Re: Democritus' sources for his atomist theory
- From: "Agamemnon" <agamemnon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 22:36:51 -0000
"Matt Giwer" <jull43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:472b9680$0$25673$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Agamemnon wrote:"Matt Giwer" <jull43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:47278103$0$32535$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAgamemnon wrote:"prr" <psaulmoneonenine@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1193704551.355706.252480@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWhile you can get to the idea that all motion has to have a finite minimum amount to get passed Xeno's paradox,OK I know some smarties might say "Leucippus." Then give me hisHave you read Plato's Timaeus? If not read it.
source, ok? :) I'm wondering if this was simply a good guess by folks
who were grasping for straws, or if they got these theories from
Persia or India (it is true that reincarnation was en vogue among some
of the presocratics), or was it something else? How did Democritus
come to believe in this theory?
Let me clarify my question-I'm not asking for someone to recount
Democritus' own teachings. What I'm asking is, where did he get it
from? Was this just typical of the guesswork that was done by most of
the presocratics of his age-with him being the lucky correct guesser?
Or was he reflecting ideas that had been carried into Ionia from
farther east? Or south, from Egypt?
The atomic theory of Democritus time was pretty close to modern Quantum theory. We now know that Archimedes invented Calculus so maybe an ancient mathematician had come up with the mathematics used in Quantum Mechanics in 450 BC since it is very basic and even Pythagoras could have derived it, and guessed that nature must work the same way, but Democritus could not understand it or his account of it got corrupted, so it became all about triangles.
The soultion to Zeno's paradox is, "There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness." "...no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/icc-gwi072703.php
There are many solutions to Xeno's Paradox. The one most common today it simply to use proper math to solve the infinite sum of 1/2^n. The answer is 1. In the quantum sense there is a smallest possible motion which is finite and not divisible into a smaller unit.
real quantum mechanics can not exist without the statistics and the uncertainty principle. Neither can be deduced from reason.
Nope. The existence of quantum entanglement was all deduced from reason by Parmenides who was also the first person to come up with the idea of time running at one rate for some observers but another rate for others and therefore explained time dilation. Read the Platonic dialogue of the same name.
As I in fact a BS in physics and a minor in math I can assure you there is no possible way to deduce it.
As a BSc in physics I can assure you that Parmenides offers a better explanation than anyone else either past or present. He coucludes "Let thus much be said ; and further let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be." Schrödinger expresses this in the form of his cat paradox.
Entanglement has nothing to do with time dilation.
I never said it did.
Photons by definition do not experience time because of their speed. Therefore changing one changes the other. It is showing the same effect in all reference frames even that of a reference frame moving at the speed of light.
I suggest you read Parmenides. He was the first to suggest the possibility of time dilation.
Both must come from observations that required the technology of the early 20th century to make.
Pythagoras may not have had the precise statistics since he could have not have made the observations to measure the physical constants and the behaviour of a system but the mathematics he already knew was not far away for the mathematics he would have needed.
As the concept of statistics does not appear in math until the 17th c. AD you are giving a new meaning to "not far away". Statistics was delayed for so long for the absence of truly random events to observe. The definition of fair coin is not satisfied until they were mass produced with a premium on uniformity. The same for dice, unless perfect cubes and the holes of depths to account for different numbers on each side there were no fair dice. In either case the study of each individual coin or die was the best way to go to predict the most likely result.
The only concept you need to understand is the concept of waves. Pythagoras had already explained musical notes as being waves governed by particular ratios and he then applied this idea of waves and ratios to the universe and concluded it must work in a similar way. Pythagoras would have also known about probabilities and been perfectly able to calculate them and understand them long before Pascal.
What is unfortunate is his calculus did not get to the level of practical application.
You don't know that. Archimedes was able to use it, but the Romans murdered him.
When there is evidence it was the only way he could done something you may have a case.
How else was Archimedes able to accurately calculate the trajectories of his missiles unless he had already derived Newton's Laws of Motion using Calculus?
Until then there can be no case. I doubt there can ever be such a case as most any approximation method as a guide to build something real is as good getting the mathematically correct answer. Absent that manuscripts are needed showing the correct answer being found using the method.
The Babylonians had the formula for solving quadratic equations 4000 years ago or 1500 years before Pythagoras. It only took about 500 years from when Europeans rediscovered it along with Algebra in the Renaissance to get to Quantum Mechanics and much less time to get to Calculus.
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