How the Laws of Physics Lie 1st Edition by Nancy Cartwright (PDF)

Description

In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “An important and challenging book.”–International Studies in Philosophy About the Author Nancy Cartwright is Professor Philosophy, London School of Economics.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book by Prof. Cartwright addresses a number of important topics in philosophy of science. She is especially concerned with the quantum theory of light as it pertains to the laser, and a great deal of attention is paid to this topic in the latter part of the book. I think that she is expressing a deep frustration with physics, particularly quantum mechanics, in terms of how indirect the abstract theory has become relative to the phenomena that physics pertains to. The “laws” seem to, at best, only provide a general framework for abstract models, that can require much in the way of approximation, and additional assumptions to put one in a position to describe, to make predictions about, to even approach the complex technology that often surrounds actual work in experimental physics. In the course of these efforts, for example, contradictory approaches can actually be created that are mutually incompatible, and our common notions of causality, which help us to make sense of the world, can be thoroughly frustrated by deeply “instrumentalist” approaches in quantum mechanics that do not open the box of the world for us to understand. She strongly objects, for example, to the idea that consciousness is somehow intimately involved in the measurement process, and she feels that the problems associated with trying to understand the “collapse” of the wavefunction in quantum mechanics are related to artifacts of mathematics. While she clearly accepts the “reality” of particles, such as the electron, and of fields, she finds much that is unrealistic about the theory of quantum mechanics. I was especially impressed by her brief discussion of operators in quantum mechanics and in statistical mechanics. I personally felt that a lot of the discussion was pretty focused on fairly advanced, technical and mathematical notions in physics. This seems to me to be quite reasonable, as mathematics, whether realistic or not, is prominently important in physics. However, I think that people who lack a good background in the mathematics of physics, or who have not received some fairly advanced training in physics will find a fair amount of her discussion entirely opaque. Nevertheless, the philosophical merit of the book, in the context of the development of philosophy of science, is quite obvious. Today, the discussions in the book, with the extensive development, for example, of string theory, are, if anything, more meaningful than when she wrote the essays of which the book is composed. I highly recommend this thoughtful deep work.

⭐Wish I had read this long ago. She is daring in her thinking and necessary for our understanding as humans grappling with our world with limited evolved cognitive abilities. The paradox is that by a good “head shrinking” our minds are expanded. I have been enlightened also by Koen’s “Discussion of the Method”.

⭐I checked out the book and quickly found that it is way over my head, so I am sorry to say that I cannot help you. My work is/was in experimental physics rather than the highly theoretical. Incidentally, in my notes I find the admonition from others to “Read the Comments” but I have forgotten the details. This might tell you something.

⭐Cartwright’s analysis is not easy to follow, but it helps to appreciate that the title is intentionally a pun. She is addressing the question of where the laws of physics stand, epistemologically (how they “lie”) as well as how they fail to capture the full complexity of the world they are intended to describe (and thus how they are not true in the sense of giving a complete, God’s-eye view of how things work). I think the critical idea is that the laws of physics are concepts that abstract away from a great many messy details that characterize things like interactions among bodies in the real universe. Each law thus comes with a ceteris paribus (all else being equal) clause attached. So, for example, the ideal gas law tells us how pressure, volume, and temperature are related, but it is reliable only for closed systems. When she says that such laws are not very useful she means something quite specific, namely, that such a law is, by itself, almost useless for understanding p-t-v relationships in open systems, like the Earth’s atmosphere, where all else is NOT equal. Such laws are extremely useful as foundational concepts in our abstract understanding of how the universe works, but it can take years, or decades, or even centuries after the discovery of a law for engineers and technologists to figure out how to cash out all of the “all else being equal” clauses in the real situations where the laws operate. For example, the central laws governing fusion in plasma are pretty well understood, but turning that understanding into an operating fusion generator is proving extremely difficult. I do agree that there is some slippage in how the word “true” is being used in many of her discussions, with insufficient discussion of some important nuances, but far from rejecting realism, I think she is giving us a very important and powerful new set of conceptual tools for understanding what realism actually requires, epistemologically speaking. In summary, I think this is an extremely important argument in the philosophy of science, one that someone who wants to defend realism and the notion of objectivity has to understand and appreciate. It’s tough going, but worth the effort.

⭐Very interesting book. Came in great condition, promptly.

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