Re: Explaining explain

["William J. Larson" <Bill_Larson@compuserve.com>]

Message text written by INTERNET:phys-l@atlantis.uwf.edu
> "Kepler's principal goal was to explain the relationship between the
existence of five planets (and their motions) and the five regular solids=
=2E
It is customary to sneer at Kepler for this. It is instructive to compare=

this with the current attempts to "explain" the zoology of elementary
particles in terms of irreducible representations of Lie groups. "
- S. Sternberg
<

No I don't think so.  Murray Gell-Mann (I think it was he who did this.)
was trying to understand quarks and was in the process of re-inventing =

Lie groups when he discovered not only that they already existed, =

but that his tennis partner was the world's leading expert on them.
If Kepler, in trying to explain the motions of the planets, had
re-discovered =

the cube and the tetrahedron and was about to re-discover the =

dodecahedron, when he happened to read Euclid, then it would =

be instructive.

Bill Larson =

Geneva
=2E..