The discoverers of the first laws of nature

By portal-3

Los descubridores de las primeras leyes de la naturaleza

Until the arrival of the French philosopher Rene Descartes, there was nothing conceptually similar to a universal law of nature, a set of instructions that are always the same under all conditions and serve to predict what is going to happen.

The modern idea of the laws of nature, then, was not only a byproduct of Descartes' philosophy, but it constituted an impressive undertaking that It started during the Scientific Revolution and that allowed us to unravel the Matrix-type code that underlay nature.

The laws of the Revolution

The ancients had known, according to estimates, only four physical laws: the law of the lever, the optical law of reflection, the law of buoyancy and the parallelogram law of velocities. That is, rather, four principles that we call laws had been discovered.

While they referred to these "laws" as evidence that nature was sometimes regular and predictable, They never identified any specific scientific principle as law.

Newtons Laws In LatinNewton's first and second laws, in Latin, in the original edition of his work Principia Mathematica.

But, for example, the Romans talked a lot about the law of nature (lex naturae), but they generally meant moral law. And, although Galileo, Harriot and Beeckman had each independently discovered the so-called "law of the fall", none of them had used the term "law" in this context. The identification of laws in its strict sense was born with the Scientific Revolution, among which the following were deciphered:

  • Stevin's law of hydrostatics.
  • Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
  • Snell's law of refraction.
  • Boyle's gas law.
  • Hooke's law of elasticity.
  • Huygens's pendulum law.
  • Torricelli's law of flow.
  • Pascal's law of fluid dynamics.
  • Newton's law of gravitation.

Only a minority of these laws had already acquired eponymous labels: the rest had yet to be named after their discoverers. Just as he wrote Isaac Newton to define his aims when, in 1703, he became president of the Royal Society:

Natural philosophy consists in discovering the structure and operations of nature, and reducing them, as far as possible, to general rules or laws, establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and from thence deducing the causes and effects of things. .

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The physicist-mathematician Henri Poincare (provides a similar definition: "What is a law? It is a constant link between an antecedent and a consequent, between the current state of the world and its immediately subsequent state."

Given this, the certainty began to emerge that, if everything is governed by laws, everything can be predictable (even if it were not computable) and therefore We lived in a deterministic universe where free will was only a cognitive illusion. You can delve deeper into this difficult topic in the following video:

Nowadays it is known that there are scientific laws that are both causal and probabilistic or stochastic. Hence, in the concept of scientific law, both types of law (deterministic and stochastic) must be considered. but it is based on four principles:

  1. Everything that exists is governed by natural laws
  2. These laws are invariant in time and space.
  3. The scientist's activity consists of describing them
  4. The existence of these laws is independent of whether the human being describes them or not.
  5. It is possible, in principle, to know all the laws


The news

The discoverers of the first laws of nature

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

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Despite all the technology available, normal pens are still used in space

By portal-3

A pesar de toda la tecnología disponible, en el espacio se siguen usando bolígrafos normales

It is often rumored that NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would write in the absence of gravity, but that The Russians solved the problem using a simple pencil. However, It's nothing more than an urban legend.

Right now, on the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts use pencils. Still, concerns about its flammability in a pure oxygen atmosphere and the threat of tiny floating pieces of graphite inspired Paul Fisher to develop the Space Pen in 1965, a fairly cheap invention.

Back to pencils

Both American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts initially used pencils on space flights, but those writing instruments were not ideal: pencil tips can chip and break, and have such objects floating around space capsules in near-zero gravity. represents potential harm to astronauts and equipment.

NASA began developing a space pen, but project costs rose, so the project was canceled and the astronauts used pencils like the Russians again. NASA never contacted Paul Fisher to develop a pen, just as he did not receive any funding from the government to develop it.

rAn AG7 Astronaut Space Pen in its case.

The curious thing about the whole thing is that to write in space you don't need a special pen. Sometimes special pens are used, but also normal ones, as As it explains in Spanish astronaut Pedro Duke:

I'm writing these notes on the Soyuz with a cheap pen. Why is that important? It turns out that I have been working in space programs for seventeen years, eleven as an astronaut, and I have always believed, because it was explained to me, that normal pens do not write in space.


The news

Despite all the technology available, normal pens are still used in space

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

Read More

In the last 40 years, Marxist authors have given way to postmodernists in the university

By portal-3

En estos los últimos 40 años, los autores marxistas han dado paso a los posmodernistas en la universidad

The last four decades have shown a relative decline of Marxist thought in universities. Their influence has been replaced by “poststructuralist” (or “postmodernist”) thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Deleuze.

Poststructuralism is mainly indebted to the thinkers of the European 'conservative revolution' led by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Quotes

Marxism survived in the structuralist moment in France (1950s and 1960s) through Louis Althusser, but not as the post-structuralism of Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, none of whom can be called Marxist. The starting point for poststructuralists is Nietzsche. For classical Marxism it is clearly Hegel. These, intellectually speaking, are two different languages or thoughts.

Furthermore, we can verify this paradigm shift in the number of citations of the references of Marxism and postmodernism.

In a Quantitative investigation From the JStor academic database, which tracks the frequency of names and key ideas in all academic articles and chapter titles published globally between 1980 and 2019, we discovered that the alleged mastermind of Cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, starred in 480 publications. Friedrich Hayek, possibly the main influence on the neoliberal free market reforms of recent decades, starred in 407.

The “Frankfurt School” appeared in fewer than 200 titles, and the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (identified as a key transmitter of the cultural Marxist “virus” in the United States) was the subject of just over 220.

However, in the last decade, the most cited thinker was the neo-Nietzschean theorist, Giles Deleuze, which appeared in 770 titles during 2010-19. That is to say, political and economic Marxism seems, judging by the quotes, in clear decline, What has gained strength is cultural Marxism or postmodernism. Which will be good news for liberals or some economists, but it is bad news for epistemologists who love positivism and the expository clarity of science.


The news

In the last 40 years, Marxist authors have given way to postmodernists in the university

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

Read More