Reddit thread in r/askphilosophy:
What historical examples are there of logic applied to ridiculous notions? Francis Bacon proposed in Novum Organum that logic often only reinforced “errors” that had their foundation in “commonly received notions”, notions which he deemed “overhastily abstracted from the facts”.
In an effort to better help students understand what Bacon proposed as a methodology for scientific inquiry, I was hoping to point to real historical examples of what Bacon, or rather the modern thinker, would consider to be logic applied to false notions. […] Any suggestions of historical examples of logic applied to ridiculous notions?
In the sense of history being made, we are currently in the midst of a historic case of “logic applied to ridiculous notions” and it has had an impact that is far greater than epicycles by many orders of magnitude. Ask yourself what is the weakest point in the tower of scientific knowledge culminating in general relativity, quantum theories, and the standard model of cosmology? It turns out there is a single point of failure approximately 125 years ago, circa 1900. The entire classical to quantum transition relies upon falsifying exactly one primitive imagination of a model that has infinitely many variants. The model that was falsified is the following in Euclidean space and time:
- 1a) The negative geometric point potential maps to the electron.
- 1b) The positive geometric point potential maps to the nucleus of Hydrogen, i.e., the proton.
- 2) The potential emissions of geometric point potentials travel at c, the speed of light.
- 3) A geometric point potential velocity may not exceed c.
Ok, so that was rightly falsified. Hurrah.
How many other models can you imagine? Not only do you get to explore the aspects 1, 2, 3 above, but you can reverse engineer the physics and geometry with state-of-the-art knowledge from the GR/QM paradigm.
So that’s the missed opportunity and how you solve nature. It’s easy to discover the architecture of nature. That’s your first clue.
Because of this missed opportunity, the narrative logic of GR/QM/LCDM science is way off track. And that’s why physics and cosmology are in crisis. The mathematical theories match observations and vice versa, but they are at too high in the ontological stack. The direct progress return on investment over the last 50 years is very low. There are a large number of major questions unanswered and great confusion and perplexity over the narrative of these fields.
I think the first priority is to get the fields of physics and cosmology back on track.
Historians will then need to figure out in detail how this 125 year era occurred and why science did not discover this fundamental missed opportunity in the interim. Op’s question is an important aspect of this history.
J Mark Morris : Boston : Massachusetts
p.s. My response was auto-deleted immediately. I sometimes wonder whether we already have Ai overlords suppressing ideas. That’s a different issue. Who has the energy to leap all these hurdles only to have your response removed because the ideas are too simple and logical to be believable. LOL. That’s what happens when science misses the architecture of nature for 125 years and scientists believe things are far more complicated than they are in reality.
p.p.s.
The moderators of the physics and cosmology subreddits portray the subs and themselves as academic. I don’t know if those moderators are professional scientists, fan bois, incels in their parent’s basement, or all of the above. What I do know is that they are extremely rude, love to wield power and tick off anyone with an idea, and are actually clueless about nature. They really don’t physically understand the mathematics they are using. They don’t visualize the geometry. They are trying to find the geometry by chiseling from the outside, but they have a long way to go with this failed approach. Ai will beat them in less than 5 years. Or they could listen to someone who has told them ad-nauseum that there is one more quite obvious reductionist assembly architecture below GR and the standard model that their predecessors missed circa 1900. Oh, and the LCDM people. About that bus…… splat. Thoughts and prayers.
I have less experience in the philosophy subs, but it seems like nothing I post makes it through the mods. It’s tragically humorous, since philosophy should be very open to big new ideas. At least the mods in philosophy are like stone walls for discussion. I’ll take that every day over the offensive behaviour of physics and cosmology sub moderators.
Neoclassical 