I, I who have nothing...

[Nearly Sane]

Short piece and interview with Lawrence Krauss on the 'redefinition' of nothing. I think one of the oddities is that nothing is a concept that feels almost childishly easy to think about and define but in the sense of absolute nothing, it is a shockingly hard and perhaps meaningless idea.


http://m.nautil.us/blog/why-we-had-to-change-the-meaning-of-nothing

[ekim]

It's all or nothing.

[Sriram]

And some people think science and philosophy are distinctly different! 

[Nearly Sane]

And some people think science and philosophy are distinctly different! 

In some ways they are. There is little philosophy in chemistry, and philosophy is so wide a subject as to be almost meaningless. That there is such a thing as the philosophy of science underlines that we have to be careful here. That's not to say in any sense that I disagree that a statement that they are distinctly different would be wrong, but rather that to think it is all just the same is also problematic.

[Sriram]

In some ways they are. There is little philosophy in chemistry, and philosophy is so wide a subject as to be almost meaningless. That there is such a thing as the philosophy of science underlines that we have to be careful here. That's not to say in any sense that I disagree that a statement that they are distinctly different would be wrong, but rather that to think it is all just the same is also problematic.

You are treading a little too gingerly here...

Science is a subset of philosophy and tries to be more precise and methodical as compared to other areas of philosophy.  That's all. 

Like everything else, it is a spectrum too with spiritual philosophy at one end of the precision scale, then social philosophies, ethics, politics and so on.......then psychology,  medicine and biology. chemistry and finally physics/maths at the other end.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

''Why we changed the meaning of nothing'' is something only a deluded linguistic pirate and intellectual totalitarian could come up with.

He doesn't have the authority or ability to do that. All one can do is add a new meaning to a banker of meanings.

As for the scientific concept of nothing, maybe science can never define nothing in the traditional sense because we can never bring the methodology to bear on that concept. We can never know a time when there was nothing and we certainly cannot anymore analyse nothing. Unlike Darwinism ''traditional nothing'' cannot leave any fossil evidence.

A scientists nothing MUST therefore always be something. It is a limit of science and in no ways the result  a Phd changing the meaning of nothing.

 high profile celebrity antitheists who happen to have worked in science reached a zenith when several of them fell to the flattery of the Edge request to redefine science by saying what they would make redundant. Essentialism(definition) and falsification look like redefinitions tailored toward the antitheist agenda.IMHO. 

[Walter]

''Why we changed the meaning of nothing'' is something only a deluded linguistic pirate and intellectual totalitarian could come up with.

He doesn't have the authority or ability to do that. All one can do is add a new meaning to a banker of meanings.

As for the scientific concept of nothing, maybe science can never define nothing in the traditional sense because we can never bring the methodology to bear on that concept. We can never know a time when there was nothing and we certainly cannot anymore analyse nothing. Unlike Darwinism ''traditional nothing'' cannot leave any fossil evidence.

A scientists nothing MUST therefore always be something. It is a limit of science and in no ways the result  a Phd changing the meaning of nothing.

 high profile celebrity antitheists who happen to have worked in science reached a zenith when several of them fell to the flattery of the Edge request to redefine science by saying what they would make redundant. Essentialism(definition) and falsification look like redefinitions tailored toward the antitheist agenda.IMHO.

and nobody really cares about your 'IMHO' , so there.