The Hegemony of World Positivism

Albro Swift wrote: 
 ...equivalence between inertial and gravitational mass...must
 appear simply as an accident in an ether theory...  We can say 
 "must" for the same reason that we can tell someone who claims 
 to have 'squared the circle' with straight-edge and compass
 that there *must* be an error in his solution...

Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 Ignorance as an argument.  There are always a lot of different ways 
 to reach the same conclusion.  I reach the same conclusion as relativity,
 not a different one like someone who claims to have 'squared the circle'.
 Your analogy completely fails.

No, it's a very good analogy, because typically a circle-squarer
actually CAN draw a square with the same area as a given circle,
and a trisector actually CAN divide an angle into three equal parts,
and a "prover" of Fermat's Last Theorem actually CAN give you the
right answer ("sure enough, not possible for exponents greater than
2").  But the *conclusion* is not really at issue.  The task is
not to give a practical construction or a chain of incoherent
assertion leading up to the "conclusion", but rather to give a
satisfactory *conceptual* construction within a rigorous theoretical
framework.  (Here "satisfactory" means that other smart people agree
with it.) 

Now, the analogy is inexact to the extent that circle-squaring was
linked to a *specific* theoretical framework (the "axiomatic system"
of Euclid), whereas the problems of physics can legitimately be
approached on the basis of ANY "satisfactory" (see above) theoretical
framework, certainly not limited to relativity theory.  However, it is
still the quality of the framework that matters, and there remain the
essential requirements for unity, coherence, heuristic power, etc.

Suppose someone assembles every experimental result he can find, puts
them in a catalog, and says "Here is my theory of everything, from
gravity to quantum mechanics!  It is in perfect agreement with all
experiments!  Please acknowledge that I have unified gravity with
quantum mechanics and produced the greatest scientific theory in
history!"  In a sense he is doing just what the circle-squarer does,
namely, producing the "result"  of "unifying quantum theory with
gravity", but he's doing it simply by juxtaposing them in a catalog,
which is not regarded as a satisfactory theoretical framework by
anyone - except perhaps himself.  He may claim that his catalog is
a unified, coherent, and beautiful theory, but ultimately these
things are decided in the marketplace of ideas.  In that marketplace,
the theory of relativity is valued quite highly, and ether theories
are not.  This may be an indication of widespread ignorance and
stupidity among virtually all the great scientists of the century,
or it may be an example of good taste and sound judgement.


Albro Swift wrote:
 General relativity accounts for the indistinguishablility of inertia
 and gravity in the best possible way: by saying that inertia and
 gravity are the same thing.  This is simply Leibniz's Identity of
 Indiscernibles.

Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 Fine for you. Be happy with this "best possible way"... I don't 
 bother about your feelings of beauty.  I don't believe that these 
 indistinguishable states are really the same thing.  This is at least 
 in principle a physical hypothesis - the Pauli principle can be used 
 to decide.

Yes, you certainly don't bother about my idea of beauty; for example
the belief that indistinguishable things are actually entirely
different is an example of what makes a theory very, well, lacking in
beauty.

Incidentally, you suggest that the "Pauli (exclusion?) Principle"
could be used to evaluate the truth of the Equivalence Principle, 
but it seems to me that a truly dedicated etherist could probably
reconcile himself to an adverse result by simply saying "I know the 
EP is wrong, so if the PP says it is right, then all we have done 
is proven that the PP is imperfect".  This points out one of the
fundamental flaws in notion of falsifiability as final arbiter (as
does the catalog argument).


Albro Swift wrote:
 ...It would be more illuminating to consider whether, given
 the developments of experimental and theoretical physics in this
 century, it would have been possible to NOT develop the theory
 of relativity.  Could such an elegant and powerful point of view
 have gone unnoticed in the light of modern physics?

Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 We simply have to assume that Popper's rejection of positivism would
 have happened not 1934 but before 1905 and accepted by the leading
 scientists.

You previously acknowledged that relativity is not a positivist 
theory and does not accord with positivist principles, yet you
continue to harp on positivism.  Your position seems to be that
although relativity isn't a positivist theory, there are some 
nitwits who mistakenly believe it is, and therefore positivism 
is responsible for the acceptance of relativity in the scientific
community.  That is not an accurate appraisal of the situation, 
and it certainly isn't a valid criticism of relativity.

Also, it's wrong to think of "world positivism" exercising some 
kind of hegemony over scientific thought until 1934 when our Saviour 
Karl Popper led us to the promised land (just as it's wrong to 
think that many scientists today take Karl Popper as their guide 
to philosophy).  Positivism has always been a minority viewpoint,
among both philosophers and physicists, before and after Popper.


Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 A central part of Popper's philosophy is a hidden variable theory -
 the theory of truth. We can only guess, we have no criterion of 
 truth, thus, we cannot observe truth. Nonetheless, we believe that 
 truth exists, in the simple sense of "correspondence to the facts".

This philosophy has been around for as long as philosophy has 
been around.  You would be able to put your Popperism into 
better perspective if you familiarized yourself with some other 
philosophers.  One of the things you would find is that Popper
was a decent but 2nd rate philosopher, not particularly original.
This familiarity would help you avoid making mistakes such as
thinking that relativity was accepted only because of a lack
of a philosophical framework in which any alternative could
be considered.


Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 Once we accept this philosophy of science, we can as well accept
 the unobservable "preferred frame" of the ether.

This WAS the philosophy of science, and people DID accept the
unobservable preferred frame.  Then, after further consideration
of this and some alternatives, they decided to reject the 
unobservable.  You seem to imagine that people would like the 
idea of an unobservable preferred frame if only they would give 
it some thought.  That's preposterous.  It's as if you claimed 
that scientists would choose Ptolemy's interpretation over 
Copernicus' if only they gave Ptolemy's system some consideration.
The point is, they DID consider Ptolmey's system, for centuries, 
and they eventually discarded it in favor of Copernicus.  
Similarly, the phycists in the early 1900's, such as Lorentz, 
were fully aware of Lorentz's ether theory, as well as many other 
ether theories.  You seem to think Lorentz acknowledged the 
superiority of relativity over his own theory - the theory that 
he had spent most of his LIFE developing - simply because he 
mistakenly believed relativity was a positivist theory, and Karl 
Popper hadn't been around to tell him that positivism is stupid.



Albro Swift wrote:
 ONLY general relativity?  That covers a lot of territory (like the
 universe), and the theory itself is regarded by many knowledgeable
 scholars as the most beautiful physical theory we have.

Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 But it has now a beautiful ether-theoretical competitor, which covers
 at least the same territory.

It has ALWAYS been possible to cast relativity in the form of an ether
theory.  That is well-known, but the result simply does not appeal to
most scientists.  Your use of the word "now" suggests that you think
there was a time when this was not known, just as you seem to think
the ideas you attribute to Karl Popper were not known prior to 1934.
You're mistaken on both counts.


Albro Swift wrote:
 EPR does not falsify relativity.

Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 There is a loophole for (strong) Einstein causality + (strong, local)
 EPR-realism?  Explain.

There are MANY loopholes; in fact, there are TOO many.  Anyone
who says (as you have said) that the Aspect experiments have only
one possible "explanation" is simply being naive.  If you have any
ambition to ever be taken seriously, you should begin any discussion
of EPR by acknowledging that there are many experimental loopholes 
and alternate conceptual frameworks that enable many different
interpretations of "what's really happenning", and we aren't, at
present, able to clearly resolve between these alternatives.  For
example, in spite of the fact that you regard EPR as conclusively
anti-relativistic, there exist interpretations of QM that explicitly 
RELY on the non-positive definite metric of spacetime and the time-
symmetric relativistic Schrodinger equation to "explain" EPR and the 
other quantum puzzles.  Thus, while you are claiming that relativity 
cannot be valid in view of EPR, others are INVOKING relativity to 
explain EPR.  Now, you may not find their point of view to be 
compelling, but you don't enhance your credibility by talking as 
if other alternatives either don't exist or are clearly ruled out
by some unobjectionable principles of science.


Albro Swift wrote:
 ..typically a circle-squarer actually CAN draw a square with the 
 same area as a given circle... and a "prover" of Fermat's Last 
 Theorem actually CAN give you the right answer ("sure enough, not 
 possible for exponents greater than 2").

Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 And the ether crackpot CAN measure absolute time with some home-made
 synchronization method. For this group of crackpots, the analogy
 is really good.

That's not the analogy.  It's that the etherist can tell you how 
light rays are deflected around the sun, and how Mercury's orbit
precesses, and so on, just as the Fermat solver can tell you that
there are no solutions for exponents greater than 2.  The point is, 
we don't believe that he has arrived at his result in a way that is 
as conceptually sound as the way that Andrew Wiles arrived at it.


Albro Swift wrote:
 Suppose someone assembles every experimental result he can find, puts
 them in a catalog, and says "Here is my theory of everything, from
 gravity to quantum mechanics!  It is in perfect agreement with all
 experiments!  Please acknowledge that I have unified gravity with
 quantum mechanics and produced the greatest scientific theory in
 history!" 

Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 No problem. We ask him to make predictions about some experiments
 we have not yet made. He remains silent with his catalog.

Nope, he interpolates/extrapolates from his catalog, which will
usually work for most kinds of experiments.  Of course, we might
suspect that there are some completely unusual experiments unlike
anything ever tried before, and we may doubt that his catalog will
be much help to us in such a case, because it has no underlying
conceptual strength.  Nevertheless, he will doubtless continue to
claim that his catalog is a beautiful theory, up until the new 
and unusual experiment is performed, at which point he will add 
it to his catalog and go right on deluding himself.  (To be fair,
even the best of theories have been caught out when experiments 
were pushed into new regions, cf Newtonian mechanics.)


Albro Swift wrote:
 In that marketplace, the theory of relativity is valued quite
 highly, and ether theories are not.  This may be an indication of
 widespread ignorance and stupidity among virtually all the great
 scientists of the century, or it may be an example of good taste
 and sound judgement.

Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 It was completely correct according to Popper's criterion to prefer
 relativity before Aspect's experiment.  It was reasonable even after
 this as long as there was no comparable ether theory of gravity.  The
 fact that such a theory exists is widely unknown because it has not
 yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. 

The fact that one can re-cast general relativity in the form of 
an ether theory is NOT widely unknown, and you would know that it is
not widely unknown if you would put down that tattered old copy of
"The Logic of Scientific Discovery", set aside your pet theory for 
3 months, and read what some other people have to say on these
subjects (and I don't mean Usenet).  The reason ether theories are 
not widely embraced by the scientific community is NOT that people 
are sitting around thinking "Gosh, it's too bad we can't figure out
how to reformulate GR as an ether theory, because that sure would be 
a nice theory!"  

Everyone KNOWS you can reformulate GR as an ether theory - it's the
kind of exercise you assign as homework for undergrads.  The thing
everyone does NOT know is:  Why would we want to?  As explained
above, pointing to EPR is not an answer, nor is asserting that it
will enable us to quantize gravity (especially since there is no
evidence that it will), nor is asserting that Karl Popper would 
have wanted it that way.


Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 We cannot observe all [degrees] of freedom of the ether because 
 we are part of the ether ourselves.  The four conservation laws 
 define four of ten [degrees] of freedom which are not connected 
 with matter, thus, unobservable.

This is nothing but a (vague) re-statement of the implications of 
the four contracted Bianchi identities carried over directly from
general relativity - inevitable in any etherization of GR.  By
the way, when you say we can't observe certain degrees of freedom
because we ourselves (the observers) also have those same degrees 
of freedom, are you not approaching rather near to the idea that
those degrees of freedom are (dare I say it) relative?


Ilja Schmelzer wrote:
 BTW, I observe that the strongest opposition against my ether
 theory comes from people who reject Popper.

You REALLY need to get off Popper and find someone else to 
cite once in a while.  Why not look into, say, Poincare's
conventionalism?