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Re: [Phys-L] nature +- observations +- models



You have to read it more than once, but then you appreciate these as very pithy observations.
These thoughts are the springboard toward a realistic physics.

Bob Sciamanda
Physics, Edinboro Univ of PA (Em)
treborsci@verizon.net
www.sciamanda.com

-----Original Message----- From: Derek McKenzie
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2016 6:37 PM
To: Phys-L@Phys-L.org
Subject: Re: [Phys-L] nature +- observations +- models

Here are some questions I feel I need to be able to answer in order to
claim that physical theories can tell me what is *really* going on in
nature (as opposed to providing useful conceptual and computational
models).

1) Can I point to an existing model that achieves this? I would argue
that this requires the model to make no false predictions, since I don't
see how any model that gets nature wrong can possibly be telling us what
is *really* going on.

2) If I did discover a model which describes what is *really* going on
in nature, how would I know it? Newton's theory of gravity seemed to
tell us that bodies *really* pull on each other with an inverse-square
force, and for over two centuries it kept further reinforcing that view
with better and better predictions and confirmations. But we know how
that story ended, so how would we recognize when a model will not
succumb to the same fate?

3) If I don't think a worm understands what is *really* going on in
lightning, and I also don't think a dog (who I would presume has a more
sophisticated version of events than a worm) understands what is
*really* going on in lightning, how do I justify arguing that some
arbitrary collection of 'cosmological stuff' located at some arbitrary
level of the food chain in some arbitrary part of the universe would
somehow have such privileged epistemic access?

I could go on, but these are the sorts of questions that lead me to the
view that physical theories are just models available to a particular
type of cerebral cortex. It is not a denial of an objective external
reality, of course, but rather a denial of the claim that there is a way
of describing that reality that is *really* true.

Derek McKenzie
PhysicsFootnotes.com


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