(Part 2) Best philosophy of science books according to redditors
We found 1,533 Reddit comments discussing the best philosophy of science books. We ranked the 420 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
21. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
7 mentions
Used Book in Good Condition
> 3rd: I wasn’t trying to be right or wrong. I just wanted some perspective on the way I think about the unknown. it seems that I’m more of a believer that what we don’t know could be anything while most people I’ve talked to think that what we don’t know will end up being nothing.
The unknown is precisely that: unknown. The reason I am an atheist and not a believer any longer is because of the assertion by religion that it knows answers it can't justify. Because of revelation, because of scripture, because of any number of excuses that followers give that don't actually translate to anything concrete. I don't know what people you've talked to who assume what we don't know will end up being nothing but they are most assuredly not scientists.
Here's some food for thought from actual scientists:
Imagination is more important than knowledge. -Albert Einstein
We know that what we do know about the universe comprises four percent of everything that drives it. - Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ignorance is what drives science. - Stuart Firestein
It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man. - Richard Feynman
Depends what you mean by “Mathematical Philosophy.”
Intro to Mathematical Philosophy is kind of an abridged version of Principia Mathematica. Russell is attempting to derive mathematics from basic logical principles.
Many of the principles you read about in this book are covered in the first couple weeks of a Real Analysis class, though, Russell definitely has his own style. It reads less like a textbook and more like Russell giving a lecture. Knowledge of Analysis would help. Though I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. If you have a fair bit of math knowledge, and you go slow, I think you’ll be fine.
If you’re interested in the Philosophy of Mathematics, I would highly recommend Philosophy of Mathematics by Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam. It is an anthology of different writings on the philosophy of math and even includes portions of Russell’s intro to mathematical philosophy.
I firmly believe that dialogue is an undervalued and underexplored form for didactic writings, but I don't think The Little Schemer's two-column version with its short snippets of text is as good as it could be, or indeed very good at all. I would be in favor of something less catechismic and more discursive. And having more than two characters lets you illuminate questions and answers from many different angles. An example closer to my vision is Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations, which is half philosophy and half mathematics: the philosophy of mathematics as grounded in actual mathematical practice. That book is perhaps needlessly digressive, owing to its ultimately philosophical purpose, but it demonstrates an effective adaptation of classical philosophical dialogue to more mathematical matters.
Incidentally, Proofs and Refutations is the only book on the philosophy of mathematics that I'd recommend without hesitation or reservation to a fellow mathematician. You should all check it out. The excerpt on Amazon gives a pretty faithful impression.
If any of you know of any, I'd be very interested in other books that put dialogue to effective use outside its usual philosophical domain.
There are a number of useful guides available but they're all written by aficionados, or other successful players, though - not the designers.
This is the best guide for a high Int/Cha talkie game, I think.
This is well recommended for a more aggressive style of game, but a lot of people mistakenly misapply it to trade - it's really just for combat.
This is great for a sneakier game.
This is a badly written hack job that too many players put a lot of stock in; supposedly it was written by the designers, but it was actually written (and re-written) by a lot of different guys and is very contradictory - i'd avoid
Finally, this won't help you play, but it really explains the deeper mechanics.
And this goes into detail on the meta-game.
Hope that helps!
For Frege, complete generality was a key part of logic so his logical system was designed to be completely general. For that reason his system reduced math not to a theory of sets but a theory of concepts and their extensions (concepts are what is denoted by a phrase like "is blue" or "was born before Frege" while the extension of a concept is the collection of all objects for which a given concept is true). Russell's paradox demonstrated that Frege's system was inconsistent which made it unsuitable as a foundation for mathematics.
In response, mathematicians came up with an alternative foundation for mathematics called Zermelo Fraenkel set theory (or ZF). To the best of our knowledge ZF is consistent but it seems to lack the full generality that is a hallmark of logic. Here are two reasons:
If you're interested in reading about the foundations of math and already know the basics of logic and naive set theory I recommend "Philosophies of Mathematics".
Edit: your --> you're
Edit 2: Fixed error caught by /u/fractal_shark
Can confirm, had to buy the illustrated edition just to understand.
Shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an interview: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything," he said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, ‘Well, it still might be true.'" These words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle physics.
What some (gentile) Nobel laureates think about string theory:
Well this thread title drew me like a hunk of iron to the world's biggest magnet.
The short answer to the title question is "no, except maybe in some very trivial sense." The longer answer is, well, complicated. Before I ramble a little bit, let me say that we should distinguish between the rhetorical and (for lack of a better word) "metaphysical" interpretations of this question. In many cases, the language used to describe some theory, problem, proposal, or whatever is indeed unnecessarily complicated in a way that makes it difficult to communicate (some parts of the humanities and social sciences are particularly bad offenders here). That is indeed a problem, and we should strive to communicate our ideas in the simplest language that's appropriate for the audience we're talking to. I take your friend's thesis to be a bit more substantive than that, though: he's claiming something like "all big messy systems are really just lots of small simple systems, and we can learn everything we need to know about the world by looking at the small simple systems." That's the viewpoint that I think is mistaken.
I think it's really important to distinguish between complicated and complex, both in the context of this discussion and in general. Lots of things are complicated in the sense of being big, having lots of moving parts, difficult to understand, or exhibiting nuanced behavior. A box of air at thermodynamic equilibrium is complicated: it has lots of parts, and they're all moving around with respect to one another. Not all complicated systems are also complex systems, though, and understanding what "complex" means turns out to be really tricky.
Here are some comparisons that seem intuitively true: a dog’s brain is more complex than an ant’s brain, and a human’s brain is more complex still. The Earth’s ecosystem is complex, and rapidly became significantly more complex during and after the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. The Internet as it exists today is more complex than ARPANET—the Internet’s progenitor—was when it was first constructed. A Mozart violin concerto is more complex than a folk tune like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The shape of Ireland’s coastline is more complex than the shape described by the equation x2 + y2 = 1. The economy of the United States in 2016 is more complex than the economy of pre-Industrial Europe. All these cases are relatively uncontroversial. What quantity is actually being tracked here, though? Is it the same quantity in all these cases? That is, is the sense in which a human brain is more complex than an ant brain the same sense in which a Mozart concerto is more complex than a folk tune?
These questions are extremely non-trivial to answer, and a very large number of whole books have been written on the subject already; so far, there's no universally accepted consensus of what makes complex systems special, or how to measure complexity in the natural world. There is, however, a growing consensus that P.W. Anderson was correct when he wrote in 1972 that "more is different": in many cases, systems consisting of a large number of relatively simple components interacting in relatively simple ways can display surprising, novel behavior. That's characteristic of complex systems: they behave in ways that we wouldn't expect them to (or even be able to deduce) based on an examination of their constituent parts in isolation from one another.
Complex systems often show interesting patterns of behavior that cut across scales of analysis, with their dynamics at one scale constraining the dynamics at other scales (and vice-versa). This sort of "multiscale variety" has been used to develop a mathematical theory of strong emergence, demonstrating how it can be the case that more is different. I've called this quality "dynamical complexity," and defined it as a measure of the "pattern richness" of a particular physical system: one system is more dynamically complex than another if (and only if) it occupies a point in configuration space that is at the intersection of regions of interest to more special sciences. For instance, a system for which the patterns of economics, psychology, biology, chemistry, and physics are predictively useful is more dynamically complex than one for which only the patterns of chemistry and physics are predictively useful.
The notion of dynamical complexity is supposed to correspond with (and give a physical interpretation for) the formalism of effective complexity, which is an information-theoretic concept developed by Murray Gell-Mann at the Santa Fe Institute. Effective complexity is grounded in the notion of algorithmic information content, and tracks the "amount of randomness" in a string, and how any non-randomness--information--was produced. A key feature of dynamical complexity is that the total "information content" of a physical system--the total number of interesting patterns in its behavior--may be perspectival, and thus depend on how we choose to individuate systems from their environment, and how we demarcate collections of microstates of the system into "relevantly similar" macrostates. Those choices are pragmatic, value-driven, and lack clear and uncontroversial "best answers" in many cases, contributing to the challenge of studying complex systems.
As an example, consider the task of predicting the future of the global climate. What are the criteria by which we divide the possible futures of the global climate into macrostates such that those macrostates are relevant for the kinds of decisions we need to make? That is, how might we individuate the global climate system so that we can notice the patterns that might help us predict the outcome of various climate policies? The answer to this question depends in part upon what we consider valuable; if we want to maximize long-term economic growth for human society, for instance, our set of macrostates will likely look very different than it would if we wanted to simply ensure that the average global temperature remained below a particular value. Both of those in turn may differ significantly from a set of macrostates informed by a desire to maximize available agricultural land. These different ways of carving possible future states up into distinctive macrostates do not involve changes to the underlying equations of motion describing how the system moves through its state space, nor does the microstructure of the system provide an obvious and uncontroversial answer to the question of which individuation we should choose. There is no clearly "best way" to go about answering this question.
Compare that project to modeling the box of gas I mentioned earlier and you can start to see why modeling complex systems is so difficult, and why complex systems are fundamentally different. In the case of the gas, there are a relatively small number of ways to individuate the system such that the state space we end up with is dynamically interesting (e.g. Newtonian air molecules, thermodynamic states, quantum mechanical fluctuations). In the case of the global climate, there are a tremendous number of potentially interesting individuations, each associated with its own collection of models. The difference between the two systems is not merely one of degree; they are difference in kind, and must be approached with that in mind.
In some cases, this may involve rather large changes in the way we think about the practice of science. As /u/Bonitatis notes below, many of the big unsolved problems in science are those which appear to "transcend" traditional disciplines; they involve drawing conclusions from our knowledge of economics, physics, psychology, political science, biology, and so on. This is because many of the big unsolved problems we're concerned with now involve the study of systems which are highly dynamically complex: things like the global economy, the climate, the brain, and so on. The view that we should (or even can) approach them as mere aggregates of simple systems is, I think, naive and deeply mistaken; moreover, it's likely to actually stymie scientific progress, since insisting on "tractability" or analytically closed models will often lead us to neglect important features of the natural world for the sake of defending those intuitive values.
These three sent me to grad school.
ET Bell, Men of Mathematics
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Touchstone-Book-E-T-Bell/dp/0671628186/
Davis and Hersh, The Mathematical Experience
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Davis/dp/0395929687/
Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations
http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-Refutations-Logic-Mathematical-Discovery/dp/0521290384/
The basic theme of differential geometry is to take calculus in R^(n) and do it in a more general n-dimensional spaces (called manifolds) that are "locally" like R^(n). For example, think of a sphere: when you look at it close enough (like when you're living on the Earth), it looks flat, and you can do calculus with lines on the ground and everything works out. On a larger scale, though, things get messed up when you look at scales large enough for the curvature of the Earth to make a difference. So you always have to look infinitesimally close (that's where the "differential" part comes in). Feel free to ask more about that.
As for notes, I mostly learned from this guy, whose notes on differential geometry are available online. I also really like this book. If you'd prefer a more easygoing, computational approach, take a look at this book, or some other gentle introduction to GR.
ETA: If you'd like to think about non-Euclidean geometry using only basic linear algebra, take a look at these notes.
At 15 years old he should be able to handle any sort of casual history book. A text book probably isn't up his alley, but when I was 15 I bought a Philosophy for Dummies book to help me understand some topics a teacher didn't clarify well enough for me. I was hooked on those For Dummies books for awhile. They're vaguely humorous and they explain topics in an easy to digest, non-tiring way.
Aside from that, A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich, and A Brief History of Time and the Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking were both wonderfully fun books that might appeal to his history and science interest without being belittling.
I highly recommend the book, Is God a Mathematician? It deals with this question directly. Link
There's a good book about it:
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https://www.amazon.com/Ignorance-Drives-Science-Stuart-Firestein/dp/0199828075
If you want to read about how reliable a proof is, I highly recommend Imre Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations book. The best book about proof that I have ever read. It also doesn't require you to have a mathematical background, because the proofs are mostly geometrical.
The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger may be a good one for your purposes. There is a talk by him on the basic ideas here.
Though he would probably not describe it this way, I think his view has a lot of similarity with buddhist psychology. One way of thinking about meditation is as a technique for learning to be more aware of the medium of your experience, making it less 'transparent' (in Metzinger's sense) and therefore reducing the illusion of selfhood. But just loosing the illusion isn't enough to be happy. You have to develop compassion as well.
Osteopathy in Europe != osteopathy in the US. One is exclusively manipulation, the other is a full fledged, fully trained, medical doctor who took an extra class on manipulation (albeit at the cost of less basic science classes and possibly a rotation in manipulation in lieu of one in something else). Most DOs don't use manipulation to any significant degree.
The history behind it is interesting. I refer you to Norman Gevitz's The DOs. In short, the late 1800s/early 1900's had a lot of wonky areas claiming to be medicine. Things like electricity, magnetism, naturopathy, old school allopathy, homeopathy, etc. Many of the better aspects of these fields consolidated under the allopathic banner and with the Flexner report, most of the ones that didn't were regulated out of mainstream existence. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the report was commissioned by the AMA and critiqued by many as an example of regulatory capture.
For some reason osteopathy tended to remain it's own thing, and while many osteopathic schools closed due to Flexner report, enough were found competent to teach medicine and flexible enough to change curriculums as needed, and remained open to have a significant influence in certain areas of the country and the field developed as a kind of offshoot of the allopathic model with their own board exams and residency training. In WW2 there was a shortage of MDs in the army so they allowed DOs in which greatly increased mainstream acceptance. In the 1950s there was talk of integrating the California osteopaths and/or schools into the allopathic organization which culminated in UC Irvine being bought out and the california DOs being able to buy an MD title. This led to more mainstream acceptance though with the large cost of losing one of our best schools and much influence in the west coast. In short it's a complex, long, and hard fought history that got us where we are.
As far as EBM and the litigious culture, I honestly have no idea why most of this stuff is reimbursed. There really isn't much level 1 research on the stuff and the cochrane review for LBP pain and manipulation says its no better than other interventions. A tylenol is a lot cheaper than an office visit... I don't mean that in a disparaging way but just to highlight the lack of quality research.
Interesting to note: since thermodynamics is Newtonian, and Newtonian physics is time-reversable, entropy also increases going backwards in time. To get around that, you have to insert prior information into the problem by assuming a low-entropy state in the past.
In that sense, it's not entropy maximization that breaks the symmetry, but the prior information.
Discussed in more detail in this book.
Some good readings from the University of Cambridge Mathematical reading list and p11 from the Studying Mathematics at Oxford Booklet both aimed at undergraduate admissions.
I'd add:
Prime obsession by Derbyshire. (Excellent)
The unfinished game by Devlin.
Letters to a young mathematician by Stewart.
The code book by Singh
Imagining numbers by Mazur (so, so)
and a little off topic:
The annotated turing by Petzold (not so light reading, but excellent)
Complexity by Waldrop
What is this thing called Science? an introductory text to the philosophy of science. It takes a look at different descriptions of science, with a lot of focus on falsification, and points out where they fail to be sufficient descriptions of science.
I read this shortly after reading The Demon Haunted World and it really does help to sharpen up the critical thinking skills which one receives from reading The Demon Haunted World. I think that it should be required reading.
Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic is a classic "primary text" that advocates a specific point of view (that arithmetic can be reduced to logic in some sense).
These are a couple of contemporary introductory books that provide decent surveys of some major views:
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Mathematics-Alexander-George/dp/0631195440
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-The-Philosophy/dp/0192893068/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_z/181-3737012-4965247
EDIT: If I had to choose, I would pick the Velleman/Alexander book.
Following this up I would recommend "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" by Carnap, "Critique of Pure Reason" by Kant, "Philosophy of Mathematics" compiled by Putnam and Benacerraf, "Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology" by Shapiro, "Mathematics in Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Reflections on Mathematical Practice" by Shabel, and "On the Infinite" by Hilbert.
Also I would recommend looking into the lesser works of Shapiro, Shabel, and Yablo
Edit: I forgot to mention that Aristotle and Badiou also have writings on mathematics.
/u/LeeHyori nailed it as to where you should start. After that, follow a philosophy of mathematics course. If you can't find one, you won't go wrong by reading through Benacerraf and Putnam's antology which manages better than almost any academic anthology I know to select all/only the heaviest-hitting papers in the field, stopping about 1-2 generations ago.
You should also pump your technical background in logic, set theory, model theory, category theory and the like. Logic and set theory are absolutely essential: tackle these sooner rather than later. The rest can wait a bit longer.
I know you're admitted and all, but regardless, I wholely recommend reading through The DO's Even if you are going to an MD school, it really gives a historical and present day context to the DO/MD differences, similarities and motivation for doing so. It also explains the phenomenon on why so many people believe so adamantly into homeopathy/naturalistic medicines.
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mathematics-Selected-Paul-Benacerraf/dp/052129648X
This is a collection of important papers on the subject compiled by Putnam and Benacerraf (perhaps the two most prominent philosophers of mathematics alive today... though they are both retired). It's longer than what you want, but you can select and read any or all of the articles that interest you.
I'm a big fan of reading historical physics papers. I have this extremely well-annotated version of Newton's Principia, this collection of Schrödinger's original QM papers, and this fairly easy to find collection of relativity papers (mostly Einstein). Oh yeah, and these Dirac lectures.
Besides that, I just use my university subscription to find old papers, which is usually successful if they were published in English or sufficiently famous. I would say that I have a lot of "classic" papers saved just through finding them on Google Scholar or whatever. I could try to go through and list them, but I'd say it's mostly "usual suspects" plus important papers from my own interests (condensed matter/stat mech/QFT).
The fact that you are still operating under of the assumptions that the Chicago and Austrian schools provide shows that your personal understanding of economics is at least 60 years old.
Get a book on complexity theory. If you are the practical guy you claim to be, I'm sure you will enjoy it.
Here's one for the layman: http://www.amazon.com/COMPLEXITY-EMERGING-SCIENCE-ORDER-CHAOS/dp/0671872346
Her's one if you are into math:
http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Complexity-A-Modern-Approach/dp/0521424267/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2
To put it simply, We could argue for years about the examples you gave simply because the complexity of those situations allows for a multitude of different, yet similarly rational, arguments (a fact which, as an admirer of the Austrian school, I'm sure you can agree with). There is a great little bit on Wikipedia's page on economic models (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_model) - under the heading "Are economic models falsifiable?":
The sharp distinction between falsifiable economic models and those that are not is by no means a universally accepted one. Indeed one can argue that the ceteris paribus (all else being equal) qualification that accompanies any claim in economics is nothing more than an all-purpose escape clause (See N. de Marchi and M. Blaug.) The all else being equal claim allows holding all variables constant except the few that the model is attempting to reason about. This allows the separation and clarification of the specific relationship. However, in reality all else is never equal, so economic models are guaranteed to not be perfect. The goal of the model is that the isolated and simplified relationship has some predictive power that can be tested, mainly that it is a theory capable of being applied to reality.
So the point of an economic model, indeed the point of any model is to, in the words of Wolfram, "Examine certain essential features of a system and idealize away everything else." Models are, by their very nature incomplete. There is also an infinite number of possible models, each with a varying degree of accuracy. With these two points in mind, it seems foolish for one to plant a stake in the ground at any one of them and say, with certainty, that this one is the best one. It is also similarly foolish to ask others to provide, immediately, models which will yield better results in every standard, or else you will go back to the old ones. Unfortunately, progress is made through trial and error, not sitting at a desk with head in hands.
It definitely looks like crazy-not-really-science ramblings.
Maybe a good alternative, from a nobel laureate, would be Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Martinus Veltman ?
It's extremely easy to read and I found it fascinating when I took my first introductory courses.
Confrontational atheism: Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier
>"Know, then, my friends, that everything that is recited and practiced in the world for the cult and adoration of gods is nothing but errors, abuses, illusions, and impostures. All the laws and orders that are issued in the name and authority of God or the gods are really only human inventions…."
>"And what I say here in general about the vanity and falsity of the religions of the world, I don’t say only about the foreign and pagan religions, which you already regard as false, but I say it as well about your Christian religion because, as a matter of fact, it is no less vain or less false than any other.
Softer (much less confrontational) atheism: 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God
>This unique approach to skepticism presents fifty commonly heard reasons people often give for believing in a God and then raises legitimate questions regarding these reasons, showing in each case that there is much room for doubt. Whether you're a believer, a complete skeptic, or somewhere in between, you'll find this review of traditional and more recent arguments for the existence of God refreshing, approachable, and enlightening.
Favorites non-fiction (or at least mostly non-fiction as time will tell) and not directly related to atheism: Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension and The Illustrated A Brief History of Time and the Universe in a Nutshell
Favorites fiction (also not directly atheist related): Treasure Island, and Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld
Atheism book I've tried to read and found to be over my head that's supposed to be the end-all-be-all: The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God
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Currently reading and while enjoyable it's a bit tough to get, I've found myself re-reading pages regularly: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
Good post. I must say i follow a similar train of thought considering most matters you have discussed. It seems scientific thought plays a big role, and hence would be wise to understand the philosophical stance of science, or at least the attempts that have been made to understand it. A book i haven't read yet, but will embark on soon is titled What is this thing called science which as far as i'm aware is the go to introduction to philosophy of science text, also among universities. Also there is a good series on youtube that i've watched which covers some of the main ideas in philosophy of science such as inductivism, deductivism, paradigm theory and systematicity. That's a good watch, ~ 12 lectures that go for about an hour or so each. I can give you the lecture slides if you want. Also in relation to philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is also very popular in which Kuhn puts forth paradigm theory.
I've only attended medical school so far, unfortunately. Everything I know about chiropractors come from my professors, personal experience, and various articles and books.
I think the history of medicine is fascinating, especially since the branches now seen as "alternative" like homeopathy, magnetic therapy, chiropractic, and osteopathy had really good reasons for existing back when MDs thought heavy-metal poisoning was a panacea and rusty hacksaws would suffice for limb amputations (aka the late 19th century).
My Recommendations:
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality
Brian Greene Has Three Wonderful Books
The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone
The first one, is mostly history with a fair bit of Quantum/Particle physics.
Brian Greene covers topics from cosmology, quantum physics, and he is also a string theorist so he touches upon that.
The Quantum World is a more detailed introduction to quantum physics.
The Ego Tunnel is really accessible, and much shorter than Being No One. Either are great.
Hawking's On The Shoulders of Giants
Gribbin's The Scientists
Smithsonian's Timelines of Science
There are also a ton of good historical books on almost every major milestone in physics - a few I enjoyed:
The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electric Field by Nancy Forbes
E=MC2 by David Bodanis
Quantum by Manjit Kumar
The Big Bang by Simon Singh
I can't link you to any histories of biology or chemistry, sorry, those aren't my areas of knowledge.
I learned from Baez & Muniain; Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity.
Toward the end of the course, I met Brian Greene at a public talk, and he recommended Schutz; Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics.
Imre Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations helps make a little bit of the magic less magic.
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Mathematics-Alexander-George/dp/0631195440
I took a course on Philosophy of Mathematics with the authors of this book. It contains an entire section on intuitionism, which is well-written and would serve as a nice place to start.
It sounds like you might have a leg up on the "absolute beginner," but these were the books that helped me get my head around some of the basics: (using Amazon preview links for samples of the first two)
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I second looking into the Santa Fe Institute and their free online courses.
Two great books combined:
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Brief-History-Universe-Nutshell/dp/0307291227/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374682560&sr=1-3&keywords=universe+in+a+nutshell
This book: Mario Livio - Is God a Mathematician could be what you are looking for. It discusses by way of looking at the history of math whether math is invented or discovered.
A good book that tackles the subject in an interesting manner is entitled "Ignorance: How it drives Science" , by Stuart Firestein.
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0199828075?pc_redir=1404709311&robot_redir=1
He argues that pure research, without clear application to current practice, is required in future research. He is also largely against the hypothesis-driven model of setting research questions.
I bought this book but haven't started it. I fist saw Rabbi Shimon Dovid Cowen on YouTube. His book looked great. Rabbi Moshe Weiner gave it an enthusiastic endorsement. Perusing it I read about the Abraham-Brahman connection, which is fascinating.
My summer reading has been Job-like. I put Feser's latest opus on the trunk of my car before taking the garbage to the curb. Drove to work. "Where's my Feser?!" Derp. This happened once before with Schopenhauer, as if to vindicate him.
RADICAL summer reading about Maimonides fighting Kabbalah before there was a Kabbalah to fight.
You are rather confused about essential forms, final causes, and actualization, none of which are related to matter/energy conversion, except inasmuch as matter has the potential to be energy and energy has the potency to be matter.
Actualization is not directly related to metaphysical perfection, since purely accidental changes such as changes in position or color or simply moving through time are all actualization of potential without impacting the essence of a substantial form or its telos.
If you would like, I can point you to an introduction to Hylomorphism https://www.amazon.com/Aristotles-Revenge-Metaphysical-Foundations-Biological/dp/3868382003
But even if you would like to reject Hylomorphism, that's a philosophical debate, not something physics can comment on.
I had a comment in here giving a reason for he post, though that's not an explanation.
> Note: may not be the best place to post, but I needed to post somewhere in order to link it in Dr. Feser's open thread today, which he only does a couple of times each year. I've been working through his books since early this year, and developing this concept map as I progress.
By way of explanation, this is a work in progress to visualize the relationships between the concepts brought to bear in the philosophical advances of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Beginning for the fundamental argument for the necessary reality of the distinction between actuality and potentiality, the concept map walks through the conceptual divisions of act and potency. Notably, the divisions of act arrive at a core conception of God as Pure Actuality, Being Itself, utterly devoid of any potentiality or passivity. This is not a proof of God, but rather simply serves to define God's role as the First and Unmoved Mover and Sustainer of all things.
The divisions of act and potency expand to the right of the map, where you see how actuality and potentiality come together as Form and Matter to produce concrete, material things.
Branching off of from the soul (here defined as the substantial form of a living substance), there is a section which details the powers or capacities of the different levels of living substances, which are hierarchically related, with respect to the corporeal order.
For now, the section on the Four Causes is placed on its own, as I still haven't decided where best to tie it in, since many topics make use of this principle. Particularly, Final Causation (defined as the end, goal, purpose, directedness or teleology of a thing) is essential to understanding the concept of objective goodness, which carries into the section on ethics (which, in this view, amounts to an understanding of the directedness of the will).
Also included, but not yet connected as well as it could be, is a section on the divine attributes, along with a brief explanation of how we can know them.
There is much more that can be included. As mentioned elsewhere, this was posted here so that I could link to the WIP. I had hoped that I could catch Edward Feser's attention in the comments of his open thread, which he posted on his blog site yesterday, and which he does only a couple times per year. This concept map is the result of my learning from his books:
I am still working my way through this last one, and when done I intend also to read:
If you're interested in the topic, you should check Dr. Thomas Metzinger work too, here is a TED talk explaining his experiments and what let him to develop his theory of the mind.
He wrote a book call The Ego Tunnel that I totally recommend.
The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger is supposed to be good.
You might post these singly. There is a lot of room for discussion in each one.
Your last two caught my eye. I suggest, if you have not read them, two books simply named Complexity and Emergence.
Happy Cakeday.
I wholeheartedly recommend [Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Martinus Veltman] (http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Mysteries-Elementary-Particle-Physics/dp/981238149X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406678496&sr=8-1&keywords=facts+and+mysteries+in+elementary+particle+physics). In all honesty I am only 60 pages in, but I am loving being along for the easy-to-comprehend ride.
I've just finished The Windup Girl, which I had been putting off for some time. It was, quite simply, the most astounding and breath-taking science fiction book I've ever read. I loved it.
However, my problem is that I buy books compulsively. Mostly hard copies, but recently I bought a Kindle and buy the odd e-book or two. I have literally hundreds of books on my "to read" list.
One near the top is A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. I recently read her phenomenal Wolf Hall and was blown away by her skills as a story teller. I'm a bit of an armchair historian, and I'm particularly interested in the French Revolution (amongst other things), so I'm very excited by the prospects this book holds. If it's anything like Wolf Hall then I'm in for a very particular treat.
Also near the top lies Quantum - Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar's much lauded recent history of the emergence of quantum mechanics. I very much enjoyed other tangentially related books on this topic, including the wonderful The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Fly in the Cathedral, so this should be good fun and educational to boot.
Having read and loved Everitt's biography of Cicero, I'm very much looking forward to his biographies of Augustus and Hadrian.
I'm listening to an audio-book version of The Count of Monte Cristo on my iPod, which I find rather enjoyable. I've only got through the first half dozen chapters and it's already taken a few hours, so this looks to be a nice, long-term and periodic treat for when I have time alone in the car.
Cronin's The Passage keeps piquing my interest, but I was foolish enough to buy it in that lamentable format, the much cursed "trade paperback", so the thing is a behemoth. The size puts me off. I wish I had waited for a regular paper-back edition. As it is, it sits there on my bookshelf, flanked by the collected works of Alan Furst (what a wonderfully evocative writer of WWII espionage!!) and a bunch of much recommended, but as yet unread, fantasy including The Darkness that Comes Before by Bakker, The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss and Physiognomy by Ford.
Books I have ordered and am eagerly awaiting, and which shall go straight to the top of the TBR list (no doubt to be replaced by next month's purchases) include Orlando Figes's highly regarded history of The Crimean War, Rosen's history of steam The Most Powerful Idea in the World and Stacy Schiff's contentious biography of Cleopatra.
A bit of a mixed bunch, all up, I'd say.
Yeah, that was a very sloppy and rather conjectured paraphrase, I apologize. I was aiming for brevity and totally lost the point. Should have checked what subreddit I was in as well...
In The Ego Tunnel, The Brain that Changes Itself and no-doubt other recent neuroscience "dumbed-down" books there is a prevailing theme that our brain creates the world around us by unifying our disparate senses into one cohesive world of meaning. It happens to be splayed into 3-orthogonal angles of space which moves forward in time. Your nerve endings gave your brain enough feedback as a baby who feels stuff to build your "dreambody" for you which you can of course see and feel. Anorexics, amputees with phantom-limbs, etc. get fucked by something going wrong in that whole process. This system is also activated empathetically, like watching a soccer player getting kicked in the groin. That's basically how we communicate -- we tweak our universe slightly to become other people. Freud figured that out. Basic human empathy: some people lack it; some people are very specific about to whom they let it work on. This is the same body that walks around in your dreams... your world-building process without the benefit of sensory backup. It's the same one that loses orientation and gives you an out-of-body-experience, or that disappears when you take psychotropic drugs and "become the universe" or whatever.
Basically, all I'm trying to do is bring a completely different subject into the discussion. My conjecture is that since i. everything I see and hear and touch is just in my head (i.e. trees that fall in forests may create air-vibrations but those fail to classify as "sounds" because sound is a sense) and ii. either we're alone in the universe or not, which reasons because it means there's meaning in the universe beyond our present-day dwellings on the matter, then if there is a better viewpoint, a perfectly objective, whole viewpoint of the macroscopic and quantum world, or at the very least a TOE with perfect predictability so that science didn't have to go about it all the hard way like it does now then would the universe look like 3 dimensions and time? Am I a tan blob of meat or an extrapolation on a string who only thinks he's a tan blob of meat?
Because we're taking about holographic projections meaning that 4D space is a projection from a different, lesser-dimensioned space with all the same information stored in both, I figure the mathmatical projection would need to take place in the process which builds our 4D world, the human brain and nervous system.
edit: 3D!=4D... 'tan'!='lily-white pale' will remain unfixed.
In my opinion the best way to learn and understand the chaos of sub-atomic particle and their place is to start with the trying to understand the standard model. It is the model in which everything is supposed to fit. It's the big picture.
If you have time to spare, consider watching these video lectures
http://www.cosmolearning.com/courses/particle-physics-the-standard-model-416/video-lectures/
Or pick up this book meant for people not well versed in math http://www.amazon.com/The-Theory-Almost-Everything-Standard/dp/0452287863
Or if you're a masochist and feel you're upto the task of really understand this stuff take a look at http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-David-Griffiths/dp/3527406018/ref=pd_sim_b_1
That book tries to see the physics beyond the standard model, marching towards and inching closer towards the ultimate goal of physics.
Hawking is a wonderful direction to go
The Illustrated "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307291227/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_d5m3Cb47NHXQC
pantheist basics right there.
Werner Heisenberg in this book.
> Yes, that's the efficient causation. But final causatively, action begins with ideas. Recall the 4 kinds of causation identified by Aristotle. One of the errors determinists make is not recognizing final causation
Hmm... hadn't heard of that before. Interesting but I think I'd rather read Judea Pearl's book Causality than Aristotle's thoughts on Causality.
> I believe man is born as tabula rasa
I used to believe that, there's a lot of science that contradicts it, or at least limits how blank the slate is. But you don't need science to refute the general idea. If we're all born with no preconceived notions than how did thought itself emerge? Clearly our tools (culture) have written on our slate, often ways we aren't conscious of.
>Regardless, the valuing of society is not part of man's nature; rather, it's discovered and chosen.
Choice is another philosophically loaded concept. If you believe choice can occur on a subconscious level, then I don't disagree with you. But I believe people don't make significant choices unless their emotional state is worse than they think it should be.
>And while human are typically irrational and emotional thinkers in this point of time, I don't think that makes it their nature
It's their history. And my perspective is that history is a pretty good predictor of the future. Young people are often lead to believe that some great change is just around the corner, but that's rarely true.
This book is the best. I shit you not, this is my favorite book on physics/mathematical-physics. Don't be afraid of the title. It's true that eventually a number of advanced topics are discussed, but the first chapter goes through all of the differential geometry you'll need in an extremely lucid fashion. You can go to the math books recommended here, some of them are also very good, but this one tops them all in my opinion. If you can't find a copy online, or don't want to pay for a hard copy, I can PM you a copy.
Perhaps "Quantum" by Manjit Kumar would be helpful. It goes over Bohr the scientist as well the legacy of Einsten, Planck, and others.
Link: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Einstein-Debate-Nature-Reality/dp/0393339882
Some things to remember though: Bohr helped start the quantum revolution, but his science is often considered the "old quantum". Yes, he was to first to state that electrons orbit atomic nuclei, but the current model of the atom is the Schrodinger model, which states that there is a "probability cloud" where the electron is most likely to be found around the atom. So the best advice I can give you before looking more into Bohr the Scientist is to see modern scientists standing on Bohr's shoulders rather than Bohr as the Atlas of modern quantum theory.
No, it is that last piece of the puzzle that has been dubbed "The theory of almost everything".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Higgs_boson
Also a great read - http://www.amazon.com/The-Theory-Almost-Everything-Standard/dp/0452287863/ref=pd_sim_b_4
If you want a deeper understanding that stays fairly conceptual (ie., away from math), you could try Stephen Hawkings work: http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Brief-History-Universe-Nutshell/dp/0307291227/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1452022887&sr=8-1&keywords=a+brief+history+of+time+%2F+the+universe+in+a+nutshell
Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics https://www.amazon.com/dp/981238149X/ref=cm_sw_r_other_awd_IYdHwbTA3WNGE
If you haven't heard of the book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, by Stuart Firestein, I recommend checking it out. It's a fairly short read that explores the idea that it's not really knowledge we are/should be looking for, but more questions (I mostly agree with this).
To understand the general history of math, you won't need to understand what you most likely consider to be math. You will, however, need to understand how to put yourself in the shoes of those who came before and see the problems as they saw them, which is a rather different kind of thinking.
But anyway, the history of math is long and complicated. It would take years to understand everything and much of it was work done on paths that are now basically dead ends. Nevertheless, here are some other resources:
Of course, let's not forget what is possibly the most complete single resource available today:
This is a huge area and I applaud you for being interested in it. If you decide to look into it seriously, you WILL find yourself confused, bored, and annoyed at times. Yet it's a beautiful history and one that will illuminate much of the apparently meaningless gibberish in calculus, as well as many other areas.
Not exactly "how to be a man", but general non-fiction I've really enjoyed:
Benjamin Hoff - The Tao of Pooh -- Sounds childish perhaps, but its a fantastic read. Worth the time.
http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Pooh-Benjamin-Hoff/dp/0140067477
Biography of E=MC2 -- Einstein's famous equasion, told biography style. Great read, not too "sciency".
http://www.amazon.com/mc2-Biography-Worlds-Famous-Equation/dp/0425181642
Tim O'Brian - If I Die in a combat zone -- http://www.amazon.com/If-Die-Combat-Zone-Ship/dp/0767904435
Also, military field guides / training manuals are non classified and excellent resources for any sort of camping / survival you may do. Most surplus type stores carry them, or you can download and print your own!
yeah either that or this one
Entrepreneur Reading List
Computer Science Grad School Reading List
Video Game Development Reading List
I found this 1958 book by Heisenberg himself a good read (with the added historical perspective): Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. Copenhagen interpretation only, for obvious reasons.
for those of you who want a great layman's explanation of E=MC^2 delivered through some pretty fascinating stories check out E=MC^2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis
it is very good
Not really. For the cup to break to subatomic level, you'd need to have enough energy from the fall of the cup to break the cup to that level and you just haven't. This motion is forbidden by the laws of mechanics alone.
Second, I'm talking about microstates. The macrostate is the cup broken in that particular arrangement. The microstates are the different atomic configurations that at the macrolevel look like that exact same broken cup and not another broken cup. We're not even looking at broken something elses.
Look, this was my best attempt to an ELI5 explanation of a question that is not even an ELI5 question. No 5-year old kid will ever ask what a Boltzmann brain is unless he has read about thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. And at that point, it's better to give the full and correct mathematical explanation rather than an approximate one. So, if you're not satisfied with the reply, I advise you to read up on the subject.
I advise "Time and Chance" by David Z. Albert as an excellent semi-technical read on the subject. But you'll appreciate it more if you have a background in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.
You can safely skip the chapter on classical field theory in Carroll. It's all about chapter 2, 3 and 4 and even in these chapter you don't need to learn everything.
Now, I've gone through the book myself a while back and if I can recall (and judging from the table of contents) you really want to be focussing on:
1.1 through 1.7, and 1.9
2.1 -- 2.5, 2.8, (with 2.6,2.9, 2.10 optional)
3.1 -- 3.4, 3.6,3.7,3.10 (3.5 optional)
4.1, 4.2, 4.4 (4.5 optional)
This will steer you away from all the Lagrangians and fields. It's very math-heavy though, but completely self-contained. If you're having trouble with a particular subject: consult an alternative book (either GR or a book on differential geometry).
If you've made it this far, then you can test your capability with chapter 5: deriving the Schwarzschild solution, i.e. starting with the Schwarzschild metric and deriving the curvature tensor. Avoid the discussion on black holes, horizions and singularities -- these can be quite tricky.
Chapter 2, 3 and 4 is what's it's all about, really. Chapter 3 is the math you really, really need, while 2 is the buildup towards 3. Chapter 4 is putting all the math into the GR context.
Now, so far for the book of Carroll. What I actually would recommend is not chosing GR as your main goal. Instead: look at cosmology. The stuff you can learn there is incredible, and you don't need (to understand) the full machinery of GR to play around with it. You still need to learn about tensor, metrics and manifolds but you'll apply them much, much sooner. Learn about the Hubble parameter, critical density and acceleration of the universe.
Keep this in mind, because GR is very math-involved. This is the main reason why you should have some exposure to classical mechanics or E&M -- partly because of the concepts treated there, but mostly because of the experience with physics and math you'll gain from these.
Science was originally another subset of philosophy called "Natural Philosophy" at the time. It has since grown in to an independent discipline of course, but I never let those people forget where they came from!
I discuss that a bi more in the new book, and David Albert looks at it carefully in his book:
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Chance-David-Z-Albert/dp/0674011325/
The main point is that we can only successfully correlate conditions in the current universe (such as "I remember liking that show") to what conditions actually were ("I was watching that show, liking it") because entropy used to be lower. Otherwise, the most likely explanation would be "the impression that I liked the show just randomly fluctuated into existence."
Try Proofs and Refutations by Lakatos
http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-Refutations-Logic-Mathematical-Discovery/dp/0521290384
> ... you have to add another premise to conclude that absolute reality doesn't exist ... [emphasis added by me]
Lack of absolute time and lack of absolute reality are completely different things; the former does not entail the latter. In relativity, the spacetime manifold absolutely does exist. There are different ways of breaking it down into space and time coordinates. Just as in the older metaphysics of classical physics, space absolutely did exist, but there are different ways of applying a Cartesian coordinate system to it. The fact that there was no "absolute right and left" in the universe did not entail that there was no absolute reality.
For that matter, using the appropriate mathematical formalism, you can describe spacetime and the theories defined on it without any explicit coordinates. A description of how to do this can be found in Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity by John Baez. In this formalism, since you don't pick out a coordinate system at all, everything in the formalism is absolute: not frame-dependent, not observer-dependent. However, time is not part of the picture, just as right and left would not be part of a coordinate-free picture of Euclidean space.
I enjoyed "Is God a Mathematician?" by Mario Livio. It deals with the philosophical question of whether math is invented in order to explain the universe, or if math is the basis of the universe and humans are the ones discovering it. I found it to be very accessible, and many of the stories of famous mathematicians were interesting.
http://www.amazon.com/God-Mathematician-Mario-Livio/dp/0743294068/
You're right: the amount of texts out there is daunting, so it can be hard to find the right area that appeals to you. Maybe a little more about the issues and questions you're interested in would help narrowing the options down a bit.
Two books that might be worth looking at: Proofs and Refutations by Lakatos. It looks at math and advances a thesis about what "proving" in math is really about.
And, Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn. It looks at the development of science through history and puts forth a provocative thesis about how science develops.
Take a glance at those, and see if they are up your alley. They are not too difficult, but they aren't really intro texts.
1.Quantum by Manjit Kumar
2.Id recommend things like 1984 and Brave New World, I also like Twain, Steinbeck and Hemingway.
I think it would be good one.
It is worth noting that a brilliant explanation for this is provided for us by a participant: Werner Heisenberg. Not only was he a protagonist in Breaking Bad but he was also one the most intelligent men to have ever lived, and it shows in this fine book by him, which you can download for free. It is interesting to see how he engages with the philosophical side of things: how can we know that which we claim to know.
http://www.amazon.com/mc~2-Biography-Worlds-Famous-Equation/dp/0425181642
Origin of the Species. Charles Darwin. Its an easy read. And since it is in the public domain you can find it for free.
The Theory of Almost Everything: The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Mathematics-Alexander-George/dp/0631195440/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1412983653&sr=8-3&keywords=dummett+mathematics
This book has a good presentation of the most popular philosophical conceptions of mathematics, but might not be exactly what you had in mind. It's fairly technical and require a little bit of logic and set theory. If you'd like something a bit lighter I can try to think of something.
I strongly encourage you to read at least an overview on the philosophy of science, for example here, it will help clear up a large number of confusions and misconceptions you seem to have. I love Feynman when it comes to physics, but he is notorious for being a total doofus when it comes to philosophy of science. If you would like to start a new thread discussing the incredible number of ways your video's take on scientific demarcation is naive, I think lots of people here on /r/askphilosophy would be more than happy to lambast it.
Haha!
I'm reading this book right now!
http://www.amazon.com/Is-God-Mathematician-Mario-Livio/dp/0743294068
Completely Relevant. The guy goes off in the first chapter to claim Mathematics is God.
I finished Is God a Mathematician - Mario Livio
I'll rate it golden ratio out of 2
I'd half agree, half disagree, but let's not get into arguments about what studies can and can't show :-). (which reminds me that I still have to get through Causality for the next time this issue pops up).
May I suggest this book?
Quantum by Manjit Kumar here hope that's ok...
It's a fascinating retelling of the history of GR/QM and all of the people who were involved, with deep but very understandable descriptions of the science as the theories grew with the observations.
To those curious, Feser has written on the metaphysics of science:
You could buy this book but if you don't want to just read the wikipedia article on Osteopathic Medicine.
Isn't assuming that epistemology - particularly scientific epistemology - is based only on induction tantamount to religion? It's certainly an assumption that flies in the face of the evidence.
Has anyone seriously regarded science as purely inductive in, oh, say 80 years or so?
A small hint: the explanatory power of science doesn't rely simply on induction
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_power
If you want a reading list that covers the basics of the philosophy of science over the last 8 decades, the numerous references in wikipedia are that way --->
For a short, easily digestible version, Chalmers little book with the cat on the front* isn't a bad start.
* Chalmers, A, What Is This Thing Called Science?
But in any case, let's assume that induction really is a problem for scientific epistemology.
That would be a problem for /r/AskScience. An atheist needn't even accept science as a legitimate form of enquiry.
(On the other hand, I'd point to the power of science as a reason why it's hard to ignore it as a useful tool for understanding reality. Starting with that GPS phone in the bastard's hand - either there's something to relativity, or it doesn't fucking work - and the modern antibiotics that have likely saved his life three times over - go back to penecillin. He can have them back when he figures out why they're more than just the result of induction. And no going to get a sammich while he thinks about it. Without science, he'd have starved in a famine before he hit 20, assuming he was born at all. The predictive power in science comes from making risky predictions; those predictions are tested every day. That's not simply induction.)
Science. It works, bitches.
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
HUGE fan of this one. What it offers instead of many other books is it takes a historical approach to the story, which to me makes the subject significantly more interesting. He starts at Planck, describing his whole life by piecing together historical information, and does the same with every other physicist mentioned. With time, you have a full picture of each character and their life of debating each other on these topics. I really loved how he'd give a very full description of how a discovery happened, for example Heisenberg taking a very late night walk when he thought of the idea of the Uncertainty Principal. Kumar manages to keep the lead-up to each breakthrough very suspenseful by describing the state of physics at the time and the pressure each physicist was under. Later, after the famous debates we are presented with World War II and how each of the major players lived their lives throughout the war (Heisenberg worked on atomic weapon research for the axis, while Bohr was shipped to America to work on the Manhattan Project, and before the war they were both best friends). In the end you'll have a deep historical knowledge of these physicists, while having a good beginner understanding of the theories. I'm not a big reader, but I found myself glued to the book, extremely interested in what will happen next.
I remember getting a few good laughs in as well, while reading it.
For example, during the Solvay convention Einstein temporarily outsmarted Bohr with a surprise thought experiment, and in this picture we can really see the personality of each of them. (Look at Einstein's smug face)
I recommend:
http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/libraries/rare/modernity/newton3.html
Or more usefully:
http://www.amazon.com/Principia-Mathematical-Principles-Natural-Philosophy/dp/0520088174
or any basic physics textbook.
I'd check this book out: http://www.amazon.com/The-Theory-Almost-Everything-Standard/dp/0452287863/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341501920&sr=8-1&keywords=the+theory+of+almost+everything
The Standard Model was just yesterday proven even more correct with the discovery of the Higgs boson. This book is a simple intro to a lot of quantum concepts.
The Theory of Almost Everything
For some lighter reading.. How about The Grip of Gravity and E=mc^2 ? These two books are pretty cool. After reading E=mc^2 , Michael Faraday became one of my favorite physicists by far. And The Grip of Gravity is just awesome.
You should be able to find both of these at a local Half Price Books or something like it.
A Biography of E=MC^2
I took a Philosophy of Physics course as an undergraduate and we focused on thermodynamics and the arrow of time. I'd recommend the two books we read:
Physics and Chance, by Sklar:
It looks at the philosophical issues associated with the statistical mechanics approach to thermodynamics.
http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Chance-Philosophical-Foundations-Statistical/dp/0521558816
Time and Chance, by Albert:
A little more accessible than Sklar.
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Chance-David-Z-Albert/dp/0674011325
I haven't read it myself, but I heard it was very good.
http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Philosophy-Revolution-Science-Perennial/dp/0061209198
>No they aren't causes, they are limiting factors of a cause.
Please define what a "limiting factor of a cause" is.
Hint: It's a cause. (If you search the term limiting factors, by the way, most sentences will say "limiting factors cause...")
Please see: here, or here. Your understanding is simply not there at all. There is no such thing as a "grand cause" for an outcome, and even the distinction between proximate and distal causes is arbitrary. I'd rather not get into this too much (it's a geek-out point for me) but suffice to say that arguing with a practicing statistical scientist about causal modeling over something so basic as what we're calling a cause will not get you very far. We call a "cause", plainly, anything which could hypothetically be intervened upon (even if not practicably able to do so) in order to induce a different outcome, at least by the most common definition.
>> would you seriously suggest that the prevalence of sidewalks/general walkability in a community is having an effect on self-control of the people within that neighborhood?
> What?
The point of this sentence: These are factors that are associated with reduced obesity in communities. Are you suggesting, then, that the only reason there's an observed association is because it has a direct impact on self-control? That having nice sidewalks makes these people "better people" that are better able to control their diets?
> lack of ability to govern calories in vs calories out.
So which is it, the calories in/out themselves (a view which actually isn't totally true, by the way, but that's another story and not particularly relevant) or self-control as a personal factor which then impacts calories in/out? You're sneaking both into one phrase. Many things can impact the calories in/out without necessarily changing self-control.
Inductive reasoning and axiomatic bases are just two fundamental scientific tools which involve some level of belief.
I would recommend reading a book on the philosophy of science and learn about how science has been and is practiced.
Absolutely. I found mastering Edward Feser's book, which establishes God from reason alone, incredibly convincing.
See here:
https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp/1621641333/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=Edward+Feser+five+proofs&qid=1554230492&s=gateway&sr=8-1
(By the way, as I read this book I challenged it constantly. In the end, the book won. Please give it a read.)
Also, noted Atheists do attack this book. It is rather comical to read their responses, followed by Feser, who always responds to their commentary. They truly have nothing, but I love the debate.
The most important thing here is to know that the only way to refute Feser's arguments is to attack the metaphysical underpinnings of his arguments. These are defended here:
https://www.amazon.com/Aristotles-Revenge-Metaphysical-Foundations-Biological/dp/3868382003/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=Edward+Feser+five+proofs&qid=1554230725&s=gateway&sr=8-2
This is powerful work. The same metaphysical underpinnings for science are the same used here in these arguments! If we were to throw out these assumptions, we should do exactly the same with all of science.
I find it irrefutable. But, if you do read these books, and want to debate the ideas I would be happy to engage! Again, I love the truth.
Let me know how it goes!
The M.D. was the first doctorate awarded in the US. That is, it pre-dated the PhD in America by about 100 years.
The D.O. came about when a group started offering chiropractic treatment for illness in lieu of pharmaceuticals, believing that all disease came from musculoskeletal misalignment. The D.O.s started having pretty good outcomes compared to the M.D.s who were randomly dispersing toxic meds they knew little about. Eventually, educational requirements for docs began getting more intense and the D.O.s followed the M.D.s in increasing the rigor of their schooling. They became parallel, redundant degrees. Source: http://www.amazon.com/The-DOs-Osteopathic-Medicine-America/dp/0801878349/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373072965&sr=8-1&keywords=the+dos
As a side note, I thought you guys in Australia still went by "Doctor So-and-So." Isn't that still using an inflated title?
What scares me about this story (dare I say 'parable'), is the implicit understanding that it is socially and morally repugnant to seek out knowledge or to ponder the mysteries of the universe. Instead of encouraging spiritual growth and community involvement, the story celebrates shutting one's mind and one's heart to the world. The moral of the story is devoid of compassion towards others and the cheeky arrogance of this little blonde-haired brat comes across as horrifying rather than humorous.
But what is funny, and possibly ironic (or maybe just hypocritical?), is that the girl's display of religiosity is actually a modern example of idolatry in action. Here the reader is shamed (by a little girl, no less) into gathering around a shiny idol of Ignorance in order to praise the power of Not Knowing Shit. Personally, it's so sad to me that children are being raised to accept ignorance as God's Law instead of tackling it head on and making sense of the unknown.
On a related note, [Ignorance: How it Drives Science by Stuart Firestein] (http://www.amazon.com/Ignorance-Drives-Science-Stuart-Firestein/dp/0199828075) is an interesting read. The book describes how no respectable scientist revels in the darkness of ignorance. Instead, rational minds use the absence of understanding as a solid starting point for lifetimes of inquiry and research into everything and anything you could wonder about, even including poo.
Baez: http://www.amazon.com/Gauge-Fields-Gravity-Series-Everything/dp/9810220340
I'll only ask you to re-read the artists work, and refer you to ignorance:how it drives science. Since you are so set on one being better than the other, take time to really consider the other position.
I've lost 2 replies due to the stupidness of the reddit app on my phone. Just wanted to say that as a soon to be teacher that I enjoyed your posts here.
This book is right up your alley if you haven't heard of it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0199828075?pc_redir=1406030988&robot_redir=1
Except that's how science actually works sometimes. See: What Is This Thing Called Science?. The Scientific Method as it's taught in third grade has little to do with how science is actually done.
What some (gentile) Nobel laureates and their wannabes thought about string theory in their time:
My take of string theory failure is here. This failure has many curious facets - including the fact that string theorists confused the dimensional scale of the their theory, so that they didn't spot its manifestation in everyday phenomena. And vice-versa: even the conceptual opponents of string theory bothered with concept of extradimensions quite a lot in the times of its hype, despite that today - after its alleged failure - bravely pretend, they predicted and knew about it all the time (while their own alternative predictions actually failed in the same way).
The phenomenology of string theory is thus in a bit better shape, than string theorists themselves are expecting today after failure of many experiment "tests" of string theory (1, 2, 3) (not to say about their opponents, who don't understand extradimensional physics anyway).
Not quite. Cicadas understand primes. And God really stated Maxwells Equations of electromagnetism when he said "Let their be light. So what you're getting at here is: "Is God a Mathmatician"? I believe He is.
edit: formatting.