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Continuing on Sir Francis Bacon's New Organon (1620).
We cover more of Bacon's "idols," the things that distort our ability to do science impartially and talk about how Bacon divides religion from science (and what this means politically). We then move on to book 2, which includes Bacon's novel update of the Scholastic term "form" to mean something closer to law of nature, and take a look at Bacon's actual method of doing science by filling out a series of tables before actually doing any experiments.
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End song: "Stuck in a Cave" by Chrome Cranks; hear Mark talk to singer/songwriter Peter Aaron on Nakedly Examined Music #93.
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There you go again. First in the written synopsis for Part 1 and now here at 23:58. It’s not simply the “tree of knowledge”. Most importantly, it’s the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That specific knowledge is what is forbidden to mankind. What are you trying to do—put prophets and priests with more or less direct access to God out of a job?
But now that we ate it we are like gods. And lest we gain immortality by eating from the tree of life, banned we are from the Garden. Thank goodness for F. Bacon, all other knowledge is not forbidden.
” What are you trying to do—put prophets and priests with more or less direct access to God out of a job?”
sounds like a good step on the way to becoming science minded, if we need a new St.Paul there’s always
https://monoskop.org/images/7/7e/Feyerabend_Paul_Against_Method.pdf
I think an analogy can be made between heat, heat transfer and temperature by referring to the electrical concepts of charge, current and voltage (potential).
Heat is charge. Current is charge transfer, like heat transfer, and voltage is temperature difference.
A match has high temperature, but not much heat, due to low mass. Old example. This is analogous to the static-tingle coming off an old CRT TV screen. You place your hand close the screen and the charge jumps across the gap to your hand.
The snapping charge jump is the heat exchange, evidence of the large voltage potential (temperature) before the charge (heat) is dissipated. After charge dissipation, the voltage (temp diff) goes to 0, like an extinguished match.
A large battery has far lower initial voltage (temperature), but contains more charge (heat), like a warm filled bathtub. More heat to exchange.
But you wouldn’t say a battery doesn’t have charge just because it isn’t connected, preventing current flow . So the bathtub still contains heat even though you have yet to dump in the ice cubes.
New citizen here, just wanted to say I enjoyed this episode! It’d be great to hear more about Bacon’s “New Atlantis”.
Thanks, Avery! It sounded to us like it wasn’t actually entertaining enough to read, but go for it!
Really enjoying the philosophy of science episodes.
Just to nit pick the comment at around 22:00 about Maxwell’s equations having to adapt to relativity – the example was an unfortunate one as one of the great successes of special relativity is that it was consistent with Maxwell’s theory.
Historically, the tensions in theories of physics lay in the fact that out of three extremely well attested theories at the beginnings of the 20th century, Maxwell’s electromagnetism (EM), special relativity (SR) and quantum mechanics (QM), it was the latter that clashed with the former two. Despite many successes of QM, it’s incompatibility with SR (which was backed by EM) urged for further developments of the theories.
Of course, Maxwell’s EM provided an amazing classical description of light which was and still is used for semi classical descriptions of nature (for instance, interaction of atoms and light can use a fully quantum description of the atom whilst getting away with using classical electromagnetism, capturing many important phenomena and avoiding unnecessary complications.)
Ultimately, a fully quantum description of light was necessary, compatible with SR and QM (quantum filed theory) and I would say that this would be a better example of having to modify our formulations of nature.
Hope this doesn’t come off as dismissive as I’m simply trying to point out an error.
Thanks a lot
Thanks! Do you have any other history-of-science suggestions for us? Best, -Mark
Even though there is no way to use inductive reasoning to make conclusions with certainty, Bacon is pretty much right that science primarily depends on inductive reasoning. Because deductive reasoning ultimately is just a way of rephrasing things. Really all syllogisms are just like “John is a bachelor. All bachelors are single. Therefore John is single.” Nothing new is being said, it’s just fleshing out or rephrasing what we already know, or applying something to a specific case. To learn anything new about the world we need inductive reasoning. But inductive reasoning isn’t valid. That’s the conundrum as I see it.