(no subject)
Jun. 14th, 2016 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI heard a Chuck Klosterman interview about his new book about humanity's tendency to be wrong, which sounds fascinating. Klosterman is a fascinating writer, someone who is deeply obsessed with and passionate about all the ebbs and flows of popular culture, but who is capable of stepping back from that passion to be strikingly dispassionate. I do not say what follows to criticize Klosterman.
But Klosterman said something about how the world believed Aristotle's ideas about gravity for 2000 years and has only believed in Newton's for a few hundred, and... I think this is worth picking apart. Call it an addendum to my post on Einstein overthrowing Newton (http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/165355.html).
I think this is a wrong way to think about Aristotle because it misunderstands the ancient world and therefore leads us to incorrect ideas about how science works.
Aristotle ascribed to materials some sort of natural desire to move toward the center of the Earth. He did so, one assumes, based on making the following observations: If you take an object and elevate it, it will fall toward the Earth. A person is capable of moving upward and downward depending on what naturally suits them. Therefore, one may guess that objects that move are impelled on similar principles, and if we only observe them moving downward, it is because their natural inclination is to move downward.
This is not a very sophisticated argument. A modern 10 year old with a little sophistication can conduct the experiments that guided the Newtonian revolution. But it's an observational argument from analogy. I've seen much, much worse from modern social science theorizing. It's not super terrible to believe this if you haven't performed the Galilean and Newtonian experiments. The consequences of believing this wrong theory are not particularly dire, unless you think that failing to achieve the Industrial Revolution until 1750 was a dire failure for humanity.
But my intention isn't to defend Aristotle. It's to say that it's silly to say that everyone believed this for 2000 years, just because nobody came up with Newtonian mechanics until the 1600s. I don't believe it's true that everyone believed this.
First of all, the Asian, African, and American worlds had never heard of Aristotle. I don't say this to score cheap PC points by biting back at someone for suggesting that the West was the whole world. I think there is something more fundamental here. Because large parts of Europe probably also hadn't heard of Aristotle. This was not an era of mass media, this was not an era of globalization. Suggesting anything about what large masses of people believed is wrongheaded. For the most part, peoples' beliefs were probably informed by the people in the village around them and not much else.
And second, as a consequence of this and of the kind of world they lived in, people probably had simple and particular ideas about how gravity worked. It's not like it was impossible to work with gravity before Newton, it's just that there wasn't Newton's powerful and useful mathematical system for calculating the force of gravity. So when an engineer designed and constructed a water-wheel to turn a mill, they made determinations about gravity that were functional. They had observations about how the wheel turned that were dependent on an in some cases very intricate empirical understanding of how gravity behaved.
So I'm not sure how productive it is to say that the ancients believed in Aristotelian gravity. They believed in a combination of Aristotelian gravity and empirically observed gravity, a theory of gravity we might call 'Carpenter's Gravity'.
And recall what I said in my last post in this series: "The value of science is not its elegance. The value of good science is its descriptive power, which endures even after good theories fall." What's important to recognize about pre-Newtonian physics was that in limited ways it was productive in terms of descriptive power. It did have an observational truth to it: Objects tend to move toward the ground, at a speed that can be measured in order to build mechanisms. And in some ways that pre-Newtonian Carpenter's Gravity remains productive to this day. Can you go to the moon with Carpenter's Gravity? No, but there are many simple mechanisms that can be designed without specific reference to Newtonian mechanics by trial and error and simple gravitational intuition. I know lots of actual carpenters who couldn't hack a high school physics class but are plenty clever when it comes to how things move.
And I think it's bad to go around telling each other that until Newton showed up, everyone was wrong about gravity. It gives a false sense of superiority, and a false sense of the narrative of scientific history. I think there is a problem when we exclusively think of science in terms of paradigms supplanting paradigms, because some component of the past paradigm always remains: the part that was productive. As an engineer, that's the part I usually care about anyway.
But Klosterman said something about how the world believed Aristotle's ideas about gravity for 2000 years and has only believed in Newton's for a few hundred, and... I think this is worth picking apart. Call it an addendum to my post on Einstein overthrowing Newton (http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/165355.html).
I think this is a wrong way to think about Aristotle because it misunderstands the ancient world and therefore leads us to incorrect ideas about how science works.
Aristotle ascribed to materials some sort of natural desire to move toward the center of the Earth. He did so, one assumes, based on making the following observations: If you take an object and elevate it, it will fall toward the Earth. A person is capable of moving upward and downward depending on what naturally suits them. Therefore, one may guess that objects that move are impelled on similar principles, and if we only observe them moving downward, it is because their natural inclination is to move downward.
This is not a very sophisticated argument. A modern 10 year old with a little sophistication can conduct the experiments that guided the Newtonian revolution. But it's an observational argument from analogy. I've seen much, much worse from modern social science theorizing. It's not super terrible to believe this if you haven't performed the Galilean and Newtonian experiments. The consequences of believing this wrong theory are not particularly dire, unless you think that failing to achieve the Industrial Revolution until 1750 was a dire failure for humanity.
But my intention isn't to defend Aristotle. It's to say that it's silly to say that everyone believed this for 2000 years, just because nobody came up with Newtonian mechanics until the 1600s. I don't believe it's true that everyone believed this.
First of all, the Asian, African, and American worlds had never heard of Aristotle. I don't say this to score cheap PC points by biting back at someone for suggesting that the West was the whole world. I think there is something more fundamental here. Because large parts of Europe probably also hadn't heard of Aristotle. This was not an era of mass media, this was not an era of globalization. Suggesting anything about what large masses of people believed is wrongheaded. For the most part, peoples' beliefs were probably informed by the people in the village around them and not much else.
And second, as a consequence of this and of the kind of world they lived in, people probably had simple and particular ideas about how gravity worked. It's not like it was impossible to work with gravity before Newton, it's just that there wasn't Newton's powerful and useful mathematical system for calculating the force of gravity. So when an engineer designed and constructed a water-wheel to turn a mill, they made determinations about gravity that were functional. They had observations about how the wheel turned that were dependent on an in some cases very intricate empirical understanding of how gravity behaved.
So I'm not sure how productive it is to say that the ancients believed in Aristotelian gravity. They believed in a combination of Aristotelian gravity and empirically observed gravity, a theory of gravity we might call 'Carpenter's Gravity'.
And recall what I said in my last post in this series: "The value of science is not its elegance. The value of good science is its descriptive power, which endures even after good theories fall." What's important to recognize about pre-Newtonian physics was that in limited ways it was productive in terms of descriptive power. It did have an observational truth to it: Objects tend to move toward the ground, at a speed that can be measured in order to build mechanisms. And in some ways that pre-Newtonian Carpenter's Gravity remains productive to this day. Can you go to the moon with Carpenter's Gravity? No, but there are many simple mechanisms that can be designed without specific reference to Newtonian mechanics by trial and error and simple gravitational intuition. I know lots of actual carpenters who couldn't hack a high school physics class but are plenty clever when it comes to how things move.
And I think it's bad to go around telling each other that until Newton showed up, everyone was wrong about gravity. It gives a false sense of superiority, and a false sense of the narrative of scientific history. I think there is a problem when we exclusively think of science in terms of paradigms supplanting paradigms, because some component of the past paradigm always remains: the part that was productive. As an engineer, that's the part I usually care about anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-06-14 02:13 pm (UTC)Whereas, our explanations of gravity seem to be steadily getting better. Aristotle didn't add a whole lot over an instinctive "things tend to go down". Newton's version is right within a couple of significant figures everywhere it's easy to measure it. Einstein's version is the same as Newton's version in most places, but works in a lot *more* places, and resolves inconsistencies you didn't know you had. Einstein's is wrong too -- eventually it will be unified with QM in some way. But that will be more like "a refinement" than "overthrowing it". Einstein didn't say "Newton was wrong, we need to go back to Aristotle" -- pretty much everywhere Newton's gravity disagreed with Aristotle, Einstein's was like that but more so, not less so.
I think telling the difference between those things is difficult, but we often have an idea even if it's hard to put into words. It's likely some entire field of science will be overthrown. But it won't be gravity.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-06-14 03:05 pm (UTC)It's likely some entire field of science will be overthrown. But it won't be gravity.
On the other hand, the development of Relativity was 'revolutionary' in that it was traumatic to scientists as well as to nonscientists, even if it just represented an observationally minor adjustment to an already pretty robust scientific understanding.
Newton v. Einstein
Date: 2016-07-07 03:51 pm (UTC)G-d said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light.
[Alexander Pope – Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton 1730]
_________________________________________________
It did not last: the Devil howling "Ho!
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.
[J.C. Squire 1926]
____________________________
Then Norrish and Porter came and it is reckoned
Light was restored for a half a nanosecond.
[I cannot trace the author]
Southernwood