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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tunica Albuginea who wrote (740)	9/17/1999 9:12:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Respond to of 69300

Forgive my nitpicking, Tunica. But the classic aphorism was the work of Descartes. Kant would have said something more like "I think, therefore stuff is." 'Course I am not expert on history of philosophy ... so I'm not gonna plant my standard on that statement. >To me 1+1=2. Period.No discussion. To me that's a fact< I'll buy that ... but it is a fact by convention. Math is *abstract. To extend math into science, we need to introduce "observables". Science gets advanced two basic ways ... "cataloging" and "experimenting". The early botanists and zoologists were champion catalogers. Astronomers are by necessity catalogers - they can't reach out and touch something much past Pluto for now. Physicists and chemists (shyly raises hand here) are "experimenters". Geologists and molecular biologists are some of each. Reading an astronomy text (stargazing is a bit of a passion of mine) shows just how amazingly good the catalogers are at discerning patterns and building models thereon and testing them - and retaining the "keepers". A century ago galaxies were thought to be local presolar nebulae, didja know that? It took better telescopes to show that galaxies were full of stars ... nad not until Edwin Hubble discovered that Cepheid variables were 1) easily recognizable and 2) had a remarkably strict ratio of period to luminosity ... did we have a tool to find out how BIG galaxies were. I ramble. The bottom line (and the lineage of Berkeley, Hume and Kant are the steppingstones here) is that we can't PROVE a *** thing about the Observables. Proofs are limited to the Abstract - math, geometry, logic. It is an Agnostic Miracle (lolol) that math is so beautifully useful in building and testing models for the Observables. It gives me faith that all that is real. And that is my confession ... for after all I can't "proveit".