>
>
>
> SMage:
>
> A splendid description of current cosmological/astrophysical dogma,
> a "mathematical" construct piling assumption upon assumption
> (big bang, dark matter, dark energy, gravitational lensing, etc., etc.),
> and purging any elements (quantized redshifts, structural linkages
> between galaxies, etc.) which don't fit.
>
>
> JGulick:
>
> Ummm... I'm way in over my head here, but what the hey.
>
> More than a decade ago I was driving solo across the Great Basin desert,
> kind of zonked, and listening to a Hawking book on tape. The more I
> listened,
> the more exasperated I got. The astrophysical/cosmological discussion
> pretended to be accessible to the ignorant layperson (and I certainly was
> that!) but it was mostly gibberish to me... yet I managed to pick up on the
> two following exasperating, and seemingly contradicatory, tendencies.
>
> On the one hand, whenever an anomaly required explanation and a theory
> needed revising, a new concept would be introduced. Said concept almost
> always seemed haphazard to me (almost as if it was invented on the spot)
> and certainly it rarely seemed to have anything to do with hard evidence or
> material reality... rather, it almost always seemed to be drawn from some
> self-contained world of formal (or mathematical?) logic.
>
> That was annoying enough, but then there was an equally annoying though
> seemingly antithetical tendency. At several points it seemed as if the
> narrator
> was only willing to entertain conversation about those aspects of material
> reality
> that are accessible to instrumental observation. On occasion this tendency
> was
> so pronounced it seemed as though the narrator was suggesting that material
> reality itself is a byproduct of recording technologies and techniques.
>
> It was weird and infuriating, this bizarre and mad combination of
> freewheeling
> abstraction and rank empiricism. Kind of like Parsonian sociology. What's
> up with
> that? I've wondered ever since that trek through the desert...
>
>
I'd say check out the (very accesible, it was given to a non-philosophical audience, and) absolutely brilliant lecture series Adorno gave on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Its really a lecture series about the interpenetration between empiricism and formalism ("transcendentalism", same difference) taking Kant, the master of the "system", as his starting point.