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Theory of Knowledge Writing Assignment
“Nothing can be known with certainty'; Is this statement true? Are you certain? In this essay I plan to show that nothing can be known with certainty, I will examine the truth and certainty of life and of humans, and prove that nothing can be known for certain.
Sir Isaac Newton came up with many theories of time and space. Euclid said that there can be a concept of a straight line but Newton said nothing could ever travel in a straight line, see illustration below.
It shows that in this spherical universe one can go straight but never for very long. If you are certain you are going in a straight line think again. But these facts are known, if not by the general public then at least by mathematicians. However Max Born states the theory only holds water if the exact sphere of reference is specified, if nothing is certain then the sphere of reference can never be known to a point where there is no question as to it being perfect, therefore a basic theory of motion is null and void. The statement “nothing can be known with certainty'; holds true to the vast unending universe all the way down to the tinniest subatomic particle. Everything is moving; nothing can be studied to so exactly that there is no question about the object, because the act of studying an object changes the object.
I am not saying that Newton’s and other theories like it are wrong, I am saying that we put too much faith in something that is not absolute, unfortunately we have no other choice.
When I sat down to write this essay I decided to look for the easy way out. In Microsoft Word 97 there is a feature where you can ask the computer a question and it will answer it to the best of its knowledge. If computers are as powerful as man created them, then my state of the art machine with its state of the art word processor should have no problem answering the question, “Why is nothing ever certain?'; When I hit enter to ask the machine the question I was bombarded with a multitude of answers but none of which fit the question. The computer could show me how to print multiple copies of this essay, and how to get this essay on to the Internet where mathematicians and artists alike could see it.
Does certainty actually provide security, or does it set one for failure? Does doubt cause negativity or does it prepare one for the future? The idea whether certainty or doubt causes the fulfillment of dreams, goals and the future as questioned many. Certainty creates security and assurances, but is anything certain? Nothing in the world is ever certain; one’s world can be flipped upside down in the matters of days, hours, minutes and even a split of a second. Unlike certainty, doubt allows one to know there is a chance that the odds are against one. William Lyon Phelps supports certainty as a factor for success, while Bertrand Russell favors doubt because it creates comfort and prepares one for reality. Using personal knowledge and historical evidence, Bertrand Russell’s idea that doubt creates possibilities and hard work is valid, while William Lyon Phelps claims the opposite, that certainty creates success.
I am perfectly willing to grant Unger the first premise. I think that there is no problem with allowing him this, in and of itself. Even the second premise is allowable in a certain, philosophically interesting sense, and in this sense, Unger’s argument is very strong. The philosophical ideal of absolute certainty is something that I think should be given up as a vain pursuit, and I think that Unger shows this nicely.
What was General Relativity? Einstein's earlier theory of time and space, Special Relativity, proposed that distance and time are not absolute. The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock; likewise for the length of a "yard stick." Published in 1915, General Relativity proposed that gravity, as well as motion, can affect the intervals of time and of space.
The Theory of Relativity, proposed by the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in the early part of the 20th century, is one of the most significant scientific advances of our time. Although the concept of relativity was not introduced by Einstein, his major contribution was the recognition that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant and an absolute physical boundary for motion. This does not have a major impact on a person's day-to-day life since we travel at speeds much slower than light speed. For objects travelling near light speed, however, the theory of relativity states that objects will move slower and shorten in length from the point of view of an observer on Earth. Einstein also
Issac Newton was a great contributor to the mathematics and physics we use today and he is a well respected man.
Idealizations and approximations like point-masses, perfectly elastic springs, parallel conductors crossing at infinity, assumptions of linearity, of "negligible" masses, of perfectly spherical shapes, are commonplace in science. Use of such simplifying assumptions as catalysts in the process of deriving testable predictions from theories complicates our picture of confirmation and disconfirmation. Underlying the difficulties is the fact that idealizing and approximating assumptions are already known to be false statements, and yet they are often indispensable when testing theories for truth. This aspect of theory testing has been long neglected or misunderstood by philosophers. In standard hypothetico-deductive, bootstrapping and Bayesian accounts of confirmation, idealizations and approximations are simply ignored. My focus in this paper is on how the basic Bayesian model can be amended to reflect the role of idealizations and approximations in the confirmation or disconfirmation of an hypothesis. I suggest the following as a plausible way of incorporating idealizations and approximations into the Bayesian condition for incremental confirmation: Theory T is confirmed by observation P relative to background knowledge
Isaac Newton had a new approach to the existence of space and time that contradicted that of great philosophers such as Leibniz and Descates. Newton felt that space and time are infinite and independent of the body and mind, that the bodies and minds of the world existed in space and time and even without the presence of physical bodies there still would be space and time. He stated there “are positions in space and time which are independent of the material entities” that existed in them and that the principles of empty space and time are possible. In the Prolegomena, Immanuel Kant seems to have agreed in part with Newton’s views of space and time and attempted to support Newton by presenting two forms of judgment that would maintain Newton’s thesis, these being judgments of perception and judgments of experience.
In the autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton explains how he sought to find certainty in his life through religion. Merton began the book by giving an overview of his early childhood. His father was from New Zealand and his mother was an American who lived in France. Both his father and mother were artists and did not earn much money. When his parents needed extra money, Merton’s father would do various jobs in order for the family to survive. For example, he would garden occasionally and he even played the organ at the local Episcopalian church for a short period of time. This church was the first that Merton would attend. He did not understand the rituals or the concept of prayer. This lack of understanding about churches or religion, for that matter, was contributed to the fact that he never received any formal religious training from his parents. It is evident that Merton’s mother was a Quaker, but she did not choose to involve her family in the faith. Early in Thomas’s life, his mother died from stomach cancer. From this point on, Thomas would spend some of his time living with his grandparents in New York and he would travel part-time with his father to France. Merton had a fascination with the numerous cathedrals in France. Although he knew nothing about the monastic vocations or religious rules connected to the pictures in the cathedrals, hi...
The relationship between certainty and doubt has been a heavily debated topic throughout history and especially in the mid-1800s. For most people, having some doubt on one’s opinions is much more beneficial than having absolute certainty because doubt allows one to review his potential choice and leaves room for him to make improvements on his choice. Someone who lives with absolute certainty cannot weigh the pros and cons because he has the confidence that what he believes is the right decision for everyone; however, there are situations in one’s life where absolute certainty is necessary, such as in team sports. With the exception of competitions, however, it is more important for one to have doubt in his or her life because doubt allows
Sir Isaac Newton, the man that helped people figure out why things move and how they move, had a very interesting life. In the beginning of his early life, he dealt with hardships, and progressed to be an extremely inspiring man later in his life. In college he had many breakthroughs with his scientific works, including the laws of physics that we still use today. His life has answered many of people’s scientific questions that are still being asked today in physics’ classrooms all around the world. His discoveries have helped people for over 350 years to know and understand why things move the way they move, and stop the way they stop. Newton’s works comprise of the Principia and many other important publishing’s that he started when he was just in college. Newton’s life was full of discoveries, from his life as a minor to the years later in his life when he became an important individual in the government and changed the world, as we know it today.
In The Quantum Enigma, Rosenblum and Kuttner address the impact of the “Newtonian worldview” on our ability to understand and explain the phenomena of the physical world. Science has been able to greatly advance our knowledge of the natural world over the last several centuries largely due to this worldview. In this paper, five tenets of the Newtonian worldview will be summarized; two of these points—those found to be the most and least defensible—will be discussed in greater detail. As a final point, a discussion will be laid out regarding which of the five precepts, if rejected by modern physics, would be the most disturbing to give up.
Since the days of Newton, the ideas of classical mechanics prevailed in the scientific community. The ideas of absolute velocity and absolute time were accepted phenomenon and were not at all challenged. However, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, new observations were being made, observations which contradicted the current theory of the time.
... that can ever be certain is a philosophical idea called “Solipsism”. This theory determines that the only thing that can be known for sure is the self. I can be sure that I exist, and that I think. However, this theory also has its complications, because there can only be one solipsist. Therefore, there is no means of proving this hypothesis. I believe that different ways of knowing immensely affect our perception of truth. It appears unfathomable to be certain that anyone can see the truth, because the different ways of knowing influence our perception of what we believe to be ‘reality’. ‘Truth’ is formed in our minds. In my opinion, what is true and what is believed to be true cannot be discerned; I believe that we form a truth in our own minds, and that we consciously choose to believe in it, because we have no other way of being certain about our reality.
Sir Isaac Newton is the man well known for his discoveries around the term, Motion. He came up with three basic ideas, called Newton’s three laws of motion.
The major strength of science is that it has uncertainty and skepticism. Science never claims to be hundred percent accurate. There is always some degree of ambiguity and probability in science. The Heisenberg’s uncertainty in quantum mechanics is a good example of this. According to the Heisenberg’s uncertainty, we can never be sure of the position of the quantum particles. There is always a degree of fuzziness in nature and a fundamental limit to what we can understand about these particles and their behavior. We can only calculate the probability of the nature of the particle and ho...