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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 11:19am Sep 25, 2003 EST (# 13960 of 13963)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

P.W. Bridgman wrote an exceedingly interesting one two years before he died of cancer. Whether he knew of his doom when he wrote THE WAY THINGS ARE (Harvard, 1959) I don't know. The last chapter starts with this:

" We now find ourselves, at the end of our long analysis, in a position to offer a tentative and partial answer to the problem dimly shadowed forth in the INTRODUCTION, namely, to find the source of the weakness or ineptness of all human thinking."

The man who wrote that was still doing difficult experiments with great confidence and success. For all the confidence, for all the success, in spite of the Nobel Prize, Bridgman's mind stayed focused, as it had for years, on "the weakness or ineptness of all human thinking" including that thinking aided by instruments that extend the senses.

Bridgman, an experimentalist as meticulous, inventive, confident, and successful as anyone is likely to name, had a scientific style that seems as certain as it could be. He knew his own mind, and was uncompromisingly solitary - he published 260 papers, only two with co-authors. He was WONDERFUL with his hands, and his setups were brilliant. He made much of his most precise, impressive equipment himself. To my mind, Bridgman was also as intuitive and intense as any poet. I think he is one of the most interesting physicists of this century. Bridgman thought long, hard, and carefully about some of the same things that have occupied philosophers, Berkeley included, from the Greeks on. His name is now a symbol for a simple idea. He's revered partly for that simple idea, and partly for something else.

The Britannica (1985) quotes the simple idea that people remember about Bridgman from his THE LOGIC OF MODERN PHYSICS:

" In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."

Bridgman used this notion of operationality as a pattern to fit to all experimental circumstances and all scientific thought and analysis. To him, usages with experimental equipment were operations. Thoughts were, too. In a sense, this was taking the ancient Greek admonition "define your terms!" and pushing it very hard. He showed that this pushing could be enlightening, comforting, and practically useful. He pushed it the more because he was so doubtful about people's ability to see and understand even those things that eyes and instruments showed them, much less anything beyond.

Bridgman was much concerned with the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in the sciences. He saw that definition of many scientific ideas was muddled conceptually and from a measurement point of view, and showed many examples. Fighting that muddle, he became something like the patron saint of experimental precision and care.

rshow55 - 11:22am Sep 25, 2003 EST (# 13961 of 13963)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Bridgman's basic ideas of attainable reality were similar to map makers notions, or instrument maker's notions. Bridgman practiced what he preached as an instrument maker. He built accurate, reliable, explainable, trusted pressure measuring instruments up to 400,000 atmospheres, making invention after invention in order to do so.

Here was the CENTRAL thing he knew about calibrating and perfecting a measurement instrument.

. THE INSTRUMENT HAD TO PASS LOOP TESTS.

Different cycles or trajectories, ending at the same place, should yield the same final reading. This is the same test surveyors have applied for centuries. This is a kind of test applied again and again in the making of precision tools. Bridgman didn't invent the loop test. But he showed by example and forceful argument how fundamental loop tests were, and insisted that people understand.

When I think of Bridgman, I think of hard thought, and endless care, and the notion that with enough thought, and enough care, all scientific problems relating to the real measurable world could be mastered. Exacting as that ideal is, life isn't quite that easy. Bridgman knew that. But beyond what care could do, for Bridgman, lay the consolations of philosophy, not problems to be solved.

But Bridgman, the most matter-of-fact of men, taught two other lessons that stick with me.

No matter how we try, our contact with the world will ALWAYS be somewhat provisional, in ways we cannot as animals predict. We always have reason for some suspicion of our ideas about "reality."

even so,

Our instruments (in HIS sense, including our ideas and mathematical operations) do what they do.

When an instrument (or a "logical" sequence) fails a loop test, we should find out why, and fix it.

We can deal with out mathematical instruments in the same spirit we deal with other tools. We can test them, and fix them so that they pass the tests we can apply to them.

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