Plato, you bastard.
Reading on the VRE the initial chapters of a book by Lee Smolin, Time Reborn. (I get the impression he is controversial in his field of physics.) He is claiming that the Platonists have won, that modern western scientific thinking is that time is an illusion and that the laws of nature are out of the flow of time, that they exist on some eternal plane, perfect and unwavering. His pet theory is that Einstein was wrong about time being an aspect of space, that all matter is interaction and relationship between processes, that physical law evolves over time. Okay. As if I a have the educational substrate to evaluate that effectively.
I bring this up, however, because it made me wonder, did I think this before? Why is this familiar?
He claims we think that mathematical objects are the perfect forms of super-real objects in the "really" real realm. Think about that the allegory of the cave with the prisoners who only see the shadows of objects from light behind them, and mistake the shadows for the actual objects. More on point, for instance, the example that objects flung upwards from the surface of the Earth travel in a parabola as the climb and fall. Parabolas are pretty simple; odd that they should describe this path. Suspicious, even, he says.
So, apparently he feels we imagine that the parabola is the perfect template from the "Platonic realm" which Earthly objects are following less precisely because they are Earthly, but the True Form of their trajectories is the mathematically perfect parabola. No, no, Bec, they just take the path on average. The actual path would be hideously complex to write as a formula because of all the actual forces acting on an objects at any one moment, over all the moments of their trip out and back. Hold on, I thought, that last part is true, isn't it?
I had always understood that, for the sake of argument, we posit a perfect function that looks like a parabola, but we know that it's not a real thing, it's an idea. But I was, in fact, envisioning the world aiming for that shape when it sucked the cannonball back down to its bosom - that the underlying, the real shape of the motion was parabolic. And, dammit. he's right. The planet is not aiming for an elegant mathematical formula; it is just the average way objects arch up and fall into it. Plato, you bastard.
I bring this up, however, because it made me wonder, did I think this before? Why is this familiar?
He claims we think that mathematical objects are the perfect forms of super-real objects in the "really" real realm. Think about that the allegory of the cave with the prisoners who only see the shadows of objects from light behind them, and mistake the shadows for the actual objects. More on point, for instance, the example that objects flung upwards from the surface of the Earth travel in a parabola as the climb and fall. Parabolas are pretty simple; odd that they should describe this path. Suspicious, even, he says.
So, apparently he feels we imagine that the parabola is the perfect template from the "Platonic realm" which Earthly objects are following less precisely because they are Earthly, but the True Form of their trajectories is the mathematically perfect parabola. No, no, Bec, they just take the path on average. The actual path would be hideously complex to write as a formula because of all the actual forces acting on an objects at any one moment, over all the moments of their trip out and back. Hold on, I thought, that last part is true, isn't it?
I had always understood that, for the sake of argument, we posit a perfect function that looks like a parabola, but we know that it's not a real thing, it's an idea. But I was, in fact, envisioning the world aiming for that shape when it sucked the cannonball back down to its bosom - that the underlying, the real shape of the motion was parabolic. And, dammit. he's right. The planet is not aiming for an elegant mathematical formula; it is just the average way objects arch up and fall into it. Plato, you bastard.