Provide a comment on one of your classmates’ questions they posted on Wednesday. You will be graded based on your effort to provide a substantive response, which should include:
(1) a restatement of the question and
(2) a thoughtful response to it, that either attempts to answer the question or contributes to the topic the question is trying to address in some way.
The comment to respond to:
“Hi everyone!
One of the things that I got particular stuck thinking about this week was Fuchs’s contention that a constant is only a variable whose range has either been set, or has yet to be discovered (p. 16). If we suppose that this is accurate, that would imply that there is no such thing as a constant. My question this week then is: If no constants exist in our universe, how then have we, the human race, been able to advance so much in various scientific fields?
A basic problem such as 1+1=2 should be something that is a fact; when we take a single item and pair it to its twin, we then have two of said item, or twice as much as we started with. Regardless of at what point in history this may have occurred, with what type of item, or the cultural context behind said item, this concept should be secure and not open to interpretation, i.e. a “constant”. It is my understanding that things such as mathematical constants are what allow us to make predictions as to how certain elements will behave, which in turn means that we can use those predictions to experiment with methods that are efficient improvements upon previously established data.
For example, neuroscience has come so far in the past century, in large part due to the experimentation and subsequent replication which established that certain functions are associated with certain cortical regions. We know that the temporal regions house our auditory functions, that our occipital lobe houses our visual function, and so on. While there is some variability within those categories, the overarching areas and their functions is consistent in all fully developed and undamaged human brains. Would we not consider aspects such as these to be considered “constant”? On the other hand, if we consider things like our evolutionary development, we know that our brains did NOT always have these specialized regions. Does the fact that it has been variable, albeit over a large time period, confirm Fuchs’s point that there really is no such thing as a “constant”?
I would be interested to hear anyone else’s take on this particular question!!”
