I like Newton more, but bacon wins, hands down.
Did you know there is the
Baconian method?
Yeah, an actual
bacon method. ._.
The next time I'm in a conversation about deriving answers using complex philosophical scientific reasoning, I'm going to say, I'm using "the bacon method" of figuring things out. Yeah, think about that. And I'd be right, too.
Although, as wikipedia puts it, "
Inductive reasoning (as opposed to deductive reasoning) is reasoning in which the premises seek to supply strong evidence for (not absolute proof of) the truth of the conclusion. While the conclusion of a deductive argument is supposed to be certain, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument is supposed to be probable, based upon the evidence given."
"Bacon's method is an example of the application of inductive reasoning. By reasoning using "induction", Bacon meant the ability to generalize a finding stepwise, based on accumulating data. He advised proceeding by this method, or in other words, by building a case from the ground up. He wrote in the Novum Organum that
"Our only hope, then is in genuine Induction... There is the same degree of licentiousness and error in forming Axioms, as in abstracting Notions: and that in the first principles, which depend in common induction. Still more is this the case in Axioms and inferior propositions derived from Syllogisms." (See for example, aphorism XVII of the Novum Organum.)"
In essence, where as Newton derived absolute answers from his work, Bacon tried to find probable answers. In a way, Bacon's method is more accurate, at least to the real world, because we can never truly know something about the world exactly; if you tried to measure the weight of say, several oranges, and you roughly got to 2 pounds, this would only be a probable estimate. The true answer would be 2.151534455228928484848282482426 pounds, going on forever until we got down to the smallest weight possible, say from an atom, which we would be incapable of measuring exactly. It would be impossible to know the real answer or the exact answer of the weight of the oranges, not only as a result of a lack of a human's ability to observe it, but because our tools would never be capable of getting something that exact either. When we observe something, we end up effecting it; light for instance will need to bounce off of the particle and come back altered in some way for us to see the change and thus determine what it is, which will ultimately still effect that object, since light actually has some substance, although very little. At quantum levels this effect becomes more pronounced since the particles we are trying to observe are even tinier, and electron microscopes have such a drastic impact on atoms that just observing it via the electron microscope, which bombards the object with the electrons and then detects the changes to the electrons coming back, changes the atoms we're looking at themselves, since we are trying to observe a single atom or even smaller, which using electrons to bounce off of it, which are actually the same size or even larger than many of these particles we're trying to observe, drastically impacts it. It would be like trying to observe a car by crashing a car into it and seeing what bounced off of it, I.E. your own car. When you've got something that tiny, even light particles are so big you more or less smash into it just like a car accident, knocking the particle way and causing some pretty tremendous changes, rather than bouncing the incredibly tiny light particle back (all we see are
reflections of light, instead of the objects themselves).
Even if we could measure the weight of an orange precisely, the weight of the oranges fluctuates, say with the rotation of the earth, with the earth gaining and losing mass effecting the gravity, with more forced being applied as a result of certain stimuli. It constantly loses mass by fluffing it off as gases and contact debri, which is why we can smell it, or get it on our fingers and then have our fingers then look and feel differently. Even in a closed room with no oxygen or light, the orange is constantly decaying, with it's atoms projecting themselves off the orange as it's fragile organic compounds break down. And that would be assuming it could be completely closed off from all stimuli or that doing so wouldn't destroy the orange, such as by freezing it by getting it down to a point when it's atoms are so cold, they're frozen; and what do we define as the orange? Do we count the water; and if so, do we count the condensation on the outside of the orange? That's water, on an orange, but it's not the orange because it's not inside it; and does that mean the orange is whatever is inside the peal? How do we determine what that surface is? You could go on forever about the intricate nature of just trying to
define what an orange is, and with a constantly changing mass and weight, how could you ever truly determine what it's mass was, especially with imperfect instruments?
But Newton is equally correct in many of his endeavors to find absolute answers. In fact, Newton spoke in incredibly vague terms in virtually all forms of his science, which did give absolute facts. Where as science is flexible, something such as mathematics is an empirical science; you will always have the right answer, constantly. 2 + 2 =4, no matter what, no matter the situation, and it's perfect. You will never find a perfect example of that in the real world, but in the hypothetical made up self defined world of mathematics, 2 + 2 =4
is perfect. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; our universe does actually work in absolute perfection. Energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, yet it can be converted into forms you don't want. You throw a baseball, and it bounces off of a wall; some of that energy is "lost" in the bounce, in the vibrations in the air of sound, in friction creating heat. The chemical energy stored up in your body is lost as heat and other forms of "waste", which your arm exerts imperfectly onto a ball to make it travel quickly in the first place. You don't lose energy, but you lose energy into a specific spectrum. Thus while we can never know how much energy a ball has exactly, we can know exactly that the energy will never increase or decrease; in fact, we know that the energy and mass of the entire universe will always stay constant, and never change. Thus where as Newton focused on answers you could find absolutely, such as 2 + 2, the very definition of mathematics giving you a perfect answer, and invented calculus and so on, Bacon focused on more inductive reasoning, that is finding probable answers.
This is, believe it or not, actually a very interesting topic.
However, I don't really see a vs. Both are right in their own way. Where as we can argue Bacon's philosophies are more practical to real life, Newton's philosophies give us a really solid basis to get estimates about the real world. E = 1/2(Mass)(Velocity)^2 is imperfect, as you have to factor in lorentz. The more you approach the speed of light, the exponentially more energy it takes; because it would take infinite energy to go the speed of light, nothing with mass can ever travel at that speed. But that's not factored into Newton's simplistic equations, which isolate the specific factor you're looking for. So while Newton's answers are never perfect in the real world, they allow us to isolate a specific factor and just calculate that, which perhaps ironically gets us very close to probable estimates, which Bacon's philosophies focus on. Newton allows us to derive a perfect answer within certain limitations, if we ignore other factors, so long as we change the goal posts to fit our specific situation, where as Bacon suggests it's impossible to do in the real world, and has put forward methods of dealing with the imperfection, incrementally increasing our accuracy in degrees. Granted, this is mostly just what I know about Newton being combined with what little I know about Bacon especially after a quick google search but, there's actually more meat to this than I thought.
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