Monthly Archives: February 2016

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The Ring of Gyges

After a brief foray into scientific thought experiments, I want to return to pure philosophical ones. For this week’s post, I want to focus on another famous thought experiment from Plato’s Republic: “The Ring of Gyges”. In the Republic, the story of the ring of Gyges is told by Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, when he his talking to Socrates about the nature of justice (for anyone interested, this comes at the beginning of the second book of the Republic). Socrates and Glaucon are discussing Thrasymachus’ assertion (from book 1) that “injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice,” and trying to decide whether people would prefer to be unjust if they knew that they would not be punished. To help them consider this question, Glaucon explains to Socrates the legend of the Ring of Gyges.

Gyges, a real historical figure, was the king of Lydia from 716 to 678 B.C.E.; approximately 3 centuries before Socrates and Glaucon would have had their dialog (to clarify, Plato wrote the dialogues after Socrates’ death and the extent to which they are based on real events is unclear). According to Glaucon’s legend:

When Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he … saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended…. (Later) he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result: when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. (The other shepherds sent him to make an annual report to the king; but) as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king, slew him, and took the kingdom.

This is clearly mythological, but many aspects of it do align with what historians understand of the life of Gyges. For example, Gyges was born a shepherd, was sent by other shepherds to deliver a message to the King of Lydia, and did kill the King. It is unclear whether he seduced his wife prior to killing the king or married her after, but they did have a relationship.

The question that Socrates and Glaucon discuss is whether a man who could make himself invisible would behave justly or unjustly. Glaucon agrees with the general principle expressed by Thrasymachus that men are only just out of a fear of reproach or punishment; and therefore argues that, with the knowledge that his unjust behavior would never be punished or discovered, “no man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men.” Socrates however argues that a man who did these things would be a slave to his appetites (the word that the Ancient Greeks used to describe one’s desires) and would never truly be happy or fulfilled as long as he lived unjustly.

The Ring of Gyges offers one way of looking conceptualizing the role that shame and social pressure play in making people behave morally, but different philosophers have come up with a number of similar thought experiments since Plato. It is a little off-putting to think that you, the person sitting next to you, and the hundreds of people you walk past on a daily basis are restrained from killing you only by a form of pseudo-peer-pressure; but deep down anybody who has ever done something in private they would never have done in public knows that there is some truth to this.

This intuition laid a lot of the ground work for social contract theory’s “state of nature/state of war” and has perplexed legal and social philosophers for millennia. On a lighter note, some have speculated that the ring of Gyges, with makes its wearer invisible and possibly evil, may have been the inspiration for the “One Ring” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, though this is a controversial claim. Whether or not it was the inspiration, there are a lot of notable similarities.

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Raman, Thought Experiments

Physics or Philosophy

Last week I wrote about the value of thought experiments in the sciences. To illustrate my point, I used the example of Einstein’s theory of relativity and talked about how scientists never could have arrived at the concept empirically and the fact that they had still been unable to prove it. Apparently my challenge was accepted, because earlier today scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed that they were able hear the sound of two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light years away by registering ripples in space time. The results announced today are the first empirical conformation of the existence of gravity waves, which Einstein predicted as part of his general theory of relativity (which I discussed in last week’s post). It is also the first ever direct detection of black holes, which have been impossible to observe until now because of the fact that they do not emit any radiation. The fact that after 100 years of technological and methodological progress scientists have only now been able to confirm Einstein’s theory, and only with his research to tell them what to look for, shows how far ahead of his time Einstein was and further proves my point about the incredible power of thought experiments.

Rather than pick another though experiment to talk about, I want to give a quick overview of how thought experiments have driven the refinement/development of relativity, quantum theory, and many of the other most significant discoveries in physics of the last century. This is not an appropriate venue for an overview of the theories themselves (and I would certainly not be qualified to give one even if it were), but there are a few unifying themes that make thought experiments particularly useful in these fields.

In a review of a recent book about Einstein and Schrödinger, the author notes that “each had a strong philosophical bent, which shaped his worldview” and that “those philosophical influences contributed to their mutual dislike of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.” One of the main reasons that physicists often resort to using thought experiments to make their points is that the theories they work with often deal with unobservable phenomena that are either far too large (think black holes), far too small (think fundamental particles), or far to abstract (think space time or the alternate dimensions required by string theory) for people, even theoretical physicists, to conceptualize (as a side note, all of those examples started as thought experiments). Thought experiments, when well designed, allow physicists to think through conceptual problems without getting bogged down in cumbersome details. The physicists can then work backwards to test their intuitions empirically. They are not always right, Einstein was wrong about quantum entanglement and most modern physicists believe that Schrödinger was wrong about superposition, but the thought experiments give them a starting place for empirical testing.

Stephen Hawking famously said that “philosophy is dead” because there was nothing else for us to learn about the world without hard data. While his commitment to data and evidence may resonate with many in STEM fields, you unfortunately will not be rid of us philosophers so easily. The story of the last century of physics is philosophy first, math later. In the same interview, Hawking himself admits that scientifically testing his preferred unifying theory, called “M Theory,” would require a particle collider the size of the Milky Way galaxy; but he defends his commitment to it with synthesis, logical syllogism and thought experiments: much like a philosopher would. If Stephen Hawking is correct that philosophy is dead, someone should probably tell Stephen Hawking: he may be out of a job!

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Gedankenexperiment

For this week’s post, I want to explore the relationship between philosophical thought experiments and scientific thought experiments. When people think about science, they usually think about empirical experimentation, not philosophical conjecture; however, many of the greatest scientists have also been philosophers, and their philosophy has had a profound impact on their scientific discoveries. This is perhaps most obvious with older scientists/philosophers; such as Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Descartes (yes the same one from last week); but it is no less true of more recent ones like Bohr, Einstein, Turing, and Heisenberg. While it may seem counter-intuitive, many of science’s greatest developments in the last century have come from thought experiments rather than physical ones. To better illustrate this, I want to give a famous example.

There is perhaps no more famous modern scientist than Albert Einstein. While many people are vaguely familiar with some of his most notable work (E=MC2, Special and General Relativity, etc.), fewer people are familiar with his research methods. Einstein himself described the process through which he discovered relativity as a “Gedankenexperiment,” gedanken being the German word for thought. This experiment was simple.

Einstein imagined that he was riding on a beam of light and looking at another beam of light parallel to his own. Reasoning from classical mechanics, the second beam should appear to be still, yet according to the laws of electromagnetism, light’s speed must always be 3×108 meters per second. Both classical mechanics and electromagnetism claimed to be universal, meaning that the laws were the same for all observers, but Einstein’s thought experiment led him to conclude that either classical mechanics or electromagnetism was wrong, or that neither was universal. Confident in the laws of each, he reasoned that neither could be universal. It was from this insight that special relativity was born.

He was not done yet though. He then thought about a man in a falling elevator car. He knew that the car and the man would fall towards the center of the earth at the same rate, and reasoned that the man would thus be unable to feel his own weight. He then realized that the man would also be unable to determine, from within the car, whether he was falling due to gravity or accelerating up as the result of a force. While this was a revolutionary insight at the time, it probably should not have been. If you replace the elevator in Einstein’s experiment with the earth, which is constantly in motion, it is obvious that our measurements of motion here on earth are relative to our frame of reference. We do not express the speed at which cars travel as the observed speed (say 60 MPH) in our reference frame plus the speed of the earth’s rotation around the sun (roughly 1000 MPH) plus the speed at which our solar system is moving within our galaxy (roughly 514,000 MPH) plus the speed at which our galaxy is moving within the universe (indeterminate, because we have no external frame of reference, like the man in the elevator!!).

The fundamental insight Einstein had was one that scientific experimentation could never have arrived at empirically, since its entire premise is that empirical observation itself is relative. Without philosophy, the theory of relativity and the scientific breakthroughs that came with it would have been impossible. While this is just one example of the intersection between philosophy and science, I hope it has been helpful in understanding their relationship. If you guys are interested, I have dozens of similar examples and would gladly write a few posts about them, so let me know in the comments.

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