In one corner, we have the estimable Sir Isaac Newton and Roger Coates (and of course Andre the Giant, upon whose shoulders they are standing), and in the other, we have Bishop Berkeley and Ernst Mach, looking to throw down at the speed of sound. Berkeley can't get Newton and his forces out of his head (literally), and boy oh boy is the fight ever on.

We discuss

• How should teachers address the "students using ChatGPT to write their essay" problem? Can we learn a bit from Stalin here?
• Is Ben basically Gandhi? (Answer: Yes of course)
• How can one be both an idealist and an empiricist?
• WTF is a 'force'???
• Instrumentalism and Essentialism
• The history of the debate between Berkeley and Newton
• The lifelong feud between Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzman
• What's the difference between essences and unobservables?
• Is Mach a filthy plagiarist?
• Who won the essentialism vs instrumentalism debate? (Answer: Neither side won. Popper won.)
  

References

• Go amuse yourselves and watch some videos of Newton's spinning bucket thought experiment.
• Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics

Quotes

Everybody who reads this list of twenty-one theses must be struck by their modernity. They are surprisingly similar, especially in the criticism of Newton, to the philosophy of physics which Ernst Mach taught for many years in the conviction that it was new and revolutionary; in which he was followed by, for example, Joseph Petzold; and which had an immense influence on modern physics, especially on the Theory of Relativity.

• Popper, C&R Chapter 6

(20) A general practical result—which I propose to call ‘Berkeley’s razor’—of this analysis of physics allows us a-priori to eliminate from physical science all essentialist explanations. If they have a mathematical and a predictive content they may be admitted qua mathematical hypotheses (while their essentialist interpretation is eliminated). If not, they may be ruled out altogether. This razor is sharper than Ockham’s: all entities are ruled out except those which are perceived.

• Popper, C&R Chapter 6

No attempt was made to show how or why the forces acted, but gravitation being taken as due to a mere "force", speculators thought themselves at liberty to imagine any number of forces, attractive or repulsive, or alternating, varying as the distance,[4] or the square, cube, or higher power of the distance, etc. At last, Ruđer Bošković[5] got rid of atoms altogether, by supposing them to be the mere centre of forces exerted by a position or point only, where nothing existed but the power of exerting a force.[6]

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imponderable_fluid

Mach's antipathy to theorizing and to the invocation of "metaphysical" and therefore unprovable notions led him to some extreme opinions. In The Conservation of Energy he remarks: "We say now that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, but this hydrogen and oxygen are merely thoughts or names which, at the sight of water, we keep ready to describe phenomena which are not present but which will appear again whenever, as we say, we decompose water.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

In Mach's world, there was to be no such thing as "explaining" in the way scientists had always understood it. Mach even went so far as to argue that the traditional notion of cause and effect-that kicking a rock makes it move, that heating a gas makes it expand —was presumptuous and therefore to be denied scientific status.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

But it was not always so. Well into the latter half of the 19th century, most scientists saw their essential task as the measurement and codification of phenomena they could investigate directly: the passage of sound waves through air, the expansion of gas when heated, the conversion of heat to motive power in a steam engine. A scientific law was a quantitative relationship between one observable phenomenon and another.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

Errata

• Vaden incorrectly said this that this essay was referenced in Mach's wikipedia page. Wrong! Fool! It was Berkeley's wiki page # Socials
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Do you have any fluids you'd like us to ponder? Send a sample over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Support Increments

• The conflict between Galileo and the church
• What is instrumentalism, and how did it become popular?
• How instrumentalism is still in vogue in many physics departments
• The Problem of Universals
• The essentialist approach to science
• Stars, air, cells, and lightning
• "What is" vs "How does" questions
• The relationship between essentialism and language, and its influence on politics.
• Viewing words as instruments

See More:

• Instrumentalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism
• Essentialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
• The problem of universals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals

Quotes:
Few if any of the physicists who have now accepted the instrumentalist view of Cardinal Bellarmino and Bishop Berkeley realize that they have accepted a philosophical theory. Nor do they realize that they have broken with the Galilean tradition. On the contrary, most of them think that they have kept clear of philosophy; and most of them no longer care anyway. What they now care about, as physicists, is (a) mastery of the mathematical formalism, i.e. of the instrument, and (b) its applications; and they care for nothing else.
-- C&R, Page 134

Thus my criticism of essentialism does not aim at establishing the non-existence of essences; it merely aims at showing the obscurantist character of the role played by the idea of essences in the Galilean philosophy of science (down to Maxwell, who was inclined to believe in them but whose work destroyed this belief). In other words my criticism tries to show that, whether essences exist or not, the belief in them does not help us in any way and indeed is likely to hamper us; so that there is no reason why the scientist should assume their existence.
-- C&R, Page 141.

But they are more than this, as can be seen from the fact that we submit them to severe tests by trying to deduce from them some of the regularities of the known world of common experience i.e. by trying to explain these regularities. And these attempts to explain the known by the unknown (as I have described them elsewhere) have immeasurably extended the realm of the known. They have added to the facts of our everyday world the invisible air, the antipodes, the circulation of the blood, the worlds of the telescope and the microscope, of electricity, and of tracer atoms showing us in detail the movements of matter within living bodies. All these things are far from being mere instruments: they are witness to the intellectual conquest of our world by our minds.

But there is another way of looking at these matters. For some, science is still nothing but glorified plumbing, glorified gadgetmaking—‘mechanics’; very useful, but a danger to true culture, threatening us with the domination of the near-illiterate (of Shakespeare’s ‘mechanicals’). It should never be mentioned in the same breath as literature or the arts or philosophy. Its professed discoveries are mere mechanical inventions, its theories are instruments—gadgets again, or perhaps super-gadgets. It cannot and does not reveal to us new worlds behind our everyday world of appearance; for the physical world is just surface: it has no depth. The world is just what it appears to be. Only the scientific theories are not what they appear to be. A scientific theory neither explains nor describes the world; it is nothing but an instrument.
-- C&R, Page 137-8.

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