Room-temperature superconductivity?

[GIThruster]

Pretty impressive judgement for someone who obviously has not read the book.

Instead of generalized character assassination, perhaps you can point to what you don't like here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

I am not interested in general, unsubstantiated and inflammatory comments, character assassination or cheezy rhetoric based upon associations, etc. If you don't have a cogent objection to sections 2 or 3, I can't imagine how you'd have a noteworthy objection.

BTW, people have always used bad science to push their political agendas. They use bad religion. They use good science. They use good religion. They use a gun. They use sticks and stones and always have.

People use anything they can think of to push whatever they care about. Blaming that on Kuhn makes you sound as out of touch as anyone can be and in fact, it makes you sound like the kind of person you're complaining about.

[johanfprins]

Not true. The state of affairs has never been any different than it is today, and it is not confined to physics or even to science.

I agree that it has always been a general malaise in all disciplines.

This is the way things have always been.

Not in physics. After the Royal Society was founded during the 17th century, we have had a welcome respite in physics up to the end of the 19th and even the start of the 20th century. However, towards the end of the 19th century the Energetists already started demolishing the new found opennes to new ideas by attacking poor Boltzman. And after the Solvay conference in 1927, Heisenberg, Bohr and Born led physics back to superstition and the intolerance which is holding it back at present.

It has always been easier to agree with the priest and learn what the clan or church said, then to decide for yourself. Even considering that the local shaman, or priest or scientist is mistaken, causes all manner of angst. It is ALWAYS the case that when a paradigm is in place, those holding the paradigm will defend it until it is obviously indefensible. That is the way life is--always.

Just a pity that the physics-church has now become worse than the actual church in this respect. The physicists claim that they only judge new ideas in terms of experiment and logic WHILE not doing this at all anymore. At least churchgoers do not lie in this manner.

BTW, Galileo was persecuted by the church, but it's good to realize that all the scientists of his day were churchmen, and they were the ones who persecuted him.

I have pointed out this clearly in my book. The church was also the scientific academy at that time. It is therefore very sad that at present the Royal Society of London is more closed-minded, dogmatic and bigoted than the Vatican ever was.

Life and history are completely full of this dynamic. It's not the result of some decay in human civilization. It's the result of how we learn. It's the obvious dictate of human epistemology.

You are acting as an apologist here: It is like playing the violin while Rome is burning. By this time we should have learned from past mistakes: Especially the physicists who dishonestly claim that they have actually done so.

No harm, no foul, no loss. If it were not so, science would be too flighty to trust. The burden of proof is always on the revolutionary and this is just as it should be--but it really is a pain to be a prophet crying out in the wilderness.

I disagree: The burden of proof that a new idea is wrong must be on the critics: If a new idea cannot be proved to be wrong by experiment or impeccable logic, it should not be attacked as a heresy. If we do not change this attitude our planet and the human race is going to go to pot! The signs are already there.

BTW, during the next week I might not be in a position to access the internet on a daily basis: But am looking forward to engage this forum in further discussions. I have not had so much stimulation in a long time. If anybody can prove by using experimental data and logic that I must be wrong; I will be grateful since it will help me to stop wasting time by barking up a wrong tree.

[Giorgio]

Excellent question: You have gone for the jugular!

I just tried to concentrate all my doubts in one last shot.

Your reply was as expected, and your logic is sound.
The only exception I have is in the last point when the boundary condition kick in. That point still does not convince me.

I will wait for your book for the additional details and also for the suggested experiments to support your hypothesis.
Hopefully I can disturb you some more in the future with my doubts once I will have some free time to put them on paper in a clear way.

Meantime let me thank you for your willingness in discussing and sharing your ideas with us.

[johanfprins]

Hopefully I can disturb you some more in the future with my doubts once I will have some free time to put them on paper in a clear way.
Meantime let me thank you for your willingness in discussing and sharing your ideas with us.

It is really I who must thank this forum and the high quality of the physics being discussed. I am looking forward to more questions and arguments from you since they have been extremely relevant; and have helped to hone my mind.

[GIThruster]

Life and history are completely full of this dynamic. It's not the result of some decay in human civilization. It's the result of how we learn. It's the obvious dictate of human epistemology.

You are acting as an apologist here: It is like playing the violin while Rome is burning. By this time we should have learned from past mistakes: Especially the physicists who dishonestly claim that they have actually done so.

Everyone believes they are more rational than they are. I'm not saying we're irrational, and this is one of the charges made against Kuhn in his time, mainly because it was chic back in the '80's. What I'm saying is that people have always been people.

When we study epistemology very carefully, one of the things we realize is that there are all sorts of good reasons for the general hesitance in accepting, and even in re-examining, foundational sections of our noetic structure. When we call into question certain kinds of things, no matter how rational we are; there is a fully human fear response. Question your faith, be it in the local priest, your religion, your world view, your trust in your spouse, the presumptions of your discipline--anything that has vast consequences for the rest of your noetic structure--and you will get angst. In fact, our personal psychology reflects this. It is for example, perfectly healthy for people to lie to themselves about certain kinds of things, and when they don't, they have huge issues. These defense mechanisms are part of how the human mind works and needs to work. There's no point complaining about them.

It's no crime to realize that trying to convince those with decades of study at stake, to re-examine their beliefs, is going to be a major task. What I like so much about Kuhn is, despite he's not an epistemologist, he's identified the dynamic in history as one of failure--as a current paradigm repeatedly fails to answer certain kinds of puzzle questions, as it generates more and more "anomalies" that it cannot cope with, it earns the place of re-evaluation. That opens the door to revolution in science, as opposed to normal, evolution in science.

For as long as we don't recognize the anomalies and shortcomings of QM for what they are, we are blind to the need to press on to a new paradigm. You cannot sell a new paradigm just by saying it is better at answering puzzle questions than the current paradigm. You have to show how, where and why the current paradigm is falling short. That is certainly the key to revolution in scientific theory.

Point out again and again, how current theory is failing to answer the puzzle questions. This is the only way to move forward with a proposed replacement--people need to realize how QM does not work so they will begin to consider an alternative.

[IntLibber]

Pretty impressive judgement for someone who obviously has not read the book.

Instead of generalized character assassination, perhaps you can point to what you don't like here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

Okay, you asked for it:

"Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure of the different scientific theories."

i.e. applying postmodernist moral equivalency to science. Kuhn was a bottle washer type who, in keeping with his marxist politics, saw scientific paradigms merely as equivalent to competing ideologies and that all were equally valid on their own terms. He believed that one paradigm only supplanted another when adherents to the older paradigm died off/retired and were replaced in the publishing world by adherents to the new paradigm, without any judgement as to which paradigm was better, and refusing to recognise that people are capable of rational thought, changing their mind, and admitting they were wrong. To quote Feynman, "science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts." This requires that all real scientists be capable of admitting they are wrong when it is demonstrated by the evidence.

"This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories."

This right here is a biggie. It should be obvious to any physicist that Newton was built upon by Mach, Maxwell, and Einstein, and subsequently that Heisenberg, Feynman, etc built upon Einstein. They did not supplant their predecessors work entirely, contrary to Kuhn's claims.

Kuhn instead points to the leaps from Aristotle to Galileo to Newton, claiming, for instance, that Galileo completely supplanted Aristotle. The problem of course was that Aristotle was not an empirical experimentalist at all, he never did a single experiment, he felt they were crass and beneath the dignity of a philosopher. For this reason, Aristotle cannot be considered a scientist and since Kuhn compares a nonscientist philosopher against a scientist, his thesis falls apart.

[GIThruster]

"i.e. applying postmodernist moral equivalency to science."

No. You're completely wrong. Can't read past the first sentence. If you'll read the bit at Stanford, you'll see that is nothing like true and you have no idea what you're talking about.

"Incommensurability" is the logical outcome of Kuhn's understanding of what a "paradigm" is in it's larger sense. It has nothing to do with post modernism, nor cultural relativism.

Kuhn's point was that certain kinds of theories have broad and deep consequences that disable them from talking the same language. since paradigms essentially form the language, they have different language so to speak--not unlike QM and GR. They don't speak to each other, because they're speaking about different things.

It's all in the link.

BTW, I share your annoyance over both post-modernism and cultural relativism, but that's not the kind of thing Kuhn is talking about.

[IntLibber]

"i.e. applying postmodernist moral equivalency to science."

No. You're completely wrong. Can't read past the first sentence. If you'll read the bit at Stanford, you'll see that is nothing like true and you have no idea what you're talking about.

"Incommensurability" is the logical outcome of Kuhn's understanding of what a "paradigm" is in it's larger sense. It has nothing to do with post modernism, nor cultural relativism.

Kuhn's point was that certain kinds of theories have broad and deep consequences that disable them from talking the same language. since paradigms essentially form the language, they have different language so to speak--not unlike QM and GR. They don't speak to each other, because they're speaking about different things.

It's all in the link.

BTW, I share your annoyance over both post-modernism and cultural relativism, but that's not the kind of thing Kuhn is talking about.

Okay, fair enough. The problem is that that IS how he is interpreted by society today, especially postmodernists who cite and reference him to justify their "scientific" credentials for their arguments.

I was, btw, referring to his Stanford period work. and I quoted directly from the page. It clearly states that Kuhn rejected and overturned the standard idea that science is one of evolution and refining earlier work. So thats not my argument, thats the argument of the page you cite.

Kuhn has been widely embraced by Marxists as a new paradigmatic evolution of Marx:

http://home.flash.net/~comvoice/18cParadigm.html
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/defaul ... l_id=10426

specifically:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/sn-fleck.html

It is easy to see that many of the concepts made familiar by Thomas S. Kuhn clearly resemble those put forward decades earlier by Fleck. For example, Kuhn's doctrine of the paradigm has a close parallel in Fleck's concept of thought style; what Kuhn designates as the "theory‑charged" nature of observations was similarly stressed by Fleck; Kuhn's distinction between normal and revolutionary phases in the development of science is at least very closely adumbrated by Fleck; both have almost identical views as to the role of scientific training, and of textbooks particularly, in preserving and furthering the practice of an established thought style or paradigm. It is true that these assertions have nothing sensational about them. Kuhn himself, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago 1970, p. vii], referred to Fleck as a thinker whose work "anticipates many of my ideas." Further, W. Stegmüller, for decades head boy and keeper of the Grail in Germany for a variant of positivism, has only recently learned (from the example of Ludwig Fleck) that his renunciation of positivism, published in 1973, did not need a Kuhn to bring it about as he had believed.

L. Schäffer [4], reporting the Stegmüller conversion, cites other bourgeois philosophers (besides Fleck) to show that the historical and social dimensions of scientific work had been known and discussed long before Kuhn. Unfortunately, Schäffer himself "overlooks" the authorities most important for his purpose, namely, K. Marx and F. Engels. Many of the ideas found in Fleck and Kuhn on scientific research and its history were expounded by Marx and Engels much earlier and on a sounder philosophical basis; moreover, here the ideas were not a matter of chance but were rooted in the structure of their philosophical thought. That any state reached by science can be understood epistemologically only if seen in its historical movement, that the history of a science presents revolutionary and evolutionary stages, that science is social in nature and is in a necessary connection with society as a whole, with the practical‑material basis in particular—is there any Marxist who does not know that these insights have been known at least since Engels' Dialectics of Nature and that they are supported there by copious material? [5]. Furthermore, Marx and Engels developed these findings philosophically on a much more solid basis than Fleck and Kuhn. For example, Fleck and Kuhn, while correctly stressing the social character of scientific work, are content with documenting this merely by pointing to striking instances. Yet Karl Marx gave the basis for this as early as 1844: "But also when I am active scientifically . . . then my activity is social because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active), my own existence is social activity" [6]. And Marx had already derived the fact that his "own existence is social activity" from the social character of the material production on which the entire process of mankind's life and history is based.

[GIThruster]

That's fine. Kuhn got great insult for proposing science is not just evolutionary, but revolutionary.

The Standard Model has gone through many years of evolutionary development. If life were to ever prove that this model is wrong in its basics, as per Dr. Prinz's observations (and Dr. Mills), then there would be all manner of angst to go around.

and guess what?. . .this is what we see in every revolution in science theory to date.

The devil is in the details. We need to wait see what Prinz and Mills have to show us about how QM is wrong. Personally, I think they need to get together for a week.

[MSimon]

Positively 4th St

"You had no faith to lose and you know it."

That is my general attitude.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning. - AC

[MSimon]

Unfortunately our present "physics church" consider it a heresy if anybody argues that Born, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Feynman were dead wrong.

Funny thing is Feynman was never totally happy with his creations. As far as he was willing to go was: "You can calculate things". I'm sure he was well aware that epicycles gave good answers too.

[MSimon]

Exactly! This why as a human race we are doomed. I cry every night for my grandchildren.

Delayed is a better word than doomed. There is this Internet thingy that I had a very small hand in developing. My revolution has been going on since late December of 1974. Thirty-five years in for me. So far so good.

The gate keepers may stand strong at the gates but their enemy is entering through the sewers. In a way - you have said this yourself. You are getting a discussion without too many preconceived notions. And the gate keepers can't stop you.

[MSimon]

It clearly states that Kuhn rejected and overturned the standard idea that science is one of evolution and refining earlier work.

That is how you get epicycles when gravity (what ever that is) is a better explanation.

Everyone says "gravity" (as it relates to physics and engineering) as if it meant something. Well the math is good enough for most engineering. But is it the right theory?

We say "sun rise" and yet know very well that the sun doesn't rise. The Earth turns. Or so we fancy because the math works.

[MSimon]

Here is as good a place to put this as any. I have a new blog.

http://inertiaquestion.blogspot.com/201 ... stion.html

It is devoted to research on inertia.

[johanfprins]

Fascinating discussion: I am, hoever, not really interested whether Kuhn is a good or a bad guy. Although what I can glean from the conversation is that he has just stated mostly the obvious.

It's no crime to realize that trying to convince those with decades of study at stake, to re-examine their beliefs, is going to be a major task. What I like so much about Kuhn is, despite he's not an epistemologist, he's identified the dynamic in history as one of failure--as a current paradigm repeatedly fails to answer certain kinds of puzzle questions, as it generates more and more "anomalies" that it cannot cope with, it earns the place of re-evaluation. That opens the door to revolution in science, as opposed to normal, evolution in science.

What I do not appreciate at present is the fact that the "physics-church" tells other people that in contrast to other disciplines they have an open mind when new ideas come along which challenge mainstream physics dogma. But when this happens one finds that it will be esaier to convince the Pope that Jesus is not the Messiah than to convince a physicist that there is something wrong with mainstream physics: Even when presenting incontestable proof in terms of undergraduate physics; as I have already done for superconduction 10 years ago. This means that the phydsics church is a danger to society because it is just one big lie!

You have to show how, where and why the current paradigm is falling short. That is certainly the key to revolution in scientific theory.
Point out again and again, how current theory is failing to answer the puzzle questions.

It becomes impossible when you are blocked to point this out in "peer reviewed respectable journals". So how can you point it out "again and again" so that physicists will take cognizance? If it is not passed by a closedminded "peer reviewer" they will not read it. You are finally forced to write your own book and then you are classified as a crank "since only cranks publish on their own without peer review".
That is what I mean by playing the violin while Rome is burning. Once an institution does not adhere to its founding principles anymore, like in the case of the Royal Soc. of London, The AAAS, The APS, Nature Publishing House, etc. they should be closed down in disgrace and liquidated in the interest of the future of humankind.