The Scientific Method # 3

My elaborate reply to the original question:

Hi,

"The essence of the phenomenon" and "I mean can u feel its motion?" make
your mail sound very Hegelian.

Hegel was a philosopher who said that it is futile to analyse. If you
analyse the motion of billiards balls striking each other on the billiards
table, then you are incorrect in doing so as you are only analysing your own
concepts (like force, momentum etc.) and not "the essence of the
phenomenon", as you have put it. The Analysis doesn't help you know the
events reality, to feel it.

So much for Hegel. You might like to read him.

I feel that you are not asking your questions properly. What, precisely do
you mean when you say "understand" the motion of a particle in space? Do you
want to know with what it will move in the next split second? Do you want to
know its location 3 seconds from now? There is no pooint saying I want to
understand the particle. It has nothing to understand. Scientific enquiry
will answer the questions you pose to it. Different questions asked of the
same phenomenon will yield different answers, but that is not because the
phneomenon has changed or science is wrong, but only because a different
question.

BTW you might want to ask yourself-what it is that you mean by the essence
of the phenomenon?

Consider a wave on a string. What is the nature of this phenomenon? If you
observe the wave in time domain, it appears as a disturbance flowing from
one point in space to another. If you observe it in space domain (i.e.
observe any point on the string), it appears as plain SHM. So this is not a
fallacy of science. You ask different questions, you get different asnwers.

It must be said here that the concept of understanding presupposes a mode of
expressing that understanding. All the equations and formulae are that mode
in science. The real problem, when you ask questions like this "essesnce of
phenomenon", is that you haven't grasped the mapping from equation to
phenomenon. Think of this like ED- "a cube is lying on ite edge with one of
the face at 45 degrees to VP....". To solve this we need to visualize this.
THAT is the essence of the phenomenon that is this cube. Analogy can be
extended to physics. You can be said to understand only when you know the
mapping both ways and go from one expressions to the other easily.

This, incidentally, is the great problem of how to teach Physics in a better
way in our schools and colleges. So many people I have met know all the
equations for light cones but can not map it to an intuitive concept.

Hope this doesn't sound gibberish.

Kis~