AS> Do you really think that
simplicity is in the eye of the beholder?
Absolutely! All meaning is in the mind of the beholder
however it is beheld.
AS> Is it subjective that a
65' Cadillac consumes 40 litres (or more)
of gas in a 100 miles and a 2015
Cadillac consumes less than 20
litres?
Those facts seem important to you. You must have an
emotional attachment to Cadillacs. Personally, if they got a hundred MPG I
wouldn't want to drive one.
I think of science as an iterative
"improvement" in our understanding and recognition of invariant
processes. But even "improvement" is a subjective factor.
You make the assumption, which biases your thinking, that
there really does exist a GUT somewhere. Maybe there is, and certainly we can
postulate a grander theory that says all our subtheories are true at another
node we can create and call a GUT. But there is no value, no closing of the
loop in that process.
If you can drop that assumption, your thoughts might move
in a different direction, like the belief revision systems we recently
discussed. How do we determine, when a new theory is postulated, where it’s
predictions mismatch experiment? There should be a tool for that.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
www DOT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Avril Styrman
Sent: Sunday, March 08, 2015 9:21 AM
To: John F Sowa
Cc: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Grand Unified Theories
John,
> You could say that about a circle or a sphere. If
its volume
> is finite, it's misleading to say that it's
infinite.
That's exactly what I tried to say, but I tried to dig
out the
relevant sense of Michael's comment.
> AS
>> What would be the best objective criterion in
selecting between
>> two models whose predictions match the
observations equally
>> accurately?
JS
> Simplicity is an important criterion. But
simplicity (like
> beauty, taste, elegance, etc.) is in the eye of the
beholder
Do you really think that simplicity is in the eye of the
beholder?
Is it subjective that a 65' Cadillac consumes 40 litres
(or more)
of gas in a 100 miles and a 2015 Cadillac consumes less
than 20
litres?
Is it subjective that the standard model requires that
around 70%
of the total energy must be dark energy, whereas DU does
not require
dark energy at all? Recall that dark energy was added in
the 90's
in order to make the model match the observations.
I don't understand what you mean by saying that
simplicity is in
the eye of the beholder. Do you mean that the ontological
commitments
of a scientific model are irrelevant? The why not stick
with the
Earth-centered model with its epicycles? If you commit to
the idea that
the Earth is the center of the Universe, and if you
commit to the
resulting epicycles and couple these with the best modern
formulas,
you get predictions which match the observations. Why do
you think
that people wanted to get rid of the Earth-center model?
The reason
why I take economy as the evaluation criterion is that I
have
not found any better criteria. But I'm all ears if you
have better
criteria in mind???
> space, time, matter, and energy are intimately
related
> by all known theories of physics
Apparently, the role of the conservation law of energy
(CLE) is ambiguous
in the standard model. The relativity principle alone
makes it ambiguous.
If you commit to the relativity principle, you must
reject absolute time.
Energy in Joule units is in the form kg×m^2/s^2, i.e.,
mass times distance
squared divided by time squared. If time is relative,
also energy is
relative, and therefore the notion of total energy is
incompatible with
the rejection of absolute time, or the notion of the
total energy
gets at least ambiguous. How can you talk about total
energy at time t,
if you cannot talk about the Universe at time t in the
first place?
Also the dark energy makes CLE ambiguous. Is the amount
of dark energy
constant, does it increase, or does it decrease? These
are open questions
in the standard model. In contrast, CLE is incorporated
in the basic
structure of DU, as well as absolute time.
Avril
Ystävällisin terveisin,
Avril Styrman
avril.styrman@xxxxxxxxxxx
puh. +358 40 7000 589
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