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Re: serializing the facts



At 7:48 PM -0700 8/19/00, John Denker wrote:

Science is not serial. It is a very high-dimensional tangled
latticework of facts. There is no natural ordering of the facts.

At 08:54 8/20/00 -0700, Leigh responded:
/major snip/
.... instruct their students according to a
serial schedule which, conventionally, follows an order that is
perceived to be natural in its increasing level of mathematical
sophistication. That is not an intrinsic property of the latticework;
it is largely cultural, arising as it does from the Gibbsian (as
opposed to, for example, the Cliffordian) farmalistic paradigm*.

I guess you can tell that I have to work on a particularly scary apple
tree today (and a couple of rhododendrons). Still, the metaphor is good,
except I really don't like the physicists' locution, "self consistent",
that I have used above. While it is conventional and well understood by
all of us, it is redundant and thus inelegant. Left to my own preference
I would have used the simpler term "consistent".

Leigh

* Don't worry if that makes no sense; it's a whole 'nother discussion.


I excised the interesting metaphor concerning epistemological
rigidity of the physics edifice (which can easily account for
the never observed features of present teaching like gravity
waves and quarks.)

I wanted to mention this psychological side note that Leigh
introduces about the apple tree and rhododendron: it worked on
two levels for me: was the scholarly piece a 'displacement'
activity to distract his attention from a distasteful duty?
('scary' tree-pruning) or was it a carried over construction
while mentally rehearsing an act of manual dexterity? (This
is after all, how the golf and tennis contenders are urged to
prepare their mental apparatus.)

He had the latter purpose in mind, I expect, so we can
acknowledge the 'Freudian' slip in his consideration of
'farming' duties, when he mentions "...the Gibbsian (as opposed
to, for example, the Cliffordian) farmalistic paradigm*. "
:-)

But to be half way serious for a moment: Leigh also expresses
concern for the truism built into the term "self-consistent".

As a matter of course, I here argue the opposite side:
while a consistent model of the electron is obtained by
considering the experiments showing particle-like behavior,
and a similar process provides a wave-like model, the two
models both consistent with [some of] the evidence are not
self-consistent, taken as an omnibus description. One is alerted
by this dissonance to a weakness of the models.

Does this illustration do justice to the proposition that
'self-consistent' can offer a shade of meaning different from
'consistent'? I hope so.

[Disclaimer: this work was undertaken as a non-funded displacement
activity pending the completion of a Class II tow hitch on
off-spring's SUV with an electrical RV harness hook-up.]


brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net> Altus OK
Eureka!