Science: Progressing Wisdom

Abstract: Pseudo scientific considerations by one of the USA’s most famous pundits are demolished (with the help of Krugman). Science defines progress (all the more as it requires ever more conscience). An occasion is found to reveal that physics’ relativity theory is relatively old.

REASON IS NOT SPASTIC:

The continuity of science, or, more generally of natural observations, or even of the most atavistic wisdom, is not appreciated enough. To understand this is important: fast buck artists and the worst potentates, Caligula, Nero, or Putin style, and the most terrible errors of policies, says the lethally unsustainable energy or thoughts systems we are presently enjoying, generally relate from age old wisdom denied.

A particular example of this consists into dismissing the notions of scientific consensus, and scientific progress.

Extending Galileo’s Relativity Experiments To Light

Galileo had tried to determine the speed of light, but it was too fast. However, once one knows light is a wave, one realizes that, thanks to precision manufacturing, much can be done deep inside a ship, as Galileo used to.

An example I use all the time is that Buridan discovered inertia and used it for establishing the heliocentric system. In 1320 CE, two full centuries before Copernic… Copernic just studied Buridan’s theory. So what had happened in the meantime? The Catholic Church, with the collaboration of Louis XI (the encaging king), outlawed Buridan around 1470 CE. The truth came out, because greater Poland/Czech/Ukraine (at the time) was inimical to Rome’s religious fanaticism (so Buridan was mandatory in Cracow, where Copernic studied).

So reason is not spastic. It’s the active intervention of intellectual fascism that makes reason spastic.

DENYING REASON, A USA MAIN STREAM SPECIALTY:

Making reason spastic in appearance is useful to those who want to deny reason. Such as all those who depend for their comfort upon a small oligarchy holding the world in its talons.

Science, well done, is the temple of reason. Reason inconveniences plutocrats. This is why enormous propaganda, for decades, denied, in the USA, that evolution happened (something established by Lamarck and his colleagues before 1800 CE).

So it’s no wonder that one of the USA’s top gargoyles (festering at the Wall Street Journal and Fox) dismissed the global warming consensus. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer is “not impressed by consensus.” Krauthammer is no dummy, he just plays one on TV. Like Goebbels, he has studied stuff. He is a trained psychiatrist.

Krauthammer appeared on Fox to heap spite on the Obama administration argument that the “97 percent of scientists who study this issue, who agree that climate change is real and it is the result of human activity.” The hammer of the Kraut retorted that:

“99 percent of physicists were convinced that space and time were fixed until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not… I’m not impressed by numbers. I’m not impressed by consensus…These are things that people negotiate the way you would negotiate a bill, because the science is unstable…Because in the case of climate, the models are changeable. And because climate is so complicated,” Krauthammer continued, “The idea that we, who have trouble forecasting what’s going to happen on Saturday in the climate, could pretend to be predicting what’s going to happen in 30, 40 years, is absurd.

The answer to this is what I call “Catastrophic Logic” (which allows air travel). But let’s Krugman roll:

KRUGMAN: EINSTEINIAN EVOLUTION, NOT REVOLUTION:

“As Chait notes, this logic would lead you to dismiss all science — hey, maybe tomorrow someone will write a paper showing that the germ theory of disease is all wrong, so why bother with sterilized instruments in the hospital? But there’s something else wrong here — the complete misunderstanding of what Einstein did.

Yes, Einstein showed that space and time were relative concepts. But did he show that everything physicists had been doing up to that point was all wrong? Of course not — classical physics was an incredibly useful and successful field, and almost none of what it said had to change in light of relativity. True, Einstein showed that it was a special case — but one that applied almost perfectly at the speeds and accelerations we encounter in normal conditions

So if we had an Einstein equivalent in climate science, he or she would find that existing models were right in 99.9% of what they assert, even though under extreme conditions they might be misleading.

Or maybe the simpler way to put it is, Dr. Krauthammer, you’re no Einstein.”

To be fair about climate science, it depends upon too many factors to be precise beyond the fact we are for sure, lest we do a few things real fast, and real ferocious, that we are facing one of the greatest catastrophe for a few million years, or maybe all the way back to Snowball Earth, more than 600 million years ago.

Now to expand on what Krugman said.

RELATIVITY RELATIVELY OLD:

Einstein’s work in Relativity was such a puny advance to what was known before that, nowadays, Einstein is not viewed by competent historians of science as the main architect of “Relativity”.

It’s also why Einstein did not get a Nobel for Relativity, but for the idea that light travelled as photons (and other contributions to physics)… An idea I do not believe, by the way, to be 100% correct, although Einstein was close enough to explain the photoelectric effect with it!)

The inventor of the idea of Relativity is Galileo, who described it in great detail in the early Seventeenth Century. Galileo observed that, inside a cabin deep in a ship one cannot tell if the ship is moving or not. Galileo suggested in a long list, all the experiences one can think of. Observe the connection between new technology and new science: the ship itself is the (non-) accelerator of the 17C.

For a while, in the late Nineteenth Century, some physicists thought that light was not respecting Relativity.

However, when that was tested by American physicists Michelson and Morley with an interferometer, it was found that light could not detect absolute motion.

The mystery was explained when it was found by Lorentz and Fitzgerald that length contracted in the direction of very high speed motion. That the laws of electrodynamics (summarized and completed by Maxwell) did not respect normal space-time transformations was made amply clear by Poincare’, who proclaimed the “Principle of Relativity” (1904), after publishing the mass equal energy relation in 1900, and discovering the “Poincare’ group”.

Poincare’, the most famous mathematician, insisted that Lorentz get the Nobel Prize in physics. Later, Einstein resumed all this in 1905, starting from Poincare”s idea that the fact that the speed of light was constant was a fundamental law of nature (as the work of Einstein was published by Planck in German rather than French, Dutch, or English, it got great renown).

Thus Relativity Theory was fully in a continuity inaugurated by Galileo 400 years ago. Indeed.

SCIENCE DEFINES PROGRESS:

We still use the optics found by the Greeks, and, the idea of numerals, including the zero, was developed by them and the Indians.

Greek thinkers also discerned the idea of evolution, suggested we evolved from fishes, an idea Lamarck revived by ascertaining that apes were our direct ancestor (to the hatred of the church).

In truth, science is as old as our species. We always add new layers. That’s why we have to be suspicious when some come, and claim that all what we knew before is wrong (as the cackling Multiverse turkeys do with both physics and philosophy).

The progress the genus Homo has made, is, first of all, defined by the science we have. All the more as it requires an ever more sophisticated conscience.

Patrice Aymé