Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: tredition
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Nature Does Not Answer – a groundbreaking book that redefines the understanding of science and its role in our society. Inspired by Immanuel Kant's statement that true scientific discovery lies not in mere observation but in asking specific questions, this book takes us on an exciting journey through the methods of physics and beyond. Have you ever wondered what exactly lies behind the experiments and measurements of science? Or why we often believe that scientific knowledge provides the ultimate answers? This book reveals that the scientific method often says more about how the world reacts when we intervene, rather than why it reacts that way. It powerfully illuminates that the findings we often take as absolute truths are complex descriptions rather than simple explanations. Particularly fascinating is the analysis of the concepts and ideas of modern physics. Discover how some of the most fundamental ideas we have about physics actually contradict their own findings. A valuable book for anyone who wants to scratch beneath the surface of science and see it in a completely new light. But this is not just a book about science. It is also a deep look at our society and the often technical view of human beings. The author challenges us to think beyond the boundaries of science and to realize that although it makes valuable contributions in many areas, it does not have all the answers. Nature Does Not Answer is not just a book for science enthusiasts. It is a guide for all who want to better understand the world they live in and find their place in it. It invites us to appreciate scientific knowledge, but also to question it critically. It is a reminder that there is more to the world than what we can measure, and that the search for truth is often more complex than we think. Invest in a book that will expand your thinking, change your perspective, and inspire you to see the world with new eyes. It could be the most valuable read for you this year.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 141
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
For Anja
Calwius
Nature Does Not Answer
A Critique of Pure Science
© 2023 Martin Hoffmann
Printing and distribution on behalf of the author:
tredition GmbH, Heinz-Beusen-Stieg 5, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany
ISBN
Hardcover
978-3-384-03498-4
E-book
978-3-384-03499-1
The work and all its parts are protected by copyright. The author is responsible for the content. Any exploitation is prohibited without his consent. Publication and distribution are undertaken on behalf of the author, who can be contacted via: tredition GmbH, Abteilung “Impressumservice”, Heinz-Beusen-Stieg 5, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany.
Table of Contents
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
1 Physics’ Method of Understanding the World
1.1 Measurement
1.2 Machine
2 the Philosophical Foundations of Physics
2.1 Insights from machine theory
2.2 Objects in space and time
2.2.1 Objects
2.2.2 Movement
2.2.3 Summary
2.3 The observer
2.4 Cause and effect
2.5 Induction
2.6 Facts and opinions
2.7 Is the truth in the action or in the things?
2.8 Summary
3 Science and Society
3.1 The success of the sciences
3.2 The ideal scientist and the method of physics
3.3 The scientific view of the human being
3.4 Our world is a man-made world
Final Remarks
Notes and References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Nature Does Not Answer
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
1 Physics’ method of understanding the world
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Nature Does Not Answer
Cover
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
Foreword
This book grew out of my unease about the influence of science on our lives. Whereas in the Middle Ages the church usually had the last word when it came to determining what was right and wrong, nowadays science has taken over this role.
The critique of pure science examines the so-called exact sciences, whose findings are scientific facts that differ from mere opinions, beliefs, and convictions. The focus is not on scientific action that attempts to solve problems, but exclusively on the scientific findings of the so-called basic sciences.
This book attempts to show that science’s aspiration to explain to us why the world is the way it is, or why it appears to us the way it does, has failed.
Introduction
There has been great technological progress since the Middle Ages. We now have a huge inventory of tools with which to impact very precisely on nature and to cause reactions of nature, whereby tool is to be understood in a very general way. A tool can be a machine, a device, or even a chemical compound. We do something and we know how nature reacts to it. We call this knowledge fact-based knowledge, because it is an indisputable fact that we know very precisely what our tools do. Because of this enormous increase in knowledge, we are led to assume that we completely understand nature or even the world because we are in possession of more and more knowledge about nature’s response to more and more new tools.
But have we understood what nature is? Do we know the essence of nature?
Why nature reacts the way it does, we do not know. We can only speculate and make assumptions.
And this method only works really well when applied to inanimate nature. If we apply it to animate nature, the prediction of the reaction to an interaction is much less precise. There is also knowledge about reactions of living beings to interactions without using tools, but it is much less precise and therefore has a very low value.
Peter Sloterdijk put it very nicely into words:
With the aid of Buddhist, Taoist, and original Christian, Indian, and American Indian intelligence, no production lines and no satellites can be built. However, in the modern type of knowledge, that awareness of life dries up from which the old teachings of wisdom take their inspiration, in order to speak of life and death, love and hate, antagonism and unity, individuality and cosmos, manliness and womanliness. One of the most important motifs in the literature of wisdom is a warning against false cleverness, against “head” knowledge and learnedness, against thinking in terms of power and arrogant intellectuality.
Why we value statements about nature’s reaction to our actions with the help of tools so highly will be examined in this book.
When we read texts by philosophers, the natural sciences are very often spoken of as exact sciences. In doing so, we feel a respect or even an admiration for this exactness. But what makes physics an exact science? In what way is physics more exact than philosophy?
Physics differs from philosophy in that it does not attempt to justify theses about the world through reasonable arguments. Instead, it makes experiments, and the measurement results of these experiments are regarded as facts and thus as evidence of whether these theses are right or wrong. Kant says of science that it is only the conceit of addressing the questions posed by reason to nature and not simply observing it that makes empiricism a science.
But how do we ask questions to nature? And how does nature answer?
According to physics, experiments, and measurements are the questions and measurement results are the answers. Behind this is the idea that all processes in the world can be explained by mathematical laws; that mathematical laws are the reason why all processes in the world are the way they are, and that measurement results help us to find these laws.
But why does physics believe that the world can be explained by mathematical laws? The reason lies in physics’ idea that the whole world is a machine.
Physics begins with Galileo Galilei and reaches a pinnacle with Newton, and for Galilei and Newton the world was a machine created by God in which everything is fixed. It was only much later that God was dispensed with as creator, but the machine conception has remained.
An ideal machine does exactly what it was created to do. And since God created the world as a machine, the world is of course an ideal machine. And if we want to understand how a machine works, we look at the interplay of its parts, understand what mechanisms can be discerned, and gradually comprehend the whole machine and ultimately the purpose of that machine. So we can understand physics in the sense that God has created a machine whose function and purpose we do not know, but which we can find out by gradually looking at and understanding all its parts and their mechanical interaction.
If the world is a machine, then only the world as a whole has a goal and a purpose. Each part of a machine serves only the function of the machine and obeys only the mechanical laws that describe the functioning of the parts so that the machine functions. Everything that happens in the world is determined by the creation of the world as a machine that follows its mechanical laws.
It is a brilliant move of physics to reduce the task of understanding the world to finding laws – simply by believing that the whole world is a machine and obeys the laws of a machine. Whereas in the church of the Middle Ages, when people believed in the existence of God, they still had to find reasonable explanations why the world is the way it is, why God set this or that up this way, physics can do without this altogether. It is enough to find mathematical laws to understand the world, because God created the world as a machine and we only have to find the mechanism and the functioning of this machine to explain the world.
So naturally the question arises why physics believes that the world is a machine. Why does physics believe that goals and purposes play no role in describing phenomena and processes in the world? That everything is predetermined by mathematical laws? After all, our living world is by no means such that we have the impression that everything is predetermined. When we get up in the morning, we can spontaneously decide to put apricot jam on our toast instead of strawberry jam. In general, we make decisions throughout the day that do not seem predetermined in any way, and we are constantly surprised that things turn out differently than we thought. How can the idea arise in such a world that everything is in fact predetermined?
Physics manages this by a simple trick. It splits the world into objective and subjective and claims that all phenomena that do not fit into the machine model are subjective and do not really exist. For in the machine called the world, there are no spontaneous decisions. All perceptions and processes in the world are either to be explained as mechanical parts of a world machine, by finding its mathematical laws, or physics explains to us that these perceptions in reality – objectively – do not exist at all. If we do not find mathematical laws for a perception, then we only imagine – subjectively – that this perception really exists. Only when we find a mathematical law can we say that this perception really exists.
***
The first part of the book deals with the method of physics. Experiment and measurement are examined and it is shown that the method of physics does not ask nature any questions at all and that nature does not answer either.
In the second part, the concepts and ideas of physics are subjected to a philosophical examination.
The third part is about the role of science in society. Why physics could become the leading science and gradually replace the church as an authority. Why its method was adopted by other sciences and what actually happens when people engage in scientific activity.
The final chapter attempts an outlook on a different approach to science in society.
In the following chapters, various terms and ideas of physics are dealt with, and since all terms and ideas are interrelated, there is inevitably some repetition, but this is intentional for better understanding.
Notes, quotations, and references are mainly not included in the running text, but in a separate chapter at the end of the book.
1 Physics’ method of understanding the world
While philosophy traditionally tried to understand why the world is the way it is, or why it appears to us the way it does, physics has a completely different concern. Instead of finding rational explanations why a stone falls to the ground when we let go of it, physics, for the first time in human history, asks how exactly the stone falls. The question of why is replaced by the question of how.
And the answer to the question “How does the stone fall?” is not answered by thinking, but by observing and measuring.
But why does physics believe it can do without the question of why? Why should it no longer matter why the stone falls? Because it replaces the why with mathematical laws. The mathematical law is the substitute for the rational explanation, because if there are indeed mathematical laws that describe the movement of objects, then the movement of these objects is fixed for all time. The past and the future of the movement are exactly described by the mathematical law. The reason why a stone is here now and there later is described by the mathematical law. We do not need any other reasonable explanations.
By describing movement mathematically, physics can dispense with the goal and purpose of a movement. Everything we observe is determined by the past and determines the future. If we go to Italy for a holiday, the goal of our movement is Italy and the purpose is the holiday there. For the stone that falls, physics dispenses with this description. The stone does not fall because it has the purpose of lying on the ground, and the stone also does not associate a purpose with lying on the ground. The stone falls because it obeys the mathematical law. Of course, the stone does not obey the law in the same way that we obey a law. In fact, this sentence is only a shortened form of saying that the law describes its movement and the construction of the world machine forces it to obey this law.
The task of physics is now to find out how fast or slow the stone falls and whether its speed is constant or whether its velocity changes.
To be able to solve this task, we need the possibility to measure velocities, and the measurement result must be a number. This number is the measure of speed. Because in order to be able to say that this stone falls twice or three times as fast as another stone, we need a measure of speed.
But physics wants even more. It is firmly convinced that there is an order in nature and that it can find out the rules of this order. That it is therefore no coincidence why one stone falls faster than another. That the height from which the stone falls has a direct influence on the speed with which it hits the ground. And physics is also absolutely convinced that the rules of this natural order are mathematical in nature. That we can therefore find mathematical laws that can accurately describe the falling of stones from different heights. Whether there is a mathematical law is not questioned at all. The question of physics is exclusively: which law applies?
And physics seeks this mathematical law not only for falling objects and for all objects that move, but also for all perceptions and their changes. The why of philosophy is replaced by the mathematical law. If physics finds a mathematical law that describes a phenomenon, then that is the reason for the observed phenomenon. So if we want to understand the world, physics tells us to find mathematical laws that describe the observed phenomena. That’s all it takes. The mathematical law is the reason why the world is the way it is, or why it appears to us the way it appears to us.
To find a mathematical law, we have to make many measurements and connect the measurement results by a mathematical function, which can then be considered a general law, because physics is convinced that we can discover general laws through individual measurements. This procedure is called induction.
The method of physics to understand the world thus consists essentially in measurement and the search for the mathematical laws that fit these measurement results. To do this, phenomena that we observe must be transformed into numbers, which are then identified as representatives of this law. They must always be laws that precisely define the temporal and spatial change. This is established by definition because physics is convinced that the whole world is a machine and is therefore mathematically describable.
So we need a procedure to generate numbers from observations. That is measurement. And we need a mathematical law that fits these numbers.
1.1 Measurement
But what is a measurement and how do we carry out a measurement in practice?
First of all, it is clear that the result of a measurement must be a number if the measurement result is to be part of a mathematical law. But how do we get from the observation to a number?
