I have just finished reading The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking. It is Hawking's follow-up to A Brief History of Time and I found it to be a more enjoyable read if for nothing more than the interesting diagrams and illustrations that accompany the dense scientific writing. Unless you are comfortable with reading and not understanding everything that you read, this is likely not the book for you.
I enjoy reading scientific text especially when it comes to logic, reasoning, and theory behind scientific events. I find that my perception of the world around me continually changes as I read and it shaped the way I view and also interpret happenings in my daily life and beyond.
In relation to my master's course, a couple things stood out that I'll example for you. what happens when to theories contradict each other yet they both have valid points. It is easy to say well...a little from column A and a little from column B...but if the two theories have fundamental differences that are juxtaposed...you can't say that without accounting for the differences.
Here is one example. Determinism is considered to be the doctrine that all facts and events exemplify or are examples of natural laws....physics for example. The Uncertainty Principle is another idea formulated by Werener Heisenberg that once can never be exactly sure of the position and velocity of a particle. The closer or more accurately you determine either position or velocity, the less accurately you can know the other.
Hawking mentions that at first sight determinism is threatened by the Uncertainty Principle. (Hawking 2001) How can all events that occur possibly be explained through this idea of Determinism if at the very basic essence of the "scientific" universe, one cannot accurately identify the velocity of a particle and its position at the same time? Another man named Marquis de Laplace created his own idea of scientific determinism that basically says if we were able to identify and map the position of a particle and its velocity at any given time, we could then determine, through mathematical computations and algorithms, that particle's position and velocity at any point in time in the future or the past. This however is a tough assumption, or maybe even illogical as Spock might say, because in the first place if we cannot accurately measure both position and velocity, the next step would not occur accurately. A small mistake in early calculation can skew future results greatly making them invalid as most mathematicians and statisticians would know. Lousy data in....you get lousy data out.
Now to simply throw out all ideas would be a mistake. One needs to learn from previous research and philosophical positions. If the theories had been totally discarded, we never would have seen a somewhat revolutionary idea called quantum mechanics...maybe you have heard of it. Quantum mechanics was able to somewhat rejuvenate the idea of determinism while accounting for the Uncertainty Principle. In quantum mechanics, the actual position and velocity of a particle does not need exactness but can be accounted for in a wave function. This allows for mathematical models to be developed with a a wave function. The amount of change or rate of change in the wave function is known as the Schrodinger equation named after Erwin Schrodinger. With this new interpretation, one can now approximate to a fairly specific degree, the position and velocity in the past and future.
So it is not that either philosophical-science view was incorrect and therefore one must start over, but that we can learn and integrate all knowledge, synthesize it. Quantum mechanics still uses the idea of determinism but on a reduced scale. It was not the be-all and end-all. The book opened my mind to many different viewpoints and that I think can be applied to attempting to understand the viewpoint and epistemological approaches to research in other areas.
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