🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5AUG199216205357@zeus.tamu.edu> dwr2560@zeus.tamu.edu (RING, DAVID WAYNE) writes:
>
>But this is beside the point. Real people who ask why the sky is blue are
>taking for granted that the night sky is dark since every child knows this.

So a scientist cannot ask this question unless he wants to cease being real?
You are in danger of fragmenting physics into a disconnected set of fragmentary
explanations valid only in the neighborhood of legitimate observations. This
kind of physics has very strange versions of things like the second law of
thermodynamics.

My main objection to taking things for granted since they are common is
that the common observations deserve the priority in scientific explanation,
since the common observations are the most "confirmed". Not all of them are
so easy to explain, either.

>And I claim it is OK to ignore supernovae, even though without them there
>would not be an earth.

Not really. And you ultimately have to explain where the atmosphere comes from,
etc. My point is that the question "why is the sky blue?" is a question about
a view of reality. When you take it for granted that the source of the daytime
illumination is the sun, wou are explaining one observation (sky is blue) in
terms of another one (daylight is sunlight). Such explanation is actually
like free association - it is a matter of choice where to stop.

As far as I can tell, you can't get anywhere in physics without making any
of these choices. The consequence is that what you call physics is what you
have chosen to call physics.

Note that the scientific method does not make these choices for you. The
scientific method is essentially intact even if you decide that 'observation'
means conducting an a priori computation using Conway's cellular automaton.
In one sense this is obvious - you can do science on some restricted piece
of the 'universe', but the upshot is that you cannot use the scientific method
to guarantee that your choices of observations are in any sense 'complete',
since the method is perfectly happy with a restricted choice.

In view of this, where is it reasonable to stop? Is the widespread feeling that
the universe is 'understandable' (Cf. remarks of Einstein, Wigner) anything
more than the fact that we can explain what we have chosen to limit our
explanations to?

If physicist were happy to stop, why do they want either an SSC or the money
to be spent in some other part of physics?

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt