Is science "relative"?

[RagingWarGod]

Mostly brought on by a conversation I had with someone about reification and how it then turned into speed and other subjects in science:

The problem isn't just that you can't measure it, the problem is that the concept of speed doesn't make any sense in the absence of other things. It's a relative property describing a change in proximity between 2 objects, if there is just one object, there is no speed because there is no change in lateral proximity. Speed is not an absolute property that exists without an observer or reference point.
And if that's a mind fuck, well the same applies to space and time as well. Space and time don't actually exist in an absolute sense but they are purely relative to other things. Space and time only become measurable quantities due to the relative difference to other objects and they are only perceivable through measurements.
Seriously there is no absolute clock ticking at a constant speed and with the same rate for everyone, but each observer has their own clock and what that clock displays depends on your relative location and speed with respect to that observer. So if you move away from a clock at the speed of light than time literally stands still. If something passes you with the speed of light than it will shrink. So that's why we use space time in order to calculate what another observer would see.
The general assumption being that each inertial frame of reference is equivalent to any other inertial frame of reference and that the speed of light is the same in all those reference frames. So there is literally no physical experiment that could tell you if two passing objects move at the same speed or one is resting and the other is moving or vice versa. And you can even test that in a train station where you can't tell whether it's your train that moves or the one next to you
Of course that only relates to movement at continuous speeds, changes in speed (acceleration) would be noticeable and if you see the background you're trained to assume that it's you that is moving rather than the ground below your feet or that you're driving towards a wall and not the other way around. But that's just acquired intuition, there's no physical truth to that.

Of course "wind" is an abstract idea. As said there is no such thing as "wind", it's a us grouping several phenomena into one entity and social constructs aren't meaningfully different, except for maybe that inanimate objects resist those categorizations a lot less than human beings...

Why so fatalistic? Like again all that it means that it's a fallacy is that you can't tell with certainty. Which yeah you can't. Even for seemingly easy tasks such as measuring the length of a stick, you can never tell with certainty. It's actually physically impossible to tell the actual length of a stick. That being said, we're able to tell it up to margins of error as small as sub nanometers. Which given we only see difference up to 0.2mm or something like that, is close enough...

Like...is it really that relative though? I know the fruits of science work pretty well but it's kinda hard to wrap my head around how "fuzzy" it might really be.

 

[demultiplexer]

It's not science that is relative, it is spacetime that is fundamentally relative.

 

[herko]

Time for some light Einstein reading! There’s a reason it’s called the theory of Relativity. It’s not science, it’s spacetime and Einstein explains it pretty well via the concept of frames of reference.

Find any popular explainer on Special Relativity and start reading. Despite the name, Special is easier. General is where it gets truly hairy.

 

[Coriolanus]

Mostly brought on by a conversation I had with someone about reification and how it then turned into speed and other subjects in science:



Like...is it really that relative though? I know the fruits of science work pretty well but it's kinda hard to wrap my head around how "fuzzy" it might really be.

This thread is aunty-science.

 

[rain shadow]

Please don't bring arguments you are having somewhere else to us.

Speed (more generally velocity) is relative, even in a newtonian sense.
There is no preferred inertial reference frame, however, inertial frames are preferred over non-inertial.
Your thread title is overreaching. Just because one thing in science (motion) is relative doesn't mean science itself is relative.

 

[RagingWarGod]

It's not science that is relative, it is spacetime that is fundamentally relative.

Is that related to how physics essentially says there is no universal "now".

 

[RagingWarGod]

Time for some light Einstein reading! There’s a reason it’s called the theory of Relativity. It’s not science, it’s spacetime and Einstein explains it pretty well via the concept of frames of reference.

Find any popular explainer on Special Relativity and start reading. Despite the name, Special is easier. General is where it gets truly hairy.

Guess it's too late to mention that I ask here because I've read up on that and don't understand it.

 

[hpsgrad]

Guess it's too late to mention that I ask here because I've read up on that and don't understand it.

What have you read? Which chapter gave you problems?

Get specific and people can help. Stay general and you’re just wasting everybody’s time.

 

[rain shadow]

Guess it's too late to mention that I ask here because I've read up on that and don't understand it.

Is there a vital reason you really need to understand special relativity? I don't understand it myself. I can do a super simple lorentz transform and maybe reason a little bit about trains and barn doors and twins, but I probably couldn't explain it beyond just the basics. I'm happy to talk about it a little here and there, but it seems pointless to get wrapped up in discussions that are probably a little bit beyond my abilities to understand.

At some point I just have to let it go. I think that's where you're falling down. Not being able to let stuff go, not being able to live with a partial understanding of something that is actually kind of complex.

 

[herko]

Is there a vital reason you really need to understand special relativity? I don't understand it myself. I can do a super simple lorentz transform and maybe reason a little bit about trains and barn doors and twins, but I probably couldn't explain it beyond just the basics. I'm happy to talk about it a little here and there, but it seems pointless to get wrapped up in discussions that are probably a little bit beyond my abilities to understand.

At some point I just have to let it go. I think that's where you're falling down. Not being able to let stuff go, not being able to live with a partial understanding of something that is actually kind of complex.

This, a hundred percent. I have a layman’s understanding of the whole thing. It’s pretty mind-bending. And general relativity? Beyond my possibilities.

I’m not dumb, and I literally have two doctorates. This isn’t my field, and I’m ok with that.

 

[RagingWarGod]

At some point I just have to let it go. I think that's where you're falling down. Not being able to let stuff go, not being able to live with a partial understanding of something that is actually kind of complex.

It's more about what the guy in my quote mentioned, mostly in regards to reification. It's sorta challenging my understanding of the world around me and how everything works, and what I took to be clear cut up to high school.

Sure but in that case it's somewhat moving the goal post as "proving" something is submitting an experimental confirmation of an idea, while an axiom is rather the opposite end of starting from a point that one assumes to be fixed to see where that leads one to.
Yes. Even if everyone assumes to be the center of the universe and argues that other people move or don't move with respect to them, those motions aren't entirely arbitrary but you can do the math and compute what other people ought to see in their frame of reference.
One brain teaser is for example if you take the previous example of someone throwing up a ball in a moving train. As said the person in the train sees it going up and down, the person outside of it sees it performing an arc.
Now assume your not throwing up a macroscopic ball, but a photon ( a light particle, traveling at the speed of light). Suppose you flash a light towards a mirror and count the time it takes to come back an argue that's time t.
And now remember that the external observer sees not a straight line but an arc or some triangular shape depending how fast the train moves.
However obviously the arc is longer than the straight line back and forth, so if the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames of reference and the light has to cover a longer distance, it will take it more time. So the same time t, defined by the photon going away and coming back is different in those systems.
Because the problem is that time is always determined by comparing a rate of change. So you're not actually counting well defined seconds you take an event with a reliable duration and compare that to other changes. But if the duration of events is relative to the velocity, then time is not an absolute property but relative to the observer.
I hope these things make sense, I'm somewhat tired and should go to sleep, good night.

Reification seems to be when you really think in terms of the thing (res) that you've constructed. Science is often accused of that because it employs the means of doing that, but it usually comes with an awareness of the fragility of these constructs, due to the fact that their limits are usually apparent in experiments. However when you're talking to a non-scientist who does not have access to data, experiments and theory, reifications are a neat way to visualize things.
Though ultimately if you want to do science you actually neat to dig deeper, make experiments follow the math, check the theories or create your own. Not sure there is an easy shortcut to that.
The problem is, what does it even mean to "exist" and "be real" in that context. Like we can perceive things, we can do so with some reliability, even others can perceive them, be it differently than we do, we can find ways theories that explain both our experiences and theirs. So there's some argument to be made that some things do exist and are real.
At the same time there are things that we can't measure at all (because they are too small), there are properties that we can't measure at the same time and that seem to be 2 sides of the same coin. There are things that we can only "measure" through statistics and probability distributions and they are the fundamental building blocks of everything, everything that seems to us so solid, stationary and unambiguously real. So yeah, the universe is complicated.
So no the world is likely not black/white and if it is we can't show that it is. What it actually is, well that's a work in progress and probably always will be. Is that work pointless because nothing matters? Idk. Sometimes you've got to bear the ambiguity and keep an open mind, while at other times you actually have data and evidence that at least nudge you in one direction.

 

[dmsilev]

It's more about what the guy in my quote mentioned, mostly in regards to reification. It's sorta challenging my understanding of the world around me and how everything works, and what I took to be clear cut up to high school.

When physics collides with philosophy, honestly there's usually not much that's particularly useful which is spun off. You've got this nasty tendency to get yourself wound up in a tight coil over Stuff which at best is very abstract and mostly is just random nattering. Your first blockquote is basically some of the original thought experiments underlying special relativity. The second one uses a lot of words to say not very much.

 

[hpsgrad]

When physics collides with philosophy, honestly there's usually not much that's particularly useful which is spun off. You've got this nasty tendency to get yourself wound up in a tight coil over Stuff which at best is very abstract and mostly is just random nattering. Your first blockquote is basically some of the original thought experiments underlying special relativity. The second one uses a lot of words to say not very much.

I disagree about the usefulness of the collision of science and philosophy, though that might be more an indication of my prejudice (I was a philosopher and historian of science for a long time), or perhaps an indication that I’m thinking of a sort of interaction very different from what commonly happens in most internet discussions of the two.

That said, I think you’re entirely too charitable about both block quotes. They’re both fundamentally trading in category mistakes and sloppy conceptual language. It’s no surprise that the result is confusion.

Really, OP, take herko’s advice and find a well-regarded print resource on this subject and just stop dipping into any Internet discussions of reality as it relates to the quantum world.

 

[dmsilev]

I disagree about the usefulness of the collision of science and philosophy, though that might be more an indication of my prejudice (I was a philosopher and historian of science for a long time), or perhaps an indication that I’m thinking of a sort of interaction very different from what commonly happens in most internet discussions of the two.

That's fair. I'm biased I guess because of overexposure to Random Internet Discussions on the subject, which have a signal to noise ratio of ...low, rather than more serious thinking.

 

[RagingWarGod]

That said, I think you’re entirely too charitable about both block quotes. They’re both fundamentally trading in category mistakes and sloppy conceptual language. It’s no surprise that the result is confusion.

Really, OP, take herko’s advice and find a well-regarded print resource on this subject and just stop dipping into any Internet discussions of reality as it relates to the quantum world.

Well it's hard to take what I think about something seriously because I don't understand it, so when someone appears to I just end up listening to them. It's not a habit I can really stop. I know science isn't as "solid" as I thought in elementary school, but I'm not sure it's as hazy as that dude I'm quoting thinks.

The thing is, the meaning of words are more or less word clouds where the meaning is shaped by a context and relations to other words, so by making an abstract idea concrete that fixes it's location in relation to other words. So for example active language does move it closer to thinking of "it" as an active agent with a purpose. While thinking of it as the average of a collective movement makes other thoughts more intuitive.
That doesn't have to go to the extreme of personification, but as said, historically even that is not out of the ordinary.

I mean one of the algorithms by which machine learning and neural networks operate is that they set a goal, try, compare the IS result to the OUGHT result and then adjust parameters, try again and so on. So yeah in a sense being able to imagine a goal, that OUGHT but isn't yet is what enables us to make it become. Obviously that only works if it was possible to begin with and we're also quite capable of thinking about things that aren't.
So not completely useless but to be taken with caution as to whether things actually work like that.

Like his understanding of machine learning I don't think is accurate, given my experience of chatbots and AI (they can't really explain anything, they can only repeat what is in their training data).

The other example is more to do with reification and the wind, I can't really post the thread since this was a chat on StackExchange.

He did give me this video on relativity but I couldn't understand it:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB1QFUCga0I

 

[hpsgrad]

Well it's hard to take what I think about something seriously because I don't understand it, so when someone appears to I just end up listening to them. It's not a habit I can really stop. I know science isn't as "solid" as I thought in elementary school, but I'm not sure it's as hazy as that dude I'm quoting thinks.



Like his understanding of machine learning I don't think is accurate, given my experience of chatbots and AI (they can't really explain anything, they can only repeat what is in their training data).

The other example is more to do with reification and the wind, I can't really post the thread since this was a chat on StackExchange.

He did give me this video on relativity but I couldn't understand it:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB1QFUCga0I

You should probably stop talking to that guy. They’re writing nonsense and wasting your time. That second paragraph, about IS and OUGHT? It’s meaningless. Garbage.

If you want to try and understand special relativity at a very general level, there are quality resources for doing that. I recommend against anything Internet-connected. I might be able to dig up some old references from the intro to quantum mechanics class I used to teach freshmen, but that was 20 years ago, so I imagine there are better resources. But I can look if you like.

 

[ajk48n]

I might be able to dig up some old references from the intro to quantum mechanics class I used to teach freshmen, but that was 20 years ago, so I imagine there are better resources. But I can look if you like.

If nothing else, I'd certainly be interested in that

 

[RagingWarGod]

You should probably stop talking to that guy. They’re writing nonsense and wasting your time. That second paragraph, about IS and OUGHT? It’s meaningless. Garbage.

Well when I can't convince him otherwise I think I'm the one who's wrong.

 

[hpsgrad]

Well when I can't convince him otherwise I think I'm the one who's wrong.

Then don’t talk to him. Or at least not about anything related to science or philosophy of science. Advice from a rando on the internet. It’s worth what you paid.

 

[hpsgrad]

If nothing else, I'd certainly be interested in that

I’ll see what I can dig up from the archives. It may take me some days.

And to clarify, it was a history and philosophy of science class that included some basic introductory materials. We didn’t do any math to speak of. The into to QM class I took was taught by a physicist, and we did do a bit of math; but I certainly don’t remember any of it now.

 

[ajk48n]

Ah right, well either way it should be interesting. And at least it will be more scientific than trying to relate special relativity to unconnected philosophies of life

 

[ajk48n]

Well when I can't convince him otherwise I think I'm the one who's wrong.

Well, then take this as us telling you that the other person isn't right in the confusing things they say, and maybe that can help you let this one go

 

[dmsilev]

If you want to try and understand special relativity at a very general level, there are quality resources for doing that. I recommend against anything Internet-connected. I might be able to dig up some old references from the intro to quantum mechanics class I used to teach freshmen, but that was 20 years ago, so I imagine there are better resources. But I can look if you like.

I guess technically this would be "internet-connected", but Caltech has Feynman's Lectures online, and the chapters on special relativity might be a good place to start. That first link is to volume 1 chapter 15; the interested reader should also go through chapter 16 and chapter 17.

 

[RagingWarGod]

Well, then take this as us telling you that the other person isn't right in the confusing things they say, and maybe that can help you let this one go

So when it comes to reification that's not right either?

 

[hpsgrad]

So when it comes to reification that's not right either?

Please ignore everything that person said to you.

If you still have a question, the word ‘reification’ very strongly implies that it’s a question about philosophy rather than about science. And I dig philosophy, but this forum isn’t the place for it. Unfortunately for us both, I don’t know good online places to have serious, technical, philosophical discussions.

If you still have a question and you think it’s about science, state it in your own words, without referring to anybody else’s writing. I recommend avoiding any technical term you don’t already know how to define/explain to someone unfamiliar with it.

 

[ExhaustedTechConsumer]

I'm frankly amazed that these questions are still getting replies, and not just demands to stop wasting forum members' time.

The OP posts a wall of word salad and claims it's from "someone", without any real source citation. Any attempt to plunge in and help is met with more... well I hesitate to say "gibberish", but certainly stuff that's impossible to answer in any helpful sense, and is probably also "not even wrong".

The most respectful thing anyone could do for the OP is demand that questions are posed on their own terms, and that they show some evidence that they know what the terms of the question actually mean, before spending one second on actually answering the question.

OP, the most respectful thing you could do for your audience is consider just why so much of what you write is indistinguishable from a very sophisticated trolling campaign, and do something to stop that.

 

[RagingWarGod]

If you still have a question, the word ‘reification’ very strongly implies that it’s a question about philosophy rather than about science. And I dig philosophy, but this forum isn’t the place for it. Unfortunately for us both, I don’t know good online places to have serious, technical, philosophical discussions.

I'll take your word for it then. Though I do agree with you there aren't many good places to talk philosophy online.

 

[Bardon]

Guess it's too late to mention that I ask here because I've read up on that and don't understand it.

Edit: Removed for not adding to the conversation.

 

[hpsgrad]

If nothing else, I'd certainly be interested in that

Well, this is a start:

one thing i had my students (100-level intro/survey of history of science) read was a piece on special relativity from:
Einstein and Infield, The Evolution of Physics, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1938, pp. 186-196, 224-253 (reprinted in Guerlac Selected Readings in the History of Science: pp.695-706). It's a nice summary of the basic asumptions of Special and General Relativity, some thought experiments to illustrate how things work, and some discussion of the evidence that supports the theories.

That's the most-relevant item I've found so far. It was chosen in no small part because it was very clearly out of copyright and so could be reproduced and provided to my students without copyright problems. I expect that means it's available online somewhere reasonably convenient by now, but don't have the time to go looking for it. If people cannot find it, I'll see if I can get the full text of the selection and a place to post/host it.

 

[ajk48n]

Cool thanks for that

 

[hpsgrad]

Looks like Wikipedia has an article about the 1938 book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Physics

They link to archive.org which seems to have the full text available. Even though it leaves out a bunch of more modern stuff, I suspect that @RagingWarGod would find a lot of utility in getting that book and reading the whole thing.

I found that I, and my students, understood Relativity much better after working through prior discoveries (both theoretical and experimental) in physics, particularly those which posed a problem for the received/classical/newtonian model of the physical universe. Understanding those problems, and why they were a problem (eg the so-called UV catastrophe for quantization of light or the measured invariance of the speed of light for relativity) helps understand how those post-Newtonian physical theories were arrived at.

Along those lines is Galison’s book (based on prior presentations),

Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps​

Empires of Time​

https://galison.scholars.harvard.edu/presentations/einsteins-clocks-poincarés-maps
https://wwnorton.com/books/Einsteins-Clocks-and-Poincares-Maps/

where Galison points to the practical motivation of some of the thinking that went into Einstein and Poincare’s work. I can’t recall now whether I read the entire book. I definitely have looked at at least portions of it, and believe that I attended a talk by Galison on the material he was putting together prior to publication.

So that might also be worthwhile.

 

[dio82]

Mostly brought on by a conversation I had with someone about reification and how it then turned into speed and other subjects in science:



Like...is it really that relative though? I know the fruits of science work pretty well but it's kinda hard to wrap my head around how "fuzzy" it might really be.

No. Science is absolute.

Quote Carl Popper:

"There is no such thing as the scientific method, in the sense of a set of rules that, if followed, will guarantee success in science. Science proceeds by trial and error, by conjectures and refutations, and this is all we can say about its method."

Science is the process of setting up a conjecture that can be tested and falsified and then trying to falsify that conjecture. The difference between the mataphysical and science is the ability to formulate a clear test to falsify a claim.

This is deeply profound and has many implications, such as being later used by Carl Popper to show why nearly all of (political) philosophy is wrong in his seminal must read work of "The Open Society and Its Enemies".

 

[RagingWarGod]

Science is the process of setting up a conjecture that can be tested and falsified and then trying to falsify that conjecture. The difference between the mataphysical and science is the ability to formulate a clear test to falsify a claim.

This is deeply profound and has many implications, such as being later used by Carl Popper to show why nearly all of (political) philosophy is wrong in his seminal must read work of "The Open Society and Its Enemies".

Sorry to say Carl Popper was wrong about philosophy, not to mention deeply misunderstanding what it's about since it's about answering questions that you cannot test for. Questions like morality and ethics cannot be formulated into an experiment.

As for science being absolute, he might be wrong about that too:


View: https://youtu.be/5miDUrYEXjA?si=VIExeLU2Lu4CCMzq



View: https://youtu.be/tc7LpJswIZU?si=7TiZ704fZyuIu-t1

 

[herko]

Dude, you gotta chill a bit with the reflexive contrarianism. People here are trying to help.

Reading Popper would help, even if he was wrong (he was not). You need to understand Popper to talk about this; notice a pattern here?

Dio82 is wrong, though, as he quotes Popper and then proceeds to agree with him by claiming exactly what Popper said. Science is following the scientific method. The method is perfect, in the 'spherical horse in a frictionless vacuum' sense. If you set up your experiments correctly (and this is almost impossible to do!) AND follow the logic perfectly, you get a valid result. And this result can never confirm or prove a hypothesis or theory; at best it can falsify it.

The implications are very profound, and Popper is extremely correct about the falsification part.

But since science is actually a real-world endeavor pursued by (very fallible) humans, following the method to the best of your ability is insufficient and does not guarantee any result, or quality of results. There are mistakes. There is fraud. There is misunderstanding. There are about-faces. There are reinterpretations of old results under new theoretical frameworks.

But even with all the pitfalls that come with human doing things, the improvements in the world brought by trying to do this are vast and compound enormously.

Pro tip: posting random Youtube videos is not citing authority, and you're asking people to do the work and spend their time parsing through randos' arguments. You do that. Then bring, and state, your conclusions and tell us where you sourced them.

 

[hpsgrad]

No. Science is absolute.

Quote Carl Popper:

Science is the process of setting up a conjecture that can be tested and falsified and then trying to falsify that conjecture. The difference between the mataphysical and science is the ability to formulate a clear test to falsify a claim.

This is deeply profound and has many implications, such as being later used by Carl Popper to show why nearly all of (political) philosophy is wrong in his seminal must read work of "The Open Society and Its Enemies".

I appreciate Popper quite a lot, and his Logik der Forschung (amusingly abbreviated 'LSD' from it's English translated title: Logic of Scientific Discovery) is a crucial work in the philosophy of science.

That said, if we adhere to his definition of what counts as science, we will find out that big chunks of what we see as historical science don't count. And a fair whack of what we do currently doesn't quite count either. Most obviously, and perhaps most relevant to this thread, are the various interpretations of quantum mechanics that make equivalent predictions about the world, or which make different predictions but whose predictions are untestable in any plausibly-near future.

We might decide that we're ok declaring that stuff 'not science' even if we also decide that that stuff has utility for scientific activity, or we might continue to seek a better demarcation criterion for science versus non-science activities. When I left the field, philosophers of science were not at all unified in their opinions about what science might fundamentally be, nor how definitively to separate it from non-science. I suppose that may have changed in 15 years, but I have some reasons to think it hasn't.

 

[hpsgrad]

Sorry to say Carl Popper was wrong about philosophy, not to mention deeply misunderstanding what it's about since it's about answering questions that you cannot test for. Questions like morality and ethics cannot be formulated into an experiment.

As for science being absolute, he might be wrong about that too:


View: https://youtu.be/5miDUrYEXjA?si=VIExeLU2Lu4CCMzq



View: https://youtu.be/tc7LpJswIZU?si=7TiZ704fZyuIu-t1

I have been a professional philosopher. You are absolutely, entirely, wrong about what it was I was trained to do.

I very strongly suspect you don't have any formal training in ethics, and that you're talking out your ass about those subjects too. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Finally, the guy who doesn't understand special relativity has no standing to suggest Popper was wrong about anything, especially when he's pushing more-or-less random youtube videos at us as support.

 

[Coriolanus]

Looks like Wikipedia has an article about the 1938 book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Physics

They link to archive.org which seems to have the full text available. Even though it leaves out a bunch of more modern stuff, I suspect that @RagingWarGod would find a lot of utility in getting that book and reading the whole thing.

I found that I, and my students, understood Relativity much better after working through prior discoveries (both theoretical and experimental) in physics, particularly those which posed a problem for the received/classical/newtonian model of the physical universe. Understanding those problems, and why they were a problem (eg the so-called UV catastrophe for quantization of light or the measured invariance of the speed of light for relativity) helps understand how those post-Newtonian physical theories were arrived at.

Along those lines is Galison’s book (based on prior presentations),

Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps​

Empires of Time​

https://galison.scholars.harvard.edu/presentations/einsteins-clocks-poincarés-maps
https://wwnorton.com/books/Einsteins-Clocks-and-Poincares-Maps/

where Galison points to the practical motivation of some of the thinking that went into Einstein and Poincare’s work. I can’t recall now whether I read the entire book. I definitely have looked at at least portions of it, and believe that I attended a talk by Galison on the material he was putting together prior to publication.

So that might also be worthwhile.

This is not super helpful. Multiple posters have noted and RWG has admitted that he doesn't have the education or the knowledge necessary to understand the material. All this is going to do is confuse him more.

 

[hpsgrad]

This is not super helpful. Multiple posters have noted and RWG has admitted that he doesn't have the education or the knowledge necessary to understand the material. All this is going to do is confuse him more.

Several folks here (but not RWG) expressed interest in references I might have and I found that in response to their requests. That selection was used for a freshman-level class, and the book was written for the lay reader.

I agree that it’s unlikely to be helpful for the OP. I have opinions about the OP, but have deleted them as irrelevant to a discussion about scientific matters. Suffice it to say that RWG has been extended considerable charity and it hasn’t seemed to result in anything productive or displaying growth.

 

[RagingWarGod]

But since science is actually a real-world endeavor pursued by (very fallible) humans, following the method to the best of your ability is insufficient and does not guarantee any result, or quality of results. There are mistakes. There is fraud. There is misunderstanding. There are about-faces. There are reinterpretations of old results under new theoretical frameworks.

That's sorta my point, I also remember Anil Seth saying something like that. That science is a human endeavor to understand reality and not some detached entity that tells you what to do.