That's entirely consistent with the OP's suggestion that electromagnetic radiation is non-physical right up to the point where Maxwell's conceptual apparatus suggested its existence.This work presents the synthetical mathematical analysis of available knowledge regarding physical phenomena of research interest. After Maxwell's theoretical discovery/invention of electromagnetic radiation, that radiation became an object for physical research, and most famously Hertz's which culminated in confirmation of Maxwell's theory. It turned out that those equations have a solution which describes the wavelike propagation of electric and magnetic energy in a vacuum at the speed of light. Maxwell brought together the previous work of those other physicists into 'his' four field equations. Prior to Maxwell, physicists working in electricity and magnetism worked - like Maxwell - on electromagnetic fields.

Maxwell gave us electromagnetic radiation as a new theoretical concept, Hertz gave us its empirical confirmation. I just doesn't make sense.You don't seem to understand how electromagnetic radiation was discovered. radiation thought they were trying to understand something non-physical before. I have never encountered the claim that the scientists working on e.m. That paper looks interesting, will look at it later. I have briefly perused some of the SEP entries on him in the years since, and see no reason to revise that opinion. I fairly soon as absconded to Comparative Religion which was far more congenial to my outlook Īnyway, I never really studied Armstrong as I was of the view that ‘materialist theory of mind’ wouldn’t contain anything of interest.

I was enrolled as an undergrad at UniSyd when he was head of ‘Traditional and Modern’ - in those days, the Philosophy department was split between that school and General I was in the no-man’s land trying to understand enlightenment. If I remember rightly (and I'm not 100% certain I do) David Armstrong was a mind-brain identity theorist (of the functionalist kind - MetaphysicsNow Non-physical things we have discovered so far, are objects that only exist in symbolic form, such as the objects and necessary truths of mathematics.Īs for the mathematical truths not yet discovered, then I am forced to conclude, by my preferred epistemology, that they already exist. There are actually more examples of entities that were once thought of as physical, but were discovered not to exist - the ether, flogiston, elan vital. This includes everything we have discovered, and everything we have yet to discover. I don't think I am misrepresenting physicalism too much by describing it as the metaphysical assertion that everything that is instantiated in Reality is physical. What is your concept of the non-physical? - johnpetrovic At the present time, self-aware consciousness is non-physical. For example, prior to the work of Maxwell and Hertz, electromagnetic radiation was non-physical, but became physical as a result of the knowledge that they generated. The non-physical is associated with our current state of scientific knowledge. My concept of the non-physical is phenomena that cannot be detected by our senses and the scientific extensions of our senses and which cannot be explained by existing scientific paradigms.

Non physical phenomena definition