more on Davies' article
Dec. 27th, 2007 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
countrycousinThis post will refer to a couple of NY Times articles. They want registration, and I have not noticed ill effects of it, but for the shy, there is http://www.bugmenot.com.
A few weeks ago, Paul Davies made an op-ed column which I complained about here .
Last week, Dennis Overbye, NYT science columnist, put together a collection of responses (and re-responses from Davies) .
I was bemused by the variety in the responses, and I still find little to admire in Davies responses, but he holds an influential position, so perhaps I'm not trying hard enough. But it seemed a fertile topic for discussion.
above crossposted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
philosophy.
Davies says he was misunderstood, but that he feels that "real" laws should hold everywhere and when, not just in our little universe. (This refers to hypotheses that say that some of the physical constants we have a tough time explaining might be chance occurrences, and that there might be other universes with different such. Davies seems to feel that this is a much greater leap than assuming a God. I agree it is subject to the same criticism I level at Intelligent Design - it is an excuse to stop looking for hard-to-discover relationships. It still might be the case. )
But Tegmark's comments I don't understand. And I haven't read his work, so I'm just reacting to Overbye's summary. But I'm in the math-as-description camp. There's lots of math. And only one universe that we know about, despite all the charming hypotheses.
Then there is Feynman's “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” No comment. But someone ought to be talking about it.
A few weeks ago, Paul Davies made an op-ed column which I complained about here .
Last week, Dennis Overbye, NYT science columnist, put together a collection of responses (and re-responses from Davies) .
I was bemused by the variety in the responses, and I still find little to admire in Davies responses, but he holds an influential position, so perhaps I'm not trying hard enough. But it seemed a fertile topic for discussion.
above crossposted to
philosophy. Davies says he was misunderstood, but that he feels that "real" laws should hold everywhere and when, not just in our little universe. (This refers to hypotheses that say that some of the physical constants we have a tough time explaining might be chance occurrences, and that there might be other universes with different such. Davies seems to feel that this is a much greater leap than assuming a God. I agree it is subject to the same criticism I level at Intelligent Design - it is an excuse to stop looking for hard-to-discover relationships. It still might be the case. )
But Tegmark's comments I don't understand. And I haven't read his work, so I'm just reacting to Overbye's summary. But I'm in the math-as-description camp. There's lots of math. And only one universe that we know about, despite all the charming hypotheses.
Then there is Feynman's “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” No comment. But someone ought to be talking about it.
