Andy Fletcher is a teacher who spends most of his time know giving workshops to international schools based around Theory of Knowledge themes. Today, he was presenting a one day workshop for TOK students from a couple of Shanghai international schools. I’ve posted my notes here.
Web sites:
http://web.mac.com/kamfletch/LUE/Home_Page.html
What are facts?
- as technology improves, so does our evidence.
- What we thought was true…. (Science and Religion)
- Flat earth (Flat Earth Society still exists)
- Geocentric Universe
- Young Earth Universe (6000 years)
- God exists
Isaac Newton’s Universe
‘Discovered’ using the Scientific method: Observation -> experiment -> predictions
Factors of Isaac Newton’s Universe
- Determinism: eg playing pool (hit cue ball, hits other ball, into pocket).
- La place (french philosopher)
- No free will, everything predetermined
- ‘We are nothing more than colliding particles on a cosmic pool tables’
- Mechanism
- universe is nothing more than a machine
- predictable, nothing random
- Example of eclipse: virgin in volcano
- Reductionism
- Take things apart to better understand them (to make predictions)
- The smaller the parts, the better understanding (body, organ, blood, cells, electrons….)
- We are nothing more than the sum of our parts
- Infinite
Relativity/Special relativity (Albert Einstein)
- Time
- speed of light is an absolute
- time therefore, is not
- So time changes as you near the speed of light
- At the speed of light, everything happens at once
- Space-time
- woven together (whatever happens to time, happens to space)
- Gravity
- Space-Time is warped in the presence of gravitational fields
- Time passes more slowly close to the enter of gravity
- Black holes
- space & time cease to exist
“If nothing else, know this: You are a clump of space-time and made of star dust”
Quantum Mechanics
- Ripples – interference
- Heisenberg Uncertainty principle: you can know the speed, but not location OR know the location but not the speed …. until you look at it.
- One particle can be in two places at the same time
- Particles can communicate instantaneously
- Quantum tunneling (explains lasers, semi conductors, photosynthesis….)
- Observation defines reality – i.e. no objective reality
- Schrodinger’s cat
- No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is observed
The Universe
- need to start with a high degree of order (same temperature)
- For life to start – 93 factors needed to be in place.
- The odds against life happening by random chance: 10 to the 10 to the 123 :1
- The Anthropic principle: everything about the universe tends to create life creating environments
- Without observers, you do not have a Universe
