Re: Mind's Eye Re: Science and religion in modernity

And some feel science is boring unless it can be translated into
everyday life in meaningful ways.

On Oct 20, 3:50 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We travel at 60k plus miles an hour in the solar system and 500K
> through the galaxy in our system.  I tend to believe we can measure
> this kind of thing and that we are always left with questions like
> Allan's about before after and beyond.  Hitch-hikers' Guide probably
> gets to the irony.  Quite a few of us discount priests and text-
> authority without giving up on spirit.  Spinoza remains the clearest
> example.
>
> Creation stories end up in infinite regress - scientific and otherwise
> - and beg the question of 'what came before that' by positing a
> fiction of something that needs no creator or origin.  I don't believe
> god whipped up the Grand Canyon, but in the limits of our thinking
> something whipped up something that led to the evolution of our planet
> etc.  I tend to think science rather than literature may lead to a
> different way of seeing this and surviving until this is possible.
> Literature is generally bland and lacks depth - though there are great
> moments.  I suspect one of the key issues is raised by Gabby a lot of
> the time - we need to replace current authority and know the irony is
> such attempts just produce the same old business as usual (WB Yeates
> was good on this).
>
> The stuff on thermodynamics above is very similar in method to
> Einstein and what we might now term Wittgensteinian deconstruction -
> trying to find the common elements and mistakes in various competing
> arguments and readdress the apparent conflict.  Molly has some words
> on this too.
>
> On 20 Oct, 20:37, Molly <mollyb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > google books had a copy up online, it may still be there.  Used book
> > outlets like Alibris will allow you to put in the book you are searching
> > for and notify you when a copy becomes available for sale by a store that
> > uses their service.  Other than that, you may find some good articles about
> > it with excerpts online.  for Einstein fans, it is a favorite.
>
> > On Saturday, October 20, 2012 10:14:03 AM UTC-4, Allan Heretic wrote:
>
> > > how does a person get a hold of the original text..??
> > > Allan
>
> > > On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Molly <moll...@gmail.com <javascript:>>wrote:
>
> > >> The Einstein "The World As I See It," originally began as his ponderance
> > >> of something greater than science, and acknowledgement of spirit in action.
> > >>  The original edition is the best, as his editors put together texts with
> > >> lectures for him under the same name, and those books have an entirely
> > >> different flavor.
>
> > >> From my view, "knowing" is not the end of it, but the beginning.
>
> > >> On Saturday, October 20, 2012 8:09:19 AM UTC-4, gabbydott wrote:
>
> > >>> Honestly, Vam, I don't think that it was Einstein's lack of knowledge
> > >>> that made him pose such a daft (in the sense of limited) question. I read
> > >>> this as a description of the state of occidental science at his time - the
> > >>> conflict between the ontological and the constructivist explanatory models
> > >>> of the nature of knowledge.
>
> > >>> On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 8:41 AM, Vam <atewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >>>> You spoke of Einstein, about his " only " interest being whether God<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God> had
> > >>>> any choice in manifesting the universe and this observed creation.
>
> > >>>> My own suggestion is that if we do not know enough we will always think
> > >>>> along those lines.
>
> > >>>> To the uninitiate, the desktops of today would seem to be thinking
> > >>>> entities ...
>
> > >>>> *So, do we know enough ?*
>
> > >>>> <https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-EBJSz8MhWQU/UIJGzwpvR3I/AAAAAAAAB0...>
>
> > >>>> On Saturday, October 20, 2012 6:36:45 AM UTC+5:30, rigsy03 wrote:
>
> > >>>>> I took a course on the Snow-Leavis(1959-1962) controversy in the
> > >>>>> mid-'70's. Perhaps we should then conclude scientists do not
> > >>>>> understand humanism? Other works involved included various essays and
> > >>>>> books by Aldous Huxley ("Literature and Science") and Bronowski
> > >>>>> ("Science and Human Values"). Not sure that "incomprehension and
> > >>>>> dislike"(Snow) between the two groups has changed at all when
> > >>>>> considering the gap between rich and poor nations, smart weapons, etc.
> > >>>>> as science and militarism promote the self-interest of various
> > >>>>> nations/
> > >>>>> political theories and practices. Should we quibble that Nazi
> > >>>>> scientists propelled the USA moon landing? At least the moon survived.
>
> > >>>>> On Oct 19, 1:37 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>>>> > The below is rather long, but physics is returning to some of the
> > >>>>> > ideas of James Maxwell.  My dog is named after him.  Years ago, we
> > >>>>> > were told their were two cultures ( CP Snow) - one knew the 2nd law
> > >>>>> of
> > >>>>> > thermodynamics and the other did not (literary types).  The 2nd law
> > >>>>> > involved was a straw man.  The following, as Max needs his walk, is
> > >>>>> > paraphrased from last week's New Scientist.
>
> > >>>>> > A few decades after Carnot, the German physicist Rudolph Clausius
> > >>>>> > explained such phenomena in terms of a quantity characterising
> > >>>>> > disorder that he called entropy. In this picture, the universe works
> > >>>>> > on the back of processes that increase entropy - for example
> > >>>>> > dissipating heat from places where it is concentrated, and therefore
> > >>>>> > more ordered, to cooler areas, where it is not.  That predicts a
> > >>>>> grim
> > >>>>> > fate for the universe itself. Once all heat is maximally dissipated,
> > >>>>> > no useful process can happen in it any more: it dies a "heat death".
> > >>>>> A
> > >>>>> > perplexing question is raised at the other end of cosmic history,
> > >>>>> too.
> > >>>>> > If nature always favours states of high entropy, how and why did the
> > >>>>> > universe start in a state that seems to have been of comparatively
> > >>>>> low
> > >>>>> > entropy? At present we have no answer, and there is an intriguing
> > >>>>> > alternative view.
>
> > >>>>> > Perhaps because of such undesirable consequences, the legitimacy of
> > >>>>> > the second law was for a long time questioned. The charge was
> > >>>>> > formulated with the most striking clarity by the Scottish physicist
> > >>>>> > James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. He was satisfied that inanimate matter
> > >>>>> > presented no difficulty for the second law. In an isolated system,
> > >>>>> > heat always passes from the hotter to the cooler, and a neat clump
> > >>>>> of
> > >>>>> > dye molecules readily dissolves in water and disperses randomly,
> > >>>>> never
> > >>>>> > the other way round. Disorder as embodied by entropy does always
> > >>>>> > increase.  Maxwell's problem was with life. Living things have
> > >>>>> > "intentionality": they deliberately do things to other things to
> > >>>>> make
> > >>>>> > life easier for themselves. Conceivably, they might try to reduce
> > >>>>> the
> > >>>>> > entropy of their surroundings and thereby violate the second law.
> > >>>>> > Such a possibility is highly disturbing to physicists. Either
> > >>>>> > something is a universal law or it is merely a cover for something
> > >>>>> > deeper. Yet it was only in the late 1970s that Maxwell's entropy-
> > >>>>> > fiddling "demon" was laid to rest. Its slayer was the US physicist
> > >>>>> > Charles Bennett, who built on work by his colleague at IBM, Rolf
> > >>>>> > Landauer, using the theory of information developed a few decades
> > >>>>> > earlier by Claude Shannon. An intelligent being can certainly
> > >>>>> > rearrange things to lower the entropy of its environment. But to do
> > >>>>> > this, it must first fill up its memory, gaining information as to
> > >>>>> how
> > >>>>> > things are arranged in the first place.
>
> > >>>>> > This acquired information must be encoded somewhere, presumably in
> > >>>>> the
> > >>>>> > demon's memory. When this memory is finally full, or the being dies
> > >>>>> or
> > >>>>> > otherwise expires, it must be reset. Dumping all this stored,
> > >>>>> ordered
> > >>>>> > information back into the environment increases entropy - and this
> > >>>>> > entropy increase, Bennett showed, will ultimately always be at least
> > >>>>> > as large as the entropy reduction the demon originally achieved.
> > >>>>> Thus
> > >>>>> > the status of the second law was assured, albeit anchored in a
> > >>>>> mantra
> > >>>>> > of Landauer's that would have been unintelligible to the
> > >>>>> 19th-century
> > >>>>> > progenitors of thermodynamics: that "information is physical".
> > >>>>> > James Joule's 19th century experiments with beer can be used to
> > >>>>> > illustrate this idea. The English brewer, whose name lives on in the
> > >>>>> > standard unit of energy, sealed beer in a thermally isolated tub
> > >>>>> > containing a paddle wheel that was connected to weights falling
> > >>>>> under
> > >>>>> > gravity outside. The wheel's rotation warmed the beer, increasing
> > >>>>> the
> > >>>>> > disorder of its molecules and therefore its entropy. But hard as we
> > >>>>> > might try, we simply cannot use Joule's set-up to decrease the
> > >>>>> beer's
> > >>>>> > temperature, even by a fraction of a millikelvin. Cooler beer is, in
> > >>>>> > this instance, a state regrettably beyond the reach of physics.
>
> > >>>>> > The question is whether we can express the whole of physics simply
> > >>>>> by
> > >>>>> > enumerating possible and impossible processes in a given situation.
> > >>>>> > This is very different from how physics is usually phrased, in both
> > >>>>> > the classical and quantum regimes, in terms of states of systems and
> > >>>>> > equations that describe how those states change in time. The blind
> > >>>>> > alleys down which the standard approach can lead are easiest to
> > >>>>> > understand in classical physics, where the dynamical equations we
> > >>>>> > derive allow a whole host of processes that patently do not occur -
> > >>>>> > the ones we have to conjure up the laws of thermodynamics expressly
>
> ...
>
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