When Science Went Modern | Hacker News Reader

When Science Went Modern

hedgehogreview.com

32 pointsallthings8 comments

>when relativity theory and quantum mechanics not only overturned the achievements of Galileo and Newton but also challenged our deepest intuitions about space, time, and causation.

Causation stayed the same from Galilean to Lorentzian relativity. It remains as a touchstone of things working as expected.

Yes. All these historians inspired by Kuhn's construction of the "revolutions" are completely missing what the discoveries are, and are misusing the words like "overturning." There are also a lot of philosophers that also simply don't understand what they talk about.

The Newtonian Laws are still good enough for most of the common calculations of the effects of gravity, where they aren't enough we are using the improvements by Einstein, but technically these are still the improvements for the calculations in the extreme ranges. So it's not that it's practical to say that what Newton is "overturned" when one still needs his very formulas every day.

Not really. The explanations of reality are entirely different thus reaching different conclusions (even if the different conclusions only happen on extreme events). That's what the historians mean when talking about overturning theories. It's not really surprising that Newton and Einstein explain most experimental data, otherwise, one of them would be a crappy theory.

To put a simple example, geocentric model not only was at least as accurate for calculations of celestial bodies positions than initial heliocentric models, but it was actually simpler, but it's easier to say the model was overturned because the difference in the explanation is obvious.

In Newton/Einstein case, the difference is on the underlying concepts (the most obvious, the speed of light limit), but it's really easy to see that even if equations approximate on some range, they're not equivalent.

If these narrations were first introduced in the internet posts on HN and the “fine” historians would post under the title “Newton overturned” their post would be flagged at least as a clickbait. Because we use the same Newton formulas today for the same kinds of calculations for which Newton used them: to calculate the motions of the planets in the Solar system.

For all the observations and measurements available at Newton's time, his formulas were enough. Once we managed to measure some extreme behaviors like the constant speed of light in different directions (by Michelson), something better was needed for these extreme cases which would still get the same results for all previous existing observations! That's exactly how Einstein presented his work at the time.

So the new formulas are improvements, and except for the extreme cases the new formulas produce the same results like Newton's.

All that talk about "overturning" is just trolling, and Kuhn is the chief one, "par excellence". Or as 'whatshisface' correctly named, it's the plain "false narrative." The only one from those mentioned by Kuhn who was ever actually "overturned" was Aristotle, but nobody can call him a scientist, for he is the one who didn't like experiments to learn something or prove his thoughts. Kuhn specifically tried to come to the terms with Aristotle's work and then projected his confusion to everything else in his "seminal" work. And that was accepted and even more bastardized by every "philosopher" or "historian" who reads only other "philosophers" and "historians" but never tries to understand the topic about which he writes. It turned out to be the basis for "everything is relative, including the scientific conclusions and the truth is also relative because those who don't understand the topic will not accept the arguments" which is as deep as "math is hard let's go shopping." I definitely share Feynman's opinion that the "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." (Yes, I feel anger when I write about said "historians").

So contrary to Aristotle, there were enough ancient Greek thinkers who did make real scientific conclusions:

Just an example: around 2200 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus

Hipparchus estimated the distance to the Moon in the Earth radii to between 62 and 80 (depending on the method he used, as he intentionally used two different). Today's measurements are between 55 and 64.

Also around 2200 years ago (note the pattern, a lot was done before Brian was born), some 240 years Befowe Bwian, Eratosthenes measured the Earth's circumference to almost exactly to what we know today (if I remember, when one honestly checks what he claimed, his error was only around 5%). Etc.

Claudius Ptolemy was of course also not wrong and his calculations were scientific: his formulas also worked for the measurements available to him, exactly because one can write formulas using different origin of the coordinate system. It's the Church and its dogmatic behavior that made big fuss with the claim that the Earth is "special" (because specially treated by the magic deity). And Aristotle also noted that the speed of Earth rotation would be "too big" because it would produce too much wind, if I remember. But in this case that was a bit of scientific-like reasoning, as he also had to have an idea about the approximate circumference of the Earth and he had to calculate the speed with which the surface rotates (sitting in our chairs, we still move a thousand miles per hour only due to the Earth's rotation). I say scientific-like because the word "science" simply didn't exist in the time of Aristotle.

The problem is that Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a lot easier to understand than any theory that was involved in any of the supposed revolutions. Reading false narratives will always be an easier route to gratification than reading actual knowledge.

And sadly, there are whole professions whose job description can be summarized as "spread the false narratives." People are paid to repeat them and attack those that question them:

https://milkweed.org/book/the-war-on-science

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/War_on_Science

Quantum mechanics, while not overturning anything about causation, certainly made us think less naively about it.

I will interpret the label of modern to mean that current science is somewhat directionless on many fronts overwhelmed with an explosion of conflicting theoretical findings that are difficult to verify or disprove or categorize their utility meaningfully—progressing at a snail’s pace as a result. Or perhaps this more accurately is post-modern science.

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