- Premium Academic Help From Professionals
- +1 757 528 8682
- support@standardwriter.com
Physical Geography Video Analysis
Physical Geography Video Analysis
|
Order Number |
789654112302 |
|
Type of Project |
ESSAY |
|
Writer Level |
PHD VERIFIED |
|
Format |
APA |
|
Academic Sources |
10 |
|
Page Count |
3-12 PAGES |
Physical Geography Video Analysis
Instructions/Descriptions
Watch: General notes for my online classes [Gary Pereira]
Topic 1: Science v scientism
Given our recent global history, a background course like this should probably begin with a discussion of the meaning of the word ‘science’. We need to recognize in particular the difference between science as a set of approaches to understanding reality, and science as a body of knowledge that presumably results from the application of such approaches.
There is a paradox at the heart of this duality. An over-reliance on any body of knowledge, even one that has been accumulated scientifically, is fundamentally contrary to many of the approaches that may have been used to discover that knowledge to begin with. It is therefore unfortunate that the same word, ‘science’, has this double meaning.
The tension and confusion that results have been discussed since at least the dawn of the technological age, but the struggle between accumulated ‘truth’ and the scientific goal of always trying to falsify such claims is an ancient one. Science as an approach to understanding must always include a willingness to be proven wrong.
But representatives of science as a body of knowledge are often unwilling to be proven wrong. Science is currently experiencing a replication crisis, leading to unjustified claims by some, distrust of such claims by others, and politicization.
The tools and methods of science are set aside as various people in positions of authority begin to insist on everyone’s acceptance of their own opinions and impressions. My impression is that we are experiencing this now with regard to the covid-19 virus, for example, but our often-unjustified trust in the institutions of accumulated knowledge is not new.
Consider the story of Galileo’s telescope; or rather, the story of two of Galileo’s contemporaries who became famous throughout history for one thing, and one thing only: their refusal to look through it.
Galileo did not invent the telescope, but he improved its design and demonstrated its usefulness for port operations and visual communications. When Galileo began building telescopes specifically designed to view the night sky at a higher power, and when he described what he saw, people were astonished.
If you haven’t viewed the night sky through a telescope yet, you really should try it sometime.
Even with a relatively inexpensive telescope, it is easy to see the three-dimensional contours of mountains and craters on the moon, particularly near the current limb of illumination, and on clear nights (but far away from the ‘light pollution’ of the city) you can see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.
By watching Jupiter over time, Galileo was the first to see that these moons orbited that distant planet, just as our moon orbits us.
But for formally educated people of Galileo’s time, and particularly for university educators, this was disturbing news. The contradiction between what they had assumed must be true based on accumulated knowledge (all presumably scientifically or rationally derived), and what any common, uneducated person could see by just looking through an eyepiece, led to some rather famous examples of self-delusion and stupidity. Two stand out.
Cesare Cremini was a friend and colleague of Galileo at the University of Padua. When Galileo announced that he had seen mountains on the Moon, Cremini and others denounced the claim and refused to look through the telescope. The evidence refuting Aristotle’s theory that the Moon was a perfect sphere would have made his position as Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy at the University untenable.
In other words, people would no longer believe and respect everything he said, and this made Cremini sad. Many seemingly complex and difficult but entirely false academic arguments that students are often recruited into joining actually come down to such simple self-righteousness, even in our own time.
Giulio Libri was a Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy at Pisa, and he was an open opponent of Galileo. Libri was particularly vehement in his denunciation of the telescope, which he considered to be a parlor trick, refusing to look. When Libri died, Galileo commented of him that “never having wanted to see Moons of Jupiter on Earth, perhaps he’ll see them on the way to heaven.”
Now consider (for question 1) the following quotations from George Orwell’s essay “What Is Science?’ that was published in the London Tribune on October 26th, 1945. In Orwell’s view we can all see that many non-scientists also keep rationality and objectivity, and even a willingness to be proven wrong, as their guideposts in their lives, even if they have nothing to do with the science of their time.
On the other hand, scientists have often shown themselves to be unreliable practitioners of the scientific approach to knowledge and to life. One obvious example of this, according to Orwell, involves the history of scientific nationalism. The full short essay can be easily found online in pdf form, if you are interested.
“This confusion of meaning, which is partly deliberate, has in it a great danger. Implied in the demand for more scientific education is the claim that if one has been scientifically trained one’s approach to all subjects will be more intelligent than if one had had no such training. A scientist’s political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman. The world,
in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it. But a ‘scientist’, as we have just seen, means in practice a specialist in one of the exact sciences. It follows that a chemist or a physicist, as such, is politically more intelligent than a poet or a lawyer, as such… But is it really true that a ‘scientist’, in this narrower sense, is any likelier than other people to approach non-scientific problems in an objective way? There is not much reason for thinking so.
Take one simple test — the ability to withstand nationalism.”
“Clearly, scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, skeptical, experimental habit of mind. It ought to mean acquiring a method — a method that can be used on any problem that one meets, and not simply piling up a lot of facts. Put it in those words, and the apologist of scientific education will usually agree.
Press him further, ask him to particularize, and somehow it always turns out that scientific education means more attention to the sciences, in other words — more facts. The idea that science means a way of looking at the world, and not simply a body of knowledge, is in practice strongly resisted. I think sheer professional jealousy is part of the reason for this.
For if science is simply a method or an attitude, so that anyone whose thought-processes are sufficiently rational can in some sense be described as a scientist — what then becomes of the enormous prestige now enjoyed by the chemist, the physicist, etc. and his claim to be somehow wiser than the rest of us?”
Textbooks often give the impression that the scientific body of knowledge contained within is relatively complete and settled. But as I said in the syllabus for this course, we need to distinguish between the finger that is being used to point at some object of study, and the object itself.
The tendency for educators and publishing houses to write with self-assurance is often misleading.
There is often a great deal more legitimate diversity of thought on even the most basic questions that you might find in the different fields of science than most textbooks would have us believe. Similarly, you may have noticed that people whom our leadership and news media assure us represent the very best expertise in science (as a body of knowledge), have recently shown themselves be distrustful of the methods of science and to have been largely ignorant of how best to deal with novel things nature might throw our way (e.g., the appearance and nature of a sequence of covid-19 variants).
Experts have disagreed on any number of important things related to this pandemic.
Nevertheless, some claim to represent all of science, politicizing what is essentially a difficult biological issue that needs to be worked through with some degree of humility.
The perpetual presence of human ignorance with regard to what the universe may throw our way should not surprise us. Over the following two weeks, we will explore topics that show why evolution may actually be a universal property of nature, which guarantees the emergence of novel forms and functions.
This sort of universal evolution guarantees the appearance of entirely new things (not necessarily biological) whose interactions with what already exists had never been predefined anywhere, or anytime.
If this property of nature is real, and I believe it is, it’s a wonderful thing that actually supports many peoples’ religious and philosophical beliefs, but it also guarantees the periodic appearance of potentially troublesome events that no person or algorithm had ever previously experienced or predicted.
We may eventually understand what happened and manage to avoid similar situations in the future, and that’s good. Nevertheless, some entirely new, unanticipated situation will always eventually arise. If this property of nature is real, then even the most advanced future AI system, encompassing all of science, could still not possibly anticipate everything that will happen, including processes and events that affect our future survival.
I think that this is indeed a universal property of nature, for reasons that have been expressed as physical nonlinearity and deterministic chaos, mathematically within the Incompleteness Theorems of Kurt Gödel, and by Turing and others in the domain of computation.
Topic 2: Complexity and fractals
Over the next two weeks, in preparation for a course that spans the physical and biological sciences, we’ll discuss some of the ideas that are being used to tie these physical and biological sciences together. While not a complete survey, this short introduction will give you a better picture than our textbooks provide.
Textbooks often begin with a description of the so-called ‘systems’ view of the world, involving flow diagrams with sources and reservoirs of energy, materials, and information.
The basic concepts of systems theory, ‘feedback’ for example, remain important, but over the last thirty years mathematicians, computer scientists, and many domain scientists have been developing and using tools derived from far more comprehensive theories of complexity.
In my view, a selection of videos and documents provide a more accurate and comprehensive education in the basics of how scientists conceptualize and model the world than domain-specific textbooks provide.
If any of the following ideas interest you, it is easy to find detailed published documents. In fact, for the Final Evaluation paper, whatever your chosen topic may be, I expect you to find documents online.
The applicability of the ideas that we will be presenting here to domains of your professional life (including those far from geography, or from science) should become clear the more you study them. One thing you can do to further expand your understanding is to watch the full suite of videos offered by the Systems Innovation channel that are like those selections listed below.
To be clear, one underappreciated aspect of scientific approaches to understanding is the power derived from admitting to our own ignorance, even with regard to our supposedly fully confirmed beliefs or assumptions.
It is easy to accept that the universe at the largest and tiniest scales remains mysterious. But in fact, our collective ignorance of the world involves not only the very big and the very small.
Much of what happens at even our own scales of existence and perception remains mysterious, including many of the topics contained within this course.
In particular, we will explore why so-called nonlinearities (in the mathematical sense) yield all sorts of weird and wonderful things happening at all scales. As we look more closely at astronomical objects, for example, from stars to galaxies and beyond, they reveal themselves to be as intricate and complex in their own way as living things appear to be, to us.
The more deeply we manage to look, the more the visible universe reveals its own evolution. And yet the two most significant facets of the universe itself, dark matter and dark energy, remain shrouded in mystery.
Watch: Nonlinear Systems Overview [Systems Innovation]
Watch: Fractals [Systems Innovation]
Watch: Fractals in Pictures [Systems Innovation]
Keep in mind that fractal mathematics can describe fractal forms, but also fractal patterns in time and in terms of other non-spatial characteristics. I’ll be asking you to ‘Examine’ a few more selected videos this week, but you needn’t to examine them very closely. They are here in order to stir your imagination.
If anything appeals to you, check out the YouTube channel indicated in brackets. In the first video below, as you look down on the Earth from above, ask yourself, other than the horizon line, is there anything in the picture that is not fractal in form?
Examine: The Blue Pearl III [Sean Doran]
As an example of the sort of fractal complexity that can come out of a relatively simple nonlinear relationship, consider the Mandelbrot Set, which is generated in code by a very simple iterative equation. As you zoom in towards some point along the boundary of converging solutions to that equation on the complex number plane, it reveals itself with infinite complexity, as shown in the video below.
Notice that the fractal patterns that come out of this pure mathematics often appear to be more biological and crystalline than utterly abstract. The forms you can see emerging from the background and dissolving into the foreground as we zoom in are emerging from the calculations as they are performed.
This concept of ‘emergence’ seems to be of fundamental significance within both the mathematical and observable world, although it is difficult to formalize in mere words.
Examine: Sapphires – Mandelbrot Fractal Zoom [Math’s Town]
Fractal mathematics is used to model and visualize many three-dimensional natural and artificial forms. One software package for generating such forms is called ‘Mandel bulb’. If you search on that term in YouTube, you’ll get results like the following three videos.
They demonstrate that it is not particularly difficult to generate biological or geological forms using fractal geometry. I wonder, has the gaming world caught up to what fractal mathematics can provide? You can find many more by searching YouTube for Mandel bulb, which you can learn how to use yourself (certainly a selling point if you want to be a game programmer).
Examine any of the following three videos.
Emergence [Julius Honshu’s]
Mandel bulb 3D Animation [Russ McClay]
Virtual nature (fractal world) [San Base]
Homework 1:
Based on the quotations provided above, do you think that Orwell’s essay “What Is Science?’ might still describe our perception of science and our relationship to its institutions? Keep in mind that this essay was written only a couple of months after the atomic bombings of Japan, and after the US and USSR had both recruited German weapons scientists with the Nazi defeat.
In a couple of weeks, we will briefly discuss a film from 1951 called “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, in which Professor Bernhardt and a visitor from space named Kalat portray the ‘wise scientists’ whose rationalist view of the world is forced upon the world in order to save it from itself. But do science and its institutions need reform?
What makes a system nonlinear? How is a nonlinear system different from a linear one?
Fractal mathematics can be used to describe forms in space and events in time that operate over a range of scales. What makes a form or process fractal? Describe a few natural forms with fractal characteristics.
Physical Geography Video Analysis
