Fact, Fiction, and Physics

One of the nice things about our organization and our conference is that we welcome a wide variety of subjects and speakers, so long as they are connected to relativistic dynamics in some way. Everyone who has gone to the conference over the years knows this, and the newcomers find it very refreshing to be able to explore a wide variety of topics that might not be possible at other conferences.

There was a talk on the third and final day of the conference that reminded me of this. After a morning of heavy-duty math-laden talks on quantum field theory, one of the attendees from Israel named Uri presented a talk about something I was just talking about, namely the nature of the determination of truth in science, and how it touches on the topics we had been discussing.

I could tell from the discussion that all of us in the Zoom conference found it a welcome break. There were quite few comments after the talk. Even yours truly chimed in (I am famous for asking questions from the last conference, but I had been holding back this time because we had such little time between he talks to keep on schedule and I found that others' questions were usually better than mine. But in this case, I jumped in to ask a question because I had to know the answer.

What I wanted to know was if the speaker was familiar with the work of Nelson Goodman, an American philosopher who was popular in the 1960s, and who influenced many others. Noam Chomsky was one of his students.

The speaker said he was not familiar with Goodman. Not surprisingly, no one had heard of this influential man either. I got excited and a flood of thoughts went through my head.

"Goodman wrote what was once considered to be one the most important books of philosophy since World War II, called Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.," I said. "It is considered by many to be the most important statement on the inductive reason since David Hume. Everyone was reading it in the 1960s for a while. I was actually reading it two years ago during the Mérida conference."

"Goodman specifically addressed the problem presented by counterfactuals in logical systems that rely on induction, which of course physics does utterly and completely."

"Counterfactuals are logical statements along the lines of 'if something (that didn't happen) had happened, something else would have happened as a result.' Goodman picked apart the inherent problems that this presents for induction and the determination of natural law."

"Of course in physics we tend to fall back into a positivist defense of what we do, almost instinctively. Hey, I can derive the spectrum of hydrogen or the orbit of Mars, and go then measure it, and voilà, I found my numbers are correct. But of course we know there is much more to the story than that."

That was about all I could express in the tiny amount of time I had to comment. I didn't want to hog the bandwidth. While others put in their comments, my mind drifted and I began to assemble the idea for a talk on Goodman, and how it applies to the "unsolvable" problems of physics. Within about five minutes I put together the entire outline of a talk I could give at the next conference, and a possible paper to publish out of it.

The best time to prepare a conference talk is at another conference. You'll never have as much motivation as you have in those magical hours when you together with other people who are eager to discuss these kinds of subjects.