DemistifySci Podcast on Making Sense of Physics

It's an interesting discussion.

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Some comments:

1:28:06 On bodies and their actions. Someone mentioned batteries storing electrons and Shilo compared that idea to the one that ovens store heat. Ovens and batteries are things physicists actually used to abstract concepts like electric charge and thermal energy and their relationships like the heating effect of resistance to charge flow. All of that phenomenological physics was done without positing any fundamental carriers of heat or charge. In terms of bodies and their actions you can explain an oven in terms of a cold body being put in contact with a hot one and the action being an increase of temperature of the cold body and a decrease in that of the hot one. One can then relate temperature and electric current using thermocouples, say. Then one can abstract the notion of a current source at a certain potential and call that body a chemical battery (copper and zinc electrodes in acid, say) which is something you can use to heat up an oven. All of this can be described at a macroscopic level without any need to posit fundamental properties of materials. The explanation however is never going to be more fundamental than describing how one can procure copper, zinc and acid, and use the copper to make wires which conduct at a known resistance per meter, and how to make an electrical heating element for an oven, and how to make a thermometer to measure its temperature with a certain accuracy. Then all of the material activities and the measurements that are made and compared, are what people call physics, and a physical explanation does not need to go beyond this. When it does it is a so-called metaphysical explanation. Real metaphysics however is the knowledge of how we know about the physical explanations, that they are indeed explanations: because they show the causes of things, and the reasons why those causes are not the causes of anything else. It's interesting to see how much practical chemistry people could do with the purely empirical notion of equivalent weights. 

Quantum mechanics started in the early 20th century when the atomic hypothesis became widely accepted, because people believed then that purely mathematical models constituted explanations for observed physical effects such as the specific heat capacities, thermal emission and electrical conductance of different materials. Then Einstein proposed the light-particle hypothesis because he saw the black body spectrum looked a bit like a curve of kinetic energy distribution that appeared in statistical mechanics of gases, ... Curiously, this  happened almost exactly a century after Dalton first published a table of standard atomic weights, at around the same time that mathematicians went berserk trying to reduce mathematics of infinite sets to fundamental logical elements. See Lawvere's talk on the Dialectic of the Continuous and the Discrete in About Logic Interview with Urs Schreiber. 

See Douglas Hofstadter's talk on analogy in About Logic - Is Mathematics a Story?

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