(June 10, 2020 at 7:59 am)Grandizer Wrote: It's Penrose, so I'm going to take him seriously.
He's a smart guy!
Here's an article I found just now, by coincidence. It touches on a number of issues related to the topic here, I think. It's particularly interesting to me how Newton changed what science was looking for, by giving up on material causal explanations and looking instead for mathematization. So in a way, science says it has understood the material when it stops looking at the material and changes it into an abstraction -- math.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/...t-meaning/
Much of what the writer refers to in passing is described in detail in Burtt's classic book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.
https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Foun...oks&sr=1-1
Which may be pirated here:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5...7F3D3AD067
As an early critic of the Enlightenment, William Blake accused Newton of valuing the abstracted understanding over the genuine material -- of claiming that truth is in the formula rather than in the thing itself.
