The delimitation between science and pseudoscience is part of the more general task of determining which beliefs are epistemologically justified. Standards for demarcation may vary by domain, but several basic principles are universally accepted.
Karl Popper proposed falsifiability as an important criterion in distinguishing between science and pseudoscience. He argues that verification and confirmation can play no role in formulating a satisfactory criterion of demarcation. Instead, it proposes that scientific theories be distinguished from non-scientific theories by testable claims that future observations might reveal to be false.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29821.61926
Category: Philosophy
Grandfather paradox in time travel
The most well-known example of the impossibility of traveling in time is the grandfather paradox or self-infanticide argument: a person who travels in the past and kills his own grandfather, thus preventing the existence of one of his parents and thus his own existence. A philosophical response to this paradox would be the impossibility of changing the past, like Novikov self-consistency principle (if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any “change” to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero, thus it would be impossible to create time paradoxes).
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31279.79521
Karl Popper’s demarcation problem
Karl Popper, as a critical rationalist, was an opponent of all forms of skepticism, conventionalism and relativism in science. A major argument of Popper is Hume’s critique of induction, arguing that induction should never be used in science. But he disagrees with the skepticism associated with Hume, nor with the support of Bacon and Newton’s pure “observation” as a starting point in the formation of theories, as there are no pure observations that do not imply certain theories. Instead, Popper proposes falsifiability as a method of scientific investigation.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11481.36967
The singularities as ontological limits of the general relativity
The singularities from the general relativity resulting by solving Einstein’s equations were and still are the subject of many scientific debates: Are there singularities in spacetime, or not? Big Bang was an initial singularity? If singularities exist, what is their ontology? Is the general theory of relativity a theory that has shown its limits in this case?
In this essay I argue that there are singularities, and the general theory of relativity, as any other scientific theory at present, is not valid for singularities. But that does not mean, as some scientists think, that it must be regarded as being obsolete.
After a brief presentation of the specific aspects of Newtonian classical theory and the special theory of relativity, and a brief presentation of the general theory of relativity, the chapter Ontology of General Relativity presents the ontological aspects of general relativity. The next chapter, Singularities, is dedicated to the presentation of the singularities resulting in general relativity, the specific aspects of the black holes and the event horizon, including the Big Bang debate as original singularity, and arguments for the existence of the singularities. In Singularity Ontology, I am talking about the possibilities of ontological framing of singularities in general and black holes in particular, about the hole argument highlighted by Einstein, and the arguments presented by scientists that there are no singularities and therefore that the general theory of relativity is in deadlock. In Conclusions I outline and summarize briefly the arguments that support my above views.
CONTENTS
Abstract
Introduction
– – – Classical Theory and Special Relativity
– – – General Relativity (GR)
1 Ontology of General Relativity
2 Singularities
– – – Black Holes
– – – – – – Event Horizon
– – – Big Bang
– – – Are there Singularities?
3 Ontology of Singularities
– – – Ontology of black holes
– – – The hole argument
– – – There are no singularities
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.14521.06241/1
The singularities as ontological limits of the general relativity
Newton’s action at a distance – Different views
Different authors have attempted to clarify the aspects of remote action and God’s involvement on the basis of textual investigations, mainly from the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, (Newton, 1999b) Newton’s correspondence with Richard Bentley (1692/93), (Bentley 1693) and Queries that Newton introduced at the end of the Opticks book in the first three editions (between 1704 and 1721). (Newton 1952)
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12870.11844
Time Travel
Time travel is a recognized concept in philosophy and science, but whose scope is highly disputed, giving rise to numerous paradoxes in both philosophy and science. Time travel is considered by some accepted both in general relativity and quantum mechanics, but there is a unanimous consensus that it is not feasible with current technology. (Hawkins 2010) The raised issues are different for the time travel in the past compared to the time travel in the future.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29776.76804
Eugenics
The main concern of the first eugenists, such as Karl Pearson and Walter Weldon of University College London , were the perceived intelligence factors considered to be correlated with the social class. In his speech “Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics”, Karl Pearson equates eugenics with a field of medicine. Some areas of medicine that are not commonly recognized as eugenic affect the human genes background. These include sterilization and surgical techniques that allow the functioning of reproductive organs. Even medicines that do not directly involve reproductive organs can alter the gene pool. Genetic abnormalities in such individuals are thus duplicated, modifying the genetic background. On this basis, such practices are widely accepted as more radical eugenic processes.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29167.28326/1