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Am I the only one who read the article and thought the Whig interpretation was more accurate? The "revolution" of quantum mechanics didn't overthrow Newtonian

Am I the only one who read the article and thought the Whig interpretation was more accurate? The "revolution" of quantum mechanics didn't overthrow Newtonian mechanics, Relativity didn't either. They added to Newton's view and corrected it in a few places but to this day the first thing you learn in physics is Newton. There was no revolution. Newton was right with the caveat that if things are very large, very small, or very fast things may look different. To this day if something disagrees with the core of what Newton said it's almost certainly wrong. The fact that the "paradigm shift" from deterministic to probabilistic left most of science untouched should show how paradigms aren't all that important. Quantum mechanics has multiple "paradigms" describing the exact same things and they're doing close to nothing in terms of pushing science forward, some think they're holding it back because so much time is spent arguing about them.

akamaka 11y ago
You're right, and it's the article fault for poorly explaining Kuhn's thinking. Newton's laws have never been overturned, merely refined, so we've never truly shifted away from a Newtonian paradigm. A better example (and one that Kuhn himself used), would be phlogiston theory, which was fully overturned when oxygen was redefined as an element and not as simply being "dephlogisticated air".
- nerd_stuff 11y ago
  You have a point but I forgot we were going back to Alchemy and before. Phlogiston theory was overturned but the idea of oxygen is still standing strong despite the major advances in chemistry since 1773. Other puzzle pieces have been placed around it but they're additions to it. Even if the universe turns out to be a hologram the idea of oxygen will survive. Once the big puzzle pieces are found they're rarely removed. Since the big shift towards empiricism most "revolutions" and paradigm shifts are happening in new areas or at different scales than the old ones. Much of what are being called revolutions I would call explorations of the unknown.
  - akamaka 11y ago
    I think you're actually proving Kuhn's point when he argues that the progress of science involves wiping out almost all memory of obsolete paradigms. When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it. To give an example, how much do you know about theories of geology before 1960? Any educated person today knows the basic idea of plate tectonics, but only a historian of science might know what came before. According to Kuhn, the impression you get that "puzzle pieces are rarely removed" is something that happens after science has been rewritten to fit a new paradigm.
    - nerd_stuff 11y ago
      When was the last time you actually read a science textbook? When you learn a big idea you're usually also taught when it was figured out, who did it and what it replaced. If you think back to chemistry when you were taught about the Bohr model of the atom you were probably also taught about the plum pudding model, that "atom" means indivisible and so on all the way back to the Greek system of four elements. A quick visit to wikipedia shows modern geology dates itself back to the 17th century. You can view the field since then as successive additions and modifications to what was started by Nicholas Sterno in 1669 when he stated the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality and the principle of lateral continuity. Those are 3 of the 7 principles of modern stratigraphy that wikipedia lists, but according to you and Kuhn the "modern paradigm" of geology starts in 1965 and everything before that's been erased?
      - akamaka 11y ago
        Dude, I thought you were interested in this subject, so I wanted to give some examples of how Kuhn's theory works, seeing as the article did it poorly. I guess I didn't do a much better job myself. I'm not here to argue with you in case you have that impression.
        nerd_stuff 11y ago
        My intention isn't to be argumentative but to point out that the field of science described by Kuhn doesn't match the field of science that I've seen in reality. Let me be more specific. > "When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it." Newtonian physics isn't taught from within the frameworks of quantum mechanics or relativity. The opposite is true, it's taught as if we live in a constant-time, deterministic universe. That's an exact wrong prediction for the most central and fundamental field of science. To make it worse it's something that's easy to check. That's frustrating.
ctulek 11y ago
You cannot explain the motions of planets with Newton. Not Mercury at least. You cannot launch a rocket with Newtonian physics either. It will explode, and it did indeed. I don't think you can make efficient photocells either by just using Newtonian physics. So, the new paradigms were a shift from Newtonian physics for sure.
- nerd_stuff 11y ago
  I've given you a corrective upvote. I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket launch?
  - ctulek 11y ago
    Sorry, my bad about rocket part (There is a difference in Newtonian and Relativity calculations but it is too small). For space technology it is not the rocket launches but, for instance, GPS satellites, that work with the principles of relativity, that cannot be explained by Newtonian physics. Off topic: I have no idea how this voting stuff works, and I don't know why mine is -3
- mkempe 11y ago
  Given his methods and genius, I trust if Newton had had the (modern) data about Mercury's orbit he would have developed further insights in his understanding of the laws of nature. He explicitly rejected dogmatism and did not claim that his identifications were to be used against new facts if and when such would be discovered.
  - ctulek 11y ago
    He was already aware of the mismatch with data and his theory, and he didn't hesitate to put "Hand of God" to his work to explain it. : ) That a scientist had great contributions to science doesn't mean that s/he was a human being with her own dogmas and conflicts.
analog31 11y ago
I would describe the "revolution" in the following sense. Workers were aware of both successes and failures of the classical model, and did want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They adopted as a ground rule, that any candidate for a new theory had to contain the old theory as a corner case. Rather than describing a dichotomy between conservatism and revolution, I'd say that the revolutionaries searched for and found a hybrid of the two. I also think that if any departure from steady-state is defined as a "revolution," then it's self fulfilling.
brudgers 11y ago
Re-interpretation of Newton in light of quantum mechanics and relativity are part and parcel of scientific revolution according to Kuhn. Science weaves a narrative of progress. The extreme example, and the subject of Kuhn's earlier work was the Copernican revolution: we still get the heliocentric model presented as an astronomical refinement not a form of heresy. The standard science narrative doesn't see Newton through his own eyes, as principally a theologian, either: he spent a lot of effort trying to prove the existence of god [so did Descartes despite Discourse on Method]. None of this is to downplay their intellectual contributions. It is only to illustrate Kuhn's assertion that science constantly redefines past literature as continuous with incompatible contemporary beliefs: any interpretation of Newton's work orthogonally to the existence of god does not accurately depict his views.
- nerd_stuff 11y ago
  Newton's scientific ideas, which are what matter here, remain largely untouched since they were published in the late 1600's. The fact that you'd resort to bringing up how little science focuses on his beliefs in things like numerology and alchemy doesn't bode well for the strength of Kuhn's work. There's his scientific work which is widely available, and then there's his personal beliefs. I could really care less if we don't talk about his theology, but if you're accusing science of being dishonest about his mathematical and scientific contributions that's a claim which requires better evidence than you've provided.
  - brudgers 11y ago
    I am not anthropmorphizing science, let alone accusing it of anything. Instead, I am explaining Kuhn's work [or at least my reading of it]. However useful it may be to partition Newton's work into mechanics and cosmology, its our partitioning, not Newton's. The "General Scholium" [1] was one of the improvements Newton made to the first edition of Principia in the two decades between first and second editions. There are sociological reasons why students of science are not encouraged to read Newton for themselves. [1]: http://gravitee.tripod.com/genschol.htm http://gravitee.tripod.com/genschol.htm
ScottBurson 11y ago
It's true that Newtonian physics has not been discarded, but I think you're greatly underestimating the intellectual chasm that had to be crossed to get from it to relativity and quantum mechanics. The idea that not only velocity but also time, distance, and mass are relative; the wave/particle duality; the uncertainty principle; quantum entanglement; curvature of space-time -- all these were shocking, mind-bending ideas at the time they were first broached. They all seem to fit together neatly now, in retrospect, and we understand that Newtonian physics is a useful approximation that is quite sufficiently accurate in a lot of everyday situations, but the way we think about physics now is almost inconceivably different from the way we thought about it 200 years ago.
unabst 11y ago
When a theory is based on evidence, then all it really is is an abstraction of said evidence. So unless the evidence is overturned, the theory still stands as accurately as it had since inception. What QM has is better accuracy and a different scope. It solves different problems, and where it overlaps, it does better. Also, it is not an extension of Newtonian physics, and hence is a new paradigm. It is not a better version of Newtonian physics. I disagree that multiple paradigms describe the exact same things with respect to paradigm shifting science. They are merely different models, and are not new paradigms in the Khun sense. In fact, the fact that they are not pushing science forward attests to this. There are versions of reality because we are uncertain. Not because each is a different way of thinking that solves new kinds of problems.
timtas 11y ago
Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology. It's true that Newtonian mechanics remains useful despite being based on a now falsified premise: time is a constant. Although his laws eventually break down, they do not lose all their power to predict effects from causes under certain common conditions. Popular myth holds that Ptotomeic cosomology was conceived by dull-minded early men arrogantly imagining that God must have placed us at the center. But no. It was based on centuries of documented observation (now called "data") and brilliant reasoning. The predictive power of this well developed model was excellent, even after it was overturned. So are these revolutions somehow categorically different? It's easy to think so, but that's based on an illusion of mind. Geometry is somehow much more tangible or "factual" in our minds than time. But is a flaw in the position of objects really more fundamental than a flaw in the understanding of time?
- nerd_stuff 11y ago
  > Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.......So are these revolutions somehow categorically different? They're so different that I'm surprised it's even a question. If anything the illusion of mind is bending them to fit a narrative. When Relativity explained the precession of Mercury's perihelion the existing physics was off by 1/12,000,000th of Mercury's orbit (per orbit.) Not only was the Ptolemic system off by entire degrees (as opposed to arcseconds which are 1/3,600th of a degree) it was highly dependent on the position of the observer, if you stood on Jupiter I imagine the Ptolemic system would give you complete nonsense as to where the planets would be. More importantly Newton's work has never been thrown out and you can derive classical mechanics as a special case of Relativity. You can also derive it from quantum mechanics. I don't believe you can show that the geocentric model of the solar system is a special case of the heliocentric model.
  - timtas 11y ago
    Newtoninan mechanics were once thought to be based on a set of laws. Settled truth, it was thought. A law is no longer a law when it fails to hold under particular conditions, although it might still be useful. The bulk of practical human knowledge fall into this same category. All current laws will eventually find their way there too. Conditions where relativity manifests seem way out extreme to us today. How extreme would standing on Jupiter have seemed in 1500 when your goal is not to land a rocket on the moon but to develop a more accurate calendar or navigate the Mediterranean? What will they say of Newtonian mechanics after 500 more years of hindsight?

akamaka 11y ago

You're right, and it's the article fault for poorly explaining Kuhn's thinking. Newton's laws have never been overturned, merely refined, so we've never truly shifted away from a Newtonian paradigm. A better example (and one that Kuhn himself used), would be phlogiston theory, which was fully overturned when oxygen was redefined as an element and not as simply being "dephlogisticated air".

nerd_stuff 11y ago
You have a point but I forgot we were going back to Alchemy and before. Phlogiston theory was overturned but the idea of oxygen is still standing strong despite the major advances in chemistry since 1773. Other puzzle pieces have been placed around it but they're additions to it. Even if the universe turns out to be a hologram the idea of oxygen will survive. Once the big puzzle pieces are found they're rarely removed. Since the big shift towards empiricism most "revolutions" and paradigm shifts are happening in new areas or at different scales than the old ones. Much of what are being called revolutions I would call explorations of the unknown.
- akamaka 11y ago
  I think you're actually proving Kuhn's point when he argues that the progress of science involves wiping out almost all memory of obsolete paradigms. When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it. To give an example, how much do you know about theories of geology before 1960? Any educated person today knows the basic idea of plate tectonics, but only a historian of science might know what came before. According to Kuhn, the impression you get that "puzzle pieces are rarely removed" is something that happens after science has been rewritten to fit a new paradigm.
  - nerd_stuff 11y ago
    When was the last time you actually read a science textbook? When you learn a big idea you're usually also taught when it was figured out, who did it and what it replaced. If you think back to chemistry when you were taught about the Bohr model of the atom you were probably also taught about the plum pudding model, that "atom" means indivisible and so on all the way back to the Greek system of four elements. A quick visit to wikipedia shows modern geology dates itself back to the 17th century. You can view the field since then as successive additions and modifications to what was started by Nicholas Sterno in 1669 when he stated the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality and the principle of lateral continuity. Those are 3 of the 7 principles of modern stratigraphy that wikipedia lists, but according to you and Kuhn the "modern paradigm" of geology starts in 1965 and everything before that's been erased?
    - akamaka 11y ago
      Dude, I thought you were interested in this subject, so I wanted to give some examples of how Kuhn's theory works, seeing as the article did it poorly. I guess I didn't do a much better job myself. I'm not here to argue with you in case you have that impression.
      - nerd_stuff 11y ago
        My intention isn't to be argumentative but to point out that the field of science described by Kuhn doesn't match the field of science that I've seen in reality. Let me be more specific. > "When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it." Newtonian physics isn't taught from within the frameworks of quantum mechanics or relativity. The opposite is true, it's taught as if we live in a constant-time, deterministic universe. That's an exact wrong prediction for the most central and fundamental field of science. To make it worse it's something that's easy to check. That's frustrating.

ctulek 11y ago

You cannot explain the motions of planets with Newton. Not Mercury at least. You cannot launch a rocket with Newtonian physics either. It will explode, and it did indeed. I don't think you can make efficient photocells either by just using Newtonian physics. So, the new paradigms were a shift from Newtonian physics for sure.

nerd_stuff 11y ago
I've given you a corrective upvote. I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket launch?
- ctulek 11y ago
  Sorry, my bad about rocket part (There is a difference in Newtonian and Relativity calculations but it is too small). For space technology it is not the rocket launches but, for instance, GPS satellites, that work with the principles of relativity, that cannot be explained by Newtonian physics. Off topic: I have no idea how this voting stuff works, and I don't know why mine is -3
mkempe 11y ago
Given his methods and genius, I trust if Newton had had the (modern) data about Mercury's orbit he would have developed further insights in his understanding of the laws of nature. He explicitly rejected dogmatism and did not claim that his identifications were to be used against new facts if and when such would be discovered.
- ctulek 11y ago
  He was already aware of the mismatch with data and his theory, and he didn't hesitate to put "Hand of God" to his work to explain it. : ) That a scientist had great contributions to science doesn't mean that s/he was a human being with her own dogmas and conflicts.

analog31 11y ago

I would describe the "revolution" in the following sense. Workers were aware of both successes and failures of the classical model, and did want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They adopted as a ground rule, that any candidate for a new theory had to contain the old theory as a corner case. Rather than describing a dichotomy between conservatism and revolution, I'd say that the revolutionaries searched for and found a hybrid of the two. I also think that if any departure from steady-state is defined as a "revolution," then it's self fulfilling.

brudgers 11y ago

Re-interpretation of Newton in light of quantum mechanics and relativity are part and parcel of scientific revolution according to Kuhn. Science weaves a narrative of progress. The extreme example, and the subject of Kuhn's earlier work was the Copernican revolution: we still get the heliocentric model presented as an astronomical refinement not a form of heresy. The standard science narrative doesn't see Newton through his own eyes, as principally a theologian, either: he spent a lot of effort trying to prove the existence of god [so did Descartes despite Discourse on Method]. None of this is to downplay their intellectual contributions. It is only to illustrate Kuhn's assertion that science constantly redefines past literature as continuous with incompatible contemporary beliefs: any interpretation of Newton's work orthogonally to the existence of god does not accurately depict his views.

nerd_stuff 11y ago
Newton's scientific ideas, which are what matter here, remain largely untouched since they were published in the late 1600's. The fact that you'd resort to bringing up how little science focuses on his beliefs in things like numerology and alchemy doesn't bode well for the strength of Kuhn's work. There's his scientific work which is widely available, and then there's his personal beliefs. I could really care less if we don't talk about his theology, but if you're accusing science of being dishonest about his mathematical and scientific contributions that's a claim which requires better evidence than you've provided.
- brudgers 11y ago
  I am not anthropmorphizing science, let alone accusing it of anything. Instead, I am explaining Kuhn's work [or at least my reading of it]. However useful it may be to partition Newton's work into mechanics and cosmology, its our partitioning, not Newton's. The "General Scholium" [1] was one of the improvements Newton made to the first edition of Principia in the two decades between first and second editions. There are sociological reasons why students of science are not encouraged to read Newton for themselves. [1]: http://gravitee.tripod.com/genschol.htm http://gravitee.tripod.com/genschol.htm

ScottBurson 11y ago

It's true that Newtonian physics has not been discarded, but I think you're greatly underestimating the intellectual chasm that had to be crossed to get from it to relativity and quantum mechanics. The idea that not only velocity but also time, distance, and mass are relative; the wave/particle duality; the uncertainty principle; quantum entanglement; curvature of space-time -- all these were shocking, mind-bending ideas at the time they were first broached. They all seem to fit together neatly now, in retrospect, and we understand that Newtonian physics is a useful approximation that is quite sufficiently accurate in a lot of everyday situations, but the way we think about physics now is almost inconceivably different from the way we thought about it 200 years ago.

unabst 11y ago

When a theory is based on evidence, then all it really is is an abstraction of said evidence. So unless the evidence is overturned, the theory still stands as accurately as it had since inception. What QM has is better accuracy and a different scope. It solves different problems, and where it overlaps, it does better. Also, it is not an extension of Newtonian physics, and hence is a new paradigm. It is not a better version of Newtonian physics. I disagree that multiple paradigms describe the exact same things with respect to paradigm shifting science. They are merely different models, and are not new paradigms in the Khun sense. In fact, the fact that they are not pushing science forward attests to this. There are versions of reality because we are uncertain. Not because each is a different way of thinking that solves new kinds of problems.

timtas 11y ago

Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology. It's true that Newtonian mechanics remains useful despite being based on a now falsified premise: time is a constant. Although his laws eventually break down, they do not lose all their power to predict effects from causes under certain common conditions. Popular myth holds that Ptotomeic cosomology was conceived by dull-minded early men arrogantly imagining that God must have placed us at the center. But no. It was based on centuries of documented observation (now called "data") and brilliant reasoning. The predictive power of this well developed model was excellent, even after it was overturned. So are these revolutions somehow categorically different? It's easy to think so, but that's based on an illusion of mind. Geometry is somehow much more tangible or "factual" in our minds than time. But is a flaw in the position of objects really more fundamental than a flaw in the understanding of time?

nerd_stuff 11y ago
> Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.......So are these revolutions somehow categorically different? They're so different that I'm surprised it's even a question. If anything the illusion of mind is bending them to fit a narrative. When Relativity explained the precession of Mercury's perihelion the existing physics was off by 1/12,000,000th of Mercury's orbit (per orbit.) Not only was the Ptolemic system off by entire degrees (as opposed to arcseconds which are 1/3,600th of a degree) it was highly dependent on the position of the observer, if you stood on Jupiter I imagine the Ptolemic system would give you complete nonsense as to where the planets would be. More importantly Newton's work has never been thrown out and you can derive classical mechanics as a special case of Relativity. You can also derive it from quantum mechanics. I don't believe you can show that the geocentric model of the solar system is a special case of the heliocentric model.
- timtas 11y ago
  Newtoninan mechanics were once thought to be based on a set of laws. Settled truth, it was thought. A law is no longer a law when it fails to hold under particular conditions, although it might still be useful. The bulk of practical human knowledge fall into this same category. All current laws will eventually find their way there too. Conditions where relativity manifests seem way out extreme to us today. How extreme would standing on Jupiter have seemed in 1500 when your goal is not to land a rocket on the moon but to develop a more accurate calendar or navigate the Mediterranean? What will they say of Newtonian mechanics after 500 more years of hindsight?