Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: unknown, pursuit, ideal of knowledge, Pythagoras, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein

Kurzinhalt: Wissensstreben: Suche des Unbekannten; Ideal des Unbekannten in d. Wissenschaft: von der Zahlenharmonie zur Statistik u. Quantenmechanik,

Textausschnitt: () It is not merely a tendency towards an object, it is a conscious tendency. But in seeking knowledge, not only do we tend towards it, not only do we do so consciously, but we also do so intelligently. Moreover, we do so critically
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The pursuit of knowledge, then, is the pursuit of an unknown, and the possibility of that pursuit is the existence of an ideal.
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... there is a connection between mathematics and the sounds that are harmonious!
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All of these further discoveries are analogous to the Pythagorean discovery of harmonic ratios: Archimedes' law relating displacement and buoyancy; Galileo's law of falling bodies; Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. In each case there was formulated a mathematical expression verifiable in concrete data.
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I have illustrated the development of an ideal of knowledge. What is the ideal? It is the mathematization of nature. It starts from particular laws; it moves towards a system; and its great achievement was Newtonian system. It lasted for a few hundred years, but it had been on the basis of Euclidean geometry. Einstein moved it to another basis, a more general geometry, and quantum mechanics has taken us right out of the field of law and system. The fundamental ideal has become states and probabilities.
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When scientists still fail to obtain theories that satisfy all the data, they change the ideal itself from law and system to states and probabilities.