From: Steve Peterson (speterson@fast.net)
Date: Mon Jan 06 2003 - 15:49:18 GMT
Science buffs and rebuffers,
The following quote of Einstein that I read in Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu
Li Masters (a book about quantum mechanics) has had a profound influence on
how I think about science (as has Pirsig's campfire "ghost" story):
³Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not,
however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our
endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to
understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving
hands, even hears the ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he
is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be
responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure
his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will
never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot
even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.²
What Einstein is saying is that the philosophically-minded scientist never
assumes that his/her explanation is reality. Human words and mental
constructs can never fully represent reality, at best they point to reality.
The Bohr model of an atom (electrons orbiting a nucleus in solar system
fashion) is not what an atom is. It is a tool for imaging the invisible, and
it is a useful one, but ultimately it doesnıt even make sense to talk about
what an electron looks like. The range of wavelengths of visible light is
too large relative to the size of an electron to make the idea of seeing an
electron meaningful. The Bohr model of the atom like any physical theory is
a model of realityan analogy. An analogy draws a comparison to create
insight, but by definition an analogy is never factually true, so it is
never meaningful to ask if an analogy is correct.
Try to think of what it would mean to directly compare a mental construct
like ³force equals mass times acceleration² to reality. You should hear the
sound of one hand clapping. Einstein ³cannot even understand the meaning of
such a comparison,² but those who subscribe to Scientism think they can.
To me, Scientism is confusing scientific models of reality with reality
itself.
To continue Einsteinıs analogy, force, mass, and acceleration are parts of
our model watch, and the relationship F = ma makes predictions that are
consistent with our experiences of the Universe Watch. While in the watch
analogy we could imagine opening up the Universe Watch to compare its inner
workings to that of our model watch, such a comparison makes no sense at all
when we step back from Einsteinıs analogy and try to imagine comparing a
scientific theory to the actual universe which has no case to be opened or
inner mechanism to peer at. So it never makes sense to say that a
scientific model is True, instead its usefulness in making predictions is
the measure of its worth.
Steve
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