usenet weirdness

I'm not a philosopher. How could I possibly know?

Most people who know anything about physics have that idea. The tendency is to write off the rest as nut-jobs.

When it was first invented serous physicists like Ernest Mach were dubious about the physical reality of discrete atoms, but Einstein's

It seems that "semiotics" is what you're talking about, or symbology, vis-a-vis linguistics, which is about language, about those both being aspects of, "inter-subjective accounts".

Truth is discovered / lies are invented / when a lie's discovered / that's a truth.

There's something to be said about Oxford vs. Cambridge, here for example there is _always_ the standard, serial, Oxford, Harvard comma, and its omission is considered poor style and making the language less correctly expressive. It's wrong.

We can't just say that Russell was ignorant about the Russell-ian retro-thesis, though it takes a generous reading of something like "Principia Mathematica" to arrive at that he was aware that some of his stipulations were un-founded, which is problematic since they claim well-foundedness. This is the discussion of "isolation" and "significance" in Russell, those basically being accounts of "restriction of comprehension" instead of "expansion of comprehension". So, then there's Quine, who sort of lies less than Russell (via omission) yet as well always sort of backpedals into what he "wants" to say.

That track infected and is endemic in "modern logic", while though, it is definitely not accepted the "quasi-modal" aspects of "material implication" since instead a modal, temporal, relevance logic is considered the correct "modern logic".

There are definite schools of realist and platonist and idealistic logic in the 20'th century, often embedded directly in the fundamental works of later the existentialism and nihilism for what are Being and Nothing, like for Derrida about Hussserl about geometry and a realist, platonist, idealistic account of it.

About semantics, language and semantics, here there's considered that Herbrand semantics makes the account that anything that can be written in natural language can be written unambiguously in symbolic language, and vice versa. The Montague semantics are ignored and considered haphazard. Similarly, De Morgan and direct implication provides anything necessary for inference including eschewing "material implication".

The "edge" and "corner" cases make a great account of the rational and modular, here for example about tiling the field or tesselation as you put it nicely or as with regards to picture-elements pixels or volume-elements voxels, basically then for "cases", as for "modes".

Sometimes it's said that Stern-Gerlach was "proof of the quantum". Yet, reading Leighton-Feynman-Sands for example, it's also sort of "proof of the not-quantum".

It's sort of like "Higgs boson". "The discovery of Higgs boson would complete the standard model" it was said. Billions of dollars and centuries of inches of articles later, it was claimed, "The Higgs boson is found". "Great, ..., does this complete the 'Standard Model'". "Well, yes and no, discovery of the particle would purport to so complete itself, yet when they discovered the particle, they discovered it was a doublet not a particle, so, it broke open again. I suppose we should hush now to not drown out the accolades."

My comment was also a joke.

But was it an intentional one?

Another table tells me that there are 5280 feet to the mile,

Jan

-The- are not. Your particular one, of a sudden, massive sea level rise is. (by glaciologists in bad need of more funding)

Those living at the time will hardly have noticed, if at all. The catastrophes that really happened, the Storegga slides for example, had little to do with sea level rise.

Jan

Then how could you know that 'the Greek philosophers' (whoever) usually got the wrong end?

Jan

Yes, you are completely wrong about that. There is nothing to derive or predict there.

Boltzmann's constant tells you about what units you are using, and nothing else. It is as fundamental as there being 12 inches to the foot,

Jan

Real physicists understand what are real physical constants, like \alpha for example, and which constants are meaningless, like c, because they you tell one about what units you are using.

Not necessarily nutjobs, just people who don't understand what they are talking about. If they persist in their errors they become nutjobs, outside their speciality. (I have known some electrical engineers...)

Ernst Mach was a serious physicist only in a limited domain. For the rest he was a lousy philosopher of science. (inventing what is now called 'naive positivism')

His bad philosophy of science seriously flawed his understanding of physics in general. Planck already made mincemeat of him.

According to Mach, atoms are just a theoretical conveniences without 'real' existence. Hence, according to Mach, Avogadro's number, and Bolzmann's constant, are arbitrary numbers that can be given any convenient value.

From about 1900 onwards many people invented methods for determining Avogadro's number experimentalltally. It was the convergence of different results, obtained independently by different methods, to results roughly in the same ballpark that convinced the physics community that atoms are really real, and hence Mach wrong. As for Einstein, he played a minor, but significant part in all this,

Jan

-- "Aber haben Sie Eine gesehen?" (Mach)

For sudden, read a couple of hundred years, and look at the end of the last ice age, and the fact that the Gulf Stream got turned off for about 1300 years at the end of the last ice - the Younger Dryas.

The changes in climate would have been quite dramatic enough and quite fast enough to rate as catastrophic - business as usual would not have been an option.

Think again, or think a bit harder.

The flooding of the Black Sea, which happened at much the same time, did have more to do with sea level rise. It seems to have been spread over a couple of hundred years, and people would definitely have noticed.

I've read quite a bit of the history, and historians do enjoy pointing it out. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and Greek philosophy occurred long enough ago to have been exposed to quite a lot of it.

The exact numerical value of c has mattered to me from time to time. Being human, I have to measure things in units, and transform that measured distance into a propagation delay.

Pretty much every scientist is expert in a limited domain

Pontificating outside your area of expertise is always a temptation.

Max Planck initially thought that his quantised energy was just such a theoretical convenience,

He did get around.

Good for you that c has an exact numerical value, these days.

There is nothing but a propagation delay. Length is by definition measured in (nano)seconds. Anyone who thinks different is fooling himself.

Of course, but not all of them know their limits.

Pontificating is one thing. Nasty philosophers of science, like Mach, or Popper wanted to be prescriptive, so telling others how science must be done to be correct.

Yes, but he was soon cured of that by Ehrenfest, who proved that Planck's trick was not only sufficient, but also necessary to arrive at the black body law. And of course there was also Einstein 1905.

Certainly, he was already well known before 1905, and he became a major player after that year.

Jan

Eh, an -experienced- catastrophe happens in less than ten generations. As for the end of the Younger Dryas event, that resulted in a rapid warming that may have been noticeable in a single generation, for some long-lived individuals. (like what we are seeing now) It didn't result in a sudden sea level rise.

Again, no sudden sea level rise.

I should let my imagination run wild because you do?

Again, that Black Sea -catastrophe- never happened. It was a fund raising trick too, to get money out of credulous American creationists, of the 'the Flood really happened' kind,

Jan

It is a grab bag. You can find lots of wrong and right ends in there, depending on your prejudices about right and wrong,

Jan

Science has the advantage that it looks for concensus, and can end up with a pretty robust idea of right and wrong.

Philosophy is less coherent - with much more room for prejudice.

But I couldn't measure that all that accurately, and I need at least a rough value for the propagation delay before I could build the hardware on which I could have measured the propagation delay.

You may have a preference for expressing it in nanoseconds, but machinists prefer millimeters. I found it politic to keep them happy.

At least one engineer I knew complained that he was nothing but a walking table of conversion factors. Life would be easier if that was the whole job.