Spinning Tops
Some people respect the shit out of the truth; good
I benefited from really terrific philosophy professors. I fell in love with the philosophy of science, and I studied closely with Prof. Timothy Lyons, whose lessons still repeat in my mind. Dr. Lyons, hell, this isn’t academic. Tim’s expertise is in the scientific realism debate.
The realism debate involves our scientific theories and whether we can consider what successful theories say about the world is true or at least approximately so.
The realists say yes. Nonrealists say things like what our theories say about the world is true for things we can see with our own eyeballs, but the stuff we have to use instruments and experiments to detect are things we only accept but don’t necessarily count as true. Some would go further and say we can’t infer truth about any description of the world, but if the math works, and we can do stuff with it, who cares about this capital T truth thing?
That may sound ridiculous.
But we aren’t really talking about shooting arrows and dropping apples out of trees here. Or not exactly. The theories under examination are complex physical theories like quantum mechanics or relativistic mechanics. Something, something, non-Euclidean geometry.
Me and Prof. Lyons and a few others in the Physics department set up the Philosophy and Physics club at our University. It was early in one of those meetings that I was talking to one of the Physics students, and he put this to me–I’ll probably fuck this up, but it’s close enough. Again, this isn’t academic. So dude says:
Let’s say I want to measure something about a spinning top. The questions I have about the top will determine the reference frame I use. For example, if I want to measure something about the rotation or its velocity, I may select a reference frame that is satic that observes the spinning top. But let’s say that I want to measure something about the top itself, I can also spin my reference frame and observe a stationary, or non-rotational top because my reference frame spins with the top.
Well, Ho-ly Shit!
That’s a freaking light bulb, right?
Okay, it’s a lot.
But man, that was life-changing for me! Ha! Like, seriously. My view of the world changed from that day forward. It put me in touch with myself and the world in a way I hadn’t yet understood. The breakthrough from Einstein is that your point of view, your reference frame, presents the world to you in a certain way, but change your point of view, change your reference frame, and the world presents itself to you differently. If you are still, the top spins; if you are spinning, the top is still because you spin with it. It’s all about your point of view when you look, and with the right math, you can calculate like you’re stationary, or you can calculate like you’re spinning.
So that was the Physics and Philosophy Club.
I’m telling you this because I want you to understand how seriously some people take the truth and the whole enterprise of studying our physical reality.
One day at the campus coffee shop, Tim said to me something like, “What a privilege, man. What an absolute privilege to be able to look into the world in the way that we get to. To get to study the world at its deepest levels.”
That was probably the second huge lightbulb moment of that semester. It was a privilege to have time, space, and freedom to have these conversations, and what a privilege to peer into reality. Tim was right. We read papers and discussed them with the Physics students. We worked really hard to understand the characterization of the world that was being offered and how we should think about reality because of it.
Tim drilled into my head that we never “prove” anything besides logic and mathematics. The best we can do out here is weigh evidence in terms of what is more likely to be true than something else. He practically erased words like “prove” and “true” from my vocabulary in exchange for words like “suggests that” and “is most likely the case.”
Tim is the sort of professor who calls you on your shit. If you make a claim, Tim will make you present the case for it. And I don’t mean in the classroom; I mean in regular conversation working out a point of view. With professors like Lyons he’s pushing his students. He’s pushing the discipline. He’s a close friend.
My study of the philosophy of science taught me to respect the truth and to commit only to things that I could convincingly argue for. I honestly think it continues to teach me to shut my mouth when I can’t back up something I want to say. And that’s respect for the truth. It’s good to shut your mouth when you can’t back up what you’re saying.
The truth is obtainable, Tim says, but whether we’ve got it, we can’t be sure.
Pursue the truth; we’ve got to. The truth is our common ground. The truth is what allows us to work cooperatively. The truth is that I know you and I are both observing the same world, and we can accept certain facts about it. The truth cuts to the chase. The truth speaks plainly about the complicated world, and the truth doesn’t complicate to evade a fact.
Do you ever feel like you’re not seeing the same world as someone else? That is an assault on the truth. That abandons the agreement that a common set of facts is available. Our job is to discover those facts and negotiate what we do in light of them.
Pursuing the truth means getting out of your own way, finding out whether what we say of the world is, and not fitting the world to what we say.