Re: Expelled: If you don't believe in holy physics dogma ; you're

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Bill Miller wrote:

> Taken overall, the ossifiaction in textbooks has benn compounded by
> generations of engineers and scientist -- many at th PhD level -- that
did
> not pay attention to the "tweaks" that you point out in your post.
>
> From personal experience, I have been vilified personally by PhD level
folks
> for suggesting that Maxwell's Equations are descriptive rather than
causal.

Do tell more! Scientists or engineers? Were you a student or a colleague? 
It sounds like a defensive reaction to avoid thought, or to preserve the 
perceived worth of one's piece of paper on the wall (if only they knew 
just how little they really learned in that time!).

I have no doubt that it's easy to find PhD graduates who believe the usual

mythology. They'd be lucky to learn otherwise as undergrads, and they're 
too busy as graduate students. Unless they teach during that time, and 
teach competently (i.e., not as textbook fundamentalists).

The fresh PhD graduate who goes into science/engineering research is 
hardly the Establishment (more like grist for the mill). The fresh PhD 
graduate who doesn't is even less so.

> BTW a Law, in my NTBHO is always universally applicable. Anything else
is a
> theory or a hypothesis (or occasionally wild-ass guess!)

"Currently believed to be universally applicable"? Otherwise we'd never 
know whether we have any Laws at all. Does this leave us with anything 
other than a handful of conservation laws?

Whatever a good definition of Law might be, anything that's been called a 
law in the past, or is a single equation or soundbite distillation of an 
oldish theory, tends to be called a "law" now. I think there's less of a 
tendency to call new results in physics "laws".

> For example, for many years, Newton's Law fell into the "Law" category.
Not
> anymore.

Which "Newton's Law"?

-- 
Timo Nieminen - Home page: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/nieminen/
E-prints: http://eprint.uq.edu.au/view/person/Nieminen,_Timo_A..html
Shrine to Spirits: http://www.users.bigpond.com/timo_nieminen/spirits.html