🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <snodgras.715541559@crash> Snodgrass writes:
>Mathematics is for description. Scientific models are not
>based on mathematics, they are _described_ using mathematics.

There are plenty of scientists around who believe that mathematics is
simply a tool for controlling or predicting our environment, who
believe in some kind of paradigm theory, who deplore those who accept
the current dogma blindly---and who also believe that the mathematics
of relativity and quantum mechanics is a powerful tool for control.
They might agree with you that it is wrong to think of time dilation or
wave functions or manifolds as "real" (whatever that means) but they
still accept the mathematics involved.

This is what I mean by saying that having the "correct" philosophy of
science is irrelevant to actually doing science and making progress.
Why is it that so many scientists who share your rejection of realism
and embrace the view of science as an instrument of control nevertheless
continue to cling to relativity?  If relativity really gives them no
control, would not control-hungry scientists (of which there are many)
notice this?  That they haven't means that either relativity brings
control, or that having the "right" philosophy of science doesn't cure
blindness to absurdity.

>As for the "very great success of QM", compared to what?
>Geocentricity was successful. The flint arrowhead too. Or
>conversely, shall we list its failures? Has it had very great
>success becoming consistent with the other great subjectivist
>doctrine, relatitivty? Has it had very great success in avoiding
>paradox? In creating a humanly comprehensible cosmology?

Every theory has failures.  So what?  Should we reject every theory that
has failures and thereby reject everything?  If some theories are acceptable
in spite of their weaknesses, why not QM?

>The new physics will be brought down by experiment, however. There's
>no other way.

What do you mean by "brought down"?  Completely rejected?  If so then
it seems that there is a serious problem with your theory of paradigms.
In a paradigm shift the old paradigm is rarely totally discarded.
Newtonian mechanics is an old paradigm but has survived into relativity
and quantum mechanics as a limiting case of these theories.  You are
advocating total rejection of these theories.  Such a wild paradigm shift
is unprecedented and there is no reason to expect that it will occur.
More reasonable is to conjecture that the next paradigm shift will retain
all of relativity and quantum mechanics as special cases.

It seems that you're totally convinced that the new physics is wrong.  NOW
who's being open-minded?  :-)
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949