Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed May 24, 2023 11:43 amIt took a long time to get to the math and insights that even brought the concept of space time, the way Einstein thought of it, into anyone's head.
The mathematical concept of spacetime was given to Einstein by his teacher Hermann Minkowski.
Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed May 24, 2023 11:43 amWill Bouwman wrote: ↑Wed May 24, 2023 10:41 amLong story short, we are some way off confirming whether
spacetime is a substance.
Whatever the bolded means. It will likely means something different from what the presocratics meant when they were competing to label the base substance.
Here's something I wrote in another article for Philosophy Now:
As was becoming clearer to the Greek philosophers, not only were gods a matter of taste and circumstances, their metaphysical, protoscientific hypotheses were subject to how the evidence – the appearance and behaviour of the world – was interpreted.
This point was taken up by Anaximander (c.610-c.546 BC), another student of Thales’. Rather than quibble about which element was primordial, he suggested instead that the different elements were all states of some underlying stuff that he called the apeiron, which means ‘the boundless’ or ‘the undefined’. This otherwise-undefined stuff was a smooth mixture of opposites, hot and cold, wet and dry. This is clearly a volatile mixture, and at some point it started to curdle, separating into the familiar Greek elements, earth, water, air and fire.
There is only one piece of the written work of Anaximander that survives. It is the oldest quote attributed to a philosopher in the Western tradition:
“Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
As is the order of things;
For they execute the sentence upon one another
–The condemnation for the crime –
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.”
It is difficult to tell from a few lines of poetry how Anaximander’s system worked in any detail, but the core seems to be that, depending on its blend of competing properties – hot and cold, wet and dry – the apeiron could become anything. The different ways these contrarieties – hot, cold, wet and dry – were mixed defined an element: fire is hot and dry; air is hot and wet (think steam); water is cold and wet; leaving earth cold and dry. This idea was taken up by Aristotle, who says in On Generation and Corruption: “Our own doctrine is that although there is a matter of the perceptible bodies (a matter out of which the so-called ‘elements’ come-to-be), it has no separate existence, but is always bound up with a contrariety.”
https://philosophynow.org/issues/104/Ph ... d_Branches
Bit long winded perhaps. The point is that the ancient Greeks were familiar with the idea that the stuff the universe is made of may be reducible to measurable qualities, albeit heat and humidity rather than modern concepts of mass and energy.
Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed May 24, 2023 11:43 amI mention people with different experiences because there are things, like rogue waves for a now fairly non-controversial example - where some people were rational to believe in something they could not demonstrate to the expert community (who also at the time were rational to be skeptical, though perhaps not fully rational in how they dismissed given their experiences. We don't know what else falls into that category, I think.
Absolutely. Never say never.
