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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 11:48am Sep 25, 2003 EST (# 13964 of 13968)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Black Holes In the Universe also included this:

rshowalt - 12:59pm Mar 1, 1999 EST (#1251

I have a hard time remembering that the world in my head is not necessarily a good reflection of the world outside. Other people do, too.

A person can be VERY certain of her beliefs, and be wrong. A million people in a common culture can be VERY certain of their beliefs, and be wrong. History shows plenty of examples.

My own particular case involves mathematical physics. I found, with Kline of Stanford, that there was an incompleteness in the derivation of differential equations from coupled physical circumstances, and sometimes the error is serious. In the best of all possible worlds, I'd be talking about an impossible mistake. In such a better world, the connection of geometry, algebra, and nature would have been recognized by a wise, impartial group of people who would have immediately recognized that the job, for sciences, was "mapping territories."

These people would have instinctively known that

" Scientists must constantly remind themselves that the map is not the territory, that the models might not be capturing the essence of the problem, and that the assumptions built into a simulation might be wrong. " George Johnson Proteins Outthink Computers in Giving Shape to Life March 25, 1997

In this better world these ideal people would have been clear about what the ideas of "map" and "territory" mean - the difference between "the representation of the thing" and "the thing represented." These people would have known all about the virtues of careful bookkeeping, and would have made their decisions seamlessly, carefully, and provisionally. Especially, these people would have known the kinds of care that the industrial revolution taught, and that Bridgman taught so well in the field of measurement and instrumentation.

In this better world these people would have been afraid of making mistakes, all the time, and would have set up longstanding, careful mechanisms to find and fix (not suppress) any error found.

In our world, neither mathematics nor physics developed this way, especially in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Could continuum theory have been messed up, after all these years?

I believe so. In another sense, one might say that continuum theory, in the sense you need it to derive differential equations from physical circumstances, never really formed. A connection between geometry, nature, and algebra was seen, slapped together, and defended in hundreds of thousands of big or little fights. During these fights, the people involved showed many of the same careful kindnesses one might expect in other fights.

rshowalt - 01:02pm Mar 1, 1999 EST (#1252

The needs of politics and the needs of mathematical rigor are not the same, and from Galileo's time to well after Newton's the needs of politics, and the disciplines of war, were much in evidence.

Because of problems with the derivation of differential equations under coupled physical circumstances, Newton had problems with celestial mechanics almost from the beginning. But even if Newton imagined that he had to go back and look at the geometry-physics connection, the idea, given the fights and feelings of his time, would have been prohibitively painful, even for a courageous genius like Newton. Besides, Newton had lots of things before him that were WORKING, and they filled his time and attention.

They guy who really got boxed by the problem was Maxwell.

When Cook says that

" it is amazingly "magical" that we can apply numbers to these processes and properties and predict their nature from these numbers... "

he's right. How can we think that we can somehow hold the whole universe in our heads?

Not only is the math-physics connection magic, but

rshow55 - 11:52am Sep 25, 2003 EST (# 13965 of 13968)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Not only is the math-physics connection magic, but the magic is none too well founded. The foundations of mathematical physics are not rigorous derivations, but evolutions by imperfect people under complicated human circumstances.

I think that these foundations can be put on a much more solid basis, in the sense that they can be made self-consistent, and can be carefully (and provisionally) matched to data. So math can be tested and perfected as a "measuring instrument" in Bridgman's sense. The tests one might hope for didn't happen in the 16th or 17th or 18th or 19th centuries and, so far, they haven't been worked out in the 20th century either.

I think it makes sense to look more at the lives and works done in Galileo's time, and in the half century after that. People need a clearer sense of the origins and provisional natures of these math-physics connections, which are historical constructs that have been taken for granted, and even worshiped, as certain derivations.

Some improvements on the 16th century might yet be possible.

Bob

- - - -

It is fair to ask "What have you been doing, and doing with lchic , since that posting?

I think the answer is "a lot" - work that I expect should be able to reduce the risk of agony and death from war a long way from where it has been - and make advances in science and economics possible - and if I'm wrong - there ought to be ways to check that are actually workable. http://www.mrshowalter.net/ScienceInTheNewsJan4_2000.htm

If you ask Plato's key question - how can people be so smart - yet so stupid? - - loop tests, and occasional unwillingness to use them, are an essential part of the answer. But there's more to it than that - and lchic and I have been working hard and productively since then. And though you might ask for a format less awkward than these threads, maybe - we've accomplished a lot, I believe.

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