From Sebastian Hayes
Mark Buchanan’s report of the claim by Mitchell Feigenbaum and Vittorio Gorini that the celebrated space-time anomalies of Special Relativity “emerge… from basic, purely mathematical considerations” shows how once-discredited “a priori” reasoning is becoming somewhat acceptable in science again (1 November 2008, p 28).
The philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz took a broadly “rationalist” position, which essentially claims that certain truths about the universe can be deduced by reasoning alone. Isaac Newton, who also invented calculus at the same time, claimed to take an empiricist position: “I do not make hypotheses,” he famously wrote in 1713 concerning the nature of gravity.
During the 20th century, largely because of the crushing weight of the positivist position in philosophy, a priori reasoning became thoroughly unrespectable in science. The work by Feigenbaum and Gorini and colleagues is a real body blow to that positivist scientific correctness.
Shaftesbury, Dorset, UK
