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- Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!sun4nl!relay.philips.nl!prle!hpas5!schiller
- From: schiller@prl.philips.nl (schiller c)
- Subject: Re: Philosophy before science ? (was : S
- Message-ID: <schiller.726482900@hpas5>
- Sender: news@prl.philips.nl (USENET News System)
- Organization: Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, Netherlands
- References: <102936.83838.20825@kcbbs.gen.nz>
- Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 08:48:20 GMT
- Lines: 43
-
- Hakki_Kocabas@kcbbs.gen.nz (Hakki Kocabas) writes:
-
- >> For example, electrons were there much before quantum mechanics
- >> (at least 30 years before) when they were observed in Braun tubes
- >> and similar devices. By the way, your TV and your terminal
- >
- >Whose electrons ?!
- >
- >> (except if LCD) is a Braun tube, and a
- >> ray of electrons produces the image. No quantum mechanics is
- >> necessary to observe this fact ... :-)
- >
- >WoW !
- >So it is a fact that my CRT emits electrons, is that right ?
- >but fact according to what theory ? How can I prove that
- >my CRT emits electrons, according to what theory ?
- >
-
- Electrons are a good counterexample to your idea. They were
- discovered by chance, when people were playing around with
- vacuum tubes with a little gas in them, and high voltage.
-
- I guess you have seen electron rays in high school, where you can
- see the nice blue colour (blue if the rest gas is air, as usual)
- emitted by the ray inside the tube, when you look at it from the side.
-
- Electrons were discovered like this, noting a coloured ray
- in a vacuum tube. No theory preceded the observation.
- You can say that you need a theory of what a colour is, and of what
- glas is, but we can leave this for a later thread ... :-)
-
- In high schools they show this experiment in the same way, because
- it shows that by putting a power supply to to pieces of metal in a vacuum,
- you get a beam of something. This something is called "electron".
-
- Later, you can start to measure the mass of it (yes, you need the concept
- of mass to do that), the charge (idem) etc.
-
- This fortuitious observation was the reason we say (and you too)
- that electron's were *discovered*, and not *invented* or *constructed*.
-
-
- Christoph Schiller
-