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Re: [Phys-l] About the "why" and "how questins."



On 12/20/2010 02:20 PM, ludwik kowalski wrote:

" Unfortunately, the words "why" and "how" are in our languages. They
are used by all people, including deists and scientists.

We can agree that words exist. However, I suggest that we
should be mainly concerned with the /meaning/ of words, not
the mere existence of words.

By way of analogy, suppose you hear a public service announcement
that says "please conserve energy" ...
-- its notion of energy is wildly different from the physics
notion of energy.
-- its notion of conservation is wildly different from the
physics notion of conservation.

Similarly there is a metaphysical why, which bears virtually
no resemblance to the physical why or how.

Galileo pointed this out nearly 400 years ago. Galileo
divorced physics from metaphysics and philosophy, and this
is considered the epoch, i.e. Day One of modern science.

The classical laws of motion ought to say what happens. They
may or may not say how it happens. They rarely if ever say
why it happens.

In relativity there is a scientific notion of causality, and
in thermodynamics there are scientific notions of spontaneity
and irreversibility. These are, once again, wildly different
from the metaphysical notions of why and how.

In epidemiology there are elaborate protocols for distinguishing
coincidence from honest-to-goodness cause-and-effect. These are
taken very seriously, as they should, because lives hang in the
balance. Many lives, and many billions of dollars.

This is serious business. Keeping religion and metaphysics out
of epidemiology is at least as important as keeping them out of
astronomy and biology.