Hermann von Helmholtz’s Mechanism: The Loss of Certainty: A Study on the Transition from Classical to Modern Philosophy of Nature (Archimedes, 17) 2009th Edition by Gregor Schiemann (PDF)

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Focusing on Hermann von Helmholtz, this study addresses one of the nineteenth century’s most important German natural scientists. Among his most well-known contributions to science are the invention of the ophthalmoscope and grou- breaking work towards formulating the law of the conservation of energy. The volume of his work, reaching from medicine to physiology to physics and epis- mology, his impact on the development of the sciences far beyond German borders, and the contribution he made to the organization and popularization of research, all established Helmholtz’s prominence both in the academic world and in public cultural life. Helmholtz was also one of the last representatives of a conception of nature that strove to reduce all phenomena to matter in motion. In reaction to the increasingly insurmountable difficulties that program had in fulfilling its own standards for s- entific explanation, he developed elements of a modern understanding of science that have remained of fundamental importance to this day.

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Editorial Reviews: From the Back Cover Two seemingly contradictory tendencies have accompanied the development of the natural sciences in the past 150 years. On the one hand, the natural sciences have been instrumental in effecting a thoroughgoing transformation of social structures and have made a permanent impact on the conceptual world of human beings. This historical period has, on the other hand, also brought to light the merely hypothetical validity of scientific knowledge. As late as the middle of the 19th century the truth-pathos in the natural sciences was still unbroken. Yet in the succeeding years these claims to certain knowledge underwent a fundamental crisis. For scientists today, of course, the fact that their knowledge can possess only relative validity is a matter of self-evidence.The present analysis investigates the early phase of this fundamental change in the concept of science through an examination of Hermann von Helmholtz’s conception of science and his mechanistic interpretation of nature. Helmholtz (1821-1894) was one of the most important natural scientists in Germany. The development of this thought offers an impressive but, until now, relatively little considered report from the field of the experimental sciences chronicling the erosion of certainty.

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⭐In this study, Gregor Schiemann aims to show that the current complexity in conceptions of science, both among scientists and among theorists of science, is not merely a matter of increased attention to the history of science in the modern period. Rather, it owes largely to a revolution within science from an early modern or “classical” conception of science as aiming at certainty to a more modern conception that stresses the essentially hypothetical character of scientific knowledge. He illustrates this shift by attending to the exemplary case of the famous and influential nineteenth century physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose early conception of mechanism as the appropriate and final form of all scientific knowledge underwent a shift to the point where mechanism was seen as a model or representation, explicitly acknowledged to be just one among possible approaches to making sense of natural phenomena.The book, revised and translated from a larger monograph in German, aims both to illustrate an epochal shift in the self-conception of the natural sciences, and uses the idea that this shift took place visibly in the work of Hermann Von Helmholtz as a guiding thread in an effort to resolve controversies in the historical interpretation of the significance of his wide-ranging work. While the focus is really on interpretation of changes in Helmholtz’s conception, and it would thus be mainly of interest to historians of science working on the period, it also helps to validate and clarify a claim made by historians and sociologists, that actual working scientists aren’t themselves worried about the loss of prestige to the status of scientific theorization that might come about if we accept the “theory laden” character of interpretation or the idea that science delivers models or pictures and that sometimes there is no deciding between competing models. The book shows, one might say, that the problematic character of scientific knowledge was not introduced by twentieth century philosophers and historians of science. Rather, already in the nineteenth century scientists had abandoned pretensions to certainty and had accepted the “hypotheticity” of scientific theory.The book is divided neatly into two parts. The first sets the stage for a consideration of changes in Helmholtz’s philosophy of nature and science, by outlining various strands of the conception of mechanism within “classical” (or early modern) science, and by contrasting “classical” with “modern” science and philosophy of nature. The second part explores the nature of the shift, whereby Helmholtz reluctantly came to acknowledge the hypothetical character of his claims regarding mechanics. What is intriguing about Schiemann’s approach is that he demonstrates the motivations for this shift to be rooted not in appeals to philosophy but in developments within his scientific work. Helmholtz’s initial confidence in science’s ability to reach certainty was largely inspired by his own sense of the importance of the principle of conservation of energy, the clarification of which was one of his early major accomplishments, rather than due to a latent neo-Kantianism (as has been suggested by other researchers). Later it was Helmholtz’s attempts to scientifically investigate the foundations of scientific practice by studying perception, and his attempts to subject geometry to empirical study, that led him to see theories as models and the idea of a unified theory as at most a regulative ideal.The book is quite fascinating, and the author takes great care in teasing out the importance of subtle differences — as, for example, of the difference between various conceptions of mechanism — and of the importance of changes in Helmholtz’s expression of ideas, especially in public addresses, for the significance of his work as a whole. At the same time, I should add, it is a rather tedious read, given the needlessly baroque style of writing. Most likely, this is due to the fact it was translated from the German in what I would consider to be an excessively literal fashion, preserving the often lengthy and convoluted (clause within clause within clause) sentence structure of the original monograph. There is also a tendency towards qualification regarding details, and regarding subtle differences between scholarly assessment of those details, that is likely to be appreciable only by scholars of Helmholtz, and not by the more general audience who is likely to be intrigued by the broader theme of the “loss of certainty” in science’s self-conception.

⭐If an Engineer knows that the result will be X +/- y he knows more completely the object than the classical scientist who knows the norm for the thing is X. Now tendency is natural _and leads to_ statistical results due to knowable weakness of finite causes and obstacles to the application of powers. First there is this weakness of finite causes from the real point of view and Second the observer is also instrinsically weak and external obstacles occur in observation. This tendency to deviate around a norm is also natural and knowable.A case in point is the commercial security code allotted to all computers based on the real (not ideal) configuration of memory and Operating systems which vary enough but are stable enough to serve as a key for a coded and secure classification of all such machines. Nature is weak but even this can be characterised and known and predicted to be within certain variations of measuring parameters.There is finality at base of all statistical variation. Even Heizenberg’s Uncertainty principle was used not so long ago by a Korean Theorist to characterise permissible variations amoung Virtual Particles. Schroedinger’s Wave Equation could still hold so long as position and momentum were within the Heizenberg Tolerance for Schroedinger’s Equation. It is the further intelligility of variation that flows from finality. Even a H/T run of results can be predicted because the formality of the coin restricts the passible results of the run to H/T. The coin tosser and the air respect the formality of the coin. Admittedly the variations are relatively external to that form. The coin is not destroyed and imposes a natural result on the run. Two lines of Causes are involved and both impose an efficiency on the run – whose form is basically .Either H/T not both] from the form of the coin and Either H/T from the air, distance variation in flipper’s flip.The norm and variation that emerges is knowable but not simply as a series but as a series whose accumulation of H’s or T’s deviates in its an expected norm. 1000 tosses one expects an more or less equal representation of H’s and T’s or one suspects a biased coin. This can be quantified using Combinatorics and hypothesising each result as equally likely. [][] None of this eliminates finality in nature.I suppose in a sense the finality of the experiment is most clearly expressed by/in the fact of coin falling or accelerating.Another way of looking at is is from Gallileo’s approach of eliminating all factors except gravity from the experiment then by observation and induction noting time of fall to bring out the accellerating nature of gravity.See Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof” William Wallace.

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