User talk:Ancheta Wis/p
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Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851) was heavily influenced by Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science)[1]. In 1799, Ørsted's Philosophisk Repertorium noted
- "In order to achieve completeness in our knowledge of nature, we must start from two extremes, from experience and from the intellect itself. ... The former method must conclude with natural laws, which it has abstracted from experience, while the latter must begin with principles, and gradually, as it develops more and more, it becomes ever more detailed. Of course, I speak here about the method as manifested in the process of the human intellect itself, not as found in textbooks, where the laws of nature which have been abstracted from the consequent experiences are placed first because they are required to explain the experiences. When the empiricist in his regression towards general laws of nature meets the metaphysician in his progression, science will reach its perfection." [2]
- We have the permittivity of free space as a starting point for your proposal. As Feynman points out, the name of something is not as important as the concept it represents; a plain-language description of the topic ought to be our goal. In this way, we can build an encyclopedia which endures. If the point is that we ought to reduce the number of articles simply to make a topic in physics manageable, then we could address this with navigation templates and overview articles. Then obscure or redundant articles would simply be unused or untouched. But if the concern is to simply get across the understandability of physics, then why isn't there more emphasis on equations. As compressed expressions of our knowledge, they are unsurpassed, in my opinion. This would also tend to reduce duplication and overlap because one writes an equation at his peril, here, or in physics in general; it then becomes much easier to be proven wrong. --Ancheta Wis 10:43, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
Ørsted's "First Introduction to General Physics" (1811) exemplified the steps of observation[3], hypothesis [4], deduction[5] and experiment. In 1805, based on his researches on electromagnetism Ørsted came to believe that electricity is propagated by undulatory action (i.e., fluctuation). By 1820, he felt confident enough in his beliefs that he resolved to demonstrate them in a public lecture, and in fact observed a small magnetic effect from a galvanic circuit (i.e., voltaic circuit), without rehearsal[6],[7]
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