Re: Newton Lives !

["James R. Olson, jr." <jhavok@xxxxxxxx>]

At 07:52 AM 3/2/97 -0500, David Lloyd Jones wrote:

>JRO wrote:

>> Side note:  the major advantage that I see physics having over economics is
>> that the character and relationship of the important quantities have been
>> established, and conversions that produce new insight are possible.  I've
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<various intervening sentences clipped>

>And then along came Planck and Heisenberg, Goedel and Shroedinger, to
>say they couldn't be established, after all.

All those people used the tight web of relationships to demonstrate limits
on knowledge, not that knowledge itself was impossible.  If the
relationships of various quantities had not been well established, their
work would have been impossible.

>
>Perhaps this last gives us a clue why hard scientists, i.e. people in
>the easy sciences, are so often shooting off their lip about how
>economics needs to be brought up to their standards.

You are precisely right that the hard sciences are the easy problems.  I
think I mentioned that, as well as the long period used to establish the
various relationships.

> Economics has
>measures of success and failure, and does reasonably well by their
>lights. The "hard" sciences, by contrast, make up their own criteria for
>success as they go along, and still fail to get very much usefully
>correct.

A good example of what I am talking about was a discussion of velocity of
circulation, where various relationships were proposed, but unfortunately,
the conversions produced absurdities.  I never saw a resolution.


		MV = PT		or 	MV = PY

				then

		V = PT/M	or	V = PY/M


I think your famous sharp tongue and defensivness toward your discipline
has blocked your reasoning.