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Far be it from me to unduly limit the debate, but while OP did mention Economics, isn't it usually situated within the social sciences, rather than in the humanities?
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Sep 6, 2015 06:28
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Juffo-Wup posted:Could physicists today convince Newton to give up on absolute space and velocity? The answer seems to depend on facts about Newton's psychology, and the rhetorical skill of his interlocutor. Which are weird criteria by which to judge the success of a field. I think the technology that we have as a result of our science (and the science we have discovered as a result of our technology) would kind of be essential. To paraphrase Latour, science is argumentation allied with evidence. I think one way to blow his mind would be to show him a laser passing through a diffraction grating, showing that light interferes like waves; then lower the intensity until photon detectors light up one at a time, demonstrating that light is detected one quantum at a time. Then explain what time dilation is, and use very accurate clocks to show that it does happen. If he doesn't believe you, allow him to choose each time which clock to move and which clock to keep still. These are two big ways in which modern physics is different from Newton's, and should be convincing if he's willing to accept the evidence.
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Sep 6, 2015 17:41
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chessmaster13 posted:As far as i know the nature of those quasi particles is best described as an 'interference' between two (or possibly more particles). A quasiparticle is something that acts like a particle. It's usually something that depends on a many-particle interaction between electrons, ions, etc, to give it a "vacuum" over which it can live. Phonons are easy in that they have a simple solid to start from, but Cooper pairs require a complicated interaction between electrons and phonons to provide the "vacuum". Are they real? I'm not sure if that's a good question, considering that "real" particles are also excitations over a vacuum, and that Quantum Field Theory assumes that any theory in question is just something lying over an unknown, more fundamental theory, otherwise you'd get ultra-violet infinities. If you have a theory that says "particles can only do this and that" then I think quasi-particles that do something else are a counter-example.
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Sep 9, 2015 19:59
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Discendo Vox posted:In what sense? The basic idea of post-postivist science, which isn't in itself controversial, is that all observation is theory-laden. The scientist may not have formally written out what a moon is or how they were going to use the telescope, but they were making a set of logical assumptions that predicated their interpretation of what they saw to get to their conclusion. These assumptions probably aren't very interesting, but they are present. That's what I'm getting at with the "more complex level". All observations are contingent. Popper wrote it out formally, and, for example, (ugh) Latour gave some specific examples of its effects in coming up with actor network theory. These uninteresting assumptions and implicit theoretical contingencies become important because sometimes other people can't find the moons- or the moons turn out to be space stations. Modern, Popperian scientists can be said to do "more scientific" or "better" science because they more fully explicate the contingencies of their observations, and explain where they're getting them from. What about the first Moon? More generally, what happens when you run into the first instance of something entirely novel?
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Sep 10, 2015 05:50
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