නියම, සුසමාදර්ශ හා චින්තනය

නියම, සුසමාදර්ශ හා චින්තනය

බටහිර විද්‍යාව පාසලේත් විශ්වවිද්‍යාලයේත් ඉගැන්වෙන්නේ න්‍යායික තර්කානුකූල නිමාවක් ඇති දැනුම් පද්ධතියක් ලෙස. නිව්ටන්ගේ නියම ගැන සිසුන් දන්නේ ඒ නිමාවූ පද්ධතිය ලෙස. නිව්ටන්ගේ ම ගුරුත්වාකර්ෂණය ඉගැන්වෙන්නේත් එහෙමයි. අනෙක් මාතෘකාත් ඒ විධියට ඉගැන්වෙන්නේ. සිසුන් හිතන්නේ බටහිර විද්‍යාවේ ප්‍රවාද සත්‍ය කියා. සිසුන්ට බටහිර විද්‍යාවේ ඉතිහාසයවත් මාතෘකා කිහිපයක් පමණක් අරගෙන උගන්වනවා නම් හොඳයි.

වෙනස්වීම හා කාලය

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වෙනස්වීම හා කාලය

On so called scientific knowledge – XI

A paradigm in the sense of Kuhn and not in the sense of Sri Lankan academia and NGO establishment is a base in which theories are constructed. It should be mentioned that according to the western sociologists of knowledge, knowledge is constructed and not discovered and moreover it is done in a social context. It is clear that Einstein, if born in Continental Europe in the eighteenth century would not have come up with the theory of relativity nor would he have constructed his theory if he was born in England in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He would have been out of space and time or space - time to construct his theory in either case. Incidentally Kalaya, Deshaya and Dveepaya are among the pasmaha belum or five great observations that the Bodhisatva was interested in before he was born as Prince Siddhartha Gauthama. If he was born as an Eskimo he would not have attained Buddhathva. When Einstein was born in general the whole of Western Europe was deeply immersed in the notions of absolute space and absolute time which may be called part of Newtonian paradigm and most of the theories from Astronomy to Zoology had been constructed in that paradigm. Einstein essentially changed the paradigm and introduced the space – time paradigm which was given a Mathematical formulation by Minkowski. Another paradigm shift which is even more revolutionary than Einsteinian paradigm shift has been the Quantum paradigm shift. Though many people would not have realized it then the Thermodynamics paradigm shift had been another paradigm shift in the history of western science. What we have essentially done is to claim that knowledge is constructed in a Chinthanaya, which could have several paradigms, and is created relative to the sense organs, the mind and the culture of the creator. The creator could be a western scientist, a Sinhala Buddhist or any sathva (living being).

It is clear that Kuhn does not recognize even construction of ordinary theories or “discoveries” as revolutionary science. Not all Nobel Prize winners have been paradigm shifters but sometimes would have revolutionized western science. For example Perlmutter and Reiss who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011 for “discovering” the acceleration of the universe were only working within the Einsteinian paradigm, though they have revolutionized western cosmology that had believed that the universe expanded with a deceleration. Since 1998, the western cosmologists believe that the universe expands with an acceleration following Perlmutter and Reiss having recognized the work of the latter with a Nobel Prize. If the theoretical work carried out by my students at the University of Kelaniya is correct the universe has to enter into a decelerating phase again if it has not already done so, but I doubt very much that their work will be recognized even by the Physicists in Sri Lanka, even if they are proved to be correct, due to academic politics, which appears to be the worst type of politics. In any event Kuhn thought of paradigm shifts when he talked of revolutions in western science. Following Kuhn we may categorize western science under four headings. They are (i) the paradigm shifting science, (ii) new theories and discoveries within existing paradigms (iii) very ordinary science involved with problem solving usually in the periphery using established theories and finally (iv) the undergraduate and school children science which is very often involved with verification of already known results.

Is there a so called method adopted by paradigm shifters? Unfortunately for the philosophers of western science there is no such method. What is the so called scientific method that Einstein used? Apparently he did not know the results of the Michelson Morley experiment which was finally explained by his special theory of relativity. He was thinking of a different problem in electrodynamics. The dynamo can be looked at as resulting from either the movement of a static magnet surrounded by a revolving circuit or the movement of a magnet in a static circuit. Though the results are the same the Maxwell’s equation of electromagnetism had to be used in two different ways to obtain the results. Einstein who was interested in symmetries did not like this two tongue approach so to say, shifted the paradigm from space and time to space - time and also showed that Maxwell’s equations took the same form (or invariant) with respect to observers moving relative to one another under his relativistic transformations which are also known as Lorentz Transformations. Incidentally Maxwell’s Equations were not invariant in the Newtonian paradigm and hence needed two methods in that paradigm to explain the dynamo problem. Einstein was interested in a fundamental problem that could not be solved in the then existing paradigms. There was no method that he could follow and it was left to his remarkable insight to come out with a solution. It is the insight and intuition that is involved with creation or construction whether in western science, art, music, mathematics or any other field western or eastern. It appears that creation of paradigms or even theories within a paradigm in what may be called shastra is rare than creations in shilpa. What is the method of creating a work of art? There is no method as such and what helps one to create in Art or Music is one’s intuition and insight, which of course is relative to one’s culture. It is said that there is an underline relationship between the works of Dostoevsky, Einstein and Picasso as far as abstractness is concerned. They represented a European abstract chinthanaya and were more or less contemporaries.

The category (ii) mentioned above is more creative than category (iii) with which almost all so called research done is involved with. There is both a method and intuition involved with (ii), which I might add are not “rational”, and those who are adherents of methods without an insight or intuition are bound to end up in category (iii). However, this so called method is not at all creative and it is only a set of rules not different from what is found in cookery. It is all about selection of samples, testing and analysing and is similar to selecting 10 eggs, 500 grams of flour etc. making a mixture heating to a certain temperature, maintaining at that temperature for so many minutes and of course writing a report if necessary. One has an intuition and an insight in one’s culture and the main reason that non western scientists cannot do category (ii) western science is that western science works in a culture that is different from the cultures of non western scientists. As far as the western scientists in the non western cultures are concerned category (i) western science is a non starter. In category (iii) western science very often scientists in their research proposals have to write down testing of what is known as a hypothesis. There are no hypotheses that western scientists in Sri Lanka are testing and very often the hypothesis amounts to something such as oxygen is present in air. One can write a so called research paper irrespective of whether oxygen is found in air or not provided the scientist manages to survive through and after testing.

It has to be mentioned that Kuhn did not emphasize on a method, and neither did he deny the existence of a so called scientific method. It was left to Feyerabend to finally demolish this myth of a scientific method, and he did so beautifully in his “Against Method”. He wrote a number of papers and books after the publication of Against Method, including “Farewell to Reason”. The western scientists are not different from other mortals in other fields such as Art and Music and also from other people involved with different shastras in other parts of the world. Western science is creation by a few without adhering to a so called method but depending on insight and intuition in Judaic Christian culture, and very ordinary problem solving by the vast majority who have neither intuition nor insight using a method not very much different from that is practised in cookery. Incidentally it should be noted that tuition kills intuition. (To be continued)

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva

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

A paradigm shift needed

If the Tamil leaders still believe in “Sinhalaya Modaya” then they are mistaken. The Sinhalas have a very large heart and from the time of the Portuguese or even before, the Sinhalas have been misled by various political leaderships and had entered into agreements that had finally cost the Sinhalas the country itself. The Sinhalas believed the Portuguese and entered into an agreement to “give” the latter a plot of land equal to that of the skin of a bull. However the Portuguese had intended something else and it cost the Sinhalas a land area much bigger than the area of the skin of a bull. The Dutch did not honour the agreement with the Sinhala king and continued to occupy the Eastern coast while commissioning Tamils to write so called history books such as Yalpana Vaipava Malai which according to some Tamil historians are nothing but poetry. The English deceived the Sinhala leaders with the Sinhala English treaty of 1815 and finally occupied the whole country. The Sinhalas have been cheated through out history because of their friendliness and hospitality and the Tamil leaders have been following the English, of course with the connivance of the latter, and have tried to displace the Sinhalas from the centre with various kinds of “orders” emanating from the English.

The Tamil leaders still think of so called devolution of power to the North and Eastern Provinces as a solution to what they call the national question or the ethnic problem. To begin with there is neither a national question nor an ethnic problem in Sri Lanka but a refusal by the Tamil Vellalas first, then by the rest of the Tamil community and finally by the Muslims to admit that a nation had been built in Sri Lanka at least during the time of King Gemunu (not Dutugemunu, a name coined by the NGO agents of that era) and that they could join that nation without losing their cultural identities including the language of communication. It is not a big problem to be solved and what is needed is a paradigm shift from the so called ethnic minorities.

The Muslims did not have an ethnic problem vis-à-vis the Sinhalas until Ashroff came into the scene. It is true that there were Sinhala Muslim riots in 1915 but until Ashroff joined the Tamil leaders in the seventies there had been no ill will towards each other and 1915 riots were used by the English to suppress the Sinhala Buddhist leaders who had sprung locally in various areas and who had been nobodies until then. The attitude of the English towards the new Sinhala Buddhist leadership enabled the latter to become “somebodies” in no time and in fact it helped the new leadership to establish themselves as against the old English speaking Sinhala Christian leadership trained by the English. Ashroff knew how to play the ethnic card in the seventies and joined the Tamil leaders in Vadukkodai in adopting the infamous resolution by the name of that town.

The Muslims ironically had an ethnic problem vis-à-vis the Tamil Vellalas in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as the Jaffna Vellalas wanted to be the leaders of the Muslims as well. Ponnambalam Ramanathan had proclaimed that he represented the Muslims as well in the Legislative Assembly as they were Tamil speaking. Muslim leaders such as Abdul Aziz and Siddhi Lebbe resented this idea and they claimed that the Muslims were a separate ethnic group though they spoke the same language as the Tamils. The English colonialists finally had to give in to the demands of the Muslim leaders and appointed a Muslim member to represent the Muslims in the Legislative Assembly. Thus if there was any ethnic problem it was between the Muslims and the Tamils and not between the Muslims and the Sinhalas.

In the seventies as the demand for devolution of power to the Northern and the Eastern provinces gained momentum under the auspices of the English and the Indians under the pretext that these provinces had been so called traditional homelands or historical habitats of the Tamils, Ashroff saw an opening for himself and joined the bandwagon to become the yuavaraj of the Muslims in the eastern province and thus created the Muslim Congress in order to achieve his ambition. He knew that he could become the yuavaraj only by carving out probably a non contiguous Muslim area from the so called North Eastern province which could not be substantiated on historical, geographical, demographical, cultural or any other basis, and hence supported the idea of devolution of power on an “ethnic” basis with ulterior motives. Ashroff conveniently forgot that it was the Sinhala King Senerath who settled the Muslims along the east coast when they were harassed by the Portuguese. For the Sinhala king to settle such large numbers in the eastern province in the seventeenth century and for his son to lease the coastal area up to a guava to the Dutch it is mandatory that the present eastern province came under the Sinhala kings. Perhaps Ashroff did not know that when Robert Knox was captured in present day Muttur, he was not taken to a Muslim ruler but to the Sinhala king in Mahanuwara. In spite of all these history behind the Sinhalas Ashroff wanted to deny the eastern province to the Sinhalas and shouted against so called colonization by what the racists called the Sinhala government. He forgot that the Muslims are in the eastern province as a result of “colonization” of certain areas of the eastern province with the Muslims. If the Sinhalas in the area had shouted against so called colonization by the Muslims there wouldn’t have been a Muslim population in the eastern province.

Further, in 1817 or so the English appointed a Muslim tax collector in Uva Vellassa completely defying the Sinhala English treaty of 1815, which said that the country would be ruled according to the Sinhala laws. The gentlemanly English cheated the Sinhala leaders with the treaty. The Sinhala leaders would not have signed the treaty without that particular clause and the clause on protection of Buddhism, which have been parts of the unwritten constitution of King Gemunu some two thousand two hundred years ago, which the Tamil and Muslim racist leaders wanted to erase with the support of the English colonialists. When the treaty was breached by the English the Sinhala people rose against the gentlemanly act of the English and it became the first independence struggle by the Sinhalas against the English Christian colonialists. The English who were and are not only gentlemanly but humanely, perhaps not as much as Prabhakaran, massacred the Sinhalas in the present eastern province making them to run for their lives to the present southern province. It was how the present eastern province became devoid of the Sinhala population and the government has a right to settle many more Sinhala people in the present eastern province irrespective of what the racist Tamil and Muslim leaders and the NGO lapdogs and lapbitches of the western Christian colonialists and the Blakes and other westerners have to say. The history again shows us that the Tamils and the Muslims were silent when the Sinhalas were harassed by the western Christian English, very often taking the side of the colonialists. The Muslims at least now should realize that the western Christian modernity and Judaic Christian culture is against the Muslim culture in the whole world and that they should unite with the Sinhalas to fight against western Christian colonialism. (To be continued)

(2011/04/13)

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva