I have only recently discovered that a fellow named Owen Gingerich ever lived or died. Yet he and I have very much overlapping timelines -- I was born when he was 28, and he died just two and a half years ago. Now that I know who he was, I am sorry I didn't learn of him sooner. So here is a post for Gingerich, concluding "science week" at Jamesian Pragmatism Refreshed. Gingerich was an astronomer, and an important participant in debates over what we understand by the word "planet," debates that centered -- while he was most involved in them -- on the case of alleged planet Pluto. Gingerich was also a teacher of the Harvard University course "The Astronomical Perspective," a core science course for non-scientists. To me what is most fascinating about Gingerich, though, is his work as a historian of science, and especially of the early modern developments in astronomy and physics beginning with Copernicus and continuing through Newton's day. In 2...
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The idea of inertia is not new. It was not invented by Newton, or even by Galileo. Galileo did make a fascinating elaboration on it, though. Let's look at the famous thought experiment in which he talked about dropping balls of different sizes from the Tower of Pisa. The point of the experiment is that, although there are in principle two ways of measuring mass, they come out to be the same. One can measure mass by inertia, or one can measure it in terms of gravity. If mass (gravity) is the important variable in our thought experiment, then one would expect the heavier ball -- say a cannon ball -- to fall to the ground more quickly than the small one, say, the pebble. On the other hand, if mass (inertia) in the important variable than one would expect the cannonball to move more slowly than the pebble. Inertial mass holds it back from the free fall the pebble enjoys. The only way that the cannonball and the pebble fall at the same ...
Arthur Herman has written a lengthy book, The Cave and the Light , about the history of western civilization, based upon the idea that ... well, I will let his subtitle do the work of summary: "Plato versus Aristotle, and the struggle for the Soul of Western civilization." I've skimmed the book -- it really isn't worthwhile reading this sort of thing -- and I can report that it is a tedious rehash of the mashing-up of the history of philosophy accomplished by Ayn Rand and her followers in the 1960s. Rand read somebody else's summaries of major philosophers and persuaded herself that she was an expert. I'll give credit where it is due, Herman's title, The Cave and the Light , does capture succinctly one aspect of Platonic philosophy. Yes, inside the cave of the natural world there is (in Plato's famous image) only the false flickering light of candles, and by that artificial light we see only shadows on stone. Our goal should be to get to the re...
From the much-discussed new book by the distinguished philosopher Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos . "The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of that world, expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws. Biut at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. It seems inevitable that such an understanding will have a historical dimension as well as a timeless one. The idea that historical understanding is part of science has become familiar through the transformation of biology by evolutionary theory. but more recently, with the acceptance of the big bang, cosmology has also become a historical science." So the key distinction here is not so much between the mindful and the mindless elements in the cosmos, or between subjective and objective perspectives, but ...