/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6521005
[confirmation of not knowing what the philosophy of science is intensifies

>>6521005
[confirmation of now knowing what the philosophy of science is intensifies]

>>6490690
>Detailed physics might be, but Einstein didn't give everyone pages of complex maths, he just said "E = mc^2", and let the other scientists do the heavy work for him
Yeah, that's totally what happened.

>>6474078
Hendrik Lorentz

>>6459697
>Just because I'm working on assumptions like induction being possible and practical application/prediction-making ability being a good metric for success, doesn't mean I have to get rid of those assumptions in order to justify making them. This may sound strange, but it does work, and therefore I am not going to abandon it in favour of trying to find 'truly' 'totally' 'universally' persuasive arguments.
All I'd really say in response to this is that the points of contention these days are actually more subtle than the "usual" examples which are brought out here on /sci/. To be honest, most of it comes up in the usually-disastrous discussions about QM foundations, where everyone dismisses everyone else's interpretation as "violating Occam's razor", because everyone has (in themselves justifiable!) different ideas of what constitutes "simplest". Or, whether *explanatory* power should be included in the goodness-metric; which leads into a (very interesting, if allowed to actually happen!) discussion about the different sub-notions that each person has blobbed together as part of their "intuition".

---

Different sorts of idea are going to make different "amounts" of sense to different people. Some people are comfortable with non-locality, some aren't. Some are comfortable with indeterminism, some aren't. If nothing else; if we can formulate our theories in many ways (presumably iff empirically equivalent), each being "more intuitive" to the different possible styles of thinking, we can only *increase* the overall understanding that we as a species have of our physical reality. And of each other, if we bother to read the theories from the other perspectives. Enrichment, bitches.

Someone deleted my original thread thanks to some /x/-tard shitting it up, so I'll repost.

The ideas of Lorentzian relativity are:

1. That you can explain length contraction as an actual physical deformation of objects, by considering light moving at c with respect to one 'objective' frame, and deriving that transforming spherical field/orbit solutions of Maxwell's Equations ("objects") into some Gallilean frame with 'actual' velocity v causes a deformation in the direction of movement.

2. That you can explain time dilation as an actual physical 'slowing down' of oscillatory processes, by considering the time taken to move through orbits in a deformed field.

If you read the relevant papers by Lorentz and Poincare you can see how this results in an illusory "local time" which anyone moving at some velocity will consider to be 'real'; and how the details of measuring distances/times (via synchronisation of light travelling at c w.r.t. the objective frame), and mutual contractions of apparatus, will result in light always being "measured" to move at c in any frame (tl;dr you never actually measure the 1-way velocity of light, you always measure the 2-way velocity; and though you 'actually' experience light moving at either c+v or c-v in your frame, the overall 'time taken' always suggests that the light is simply 'moving at c').

This viewpoint is considered, if nothing else, to be a very useful teaching tool by physicists such as J.S. Bell. This so-called "kinematic" approach to relativity has the advantage of being able to account for all the empirical results of special relativity, without immediately discarding the intuitive space-time framework pre-university students are accustomed to.

J.S. Bell's book "Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics" has a chapter on this (I think it was chapter 6? Not sure), and here's a copy of the book, because I love you guys so much.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3219541/textbooks/bell_speakable_unspeakable.pdf

Someone deleted the thread I was going to post this in, presumably for "anti-semitism" (i.e. pointing out that Einstein took the credit for tons of stuff that wasn't his work).

The ideas of Lorentzian relativity are:

1. That you can explain length contraction as an actual physical deformation of objects, by considering light moving at <span class="math">c[/spoiler] with respect to one 'objective' frame, and deriving that transforming spherical field/orbit solutions of Maxwell's Equations ("objects") into some Gallilean frame with 'actual' velocity <span class="math">v[/spoiler] causes a deformation in the direction of movement.

2. That you can explain time dilation as an actual physical 'slowing down' of oscillatory processes, by considering the time taken to move through orbits in a deformed field.

If you read the relevant papers by Lorentz and Poincare you can see how this results in an illusory "local time" which anyone moving at some velocity will consider to be 'real'; and how the details of measuring distances/times (via synchronisation of light travelling at <span class="math">c[/spoiler] w.r.t. the objective frame), and mutual contractions of apparatus, will result in light always being "measured" to move at <span class="math">c[/spoiler] in any frame (tl;dr you never actually measure the 1-way velocity of light, you always measure the 2-way velocity; and though you 'actually' experience light moving at either <span class="math">c+v[/spoiler] or <span class="math">c-v[/spoiler] in your frame, the overall 'time taken' always suggests that the light is simply 'moving at <span class="math">c[/spoiler]').