What I Said About Circles And Triangles The Other Day I Didn't Make It Up, You Know

I would have thought a pile of sciencey atheists like you guys would be more familiar with that icon of sciencey atheists, Hume.

The situation with Hume is more complicated, but also arguably clearer because the gap is addressed directly. In his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) he defended the certainty of arithmetic and algebra, but withheld it from geometry on the grounds that our knowledge of points and lines is inherently imprecise. The truths of Euclidean geometry were not truths about the world but of an abstract system, and would remain true if there were no figures in the world that correspond to their Euclidean equivalents. The isosceles triangle theorem, which asserts the equality of two sides of a triangle having two equal angles, is to be understood, Hume suggested, as the claim that in the given circumstances, two sides of a triangle are approximately equal—and interpreted this way the claim is certain (see Badici 2011 and de Pierris 2012).

Only, I lie, I didn't even expect you'd know about anything like that.  As you mock the entire field of philosophy, I don't expect you would even know the name, Hume.

In what you are so obviously not getting from what I said the other day, I was making a distinction between the pretenses of absolute knowledge and what we really face in the real world.   Even the absolute knowledge is not really absolute,    And if there is no, actual, perfect circle or perfect physical representation of the relationships that give rise to numbers such as the square root of two or pi, then those are abstractions, not actual, physical things in the physical universe and all of the formulae that use such numbers are, even at their very, very best, an approximation as a description of the real world, of nature, of absolute reality.  The ideal and absolute physical expression of them may, well, exist nowhere in nature.  And that's not to mention the implications of the curvature of space such as we're always told about.  The existence of such relationships are derived from idealized, absolutely flat space which doesn't even really exist.  Or are we not supposed to think about that, either?   As Heisenberg was dealing with the very tiny which can be evidenced, directly, apparently such questions might be more relevant at those resolutions while they can be made to fit and fudge for our purposes in more everyday contexts. And he was dealing with physics that is capable of material confirmation.  When you're dealing with tiny things, approximations can turn into enormous gaps and the things he was thinking about, the quantum level of matter at which so much of our every-day assumptions seem to go out the window, why can we assume those will hold in the infinitesimally smaller and entirely unobservable and non-confirmable level that today's celebrity physicists and cosmologists play with?

Thinking about that is fun, to me, at least.

You see, I remember what it said in my high school geometry textbook, that the figures of geometry, the basis of all of those formulas, were not to be found in nature but were idealized abstractions, only they put it in other words.  As I recall, Bertrand Russell, another icon of sciencey atheists made a similar statement somewhere in his voluminous oeuvre, as we say up here in the wilds of Oxford county.  And what they say coheres logically based on the inescapable imprecision built into the act of measurement and observation - as we were taught by our poor, beleagured 7th grade math teacher who deserves a place in heaven for putting up with us brats.   Some of us even learned enough to be ashamed of how we acted back then.

Along with that, when I am told such things as,  "One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the natural world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable," by such as Jacob Bronowski in explaining the work of such folk as Werner Heisenberg and other physicists, many of whom he knew, I take them at their word.  I figure if that is one of the achievements of physics in the last century made by some of the great names of physics and science, you're supposed to believe it's really true.

I am surprised that it hasn't had more of an influence on the fundamentalist thinking of so many in science, especially physics, especially of guys like Larry Krauss who as recently as 2006 wasn't a materialist fundamentalist and could be quite reasonable about the limits of science which can only address a limited area of reality but who, I'm told, became buddies with Christopher Hitchens, so notably NOT a physicist,  and he was converted to his present day fundamentalist faith, which leads him to hold to such nonsensical ideas as that the universe made itself before it existed out of a nothing that is not a nothing but physical laws which he believes existed before the physical matter - the only stuff that leads to the human formulation of those laws - existed, as well.   I think if he had bothered to take more philosophy he might understand that what he and other such fundamentalists as Stephen Hawking say on that is illogical balderdash equaling and vastly surpassing the most absurd God of the gaps arguments. Only I've stopped being surprised that today's eminent scientists can say such nonsense because, as the historian of science, Paul Feyerabend, famously put it,

 The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth.

And I'm not hesitant to say that Larry Krauss and Stephen Hawking ain't no Richard Feynman. Neither are they Einsteins nor even Schrödingers,  nor  Bohrs, though Larry Krauss is working on becoming a bore, something I used to think he didn't have in him.

For more on that, you might like to look at the quotes from Einstein in this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  I think the first one sums up the situation that leads today's eminent physicists and, even more so the cosmologists, to say some of the really stupid stuff they say so regularly.

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth. (Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944.

Today's prominent, celebrity atheist-scientists have given up the role of mere artisan and specialist and gone down to ideological hack, looking for their next mention in Huffington Post, Salon or some other media opportunity.   And the blog flies of E-ton ain't no celebrity atheist-physicists.

How is Larry Krauss's "black holes can't possibly form" idea doing among the high and sciency, these days?  It's not even ten years old but I haven't noticed it being taken seriously.   I wonder if its failure to take among them has something to do with his descent into celebr-atheist hackery.  You don't think it could have something to do with that?   Atheist hackery is a golden-parachute career of many a past-it sci-guy and has been since Bertrand Russell pioneered that route.

It's too bad that he couldn't do more with it, I thought it raised an interesting question about how things could happen if time stopped at the event horizon.  Even if it were to prove wrong, it would be an interesting question to deal with, I'd be interested in how they'd get around it.  But if he's right about that and all the stuff they've said about black holes turns out to be scholastic speculation,  I wonder what it would do to the physics around and based on black holes, not to mention the disaster for the popular reputation of science such a massive bait and switch operation would be.  I'd probably point out that it was a rather massive example of what I was talking about in that post you think is so highly risible as well.

Hey, if someone of the stature of Larry Krauss says there's reason to be skeptical of black holes and so everything that such great names as have been built on black holes, such as Hawkings have said about them, who am I to doubt it?   At least what he said on that count coheres logically and doesn't redefine words to mean their opposite.  Here's a clue for you, any statement that depends on the redefinition of a word to mean its opposite, such as "nothing" probably ain't going nowhere good.

As an aside, if black holes get pushed into the boneyard of discontinued science I wonder what it will do to the posthumous reputation of the brilliant philosopher of physics, Eddington, another great figure of classical physics who was also quite a brilliant philosopher.  I'm not a student of his conflict with his student and friend, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, but a lot of the derisive things said about Eddington are based in his skepticism about black holes.  You wonder how Larry Krauss has, so far, escaped that same derision over his skepticism.  What do the low and sciencey have to say about that?

Update:  Oh, the hilarity, in the approximately 8 comments, and counting, that Simels has left here his last one scolds me on a lack of seriousness, which I could, if I went through my trash files, match to his and his buddies condemnations of me for a lack of frivolity.   Simels, STEVE SIMELS IS TRASHING ME FOR A LACK OF SERIOUSNESS!   Oh, yeah, I'll publish that one for those who think I'm making that up, too.