Re: Physics is a human construct

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

On Thursday, Bob Sciamanda wrote (in part):

>

> Re: your math friend's comment:  When one says that mathematics is a

> human construct he does not thereby imply that we can change the list
of

> prime numbers!  Mathematics, like physics, is a human description of

> reality.  It is the description (ie. Mathematics or Physics) which is

> human, not the reality being described.  (I think this is where I
depart

> from the postmodernist school,  although I can never stay awake long

> enough to understand such needlessly complicated philosophic
ramblings.)

>

As usual, Bob, you have said something very important very elegantly. I
think, (but I have the same reaction to their soporific writings that
you do) that the post-modernists are arguing that with our modern
instruments we are <italic>creating </italic>new reality. I'm sure I
disagree with this idea, but I guess I can see why, with their limited
understanding of science, they could arrive at that conclusion.


I would like to add another important watershed to your original
thought regarding Boyle, perhaps even inspired by Boyle's work, and
that is Newton's "aha!" moment when he realized that the laws of
physics that had been devised up to that point could well apply
<italic>everyehere</italic>, not just <italic>here</italic>. It was
this realization that enabled astronomy to spawn atrophysics, and put
Kepler's stunning empirical achievement on a firm theoretical
foundation. From the students' point of view, the realization that the
trajectory of a falling apple and of an orbiting satellite can be
constructed from the same laws is an important step forward, one that
we probably make more difficult by teaching them as apparently separate
things for so much of the time in our introductory courses. The
understanding that in principle, everything in the universe can be
described by a few (relatively speaking) basic laws (i.e., that there
are not separate laws for the firmament) seems to me to be as important
as the understanding that those laws are fundamentally mathematical in
nature.


Hugh


*****************************************************

Hugh Haskell

<<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>


Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because
they

have to..

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