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Re: Real World



Hi!
This is a suggestion of a new thread to talk about. The subject
is the fact that real phenomena are, practically always, extremely
complicated and not quite suitable for exact study. It is by
disregarding a lot of details (correctly chosen by a good intuition)
that a productive analysis is possible.

I submit that astronomical ephemerides are evidence that physics has
a firm grasp on real phenomena in many cases. The formation of those
shadows should be a good test of the validity of my claim.

Yes and no. The power of Galileo's discourse was that he recognized that
real world situations were difficult to address (he couldn't time falling
objects very procisely) so he studied objects falling through shallow angles
(small balls in troughs/ramps) and then extrapolated these simpler
situations back to the more complex real world problem. He selected the
appropriate things to study in a simplification of the real world. Arons'
book has a nice discussion regarding this as the birth of modern science.
Earlier metaphysicists tried to explain WHY gravity did as it did in
telelogical terms, rather than dismissing this as unfruitful like Galileo
did and is suggested above.

Ephemerides may not be appropriate for exact study because they reflect
more than Kepler's laws which are all we really teach. Teleologically
they don't address our understandings of gravity and gravitational
phenomena (still a very open field of research) at all.

We need to discriminate what is productive in terms of the situation
being addressed. Pedagogy places great constraints on this.

Dan M

Dan MacIsaac, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Northern AZ Univ
danmac@nau.edu http://www.phy.nau.edu/~danmac/homepage.html