Day 117
So today I finally learned how a microwave works. It's the one appliance/household technology thing that I've never taken a second look at, never really taken a moment to ponder its workings. But, really a microwave is a magical object; it heats food without using heat!
Anyway, so the device is called a mangetron, which is basically a little thing that creates a magnetic field to trap and spin electrons, which are in turn captured and shot at some micro-wavelength at food, thus heating it without heat. Who knew?
In the end, it is always something of an anticlimax when our fanastical notions of magic and the supernatural get deconstructed and washed away by hard science. When an explanation (like an opinion) is rock solid, there is no more left to create within the mind. Something simply is true: we can either accept it or not.
And on the one hand I fancy to believe that this is ultimately the case for everything in the world. There is for any observation a real and true explanation. Some of these we have access to and others not. Science is the process of increasing our level of access to what Newton called the Book of Nature.
It is a beautiful picture, but I also find myself questioning it every day. As one of my recent favorite philosophers Donald Davidson points out, nomologicality (the property of being law-governed) isn't inherent so much as it is linguistic, meaning that the activity of 'discovering' laws is also in some sense an activity of formulating and generating them.
Or let us drive Newton's metaphor as an example: if nature is a book, then it has a language we must learn in order to understand it. But a language is neither innate nor objective; we construct our connotations out of cultural context and interrelationships with others. Understanding nature, then, is very much an exercise in translation and literacy, and not so much in observation and discovery. Aristotle's eudaimonia has no translation, so we try to approximate it by combining "happiness" with "the good life", "flourishing" and others. As scientists, is this all we're doing when we try to explain the nature of an ecosystem, or the behaviour of a human being?
If yes, then we have no access to the book of nature. We are thesaurus writers!
This picture is much less beautiful.
I may expand on this entry at a later date.
Anyway, so the device is called a mangetron, which is basically a little thing that creates a magnetic field to trap and spin electrons, which are in turn captured and shot at some micro-wavelength at food, thus heating it without heat. Who knew?
In the end, it is always something of an anticlimax when our fanastical notions of magic and the supernatural get deconstructed and washed away by hard science. When an explanation (like an opinion) is rock solid, there is no more left to create within the mind. Something simply is true: we can either accept it or not.
And on the one hand I fancy to believe that this is ultimately the case for everything in the world. There is for any observation a real and true explanation. Some of these we have access to and others not. Science is the process of increasing our level of access to what Newton called the Book of Nature.
It is a beautiful picture, but I also find myself questioning it every day. As one of my recent favorite philosophers Donald Davidson points out, nomologicality (the property of being law-governed) isn't inherent so much as it is linguistic, meaning that the activity of 'discovering' laws is also in some sense an activity of formulating and generating them.
Or let us drive Newton's metaphor as an example: if nature is a book, then it has a language we must learn in order to understand it. But a language is neither innate nor objective; we construct our connotations out of cultural context and interrelationships with others. Understanding nature, then, is very much an exercise in translation and literacy, and not so much in observation and discovery. Aristotle's eudaimonia has no translation, so we try to approximate it by combining "happiness" with "the good life", "flourishing" and others. As scientists, is this all we're doing when we try to explain the nature of an ecosystem, or the behaviour of a human being?
If yes, then we have no access to the book of nature. We are thesaurus writers!
This picture is much less beautiful.
I may expand on this entry at a later date.
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