Ask Lemmygrad

I'm not completely sure I understand your reasoning, but there's something I was thinking to myself about Einstein and dialectics.

The Newtownian theory was formed at an age where the newest advancements in philosophy and science were made by seeing the world in mechanical interactions and abstract absolute rules. It was opposed to theological thinking so it allowed for massive progress.

Contemporary philosophy goes beyond the enthusiasm of the first modern scientists, and one of the manifestations of this tendency are Hegelian dialectics. Given the socialist orientation of Einstein, it wouldn't surprise me that dialectics were a way of thinking that helped him go beyond the previously established necessity of having bodies touch each other to interact. Einstein surprised its time, not by being a man-computer that solves every equation, but by daring to bend concepts like space and time in a manner that shatters the old vision of a world made of simple little gears that activate each other by physical contact.

I think I can most charitably describe what I just read as a wild misappropriation of dialectics and physics. Please stop.

Caudwell's Crisis in Physics does some of this but for quantum mechanics. You'd love the read.

Really its done science first approach then dialectics to examine the environment your project's developed in for anything weird that will diminish understanding, then fix and repeat since there's no such thing as perfection in reality. You don't go in with dialectics first, that won't do you good and just make you overly rigid without proper knowledge and limit your understanding of the situation at hand leading to silly errors. Gotta ground yourself in what is known of reality first.

It is neat for thought experiments for project design too and is a way to break out of the 'its x or y or a mere continuum' to noticing 'gee this doesn't fit my data nor my problem, necessity v sufficiency for instance develops from this line of approach (and others, there are many tools in the tool kit, dia is just one) and is beyond helpful in life sciences.

You are in the midst of committing a category error. Dialectics is the model that describes changing historical, social, and philosophical systems and processes. Analogies from physics are frequently used to explain how dialectics work, but that doesn't mean dialectics govern physics, only that dialectical thinking has historically been inspired by physical processes.

The logical role that dialectics fulfills in social science is fulfilled in natural science by mathematics. So rather than taking the dialectical method and filling it with natural objects and laws at random, you should study the mathematical relationships between measurable quantities and interpret the dynamic expressed in the equations governing them. I know you might not want to hear this because mathematics is hard, but the only way to understand the inner workings of gravity is to sit your ass down with a book about general relativity and do the exercises.

The comments in this thread has made me realise I need to read the following:

• In Defence Of Materialism by Plekhanov
• Dialectical Biologist by Lewontin and Lewin

And re-read the Red Sails articles:

1. https://redsails.org/what-is-dialectics/
2. https://redsails.org/dialectics/
3. https://redsails.org/on-dialectics/

Well gravity itself is not a dialectic since gravity itself remains unchanging.

But the concept of gravity, the understanding of gravity, is a dialectic.

You go from Newton where gravity is an attractive force, to relativistic physics where gravity is not a force at all.

For Newton, gravity was a force pulling us down.

For Einstein, the force we feel is actually the earth beneath us exploding as a result of electromagnetic repulsion, and we stay “in place” at the point where the acceleration of electromagnetic repulsion is balanced by the flow of space time.

Then the concept of space time is itself a dialectic with the dominant view of physics denying a fixed “now” and instead supposing some kind of block universe or perhaps some other understanding of time where there is no fixed now.

And this dominant view increasingly challenged as absurd and reliant on non-empirical assumptions about the 1-way speed of light derived from the 2-way speed of light which gives you a minority view of neo-etherists where a “now” is restored.

It’s an understanding in flux.

Gravity itself is what it is. A fact of nature. What we understand gravity to be, that’s a dialectic.

Engels wrote

Gravity as the most general determination of materiality is commonly accepted. That is to say, attraction is a necessary property of matter, but not repulsion. But attraction and repulsion are as inseparable as positive and negative, and hence from dialectics itself it can already be predicted that the true theory of matter must assign as important a place to repulsion as to attraction, and that a theory of matter based on mere attraction is false, inadequate, and one-sided. In fact sufficient phenomena occur that demonstrate this in advance. If only on account of light, the ether is not to be dispensed with. Is the ether of material nature? If it exists at all, it must be of material nature, it must come under the concept of matter. But it is not affected by gravity. The tail of a comet is granted to be of material nature. It shows a powerful repulsion. Heat in a gas produces repulsion, etc.

It would go too far to credit Engels as a physicist because he wasn’t one but his insight into how the understanding of gravity must evolve was incredible.

I wouldn’t turn to Engels to understand gravity but it’s shocking how prescient he was in foreseeing the shifting understanding of gravity, a dialectic of the scientific revolution, well before Einstein was even born.

~~How~~ why would you describe gravity in terms of dialectics?