The Paradise of Thinking

von Peter Marquardt  

The Paradise of Thinking
Peter Marquardt
 
2012, 19th Natural Philosophy Alliance Conference, Albuquerque, NM, United States 

Abstract: „The Enemy of Science is not Error – but Inertness.“  Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), English historian

“If you can’t beat them, join them” has no justification in science, otherwise we would never had a Copernicus,  a Kepler, a Galilei, a Giordano Bruno, who courageously rose
against dogma. Inertness is the easy path to  dogma and a “closed case” label on a still open issue. Physics suffers from too many premature “case closed”  labels. There is no closed case in natural science – that is one of its trademarks. The other trademark is selfcorrectness.  

Performing an experiment or setting up a theory means to keep track of conditions or assumptions,  respectively. The photoelectric effect, Maxwell’s equations, the “ether hassle”, E = mc², the Michelson-Morley  experiment, quantization, tunneling, … – the list is long and none of its items is a closed case. Take an elementary  (really?) “down-to-earth” problem like the oblique throw: Its customary treatment is inconsistent. You  don’t have to do any calculation to see that this “flat earth” result is definitely wrong, violating time honored  physical principles, no matter how satisfactory its numerical outcome. If we fail here to arrive at consistency,  how can we hope to cope with the above list? It’s rather a matter of psychology than of science that we don’t slow down in our jumping at conjectures and keep our feet on solid ground instead and release a result only if  we are (at least halfway) sure that it will stand the “test of time”. Practically all fields of physics require continuous  fresh thinking. Science is the “paradise of thinking” and we should not let inertness expel us from it!  

Weiterlesen…

 

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Siehe auch vom Autor in diesem Blog:

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Requiem für die Spezielle Relativität

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Eine Antwort zu “The Paradise of Thinking”

  1. Peter Rösch

    Klingt irgendwie nach dem Argumentationsschema der Relativitätstheoretiker: Nichts ist gewiß, man muß halt bereit sein, alles neu zu denken. Was Marquardt hier zelebriert, ist Relativismus pur.

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