The leading Renaissance thinkers were willing to adapt their minds to the facts but weren’t sure how to fully explain them. Although it took decades for most scientists to accept Copernicus’s revolutionary claims, those scientists were not stupid. In addition to scripture and their own senses – it was obvious even to the casual observer that the sun rose and the earth was stationary – they had a fairly reasonable, scientific objection. Copernicus could accept facts as he observed them, but didn’t really have a cogent explanation of why the solar system worked as it did.
Imagine this conversation.
Copernicus’s debate opponent says, “So, Nicoli, let me grant you your silly premise for a moment. Let’s assume that we do, indeed, circle the sun. You claim that we’re spinning through space and traveling at thousands of miles per hour. Okay. What about centrifugal force? Spin a rock at the end of a string and see how many seconds it takes the ant on that rock to fly into space. Why doesn’t this happen to us? Why don’t cows slip out of the grip of milk maids and fly over the moon?”
“I don’t know,” says our hero Copernicus. “I just know what the data suggests. We are orbiting around the sun. I can’t explain it. I just know it is so.”
“So,” continues his opponent, “you have no explanation? You make no attempt to account for the simple fact of centrifugal force? You just want us to believe something that even you don’t understand?”
“Yes.”
Not much of a debate. On the one hand we have ants without opposable thumbs obviously unable to keep their grip on a rock in orbit, a phenomenon that would suggest that we should be observing panicked cows floating off into space if Copernicus was right. And on the other hand we have someone arguing that the data on the movement of planets fits better if we assume that it is the sun and the not the earth that is stationary, if we assume that we’re hurtling through space at about a thousand miles an hour. Preposterous.
It took an Enlightenment thinker – the Enlightenment thinker – to explain why. Isaac Newton solved two problems with one universal law. It is tempting to think – reasonable to suspect – that the explanation for our circling the sun would be different from the explanation of why it is not impossible to find our car in the morning, uncertain as to where it has spun off through centrifugal force. Newton sees a falling apple and realizes that it is pulled by the same force as the earth. Gravity is the universal force that explains why cows don’t fly and the earth does. Newton added laws – a theory – to observations and facts.
Newton gave the lovers of facts a set of laws that made sense of their facts.
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
Showing posts with label isaac newton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label isaac newton. Show all posts
24 March 2009
Gold's Enduring Allure
Through this recession, gold has rather steadily gone up in value. Gold is a good investment for the simple reason that lots of people think that it is a good investment. It's value lies more in consensus reality than in actual fact.
If you doubt that gold has little value, make this choice. Would you rather live in a country with lots and lots of gold - say a pound per person - but primitive living conditions or in a country with no gold and advanced medical care that extends life expectancy and the number of years you can be productive, access to a wide variety of interesting foods, clothing, housing, and entertainment options, and leisure time enough to enjoy them?
One of the biggest problems with the field of economics is that it comes on the heels of physics. Newton did not just articulate universal laws but was made head of the Treasury and set the price for silver - a price that lasted for centuries. Economists try to construct elaborate mathematical models to prove that their science is as rigorous as that of physics. And even the layman gets caught up in this, making gold out to be something of consequence. We think that things that we can hold are more real than things that we feel. We want to be physicists.
And yet it is quality of life that is the prize of economic advances - not the size or quantity of goods. Quality of life is more difficult to weigh than an ounce of gold, but it matters more. We still have a tendency to be disdainful of things like happiness and quality of life for the simple reason that they seem harder to measure than units of productivity, etc.
And yet our economy is increasingly producing goods that have no substance outside of the experience they create and their market value: video games, movies, music, and software are some of the highest value goods that we in the US now produce. Even molecules that are sold as drugs are purchased for their effects (less depression, lower blood pressure, smaller tumors, etc.) and not for the substance.
Gold has an allure but it won't always. The most obvious reason is that someone will eventually master a form of alchemy and be able to manipulate matter to create gold out of any base metal. But more importantly, it'll lose it's value simply because it is not as important as the things that money can buy - money denominated even in something as insubstantial as blips on a computer screen.
If you doubt that gold has little value, make this choice. Would you rather live in a country with lots and lots of gold - say a pound per person - but primitive living conditions or in a country with no gold and advanced medical care that extends life expectancy and the number of years you can be productive, access to a wide variety of interesting foods, clothing, housing, and entertainment options, and leisure time enough to enjoy them?
One of the biggest problems with the field of economics is that it comes on the heels of physics. Newton did not just articulate universal laws but was made head of the Treasury and set the price for silver - a price that lasted for centuries. Economists try to construct elaborate mathematical models to prove that their science is as rigorous as that of physics. And even the layman gets caught up in this, making gold out to be something of consequence. We think that things that we can hold are more real than things that we feel. We want to be physicists.
And yet it is quality of life that is the prize of economic advances - not the size or quantity of goods. Quality of life is more difficult to weigh than an ounce of gold, but it matters more. We still have a tendency to be disdainful of things like happiness and quality of life for the simple reason that they seem harder to measure than units of productivity, etc.
And yet our economy is increasingly producing goods that have no substance outside of the experience they create and their market value: video games, movies, music, and software are some of the highest value goods that we in the US now produce. Even molecules that are sold as drugs are purchased for their effects (less depression, lower blood pressure, smaller tumors, etc.) and not for the substance.
Gold has an allure but it won't always. The most obvious reason is that someone will eventually master a form of alchemy and be able to manipulate matter to create gold out of any base metal. But more importantly, it'll lose it's value simply because it is not as important as the things that money can buy - money denominated even in something as insubstantial as blips on a computer screen.
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