If you're interested, I have three OPTIONAL READINGS & AUDIO PROGRAMS for Sunday's meeting and this blog. I highly encourage you to inspire and clarify your thinking on the ideas and debates in this area by reading or skimming the first and/or second of these readings. The third is an audio download that is well worth listening to:

1. The main optional reading this month is plato.stanford.edu/entries/...progress/
This article focuses of the nature of scientific progress, a controversy that touches on the other, related issues of this month's topic, scientific realism (i.e., whether unobservable objects and processes are real and accurately described by our theories) and the unity of science (whether all sciences can be unified under one mega-theory). Some parts of the article are technical and specialized, like parts 1, 3.4 and 3.5; I would just skim or skip those parts, which aren't necessary to understanding the rest of the article. Read the intro, skip section 1, and read parts 2, 3 and 4. If you find this article difficult to understand, check out the next reading.

2. An "alternate" main optional reading is www.galilean-library.org/manuscript.php
This is a very good primer on the philosophy of science that introduces several aspects of this month's topic. If you're not familiar with this field, read or skim the interesting and relevant parts of this article.

3. www.philosophytalk.org/pastSh...nce.htm
This one-hour audio program from the "Philosophy Talk" radio show from Stanford goes into many issues in the philosophy of science, including the issues of this month's topic.
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FYI, here are the full vote-by-email results for the month:
1) Is Science Converging On The Truth? (20.5 Votes)
2) "A Foolish Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Little Minds…" (9.0 Votes)
3) Who Deserves Charity? (9.25 Votes)
4) Is What Moral Obligations Do We Have To Obey The Laws…? (14.5 Votes)
5) What Is Art? How Do We Know It When We See It? How Can We Define It? (16.5 Votes)
Each topic stays on the list until it wins or consistently receives a paltry number of votes. You may have noticed that the votes do not come in whole numbers. This is not because fractions of a person turn in votes, but because you receive one vote for your top choice, a half vote for your 2nd choice (if you had one), a quarter vote for your 3rd choice, and so on.

I am not seeing the event listing - could you post a link, or put it in the events for this tribe?
Thanks
Jason

As a former graduate student in physics, I believe that science is indeed converging on the truth. To see why this is so, it is instructive to look briefly at the history of science and how it has progressed. In a vague sense, science is as old as humanity, since human beings have always been curious about the world in which we live and how things work. However, until the 17th century, our scientific knowledge was highly primitive and empirical at best. Truly accurate scientific laws and theories had to await the Scientific Revolution, pioneered by figures such as Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Bacon, and Harvey.

As an example of the progress of science, consider the history of our understanding of gravity. According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle circa the 3rd century BC, heavy objects fall in order to attain their natural place in the universe. He envisioned four spheres for each of the four classical "elements". The natural place for earth, the heaviest element, was the center of the universe, followed by water, the second heaviest element, which formed a sphere above earth, in turn followed by air, forming a third sphere, which was finally surrounded by fire, the outermost element. Moreover, heavier objects were believed to fall faster than lighter objects, the rate of fall being proportional to the weight of the object in question.

Although this theory conformed well to observation, it was clearly wrong. Galileo was the first to see this. By dropping two stones of different weights off the top of the Tower of Pisa and noting that they both landed at approximately the same time, he was able to show that in fact all object fall at the same rate, at least when the retarding effects of friction and air resistance are removed. Galileo's great insight was in part inspired by applying the new scientific method, outlined by Bacon, which emphasizes the necessity of performing accurate experiments to test theories, rather than relying on crude observation. Through his experiments, Galileo derived the law of falling bodies, namely v = gt, where v is the speed at which an object dropped at rest acquires after time t, and g (little-g) is the acceleration due to gravity at the earth's surrface, a constant equal to approximately 9.8 meters per second squared in metric units.

Galileo's law of falling bodies is quite accurate, though not exact and not the whole story. A century later, Newton improved on this law with his law of universal gravitation, which states that the gravitational force experienced by a point mass due to another point mass is attractive (directed toward the second mass), its magnitude proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the distance separating them. Mathematically, this law is written as F = -GMm/r^2, where M is the first mass, m is the second mass, r is the distance between the two masses, and G (big-G) is a constant, known as the universal gravitational constant, equal to 6.67 * 10^-11 N m^2/kg^2 in metric units. Newton's great insight in deriving this law was his observation of an apple falling in his orchard, which led him to wonder if the gravitational force of the earth on the apple was the same force which keeps the moon in orbit. Galileo's law is easily seen to be a consequence of Newton's, though his assumption that g (little-g) is constant is not quite true, since the Earth is not an exact sphere and it spins on its axis, effects which make the value of g vary by roughly half a percent.

Newton's law stood the test of time for over 200 years, until Einstein improved on it in 1915 with his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein's great insight what a thought experiment (the happiest thought of his life), in which he imagined an elevator in deep space, far removed from any matter, but being accelerated at a constant rate. Einstein concluded that there was no experiment whatsoever which could be performed inside the elevator which could determine that the elevator was not in fact at rest on the surface of a planet and thus in the presence of a gravitational field, which would give rise to the same perceived acceleration of "falling" bodies within the elevator. According to Einstein, gravity is not a force at all but rather a geometric effect due to the curvature of spacetime (space and time) in the presence of matter. The General Theory of Relativity is one of the most complicated scientific theories I know of, but it can be summed up rather intuitively as follows: Spacetime tells matter and energy how to move and matter and energy tell spacetime how to curve.

Once again, the General Theory of Relativity necessitated slight corrections in Newton's law. For instance, according to Newton, in the absence of gravitational perturbations and other extraneous effects, the orbit of a planet around the sun should not precess, whereas Einstein's theory predicts a small yet measurable precession of the orbit of Mercury, equal to about 43 arc seconds per century. Also, Einstein's theory predicts that light from a distant star should bend around the sun by approximately 1.75 arc seconds, twice the value predicted by Newton's law.

Thus far, Einstein's theory of gravity is the best such theory we have, though it is clear that it too will need to be modified, though no one yet knows how to do so. The reason we know it's not the whole story is because it does not take into account quantum effects. A theory of gravity which manages to incorporate both general relativity and quantum mechanics may turn out to be the long-sought Unified Field Theory or Theory of Everything, which would not only explain gravity in perfect detail but also in principle be capable of explaining all natural phenomena. At present, string theory, or more recently M-theory, seem to be the most hopeful candidates for such a theory, though unfortunately no one yet knows how to make any meaningful predictions from these theories. However, I am optimistic that there is indeed a Unified Field Theory and that someday we will discover it.