Scientific principles and the logic of discovery

One of the central themes of the new philosophy of science is to explore and establish the interrelationship between science and philosophy, the interplay of which is expressed through a variety of forms, such as being and nothingness, the self-existent and the self-contained, nature and religion, living art and artistic life, reality and the ideal, norms and freedom, the law of nature and the law of will, etc. Why is it necessary to analyze and determine the interrelationship between science and philosophy? First, the interrelationship of science and philosophy with nature and society is by the principle of equivalence of scientific and philosophical category theory; second, science is not omnipotent, but cannot be done without science, and similarly, philosophy cannot be omnipotent, but cannot be done without philosophy. Reliance on science alone can not solve the problems of philosophy and society; relying only on philosophy can not solve the problems of science and nature, the history of human scientific development, philosophy, and the history of social development of a large number of facts prove that science and philosophy in line with the complex principle of the historical theory of philosophy of science superposition theory or superposition principle of the complex theory. In short, the ultimate goal of exploring and establishing the interrelationship between science and philosophy is to build a beautiful relationship between man and nature, man and society in harmony and coexistence based on scientific and rational understanding.

The laws of physics that are suitable for the quantum field are not necessarily suitable for the relativistic field, and conversely, the laws of physics that are suitable for the relativistic field are not necessarily suitable for the quantum field, for example, the inaccuracy principle of quantum mechanics or "Heisenberg's principle" is not suitable for the field of large scale earth objects and cosmic celestial bodies, and general relativity is lost in the black holes predicted by Hawking and Penrose. General relativity loses its validity in the "singularity" predicted by Hawking and Penrose. However, the law of energy transformation and conservation is suitable for both the physical world of relativistic scale and the physical world of quantum mechanical scale, and the adaptability of the law of energy transformation and conservation in the microscopic quantum world and the macroscopic relativistic world is by the equivalence principle of the philosophy of science universalism. It may be possible to consider the law of indestructibility or conservation of matter and energy as the "first law" of the physical world and to establish the "grand unified theory" or "ultimate theory" of physics in this way. But scientists are not philosophers, science has its disciplinary system and inherent evolutionary paradigm, physicists generally believe that the edifice of the "theory of everything" is based on the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics, how to complete the unification of gravity and the other three fundamental forces of nature? This is the mission of the Grand Unified Theory of Physics that Einstein failed to accomplish in the second half of his life.

The discovery of neutrinos once again confirmed the applicability of the law of transformation and conservation of energy in the quantum world. In the 1920s and 1930s, atomic physicists discovered in experiments on beta particles or electrons released by spontaneous decay of atomic nuclei that the energy before and after the "beta decay" was unequal, and part of the energy went nowhere, or "lost energy" occurred in the beta decay. ", the physicists at that time, the beta decay before and after the energy "non-conservation" phenomenon is confused, they have confirmed that the alpha decay and gamma decay are to comply with the conservation of energy law, why beta decay "violate Why does beta decay "violate" the law of conservation or "break" the law of conservation?

Bohr, the leading figure of quantum mechanics at that time, thought that the law of conservation of energy no longer applied in beta decay, while the Austrian atomic physicist Pauli, who proposed the "Pauli incompatibility principle", firmly believed that the law of conservation of energy applied to the microscopic quantum world, and in 1930, he predicted the existence of a mysterious particle, which was radiated in beta decay. In 1930, he predicted the existence of a mysterious particle, which was emitted in the beta decay, and part of the energy carried away with the particle made up for the "lost energy", which was named "neutron" by Bubble, and then renamed "neutrino" by the famous physicist Fermi of the University of Rome. "This was because the British physicist Chadwick of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University discovered the real "big" neutron in 1932, unlike the "neutron" predicted by Pauli, which was "In 1955, the existence of neutrinos was confirmed by physical experiments.

The two-way process from theory to experiment and from experiment to theory is consistent with the inverse equivalence principle of the process theory of philosophy of science and the equivalence principle of the theory of discovery. Traditional scientific discovery is more in the process from experiment to theory, and modern scientific discovery is more in the process from theory to experiment. Specifically, is each scientist's discovery characterized by an experimental approach to discovery or a theoretical approach to discovery? The inaccuracy principle of the philosophy of science plays a role in this. The discovery of neutrinos was first predicted by bubbles and then confirmed by experiments, similarly, the discovery of neutrons was first predicted by Rutherford and then detected by experiments.

The New Zealand physicist Rutherford proposed the "Rutherford prediction" of the existence of neutrons in the process of building the structure of the atom, and he confirmed the nuclear structure model of the atom through scattering experiments of alpha particles. In 1919, Rutherford discovered the proton by bombarding a nitrogen atom with an alpha particle, and in 1920, in a scientific lecture at the Royal Society, Rutherford made the "astonishing" neutron prediction. "He said that since atoms consisted of negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons, why were there no uncharged neutral particles or "neutrons"? Rutherford's student Chadwick eventually became the lucky winner of the 1935 Physics Nobel Prize for his 1932 alpha particle bombardment experiment on neutron discovery and his paper "The Existence of the Neutron" published in the Journal of the Royal Society.