Subject: Re: Creation VS Evolution
From: mls@panix.com (Michael L. Siemon)
Date: Thu, 02 Jan 1997 23:40:50 -0500
In article <32CCA9EC.7C54@erols.com>, Adrian Brunyate
wrote:
+Wilkins asserts two things: first, he disagrees with my assesment of the
+distinction between science and religon; and second, he disagrees whith
my statement that evolution should be discarded if a counterexample is
found.
Wilkins knows what he is talking about. It is rather less obvious whether
you do...
+I wrote:
+
+> >The distinction between science and religon is arbitrary (hence really
+> >should not be discussued), but well defined.
This is bizarre at best, and certainly ill-defined. What the *hell* do
you think you are saying? There is no common sense of the word "arbitrary"
that has the force you seem to want to grant it.
+> Religon is a belief system that is not
+> science in a form resembling that today.
That religion is a "belief system" we may grant (I find such usages to
be rather dubious, as religion is a cultural system [cf. Geertz] in which
practice and other symbologies enter quite as much as [and sometimes more
than] "beliefs". In any case, science is *not* any kind of "belief system"
either "today" or any other day. [Science *is* a cultural system in the
terms of Geertzian anthropology; but that does not equate the many kinds
of cultural systems with each other.] You have yet to make *any* kind of
reasonable case for your claim that the distinction of religion and science
is "arbitrary." I frankly cannot comprehend what you intend by this, nor do
I see any way of making your words into something plausibly descriptive of
reality. What *do* you mean, for God's sake?
You also fail to understand his rebuttal to simplistic "Popperian" ideas
about falsification:
+> While I appreciate your viewpoint, I think it is wrong. A theory is not
+> abandoned on the basis of a single anomaly, something that has been
+> appreciated since Kuhn, but was noted by Pierre Duhem in 1915. As
+> Dennett said, Darwinian evolution theory routinely takes the challenge
+> to explain things that its opponents say cannot be explained, but the
+> explanation may be some time coming.
+
+I was refering to actual anomalies. An observation that *appears* to
+contradict a well established theory generally does not. If a signifigant
+number of unexplained observations acumulates, or if these alleged anomalies
+are sufficiently baffling, THEN the theory would need replacing because the
+probability that at least one of the observations would be a true
counterexample would be very high.
You should drop the probabilistic flummery, as that is irrelevant -- but
otherwise you are here just agreeing with Mr. Wilkins. [I will note that
a probabilistic formulation in Bayesian terms *might* deal with these
issues; I'll leave that to Bill Jefferys to address, if he so desires!]
You need to be a bit more self-critical about this notion of "actual"
anomalies. In point of historical fact, the anomalies (apparent or actual)
that matter are those that *bother* practicing scientists. This is yet
another instance where a Geertzian perspective may be relevant -- you
have to understand something about the system to have any idea what does
matter to the users thereof. And, as a point of some considerable philo-
sophical relevance, the kinds of observations that are ignored versus the
one that are central help to define what a given science is really about
(versus what it may label itself as, in a University catalog) and what it
actually takes as its domain of interest.
--
Michael L. Siemon mls@panix.com
"Green is the night, green kindled and apparelled.
It is she that wlaks among astronomers."
-- Wallace Stevens
Subject: Re: is it possible to make holograms with non coh light?
From: 745532603@compuserve.com (Michael Ramsey)
Date: 3 Jan 1997 04:48:33 GMT
In article <5aevp0$lj6@ren.cei.net>, lkh@cei.net says...
>
>745532603@compuserve.com (Michael Ramsey) enunciated:
>
>>In article <32C9D644.2ECD@pop.erols.com>, cwthomas@pop.erols.com says...
>>>
>>>Hi;
>>>Thanks for reading this. Does anyone know if its possible to view or
>>>create holograms with noncoherent light???
>>>
>
>>C. W.,
>> holograms are made using coherent light; it's important to capture the
phase
>>relationships since this is key to the effect.
>
>>Look in the literature for "white light" holograms. These are holograms
>>which can be viewed using normal light. I have one of a stack of dimes
that
>>I made back in my optics class up in my bedroom.
>[snip]
>Doesn't it get crowded holding an optics class in your bedroom?
I must have misplaced a pair of parentheses in that sentence. Now let me
see, where have they run off to? (Ouch! Dang optic bench; I always bump my
shins when I get out of bed in the middle of the night.)
--Best regards,
--Mike
Subject: Re: Frequency-Space paradox?
From: Craig DeForest
Date: Thu, 02 Jan 1997 23:55:40 -0500
Robert. Fung wrote:
> meron@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
> >
> > In article <32C82A1A.2421@citicorp.com>, "Robert. Fung"
> > > what decides how these are paired ? Certain pairs
> > > don't seem to occur, like frequency and momentum.
> >
> > As Peter wrote, the pairing arises naturally once you've a
> > Langrangian formulation. For any generalized coordinate q, the
> > conjugate "momentum" is given by:
> > p = dL/d(q_dot)
> > where q_dot = dq/dt and the derivatives in the formula for p are
> > partial derivatives.
> It seems there should be a more fundemental reason.
There is. The reason is a very beautiful mathematical theorem called
"Noether's Theorem" (by Emma Noether, a late-19th-century
mathematician who would undoubtedly be more famous if she weren't
distressingly female for her era). Noether's Theorem links
fundamental symmetries with conservation laws. In general, under
the Lagrangian classical mechanical formulation, Noether proved
that symmetry under a particular 'q' of a system results in
conservation of the associated 'p' (as defined by meron above).
Because of the definition of the 'p's, and the fact that the
Lagrangian carries units of energy, you can immediately read off
that a given 'q' and its conjugate 'p' always multiply to units of
action (energy times time), the same units as Planck's constant.
There's a relevant article in the "Feynman Lectures" that describes
this very notion. Check out articles I-52 and II-19 from those
books.
It turns out, of course, that all these conjugate pairs are deeply
tied up in the quantum mechanical nature of our Universe: one way
to re-invent quantum mechanics is to describe the world classically
(say, in the Lagrangian formalism), then spuriously introduce
non-commutativity into some of the equations. If you (for no
good reason :-) decide that qp =/= pq for some variables q and
their conjugate momenta p, all of quantum mechanics drops out of
the Lagrangian formalism like a free lunch from a brown paper bag.
--
I work for Stanford University, not the government.
Opinions are my own! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute, dilute! O.K.!
Humans may email me as "zowie (at) urania . nascom . nasa . gov"
rather than the header address.
