Stoat
Taking science by the throat...
2024-03-26
Morality as cooperation
2024-03-18
Wood, 1909, continued
Notes
Refs
R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse
XXIV. Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse
By Professor R. W. Wood (Communicated by the Author)
THERE appears to be a widespread belief that the comparatively high temperature produced within a closed space covered with glass, and exposed to solar radiation, results from a transformation of wave-length, that is, that the heat waves from the sun, which are able to penetrate the glass, fall upon the walls of the enclosure and raise its temperature: the heat energy is re-emitted by the walls in the form of much longer waves, which are unable to penetrate the glass, the greenhouse acting as a radiation trap.I have always felt some doubt as to whether this action played any very large part in the elevation of temperature. It appeared much more probable that the part played by the glass was the prevention of the escape of the warm air heated by the ground within the enclosure. If we open the doors of a greenhouse on a cold and windy day, the trapping of radiation appears to lose much of its efficacy. As a matter of fact I am of the opinion that a greenhouse made of a glass transparent to waves of every possible length would show a temperature nearly, if not quite, as high as that observed in a glass house. The transparent screen allows the solar radiation to warm the ground, and the ground in turn warms the air, but only the limited amount within the enclosure. In the "open," the ground is continually brought into contact with cold air by convection currents.To test the matter I constructed two enclosures of dead black cardboard, one covered with a glass plate, the other with a plate of rock-salt of equal thickness. The bulb of a themometer was inserted in each enclosure and the whole packed in cotton, with the exception of the transparent plates which were exposed. When exposed to sunlight the temperature rose gradually to 65 oC., the enclosure covered with the salt plate keeping a little ahead of the other, owing to the fact that it transmitted the longer waves from the sun, which were stopped by the glass. In order to eliminate this action the sunlight was first passed through a glass plate.There was now scarcely a difference of one degree between the temperatures of the two enclosures. The maximum temperature reached was about 55 oC. From what we know about the distribution of energy in the spectrum of the radiation emitted by a body at 55 o, it is clear that the rock-salt plate is capable of transmitting practically all of it, while the glass plate stops it entirely. This shows us that the loss of temperature of the ground by radiation is very small in comparison to the loss by convection, in other words that we gain very little from the circumstance that the radiation is trapped.Is it therefore necessary to pay attention to trapped radiation in deducing the temperature of a planet as affected by its atmosphere? The solar rays penetrate the atmosphere, warm the ground which in turn warms the atmosphere by contact and by convection currents. The heat received is thus stored up in the atmosphere, remaining there on account of the very low radiating power of a gas. It seems to me very doubtful if the atmosphere is warmed to any great extent by absorbing the radiation from the ground, even under the most favourable conditions.I do not pretent to have gone very deeply into the matter, and publish this note merely to draw attention to the fact that trapped radiation appears to play but a very small part in the actual cases with which we are familiar.
Why is his second to last paragraph wrong?
Firstly, note that unlike the experiments described earlier, this paragraph merely expresses his opinion.
Second, although the troposphere is subject to convection, the stratosphere is not.
Third, in contradiction to his assertion about "the very low radiating power of a gas", the troposphere is largely opaque to infra-red radiation, which is why convection is so important in moving heat up from the surface. Only in the higher (colder) atmosphere where there is less water vapour is the atmosphere simultaneously somewhat, but not totally, transparent to infra-red and thus permits radiation to play a part.
2024-03-15
The burden of thought
Refs
2024-03-05
Orange Man Running
Update
Notes
Refs
2024-02-13
The parable of the Antheap and the Anteater
But alas one day a disaster occurred: a rainstorm washed the heap away, destroying all the order. Not a single ant died, but the Heap aka Hillary was no more.
In GEB the analogy is to processes of conciousness. But I think it works as a loose analogy between individual human beings and cultures1. We might save all the individual people from a given culture - for example, by moving them, or allowing them to move, from a war zone to some place of safety; but in the process so dilute them amongst others that their culture is lost. Or we might kill any number of people, whilst preserving the overall culture2. And so attached to their culture - mistakenly, in my opinion - are some people that they might even prefer the latter option. In our liberal-democratic way we'd like to pick both options, and save all the culture and all the people; but we've not very good when both aren't possible. In theory, I think, we would and should prioritise the individuals, preferring to treat people as individuals rather than members of tribes. But of course, what do I mean "we", White Man?
Notes
1. Spare me the tedious outrage of comparing people to ants. No, I'm not.
2. In fact this option is illusory; culture is not preserved in this circumstance, only tatters of it.
3. Actually, Aunt Hillary. Geddit?
Refs
* Torture and Terrorism (2006).
* Ban it harder! An unwelcome new trend in British politics - Economist.
* The Welfare State as Extended Warranty - Bryan Caplan.
* Linda the Bank Teller Versus Freedom - Bryan again.
* The New Hereditarian Man: You Cannot Eliminate Envy by Brian Chau.
2024-02-12
AMOC tipping points of no return
Briefly, while this is a time-dependent (~300 year) simulation, the time is not intended to represent any real set of calendar years; instead we start from pre-industrial and increment freshwater, until it "tips" at ~0.6 Sv. The main novelty then is the slow-running time; previous goes at this have tended to dump in the freshwater rather more suddenly, which may have its own effects.
But what's not at all clear from The Conversation, and which only appears rather belatedly in the RC piece, is from the discussion in the paper itself: "In the CESM simulation here, AMOC tipping occurs at relatively large values of the freshwater forcing. This is due to biases in precipitation elsewhere in the models and mainly over the Indian Ocean (37). Hence, we needed to integrate the CESM to rather large values of the freshwater forcing [∼0.6 Sv, about a factor 80 times larger than the present-day melt rate of the Greenland Ice Sheet (55)] to find the AMOC tipping event" to which SR is obliged to reply "in this model, like in most models, you need to add an unrealistic amount of freshwater, because they are in the wrong part of the stability diagram compared to what observational data imply". That doesn't fill me with confidence. What, you wanted more analysis?
Refs
* Hothouse tipping elements of no return.
* Nurture: Climatologist Michael Mann wins defamation case: what it means for scientists. But "Jury awards Mann more than US$1 million — raising hopes for scientists who are attacked politically because of their work" is optimistic: the bar, at least in the States, is very high for defamation.
* Tipping Is Optional - arch of WUWT post by WE
* Eating Animals and the Virtues of Honesty - Lab-grown meat as a way out of our greatest ethical dilemma - RH
2024-02-11
History is bunk
And so on to Putin, who apparently - I haven't read it - answered "why did you invade Ukraine" with a half hour history essay. The usual silly people have done the usual silly things - fact checking it - which is to miss the point: that simply thinking this way is wrong. It is the sort of thinking that leads to The Troubles; or the wars in the Balkans - take your pick as to exactly which ones - or the Palestinians deciding it would be an excellent idea to kill as many Israelis as they could. This is no great original insight; others have said much the same.
2024-01-30
Move to sustainable food systems could bring $10tn benefits a year, study finds?
But how is it possible for the food system to destroy more value than it creates, given that without it we would all literally starve to death? I'm assuming they're using "value" in the human context here. No humans - or only a few residual hunter-gather-peasant-ag folk - means that value has gone to zero.
The report doesn't actually say. Indeed, as far as I can tell it doesn't count the benefits, only the costs, so I can't see they have any basis for their claim. They assert $15T in costs, of which $11T are from health; and they further say that "A large share of this burden is born by people living with obesity" so this is all bollocks1, because they've failed to event attempt to back up their claim, and because the solution to obesity is to eat less, not to rebuild the world food system.
Notes
1. Also I hate the phrase "living with obesity" which is pathetic.
Refs
* Is the ECS very high? - ATTP on SH. Hint: no.
* Where did your genetic ancestors come from?
* You asked me what's my pleasure "A movie or a measure?" I'll have a cup of tea And tell you of my Dreamin'... People stop and stare at me We just walk on by We just keep on dreamin'... Imagine something of your very own Something you can have and hold I'd build a road in gold just to have some Dreamin'
* NEVER BRING A STICK TO A KNIFE FIGHT
* You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books - ACX. "You live in a world choked with ideas, where anything that rises to your consideration has necessarily won a Darwinian battle among hyper-specialized memetic replicators competing for your attention".
2024-01-26
A Muslim faith leader calls for stronger moral leadership in the Middle East?
What is actually needed in the Middle East, and arguably lots of other places as well, is for most people to stop caring so much about other people's problems1. I've kinda said this already so I suppose I should expand a little. Our Writer writes We need moral leadership from religious figures on all sides: a determination to condemn not just the violence against “our own”, but also by those who claim to act on our behalf and this isn't true; what instead all these people should do is Fuck Off and remove the beams from their own eyes. The Middle East is notable for dictatorships and corruption (errm, with at least one obvious exception), expecting it to provide moral leadership is absurd.
In particular the idea that <people of religion X> should care deeply about <other people of religion X> is stupid tribalism that the world would be better without. But alas that kind of idea is not one that a "faith leader" is going to put forward. Even phrasing it as "messages which explicitly seek to acknowledge the “other”" is wrong. He is in favour of "diplomacy of the heart" but this is dumb; it is what leads to the "ambassador recalls, trade suspensions" which he condems; what is actually needed is heads, not hearts.
The poster children for this nonsense are the Houthi clowns, who despite being dirt poor and indeed only propped up by aid, nonetheless use their valuable resources to fire missiles into the sea. The West is, tiredly, knocking them back a bit; eventually we will get bored and knock them back further.
Speaking of corruption, South Africa comes to mind, and the recent ICJ case; wherein I find "The Court considers that, with regard to the situation described above, Israel must, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular: (a) killing members of the group;...". This is obvious nonesense too; Isreal, as everyone agrees, will inevitably kill some civilians if operations continue; the only way to satisfy this would be to stop, which the court didn't order. If we read the judgement less literally to only mean "act in accordance with the convention" then that's just meaningless, because that obligation already exists.
Aid to Gaza and beyond at risk of collapse due to funding cuts, says UNRWA
Sez the Graun. And you'll find simimilar elsewhere no doubt. What's entirely missing is a thought that they are trying very hard to avoid thinking, and so blinkered are they that they have succeeded. The thought is "hmm, I wonder, just possibly, are there any other nations other than the West, just possibly some geographically close, who might have large amounts of dosh sloshing around that they could give? Nations that have, nominally at least, expressed great concern for the plight of the Palestinians". Another thought that is not being thought: though much of this goes to buy aid, much of it goes to salaries. But the Gazans receiving those salaries don't have a lot of other career options at the moment, so may as well continue working for nowt, or for promises - the Graun expresses concern about schoolteaching, for example.
Notes
1. You may perhaps think that I'm being hypocritical here. Not so! While I'm "happy" to spectate, I don't-if-I'm-honest really care much about these people's problems.
Refs
* Hamas attack: US pauses UNRWA funding over claims of staff involvement.
2024-01-17
Priests and cannibals
Which is Why American cities are squalid, a subject on which everyone has an opinion. The piece, while wrong in its conclusions, isn't too bad, given its progressive-type biases (e.g. "A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over “misuse” by less than 1% of residents. I’m not saying those concerns aren’t well-founded" but if those concerns are well founded, you shouldn't have reflexively put scare quotes around misuse, you should have been honest enough to simply use the word). So after long revelling in the problems of having the homeless around, he notices that the system has no great trouble enforcing regulations at other times: "My favourite taco place was closed down twice during my short stint in LA, for bureaucratic reasons". And yet he fails to see the answer: the system, the police, are really bad at enforcing the law for people that won't obey, that have nothing to lose. Which in turn is part of the endless need for oversight; the failure to trust people on the spot. Which in turn is part of the awful modern reluctance of people to live with their choices. See-also Ban it harder! An unwelcome new trend in British politics in the Economist.
Refs
* Good, Bad, and Terrible Options - EconLib
* The number one driver of 21st century “populism” in the West is...
* How I Learned to Love the American Empire
* The Reactionary Case for Democracy - worth a read, but the Nietzschean part is speculative and doesn't seem to be necessary for what follows
* Why the Technocapital Machine is Stronger than DEI
* The Republican Party is Doomed
2024-01-03
Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
Even if it works to perfection in eliminating the influence of social contingencies, it still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents. Within the limits allowed by the background arrangements, distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune (73-4).
The difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be (101).The two principles are equivalent, as I have remarked, to an undertaking to regard the distribution of natural abilities as a collective asset so that the more fortunate are to benefit only in ways that help those who have lost out (179).Rawls believes the notion of common assets as embodied in the difference principle expresses the ideal of mutual respect deontological liberalism seeks to affirm.
Refs
2024-01-01
Year of the Stoat
* January: Rahmstorf joins the Dork Side (25).
* February: Bad beliefs: Misinformation is factually wrong – but is it ethically wrong, too? (15).
* March: Guns are now the leading cause of death for children in the US? (27).
* April: The alternative to Atlas Shrugged (7).
* May: What’s behind the dangerous new notion that democracy should be left to the well-educated? (9).
* June: Bandit Hoekstra (2). A thin month; there were three two's.
* July: Abuse of non-linear (7).
* August: Walkabout.
* September: A summer away (6).
* October: Gray the sinner (8).
* November: Reporting of yer conflict (26).
* December: Introducing Justapedia? (3).
I'm afraid that despite the lack of encouragement, I'm likely to continue into 2024.
Refs
* Are Men Smarter than Women? - Richard Hanania.
* Bill Ackman on Claudine Gay and Harvard and DEI in general. If you prefer to read an alternative viewpoint, there's "Claudine Gay Had to Resign, But She Was Right About the Big Things", which is wrong.
* SMASH Handheld - this is getting very close to "smart guns". It needs to add a "pull the trigger and it will fire when on target" mode, plus perhaps a "jiggle" to allow it to get on target even if the human is hopeless.
2023-12-29
Kant's Dialectic
Substance
Extension and divisibility
Infinite time
Notes
Refs
2023-12-27
Happy Christmas
2023-12-13
Introducing Justapedia?
If I look at their current "Selected Contents" I find Outline of the American Civil War, Underwater diving, Poetry, Polar regions of Earth, Machine learning, Mormons, Philosophy and Adoption. Only one of those has had any updates since their import from Wiki, and that is a trivial update of a date in a flagging. That's powerfully unimpressive.
I haven't quite worked out when the import was done, but it looks to be around November 2022. Quillette gives the impression that JP is recent.
Why would you even bother doing this? Q talks about "Recent Wikipedia Controversies" but it is rather telling that issue number one for them is where the funding went, not anything to do with content. Next up is Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland, which was a thing but not that exciting (I didn't follow it). They then come to what I think is rather closer to their hearts, Race and intelligence and how it is controlled on Wiki. They may have a point; I would whinge about a variety of other articles and topics, if I felt like it. But... it all seems too thin to sustain what they want.
Notes
1. Well that sounded nice and dismissive, which is what I intended, but then I decided on a quick skim. The core content policy doesn't seem to significantly differ from what they imported; and the 5 pillars also seem eerily similar to Wiki's version.
Refs
* Grasping at straw - Light Blue Touchpaper on plod and kiddy pron.
2023-12-09
YAME: 3:01:58.4
Refs
Playlist
2023-11-20
Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says?
‘Polluter elite’ are plundering the planet to point of destruction, says Oxfam after comprehensive study of climate inequality...
The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says.
The most comprehensive study of global climate inequality ever undertaken shows that this elite group, made up of 77 million people including billionaires, millionaires and those paid more than US$140,000 (£112,500) a year, accounted for 16% of all CO2 emissions in 2019 – enough to cause more than a million excess deaths due to heat, according to the report.
The problem - apart from any quibbles with the doubtful quality of their analysis, which I suspect but am not very interested in - is that although they do their level best to present this as the 1% versus the 66%, they can't help notice that the 1% only emit 16%. So even after they've all been the first up against the wall after the revolution came, we've barely dented the problem. 84% of emissions remain - or at least they would, in the sort of static thinking that Oxfam do. Who is producing those emissions? You. Me. Our friends and colleagues. Everyone in the West. Well, everyone who isn't too dirt poor to do otherwise, really. Of course, different people emit differently, but it would need a much more careful analysis by less clearly biased people to produce something useful.
The Graun, which has the memory of a goldfish and the need to present things as though they were news, fails to point out that they've said all this before. Oh, duh, I've just realised: COP28 is coming up, hence the spam.
Refs
* Clauser-ology: Cloudy with a chance of meatballs - RC - the long tradition of idiot physicists continues.
* "When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics; How an elite clique of math-addled economists hijacked climate policy" - FFS - or, "A powerfully argued article on Nordhaus‘ climate economics" if you're SR.
2023-11-16
Lancet report: Heat stress wiped out equivalent of 4% of Africa’s GDP in 2022
But looking at some of their other pictures, you immeadiately see the problem: they're poor.
And so we immeadiately see that there are several possible solutions: reduce GW - but this isn't much of a solution, as the pic shows, even winding back three decades doesn't get you close to losing 0%; or stop being poor, which reduces the problem to negligible levels.
As a bonus, not being poor has other virtues, too. Perhaps you can think of some.
Oddly, CB doesn't much consider that option, instead perferring to whinge about "unjust transition". The reason they are poor is, of course, that their govt is shite; which is a consequence of the state of society, alas. But addressing the real problem is difficult, and entails saying things that people don't like saying nowadays.
BTW, somewhere - but I doubt I can find it now1 - was talking about ye traditionale "GDP declines with increasing T" stuff, and quibbling its stats. But never mind the details, the interesting bit was that even if you took the stats unquibbled, as well as the strong "hot countries" T-up-GDP-down correlation, there's a weak T-up-GDP-up correlation in cold countries. But because cold countries dominate global GDP, the overall effect of T up is GDP up (possibily not-stat-sigly). I'm reminded of that by the "* as percent" qualifier in the pic above.
Notes
1. Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Comment on Dell, Jones, and Olken by David Barker.
Refs
2023-11-09
Reporting of yer conflict
While we're on this, yer Beeb also say War crime claims: Volker Türk, the UN commissioner for human rights... Some context: The rules for war, which are spelt out in the Geneva Conventions, prohibit hostage taking, and say countries engaged in conflict "may not deport or forcibly transfer the civilian population of an occupied territory". But this isn't right. The actual text is Parties to an international armed conflict may not deport or forcibly transfer the civilian population of an occupied territory, in whole or in part, unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand (my bold). Omitting the final qualifier is dishonest. By contrast, taking of hostages is unequivocally a crime.
I also have a hard time taking displacing people quite as seriously as the "war crime" people do. I'm sure these people don't want to be displaced, and neither would I, but it is a far less serious matter than deliberately killing civilians. I'd rather be displaced a hundred times than killed once.
Since I've been tasteless enough to use the image I have: I think the recent habit of prolonging wars is bad, and it is better to let one side win. Hence calls for ceasefires or pauses1 in the Israel-Hamas war don't make sense and will likely lead to greater suffering. Also, per Hobbes, you're only allowed to rebel if you have a realistic chance of succeeding.
Update: What is happening at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital and why?
The Graun is fairly typical of the abysmal state of reporting. Hamas, and carefully selected doctors at the hospital, swear blind that there are no Hamas in there. Oooohhh no indeed not. And yet mysteriously the Israelis are finding it hard to get in. Why don't they just walk in by the front door? For the obvious reason: the Hamas folk inside would shoot at them. Why isn't this obvious to the Graun and a great many other people? Because the bias of their world view is so strong.
2023/11/15: the stupidity of some of the old fat white dead men is... well, I'd like to say astonishing, but in fact I'll say entirely predictable. For example, from the FT: International aid agencies expressed alarm at the Israeli incursion into al-Shifa. “Hospitals are not battlegrounds,” said Martin Griffiths, the UN aid chief. “The protection of newborns, patients, medical staff and all civilians must override all other concerns.” FFS you clown: it is definitely not true that "The protection of all civilians must override all other concerns", you know this very well, its part of the "rulez" of war. But more importantly, once the Israelis are in there, the patients and staff and evacuees are all safe, as long as Hamas doesn't shoot them.
Al-Jazmagi has a go at answering "Why is Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital so important for the Israeli army?" in a way that avoids the obvious answer: they propound the symbol-of-resistance type narrative. But this is a dubious idea, and even they are forced to answer "Hamas", although they do it right at the end in the hope you won't read that far.
Update: forced relocation
People in warm safe comfortable houses like the UN hate what they call forced relocation; e.g. this press release. But what do Gazans on the ground think? We don't need to ask them, because we can see the walls that the Egyptians are building, so the answer is clear: they would very much like to relocate.
Notes
1. As if to prove me wrong, The US says Israel will begin to implement four-hour military pauses in areas of northern Gaza each day to allow civilians to flee. But firstly, that text is deceptive: the "pauses" referred will not "begin", they have already begun, and had when I wrote the above. The US is saying that for its own internal political reasons, post-announcing something already happening as though it was a success of theirs. A brief apuse such as that, over a route out, does indeed make sense. Note that there isn't the least hint of a response from Hamas, who offer no corresponding pause in their own fighting.
Refs
* My comment at Jus in Bello by David Henderson. To which (2023/11/21) a belated followup here: given that innocent Palestinians and Israelis are morally equivalent (modulo slight quibbles about Hamas only being able to survive because it has popular support), then the Israeli hostages should not be the Israel's primary concern (prompted by this which suggests secondary-is-bad); just as they accept some regrettable civilian Palestinian deaths, they accept some regrettable Israeli civilian deaths.
* The two-state solution is still best. Actually I think allowing the Pals to emigrate is best, but no-one seems to like that; possibly not even the Pals themselves, so trapped are they in their grievances.
* Arf: Turkish MP who collapsed after saying Israel will ‘suffer Allah’s wrath’ dies.
2023-11-03
Care less
Notes
1. My pic shows Magdalene, winner of Uni Fours, byt five seconds over Cauis. Stroke's head-on-one-side posture is quite endearing.
Refs
* Keep your identity small - Paul Graham.
* File:London anti-war protest banners; File:Stop the war- American eagle.
*Book review: The Lions of Al-Rassan.
* ...the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled. Quote from Aldoux Huxley.
* JEB: UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
2023-10-27
They call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie
It isn't so obvious in whifflier domains such as morality; hence the enduring popularity of talking about The Trolley Problem, wherein we are faced with a moral dilema well out of the bounds of any experience1. Morality is custom and so things well outside experience and therefore custom aren't subject to our moral intuitions.
This smacks once again of the softer sciences thoughtlessly aping the harder ones. If there genuinely are strict laws, then testing them with edge cases makes sense. If there aren't, trying to interpret out-of-bounds information within your (admittedly unclearly-)bounded framework will only confuse you.
Even less sensible is the attempt to think about TTP in the context of Implications for autonomous vehicles. No-one is going to write their software in a way that the question comes up.
Refs
* (I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea.
* Philosophy of Physics Seminar: Sabine Hossenfelder (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy): 'Superdeterminism – The Forgotten Solution'
* The FTC’s Confused Case Against Amazon.
* In talking about The Ethical Case for a Siege of Gaza, Richard Hanania says that Individual morality does not transfer to geopolitical issues. This is consistent with what I'm saying here.
Notes
1. This also doesn't begin to cover what people would do in practice if faced with such problems. And in practice they can't be: the conditions are not real-world.
2023-10-22
Après ma mort, je ferai tomber une pluie de roses
Aristotle's Physics
There is quite a lot of words in the Physics. In a way, that's surprising: my mental image of those days is that paper3 wss in short supply, so you'd expect authors to have thought carefully before writing and to have compressed their work. Instead, A does the reverse: is discoursive and repetitive and doesn't follow a clear sequence. In this - as with the Politics - one gets the impression of a poorly edited collection of lecture notes. What it doesn't read like is ideas that have survived testing by rigourous dialectic.
Perhaps the greatest virtue of the work is as an example: that something that has survived for a long time can still be completely wrong, and yet still be defended. Consider what other ideas we see in the world today are similar. Of course, part of the problem is that anyone inclined to study this stuff deeply is going to be in sympathy with the material; no-one is going to waste much time ripping it to shreds. So why - I hear you ask - am I bothering? Well I've had these volumes on my shelves for many years now, and the time has finally come to finish reading and dispose of them.
Like say Hippolytus or Iphigenia in Tauris this comes into the "it lasted 2,000 years so there must be something worth while in it" but unlike them it is not literature; and it has not fared well. In the following I shall assume that the (English) words I'm reading have captured the original meaning of the text, despite the gulf that separates us; given the contortions that his translators and interpreters have gone through, I think it likely that I'm getting his best shot, or perhaps better than.
A discusses, let us say, motion. And he is smart enough to try to abstract; he is not interested in the motion of any individual ox-cart. Unfortunately, he abstracts all the way to abstraction; which I can best explain by comparing to, say, Galileo's experiments with rolling spheres down inclined planes. That abstracted to a concrete reality, and so was able to learn something, by observing how very simple entities behave. A abstracts out everything but movers and moving, and so is unable to learn anything.
A is interested in both the real world - or at least, in an abstract version thereof - and in the world of mathematics. Unfortunately he rarely distinguishes the two, or says which any given discussion appertains to; so much so that I doubt he has the distinction clearly in his mind. He is, however, aware that there is a distinction2.
In trying to think about how to Do Physics, A starts well Hence, in advancing to that which is intrinsically more luminous and by its nature accessible to deeper knowledge, we must needs start from what is more immediately within our cognition, though in its own nature less fully accessible to understanding. Now the things most obvious and immediately cognizable by us are concrete and particular, rather than abstract and general; whereas elements and principles are only accessible to us afterwards, as derived from the concrete data when we have analysed them. So we must advance from the concrete whole to the several constituents which it embraces; had he stuck to this, he would have fared much better. That's book I chapter I; chapter II starts off wondering how many "principle"s or "primary constituents" there are; attempting to translate this into ModernSpeak, it seems likely that he is wondering how many elements there are (rather than fundamental particles or states of matter) but - characteristically - his discussion is so unanchored by reality that one cannot really tell; he is already lost, and doesn't know it. He deduces that there must be either one, or finitely many, or infinitely many; after that he bogs down; then chapter VI concludes It is clear, then, that there must be more than one element or principle, and that there cannot be more than two or three. But, within these limits, the decision as between two and three presents great difficulties. This is based on "logic" along the lines of we need a pair of antithetical qualities; and (for the third, if needed) they need something to act on. So alas despite his declared intent to start with reality he falls at the first hurdle, and is reduced to being either Wrong, or perhaps Not Even Wrong. To the obvious rebuttal (which will come up time and again) "but in those early days it was really hard to know anything" comes the obvious answer: yes, it was. And so A, if honest, would have concluded that he simply didn't know and couldn't say anything useful on the topic. To some extent, supported by the end of book I, I believe that A was in this section merely surveying other opinions of the time, or felt himself unable to avoid opining. And sadly book II chapter I begins by stating that the elementary substances are earth, fire, air and water; see previous comments re badly edited lecture notes. Nothing else of interest appears in book II. I should perhaps note that there's quite a lot of stuff that my eyes just slide off... all the verbiage about causes for example; he does love classifying things, even if he has to make them up to do so.
Book III begins by defining motion; I took the piss out of that some years ago and don't feel much more merciful now. His problem is not realising that some things are better left undefined, as Newton did with time; we all know what it is (errm) so wrapping a pile of complicated words around a simple idea doesn't help; see-also Popper. That said, he is also covering too broad a scope; had he restricted himself to physical motion of inanimate objects he might have got along better.
Chapter IV begins to talk about infinity; but in the context of Nature (and thus, implicitly, not Maths).
[I'm fairly sure I intended to write more, but realised that it was all drivel anyway, and badly organised at that. I did Aristotle and the continuum before.]
Refs
* Paul Graham: how to do philosophy.
* Russell on Aristotle's Politics.
* My Left Kidney - ACX.
Notes
1. Although to be fair, generally not about his Physics. The sort of defensive thing you can expect supporters to say about the Physics is along the lines of What, then, are we to expect from the Physics ? Something that is still of philosophical interest; very much that is of historic interest and that has entered deeply into the texture of our language; much of purely intellectual interest and bracing gymnastic; but also much that is of vital significance in relation to that borderland between physical and metaphysical thought where mathematics and philosophy meet, which I quote from the Loeb intro. Notice that they cannot even begin to mention that so much of it is wrong.
2. From book II chapter II: we have next to consider how the mathematician differs from the physicist or natural philosopher; for natural bodies have surfaces and occupy spaces, have lengths and present points, all which are subjects of mathe matical study. And then there is the connected question whether astronomy is a separate science from physics or only a special branch of it; for if the student of Nature is concerned to know what the sun and moon are, it were strange if he could avoid inquiry into their essential properties; especially as we find that writers on Nature have, as a fact, discoursed on the shape of the moon and sun and raised the question whether the earth, or the cosmos, is spherical or otherwise. Physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians, then, all have to deal with lines, figures and the rest. But the mathematician is not concerned with these concepts qua boundaries of natural bodies, nor with their properties as manifested in such bodies. Therefore he abstracts them from physical conditions; for they are capable of being considered in the mind in separation from the motions of the bodies to which they pertain, and such abstraction does not affect the validity of the reasoning or lead to any false conclusions.
3. Or equivalent.
4. Descartes is lead to this error by his idea that the "essential" property of a given object is its extension in space, which causes him to think in these terms; presumably, an indivisible object would have a property-in-itself that wouldn't fit into his schema. In turn this leads him to fail to get to momentum, despite some promising thoughts in that area. But analysing his errors individually isn't really interesting; my point rather is that there are endless ways of going wrong; you will always fall off the knife-edge of truth, unless you have something - in the case of physics, reality - to correct you.