මුහුදු මහා විහාරය හා පට්ටම පට්ටපල් බොරු

෦ ෧ ෨ ෩ ෪ ෫ ෬ ෭ ෮ ෯

                                                   සිංහල ලිත් ඉලක්කම්

0  1   2    3    4   5  6  7  8  9

මුහුදු මහා විහාරය හා පට්ටම පට්ටපල් බොරු

මුහුදු මහා විහාරයේ ආරක්‍ෂාව සඳහා හමුදා අනූඛණ්ඩයක් පිහිටුවීමට තීරණය කරලා. ඒ මුහුදු මහා විහාරයට අක්කර තිහක් වෙන් කිරීමෙන් පසුව. ගෝඨාභය රාජපක්‍ෂ හා රනිල් වික්‍රමසිංහ හෝ ජේ ආර් ජයවර්ධන හෝ අතර වෙනසක් නොදකින පඬියන්ට වම්මුන්ට එය එතරම් ප්‍රශ්නයක් නොවනවා වෙන්න පුළුවන්. පිලිප් ගුණවර්ධන බොහෝ කලකට පෙර පුස් කෑ මාක්ස්වාදී පොත් ගැන කිව්වා. මාක්ස්වාදය ඉපදුණේ ම මැරිලා. එය මළ දරු උපතක්. පඬියන්ට වම්මුන්ට ඇත්තේ මාක්ස්වාදය පශ්චාත් මාක්ස්වාදය වැනි පට්ටම පට්ටපල් බොරු ටිකක් පමණයි. 

Conjectures, refutations and the search for truths

    සිංහල ලිත් ඉලක්කම් 

Conjectures, refutations and the search for truths

Science, symbolic truths and the devil

මේ ලිපියේ අන්තර්ගතය සමග මට ප්‍රශ්න තියෙනවා. එහෙත් මෙය පළ කරනුයේ සත්‍යය යනු කුමක්දැයි නිර්වචනය කළ හැකි පඬියකු සිටී දැයි දැන ගැනීමටයි. හැකිනම් ගණිතමය, විද්‍යාත්මක හෝ දාර්ශනික  සත්‍යය නිර්වචනය කරන්න. නිර්වචනය පමණක් සෑහේ. හෑලි අනවශ්‍යයයි.

This article is from Embo Reports. I do not agree with some of the contents. I reproduce the article only to look for a smart Alec who could define truth, whether scientific, mathematical or philosophical. A definition, without an essay, would suffice. I am sorry for the format of the article.

On so called scientific knowledge – X

Karl Popper was able to add something of his own to Western Philosophy of Science. This branch of western epistemology is in effect concerned with making theories in order to show that Western Science is unique and is in general approaching the truth, Popper was of the view that Western science differs from other systems of knowledge in that Western Science develops trying to show the theories in general are falsifiable. In other words western scientific theories are formulated in such a way that they could be falsified. A theory that is falsified is thrown out according to Popper, and it is the business of Science to see that theories are not stagnant and replaced by other theories.

Now it was known that almost from the very beginning Newton’s Theory of Gravitation did not end up with “correct conclusions”. According to the theory the planets should be moving along fixed ellipses with Sun at one of the foci. The theory was falsifiable to a certain extent but no one knew which section or constituent of the theory had to be discarded and replaced with a new theory. The theoretical prediction was not observed as the planets did not move along fixed ellipses. They moved with an advance of the perihelion (the point on the ellipse closest to the Sun) and it was clear that the theory was not quite correct. However there was a problem as there were more than one constituent of the theory, one of them being the inverse square law, which said that particles in the universe attracted each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Then another part of the theory said that the force between the particles is directly proportional to the product of the masses. The most important of the constituents of the Newtonian Theory of Gravitation was of course that the particles attract each other universally. This was beyond comprehension as it meant that a particle would exert a force on another particle instantaneously even if the particles were light years away.

During the time of Newton a force was supposed to be exerted on a particle or an object when it was either pulled or pushed. In other words in order to apply a force on a particle or an object one had to touch it either directly or indirectly with the help of a pole or a rope or some such object. Now in the case of Newtonian Gravitation a particle exerted a force (the so called gravitational force) on another particle without touching it. As we all know the Sun does not touch the Earth though there is supposed to be Gravitational Force between them. Newton’s contemporaries not surprisingly wanted to find the “rope” that connected the Sun and the Earth. Newton had no answer to this problem and all that he could say was it was action at a distance!

If Popper was correct in the sense that a falsified theory was discarded in western science then the scientists at the time of Newton or even after should have done away with the theory of gravitation and said that there was no gravitational force acting between particles. However, they did not do so until Einstein arrived in the patent office and not in a University at first and were interested in modifying other components of the theory. For example they toyed with the idea of modifying the inverse square law and said that the gravitational force between two particles is inversely proportional not to the power of 2 (inverse square) of the distance between them but to some other power such as 2.0000001 or 1.9999999. Modifying the inverse square law in that manner the scientists obtained a nasty differential equation that had to be solved but they managed to explain the advance of the perihelion.

Now the scientists should have adopted the modified theory discarding Newton’s theory as the former “explained” the “facts” better than the latter. However “rational” the scientists may claim to be they did not do so on aesthetic grounds! The original theory of Newton was beautiful than the modified theory with ugly powers such as 2.0000001. Feyerabend in his book Against Method gives a good account of this, and it should be interesting to know that western scientists are guided by aesthetics as well, and not confined to logic and observations of so called facts. Even today the symmetrical properties guide the western scientists in constructing new theories. Einstein was one of the best “beauticians” who did “facials” on theories. He was attracted to beautiful faces and he knew how to appreciate such faces at very close distances. He was interested in close action and never liked action at a distance, which he called spooky action at a distance and was ready to discard the so called Cosmological Constant which he had introduced and considered as a blunder, from the Theory of General Relativity the moment he got an opportunity. In his view the Cosmological Constant he had to introduce to make the Universe static destroyed the beauty (beautiful face or the expression) of the Theory of General Relativity. At Kelaniya we have been able to rescue the Cosmological Constant in a way, make it a cosmological parameter (variable) and make it a measure of the energy due to space (space-time if you wish) and bring the fifth “bhutha” “akasa” in line with the other four “bhuthas” “apo, thejo, vayo and pathavi”, in spite of great scientists, senior professors, so called academic heads of departments who would not touch a concept in Sinhala Buddhist culture, not to mention a “bhutha”, with a barge. (A paper making akasa and other bhuthas equivalent has been published in the Journal of Physical Science and Applications in its latest issue)

Thus the “rational” scientists in the west carried on with Newton’s Gravitation Theory even though they knew that the conclusions of the theory did not agree with the observations and that there was no way to explain a “force” between two objects at a distance apart. It implies that even if we are prepared to accept that “scientific theories” are falsifiable unlike other knowledge following Popper, it serves no purpose as the scientists are reluctant to discard falsified theories. If science carry on with falsified theories what is the big idea of constructing falsifiable theories in a Popperian sense? The irony is that while the scientists carry on with falsified theories most of them even today consider Popper’s falsifiable theory as the last word on Philosophy of Science. Peter Medawar, the Brazilian born English Immunologist was one of the better known scientists who adhered to Popper’s theory when the theory itself had been “falsified” in a way.

It was left to Thomas Kuhn who wrote his “The structure of Scientific Revolution” in 1962 to deviate somewhat from this Philosophy of Science. However, it has to be emphasised that he did not say that western science was not unique. All that he said was that western science progressed not by discarding falsified theories but through what he called revolutions. According to Kuhn in western science there are normal periods and revolutionary periods in science. Most of the scientists are no better than undergraduates who do experiments to verify existing theories and they are involved with normal science. Normal Science is not very exciting and it is problem solving within the same paradigm. According to Kuhn, it is during the Revolutionary periods that paradigms are shifted and theories are constructed within paradigms. The most famous paradigm shift is the Einsteinian paradigm that changed the views of the westerners on space and time. (To be continued)

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva

On so called scientific knowledge – IX

Is there a method which is unique to western science? There have been philosophers of science who had claimed that the so called experimental method is used in western science, and according to the old scientific method the scientists investigated with an open mind and then observed or experimented (the so called controlled experiments were a later addition) as the case may be and then came up with a hypotheses to understand the experimental data. Having formulated a hypothesis the scientists were supposed to deduce results from it and then carry out more experiments (observations) in order to ascertain that the deduced results were in conformity with the observed. The theorists of the experimental method claimed that if the observed were in agreement with the deductions then the hypotheses was promoted to the status of a theory or discarded if there was no agreement between the deductions and the observations.

The essence of the so called scientific method was testing hypotheses with observations or experiments. It was said that Galileo introduced the experimental method and showed that objects fall with the same acceleration to the ground. Before Galileo, Aristotle reigned supreme and the latter’s theory was that the heavier objects fell to the ground quicker than the lighter objects. Apparently it was the negation of this theory (hypothesis) that Galileo had tested in Pisa where he is supposed to have dropped simultaneously two objects with unequal masses from the same height and showed that the objects reached the ground at the same time. According to Aristotle the heavier mass would have fallen to the ground before the lighter object.

It is very often assumed that Aristotle had come to the conclusion that the heavier object reached the ground before the lighter object without making any observations. It is as if Aristotle had just theorised or even speculated without appealing to any observations and his theory had no so called scientific or experimental basis. However, I am of the opinion that Aristotle would have arrived at his theory only after observing at least a few cases where the heavier body reached the ground before the lighter body. If one were to drop a feather and a stone from the same height one would observe that the stone come down to earth before the feather. Aristotle would have arrived at his theory after observing this phenomenon though he most probably did not carry out any experiment to establish the theory. What Aristotle did not mention was that the “heavier” objects fell to the ground quicker than the “lighter” objects in air while Galileo said that bodies dropped at the same height at the same time came down to earth simultaneously in a vacuum. They were referring to two different situations and it is unfair by Aristotle to claim that he only speculated without resorting to observations.

In any event during the time of Budun Vahanse the Brahmins had carried out an experiment in order to determine whether there was an Athma. They had killed a person, most probably a Shudra, to find out whether “something” escaped from the body at the time of death. Though an abhorred experiment it had the ingredients of the experiments supposed to have been carried out by Galileo except for the fact that the Brahmins would not have accepted the results of the experiment as it would have demonstrated that there was no Athma. However the Brahmins could have attributed the no Athma result to experimental errors not deviating very much from the modern western scientists. It should be pointed out that Galileo wanted to show that bodies came down with the same acceleration in a vacuum and not in air. Had he dropped a feather and a stone simultaneously from the leaning tower of Pisa he could not have shown what he wanted to demonstrate and it is clear that he had selected his objects very carefully. Neither did he create a vacuum around the leaning tower, and he left it to the “observers” to imagine that the experiment was carried out in a vacuum. In essence Galileo had come to the conclusion before the experiment was carried out and he designed his “experiment” in such a way to demonstrate what he had already concluded.

The experiments are not carried out with a so called open mind and western scientists are not persons who have perfected “upeksha” or if the readers insist equanimity though it does not give the same meaning. The philosophers and others who invented the so called scientific method could see that there was no testing of hypothesis in western science, as a few lecturers in the universities know, but some investigation based on preconceived ideas. In fact there are some “researchers” in Sri Lanka who find it difficult to come out with the so called hypothesis they are testing and they just cook up hypotheses when they have to write research proposals etc. No investigation can be carried out with an open mind and the word “gaveshanya” meaning search of the (lost) cows (gavayas) tells us that the “gaveshakaya” (investigator) would not have gone in search of the cows in any arbitrary direction but in certain specific directions dictated to him by his experience. The experiments are designed based on experience in particular and on culture in general. It has to be emphasised that a living thinking person cannot have an open mind on any matter as he or she cannot erase his or hers memories, experience, culture in general, in the manner of switching off a light. All that one can do is to attempt to improve “upeksha” whatever the outcome of experience may be.

The old scientific method had to be given up but the western philosophers, especially those of science, were not prepared to accept that western science was not unique among other systems of knowledge, and they had to invent something that was supposed to be present in western science that the other systems did not posses. Thus Karl Popper probably the well known Philosopher of Science in the last century (I wonder how many erudite lecturers who teach science in our universities have heard of him, though he is supposed to be well known among the western scientists), came out with his theory of falsification. In essence what he said was that scientific theories should be formulated in such a way that they could be falsified. He claimed that Astrology and Marxism cannot be falsified and hence they were not science meaning of course western science. Ironically in Sri Lanka we have Marxists who claim to be scientists and followers of Popper! We wish them luck but why do the westerners want to insist that western science is unique? The answer to that question is that western knowledge in general and western science in particular are upheld in high esteem and are supposed to reach Truth, Reality or whatever which the other systems of knowledge are not capable. The westerners clearly use their knowledge to suppress the others claiming directly or indirectly that the systems of others are myths. Western Science and western knowledge are the weapons more than anything else that are being used to maintain the western Christian colonialism. However, unfortunately for the westerners Popper was not successful and later in the sixties Thomas Kuhn came out with his scheme to uphold the supremacy of western science with his “The Structure of Scientific Revolution which would be discussed briefly in the next instalment. (To be continued)

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva