Sunday, May 25, 2008

Jaki, S.L. PATTERNS OR PRINCIPLES 1995

vii. The dire substitution of patterns for principles

7 Relativity is the most absolutist of physical theories. Einstein wanted it to be called the theory of invariance [speed of light is absolute]

11 That an interaction which cannot be measured exactly cannot happen exactly [Heisenberg] jumps from the operational to the ontological

41 You will never know what is enough until you have more than enough [Blake]

51 The poisonous bite of a tarantula: homosexuality [Xenophon Memor p.22]

52 Marxists have always loved working on democracies that worked

51+ I.F. Stone

52 Popper

54 Guardini

60 the failure of saving the phenomena

61 the temptation to pantheism which ruined ancient religion as well as ancient science

76 Newton spent his old age erasing Descartes from his notebooks [as Descartes erased Buridan from his memory]

90 Kant’s failure

93 Newtonian physics which Kant knew only by hearsay

94 faith taken for sentiment

95 If nothing remains unchanged while changes go on, there is no ground to predicate change itself

105 Science made all too manifest its inability to assure its proper use

126 the infinity catastrophe

150 Fritz Haber’s synthetic nitric acid made it possible to prolong the war from 4 months to 4 years

156 Supercollider [he’s for it]

176 Capitalism played v. little part in that creative explosion which has characterized science for the past hundred years

200 Science is organized common sense

201 Quantum theory: no one can cut thinner than the thinnest instrument at his disposal

207 Plato who frowned on material reality

209 Principle of uncertainty = principle of operational inexactitude

215 on the other

227 Physicists like everyone are subject to the logic of the first step taken

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