Thread View: sci.philosophy.tech
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Started by Hakki Kocabas
Thu, 07 Jan 1993 23:17
Re: Philosophy before science ? (was : S
Author: Hakki Kocabas
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1993 23:17
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1993 23:17
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> However my son ! Facts are never presecribed by theory, facts are the > results of observation. However my Son ! you can't go for observation to hunt facts without knowing what you are going to hunt...:-) > For example, electrons were there much before quantum mechanics > (at least 30 years before) when they were observed in Braun tubes > and similar devices. By the way, your TV and your terminal Whose electrons ?! > (except if LCD) is a Braun tube, and a > ray of electrons produces the image. No quantum mechanics is > necessary to observe this fact ... :-) WoW ! So it is a fact that my CRT emits electrons, is that right ? but fact according to what theory ? How can I prove that my CRT emits electrons, according to what theory ? > Your (wrong) statement that "if we didn't invent QM then we wouldn't have > electrons" is a nice example which shows the difference between a > fact (based on observation) and a speculation "prescribed" by > what you (but not scientists) call a "theory", namely your > conviction that theories precede facts ... :-) It is not my conviction that theories precede facts, but it is the rule of the game that we choose to look for a fact according to a theory in our scientific activities ... just because we want to know what we are talking about and what we expect to observe and be in agreement in our language when we use it during and after and before we set up an experimentation again in accordance with the theory that we agreed on to simplify our communications in our scientific activities.. > I guess you many :-) signs mean to show that you have some theory > which comes before all your facts. Can you at least spell it out in more > detail, to enlighten us more ? :-) pip (pass in peace) > Christoph Schiller
Re: Philosophy before science ? (was : S
Author: schiller c
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1993 08:48
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1993 08:48
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Hakki_Kocabas@kcbbs.gen.nz (Hakki Kocabas) writes: >> For example, electrons were there much before quantum mechanics >> (at least 30 years before) when they were observed in Braun tubes >> and similar devices. By the way, your TV and your terminal > >Whose electrons ?! > >> (except if LCD) is a Braun tube, and a >> ray of electrons produces the image. No quantum mechanics is >> necessary to observe this fact ... :-) > >WoW ! >So it is a fact that my CRT emits electrons, is that right ? >but fact according to what theory ? How can I prove that >my CRT emits electrons, according to what theory ? > Electrons are a good counterexample to your idea. They were discovered by chance, when people were playing around with vacuum tubes with a little gas in them, and high voltage. I guess you have seen electron rays in high school, where you can see the nice blue colour (blue if the rest gas is air, as usual) emitted by the ray inside the tube, when you look at it from the side. Electrons were discovered like this, noting a coloured ray in a vacuum tube. No theory preceded the observation. You can say that you need a theory of what a colour is, and of what glas is, but we can leave this for a later thread ... :-) In high schools they show this experiment in the same way, because it shows that by putting a power supply to to pieces of metal in a vacuum, you get a beam of something. This something is called "electron". Later, you can start to measure the mass of it (yes, you need the concept of mass to do that), the charge (idem) etc. This fortuitious observation was the reason we say (and you too) that electron's were *discovered*, and not *invented* or *constructed*. Christoph Schiller
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