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Old 06-April-2006, 03:04 AM
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Ken G Ken G is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ngeo
If energy - and even mass - are ‘best understood’ as properties or attributes, not ‘things’ in themselves, and yet the ‘thing’ (in this case, a photon, but also a body of matter) is a form of energy, it seems to me the understanding will be limited. Is it perhaps that at this point science is more a matter of what works, regardless of the degree of understanding?
I think what you are saying is that science attempts to explain the universe by using concepts that work. Whether or not the universe is "really" related to these concepts is not a matter of science, more like metaphysics or philosophy. Science is always what works, from mundane concepts like a ball and a trajectory, to profound ideas like a wave function. Nature must have some other way of "knowing" what to do that is not containable in the human mind, because everything in science is actually an idealization of nature.
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