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Boundaries of Scientific Thought

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Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

Abstract

The scientific revolution, as understood to be the rise of modern science, began in the late Renaissance and took firm hold during the Enlightenment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I prefer the term ‘simplistic solutions’ to ‘simple solutions’ since, to me, the former invokes solutions that are easy or less disruptive to some pre-conceived set of ideas we might have. In other words, some complex problems do indeed have simple solutions, but they may not be the solutions we desire because they challenge our worldview. Thus what people often really seek are simplistic solutions rather than simple ones.

  2. 2.

    This is not to be confused with the “Great Jin” which was a dynasty in the twelfth century CE.

  3. 3.

    The solution to the paradox, of course, is to analyze the problem from a third reference frame (often chosen to be centered on the sun). In doing so we find that it is Alice that is actually younger when they meet again.

  4. 4.

    For a concrete example, see [16].

  5. 5.

    The origins of this question appear to be in George Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Its current form seems to have first been stated in [39].

  6. 6.

    One could design an experiment that measures the spin of both fermions and bosons, but that would be a different experiment than the one described.

  7. 7.

    It is perhaps ironic that the very first paper in the exact same collection as Davies’ was Wheeler’s famous ‘it From Bit’ article in which he argued that there should be no immutable physical laws  [61].

  8. 8.

    I use this figure routinely when I teach both quantum mechanics and pure mathematics courses. I have been known to refer to it in the quantum context as a ‘quantum meat grinder’ since it resembles an old fashioned meat grinder. Independently, Chris Fuchs (who also contributed to this volume) has been known to do the same.

  9. 9.

    I should point out that it is not necessarily true that there need to be multiple universes as such. As Everett’s biographer Peter Byrne pointed out, Everett argued that all instantiations of the wavefunction were real. He did not argue for a multiverse model. The multiverse interpretation of Everett’s argument is due to DeWitt [9].

  10. 10.

    Recent discoveries of the ‘Siberian unicorn’ notwithstanding.

  11. 11.

    There certainly is some debate about this, particularly if we equate continuity with infinity, but if we take ‘counting’ as fundamental, then there simply is no way that we know of to ‘count’ an infinite number of ‘countable’ things in a real, physical sense.

  12. 12.

    I hesitate to use the term ‘wavefunction’ here because that might imply the quantum wavefunction. I am still working in the purely classical regime.

  13. 13.

    This is not the same thing as saying that only measurable things have meaning. Things can lack physical meaning because they are not reliably measurable and yet we know with certainty that they exist in some regard. Our own consciousness is an example of this, at least until we have a better understanding of it.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Kevin Staley, Joe Troisi, David Banach, and Tom Moore for fruitful discussions about many of the points addressed in this essay. I also wish to acknowledge the Saint Anselm College Philosophy Club for inspiration, commentary, and good food.

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  1. Saint Anselm College, Manchester, NH, 03102, USA

    Ian T. Durham

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  1. Ian T. Durham
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  1. Physics Department, Saint Anselm College, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA

    Ian T. Durham

  2. Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Carslaw, Australia

    Dean Rickles

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Durham, I.T. (2017). Boundaries of Scientific Thought. In: Durham, I., Rickles, D. (eds) Information and Interaction. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43760-6_1

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