[P&N] Chapter 2: Inventing Laws of Nature
Citation: Edward A. Lee, 2017: Plato and the Nerd - the creative partnership of humans and technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
This chapter literally blew my mind. Thanks to my ignorance, I tried to find the flaws in the logics of these astonishing statements but failed, and therefore accepted these great thoughts.
Alexander von Humboldt & The Unknown Knowns
The same as Lee, or even worse(I don’t even know the parks and streets named after this guy), I know nothing about this man, either. I was shocked that it was this man who “gave us our concept of nature itself”. According to Andrea Wulf, he is a founding father of environmentalism, a visionary who predicted man-made climate change as early as 1800, the first to understand the forest as an ecosystem and the first to articulate the notion of the “nature “ itself as a “great chain of causes and effects”(connectedness of nature).
After all these great insights into the nature, why is he so largely forgotten by modern people? Wulf suggests, that he suffered from his Prussian nationality. He was with the thugs in two world wars by his birthright. It does make sense.
Both world wars of the 20th century, cast long shadows, and neither Britain nor America were places for the celebration of a great German mind.
- Wulf
Though his name may be forgotten in most English speaking countries, it is obviously not forgotten in Germany and the great ideas behind this great man also marched on.
Nowadays, the idea of “connectedness” has faded into our unconsciousness called “Unknown Knowns”. This is not about something about the potential of human beings. This is about something really fundamental and unconscious in our minds. It helps us to better understand the universe while limits our perception within a specific box as well. It has its perils and its merits.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, disrupted the prevailing view of science as “development-by-accumulation” (Kuhn, 1962). Instead of an accretion of discovered facts about the world, a scientific discipline is founded on a “paradigm,” a conceptual framework that practitioners use, often unknowingly, to interpret observations and develop theories.
…
A paradigm becomes so widely accepted and strongly held that its subjects no longer know it is there.
What is amazing to me here is the idea of “paradigm shift” - “That scientific revolution, the truly momentous advances that occur from time to time, come about through paradigm shifts rather than through accretion of knowledge.” In this case, limits as one paradigm may have, we can “shift” to another paradigm to complement that. Right as I expect, Kuhn argues that scientific paradigms are incommensurable.
Models of Nature
Human beings alway tend to find explanations for everything they find interesting, which is human nature. In the process of finding explanations, models are born, which is completely the product of thinking, impalpable but charming.
It never occurred to me that this equation may never hold in real life: \[ \sqrt{x^2 + y^2 + z^2} = r \] It is because that this equation only holds when the sphere is perfect. But such perfect sphere does not really exist in the real physical world. It is called a Platonic sphere. Although there is no real instance in real life that perfectly obey this equation, it is darn “useful”, which is models all about - “No models are true, but some of them are useful.”
Such examples are very common:
- Ohm’s Law, where the notion of a resistor is a Platonic Ideal Form. \[ i = v/R \]
If R is an empirically determined value, then Ohm’s law becomes a tautology. It is trivially true of every electrical circuit by simply using R as defined in this equation.
…
I see no choice but to conclude that Ohm’s law is a human-constructed model, not a fundamental truth about nature for no physical object in the world obeys it. - Faraday’s law, where the notion of inductance is also a Platonic Ideal Form. \[ v(t) = L \frac{di(t)}{dt} \]
Scientists and Engineers
… a scientist constructs models to help understand the target. An engineer, in contrast, constructs targets to emulate the properties of a model. An engineer uses or invents models for things that do not exist and then tries to construct physical objects(targets) to for which the models are reasonably faithful.
Scientists and engineers are good buddies. Due to Chapter 1, I would argue, these two terms may also subject to so called “Platonicity” for a man can be both scientist and engineer. And in most cases, doing either one of both well requires doing the other one well, too. So, do not neglect any one of them.