[ExI] The "Unreasonable" Effectiveness of Mathematics in theNatural Sciences

[Stefano Vaj]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:39 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> But the church would not have prevailed in the end because they would
> have been beaten in any enterprise requiring an understanding of the
> heliocentric view, such as colonising the solar system. The Ptolemaic
> cosmology may have given the right answers up to a point, but beyond
> this point it would either have failed or made the calculations too
> cumbersome; so on the basis of utility (which subsumes Occam's Razor),
> the Copernican theory is preferred. But arguing about metaphysical
> concepts - is there really a concrete world out there or does it just
> look that way? - adds nothing to science, and if anything detracts
> from the serious business of getting things done.

Very well put.

But speaking of the merits, from a strict contemporary-science angle,
is there any reason to consider a "geocentric" perspective as
intrinsically flawed or inconsistent with some experimental data? It
is not a rhetorical question, I have never given it much thought, and
since after all we recognise nowadays that the Sun is not in any kind
of "objectively fixed" position, and that the motion of a rocket can
be equally well described as a rocket moving away from earth or the
earth moving away from the rocket I simply assume that the
"heliocentric" view is simply a much simpler, more elegant and more
Occam-compliant way to describe our portion of the universe.

Stefano Vaj