Pat, (01)
I don't disagree with your main points, but I wanted to add a few
qualifications. (02)
PH> But not all ontologies need be about the physical world; and
> even those that are, need not conceptualize it the way that physical
> sciences do. As many folk in this forum will attest, our own human
> language carves the world up in ways that do not make scientific
> sense. (03)
The main qualification is that our human languages carve up the world
in whatever way the speaker or author chooses. Since a big language
like English has a lot of speakers, it supports many different ways
of carving up the world -- including every way that any scientist has
ever adopted. (04)
But I'll admit that the English tenses are biased toward a 3-D
perspective by speakers who are experiencing an immediate present,
a remembered past, and an unknown, but imaginable future. If you
think of that perspective in terms of a relativistic "light cone",
you can map it into a 4-D view in the same way that a relativistic
light cone is related to the full 4-D system. (05)
PH> I would add by way of keeping an open mind on the subject,
> it is in common cause with some current theoretical physicists,
> who have been casting doubt on the very notion of time being
> a dimension like space: see for example Lee Smolin's entertaining
> book "The Trouble with Physics". (06)
For reasons like that, I don't believe that we can or should define
a single universal deeply axiomatized ontology of everything. Even
people who have studied relativity and quantum mechanics still use
Newtonian mechanics for the sizes and speeds that people ordinarily
experience. For such things, it's pointless to use relativity or
QM because any extra precision would be swamped by the inevitable
errors in measurement. (07)
To get back to the UoM topics: physicists (and ordinary people)
use the same words and units of measurement for Newtonian mechanics
and the many newer variants that were developed during the 20th
century. However, the equations that relate those measurements
have become more complex. That is why I would keep equations
like F=ma or E=mc^2 out of the upper level ontology. I would
put them in lower-level microtheories that could be invoked
for solving particular problems. (08)
But note that the definition of 1 inch = 2.54 cm is independent
of and holds for any version of physics. Therefore, it can go
in a separate microtheory that can be combined with multiple
theories of physics. (09)
John (010)
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