[HN Gopher] Einstein and Hume's philosophy of time
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       Einstein and Hume's philosophy of time
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2021-01-17 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (aeon.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
        
       | HaoZeke wrote:
       | This is a bit of a giant leap. Scientific advances rely on many
       | many many previous works, just look at the references. I fail to
       | see the relevance of singling one out.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | The article opens with several references, from 1915 all the
         | way to 1949, in which Einstein reports Hume's influence on him
         | and says that without Hume it's possible he would never have
         | come up with relativity. That's as solid evidence of a link as
         | could exist. More importantly, though, this material is
         | interesting and worth discussing rather than dismissing.
         | 
         | (That's in the site guidelines, by the way: " _Please don 't
         | post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
         | good critical comment teaches us something._"
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
        
           | HaoZeke wrote:
           | Thank you for the reminder. I was overly dismissive and I'm
           | glad you called me out over it. To be more constructive
           | though, I feel like the intersection of the sciences and
           | philosophy now is purely driven by these kind of articles
           | which seek to establish that in the past research ideas would
           | borrow from concepts of philosophy. Globally education has
           | shifted further and further from this view, and without
           | articles like this, no living professional scientist would
           | know Hume from Kant.
           | 
           | This declining relevance is true of other scientific works as
           | well, but that is rarely touched upon. I suppose in some
           | sense my comment expressed my annoyance that only
           | philosophical roots are rediscovered every now and then.
        
       | behnamoh wrote:
       | I used to like such articles, but years and years of education
       | made me realize what matters in the real world is the math you
       | know in order to back up your claims. Otherwise, knowing a bunch
       | of stuff (like this article) doesn't get you far at all, and in
       | fact, may give you a fake sense of knowledge which is worse than
       | not knowing these things in the first place.
        
         | HaoZeke wrote:
         | Exactly! Without the math to back it up, the additional
         | rationalizing is not a foundational study. It cannot be built
         | upon, and that is why it isn't a great idea.
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-17 23:00 UTC)