Wednesday, May 16, 2018

There Aren't Any First Principles

If you are a physics major in college, the freshman and sophomore years of school are pretty challenging. It's a sort of trial by fire, at least it was when I was in school. You spend a lot of time on math and science classes, labs, and homework. I think most physics programs are structured like the one I was in--where physics is taught as a historical creation of man. It's a model of the world, and the classes really stressed that it is an incomplete and flawed model. It's really almost the opposite teaching from the popularization of physics by "media science" people like Bill Nye, or the reaction to the popularized teaching that you see by flat earthers and others on YouTube or social media.

In the first couple weeks of physics classes and labs, the problems of the toy mathematical model representation of the world become obvious. The concepts of mathematics are limited and alien to the natural world for the most part. Within the confines of narrow parameters the math model corresponds to what happens in freshman physics lab. In fact, the really basic reasoning associated with those models seems radically flawed.

On a world like ours where everything happens all at once in any moment, the concept of "First principles" or reductionism is simply an incomplete, or distorted understanding. The concept of "evolution" for example is really always about "co-evolution".

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