Future Science by John White

Author:John White [White, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science / Alternative
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Physical Laws and Universal Reason

Along with belief in matter-mind dualism there arose a greatly oversimplified view of scientific method which became dominant in the 19th century and still is dominant today, in spite of cogent objections made by philosophers and scientists of repute.

Put uncompromisingly, it is the doctrine, in Popper’s words that “all theories are, and remain, conjectures, as opposed to indubitable knowledge.”10 That is to say, the scientist can propose an hypothesis, make deductions from it, and so build a theory or “conceptual system,” finally checking that a large variety of deductions square satisfactorily with observation. But the theory stands only so long as another one does not turn up and fit better.

This view of scientific theories—as never having any element of certainty—is at once seen to be false in the case of Euclidean geometry. This is a conceptual system whose logical coherence has never been doubted. How then did it get into nature? For it is certain that the lengths of the three sides of a right-angle triangle do agree with Pythagoras’s theorem, to a degree of accuracy depending on how accurately we have constructed the straight lines and right angle. They cannot do otherwise without offending against logic. Likewise, we may ask, how did the conceptual system of electromagnetic theory, or of elementary particle theory, get into nature?

In the case of geometry it is clear that nature provides the opportunity for us to copy the concepts by a process of successive approximation. The concepts take actual physical form by virtue of additional small-bias potentialities which convert the a priori exact into the empirical uncertain. Nevertheless the overall effect is according to reason.

The truth seems to be, therefore, that nature is full of opportunities for the actualization of concepts. In fact, it is hardly too much to say that nature is nothing but concepts ac-tualized; for without concepts, it would not be intelligible. Hence it is to be expected that if we can find concepts which are “primordial” enough, all natural law could be developed from them by a kind of deduction. And this is what has proved to be the case in mechanics (classical or relativistic), and also, as we shall see, even in electromagnetic theory and elementary particle physics.

As might be expected, however, the buried conceptual possibilities in nature are exceedingly various, abstruse, and difficult to unearth. Only a few of the simpler instances can be briefly referred to here, apart from the analyses to be offered in the next two sections.

One of the simplest instances of the reason inherent in physics was discovered by the 14th century Paris philosopher, Buridan, and concerns the fall under gravity of bodies of different masses. If we take three equal balls falling side by side in a vacuum, and then repeat the experiment with two of the balls stuck together with a minute spot of glue, the body of double mass must clearly keep step, as before, with the remaining ball. There is therefore a logical compulsion in nature, ensuring that bodies of different masses keep step with each other when they fall in a force field.

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