Theories

The emergence of fundamentally new facts, inexplicable within the framework of the existing theory, leads to the development of a more general theory that "absorbs" and previous concepts. If, in the process of cognition, it turns out that some group of regularities can be deduced from regularities more general, this does not at all mean that the former are wholly reducible to the latter. They have their own specificity. In other words, "hatchability" is not yet a simple "reducibility". The relationship between private and general theories is much more complicated.

The emergence of fundamentally new facts, inexplicable within the framework of the existing theory

Let us imagine that we have two physical theories, one of which is private, the other more general. Then the domain of applicability of the particular theory lies within the range of applicability of the general theory. These theories have different equations. And it's not just that the equations of the general theory are more precise. If we take the aggregates of all the physical quantities entering into these and other equations, then it turns out that they are not the same. There are some values common to both theories. But there are also different - in the equations of the general theory, some, in the equations of the private others. The appearance of new quantities in a more general theory is associated with the application of new concepts. When going from a private theory to a general theory, it turns out that the very concepts of a particular theory (namely concepts, not equations) are approximate, reflecting the real world only with a certain degree of accuracy. New concepts used in a more general theory are more accurate.

Thus, in the transition from a particular theory to the general, what happens is what is called the breaking of concepts. That is why the private and general theories are qualitatively different from each other. How, then, in this case, one of them can be a particular case of another, flow from it? Equations of a more general physical theory contain one more world constant. There are three such constants at the present time: the gravitational constant, the so-called action quantum, or the Planck constant, and the speed of light (the inverse of the speed of light is usually used).

For example, the equations of Newton's classical mechanics do not contain world constants at all, and the equations of quantum mechanics, the special case of which is Newton's mechanics, contain the Planck constant.

In order to obtain a partial theory from the general theory, it is necessary to transform the equations appropriately and go to the limit as the "excess" constant tends to zero. The equations that we obtain as a result of such a limiting transition will not be equivalent to the initial ones. Those and others are qualitatively different from each other, they contain different values, they have different meanings. Therefore, if we had only the equations of a particular theory and wanted to conduct an inverse operation, that is, to reconstruct the equations of a general theory from the equations of a particular theory, we could not have done this, since we can not guess by the form of the equations of a particular theory what the equations of the general Theory. For this, considerations of a higher order, for example philosophical ones, are necessary. This statement, of course, should not be understood in the sense that directly from philosophical considerations it is possible to derive equations or obtain other specific physical results. But philosophical principles help to determine the most promising ways of developing science, to choose between various possible options for new theories.

Historically, the transition from a private theory to a general theory is a revolution that requires fundamentally new, sometimes "crazy" ideas, the development of new concepts. An example is the Newtonian theory of gravitation and the general theory of relativity. The first operates with Euclidean space and time independent of it; The second considers the space-time continuum, which has non-Euclidean properties. The transition to these fundamentally new concepts was a revolutionary shift in the science of gravity.

Thus, the particular and more general theories are qualitatively different. And it would be more accurate to call a particular theory not a particular, but the limiting case of a general theory.

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