to the word "contingency" and how useful it would be to
> distinguish them.
>
> If we consider any particular law, we can be certain in advance
> that it can only be approximate. It is in fact infered from
> experimental verifications and these verifications were, and
> could not be more than, approximate. On must always expect that
> more precise measurements will cause us to add new terms to our
> formulas; which is what happened, for example, for Mariotte's law.
>
> Moreover, the statement of any law is inevitably incomplete. That
> statement should include the listing of all of the antecedents
> that have to be involved for a given consequent to occur. I would
> have to first describe ALL of the conditions of the experiment
> to be made and the law would be formulated as: if all the
> conditions are met, this phenomenon will occur.
>
> But we will never be certain not to have taken any possible
> conditions, only when we will have described the state of the
> whole Universe at instant t; all parts of that universe can
> more or less influence the phenomenon that must occur at
> instant t + dt. "
>
> Which clearly highlights the fact that he thinks that the
> future cannot be predicted with any precision, and moreover,
> that we will never be able to do it.
Thank you for your kind effort of translation. Perhaps at least you and
me completely agree with Poincaré in this respect.
Eckard Blumschein
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