
A Man Who Questioned Everything - Elof
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/07/diderot-man-who-questioned-everything/
======
rafaelvasco
Makes me remember how powerful the mentality of "Really ?" is. Like:
"Everything is going terribly !" \- "Really?" \- "I'm so depressed !" \-
"Really ?". Or: "Everything is going great !" \- "Really ?". It shows that
everything moves, everything changes, nothing is permanent. So we shouldn't
act like it is. Just try to get the best of each moment and let everything
that isn't good for us pass away.

~~~
jackhack
That viewpoint is quite close to Stoicism.

While the dictionary definition is a little stuffy ("an ancient Greek school
of philosophy founded at Athens by Zeno of Citium. The school taught that
virtue, the highest good, is based on knowledge; the wise live in harmony with
the divine Reason (also identified with Fate and Providence) that governs
nature, and are indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune and to pleasure and
pain.") a more approachable view is to simply be grateful for the good things
one has and appreciate them, understanding that things could always be worse.
A form of optimism, if you will, but one that should be moderate.

The extreme of this was parodied by Dr. Pangloss in Candide, by the French
philosopher Voltaire. No matter the horrors the good Doctor observed or the
fates which befell him (war, murder, disease, pestilence, etc.) he always
absurdely celebrated what he found and proclaimed the majesty and greatness of
this, "the Best Of All Possible Worlds!" Voltaire's mockery of contemporary
philosophers via this character was as entertaining as it was thorough.

Finding a balance is key.

------
yantrams
There is a passing mention of Diderot in this book I'm currently reading -
Mathematics, the loss of certainity by Morris Kline. It is quite fascinating
to see how his view on Mathematics in 1750s was similar to that of the 20th
century formalists.

------
nyc111
By coincidence, I'm reading Lucretius' De rerum natura. [1] Lucretius of
course is also a materialist. The world is made of "primordial units" which
are the indivisible particles. These particles do not have parts. Later Newton
picked up this atomic materialism and assumed that "God in the beginning
formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles." [2]
This view became the official view of nature and is being taught at schools
ever since. I guess K. Marx also adopted it from Newton. But now even
physicists question atomic materialism. [3]

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura)

[2] Stated in his Optics.

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15679150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15679150)

~~~
n4r9
I wonder how you would define "atomic materialism", especially as opposed to
mere "materialism"?

A brief Google suggests the term hasn't been used much since the 19th Century,
but could mean either that everything is made of indivisible atoms, or that
matter is made up of indivisible atoms. However, we've known for a long time
that atoms are not indivisible.

Looking at your last link, perhaps you mean more that "everything is mass"?
But quantum field theory as described in that article has been around since at
least the 70s, and I think physicists and philosophers would still regard
quantum field theory as a materialist theory. In modern usage, "materialism"
is synonymous with "physicalism", i.e. that everything is physical [0]. Most
physicists would call themselves materialists.

I ask because the same article was posted over a year ago and someone made a
very similar looking comment [1].

[0]
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15727988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15727988)

~~~
nyc111
> we've known for a long time that atoms are not indivisible.

I do not agree with your statement that "we've known for a long time that
atoms are not indivisible." Lucretius makes very clear that atoms are forever
indivisible entities. So, _by definition_, we call an indivisible object an
atom. If it is divisible it is not an atom, according to the original
definition of the word.

What happened is that, physicists named an object an "atom" and when they
resolved that object they named "atom" into its constituent parts, they
claimed to have divided an indivisible atom. No. This is only a play on words.

Unfortunately, we see this process of loading old words with new meanings in
physics all the time. No definition is sacred in physics. As you wrote, "In
modern usage, 'materialism' is synonymous with 'physicalism'." This simply
means that physicists changed the meaning of the word "material."

This process confuses me a lot. I even have a short essay about why physics
must be semantics.

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lV91S8enG4TqkxfO3XkA...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lV91S8enG4TqkxfO3XkAn8A9I3G535kpESDQPyfMBKw/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
n4r9
Point taken!

I agree that terminology is especially fickle in physics, and it can be very
confusing. Words need to be co-opted in order to discuss the objects of a new
theory, and often they are simply chosen by rough analogy. The "mass" of
Newton's spacetime is not the "mass" of Einstein's relativity. The "spin" of
an electron is not the same as the spin of a car's wheel.

John Stewart Bell has a nice quotation about this when discussing the use of
the word "measurement" in quantum theory:

> Take for example the “strangeness”, “charm”, and “beauty” of elementary
> particle physics. No one is taken in by this “baby talk”. ... Would that it
> were so with “measurement”. But in fact the word has had such a damaging
> effect on the discussion, that I think it should now be banned altogether in
> quantum mechanics.

As for atomism more broadly, now that I think about it there are some modern
theoretical physicists with ideas about the discretisation of spacetime, for
example: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2852](https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2852)

~~~
nyc111
Thanks for the reference to John Bell. I wonder where he said that.

~~~
nyc111
I found it. J.Bell. Speakable and unspeakable... p.216

