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SilasBarta comments on The Graviton as Aether - Less Wrong
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I'm beginning to suspect that my insistence on understanding things a certain way is peculiar and possibly overly narrow.
But suppose that I look outside my window and see a light wobbling across the horizon. I think that I don't understand the trajectory of the light. Then someone finds the equation that describes the motion of the light: it turns out to be perfectly regular and periodic. I still feel I don't understand it. For me, the path of the light isn't understood until you discover that the light is a reflector attached to the wheel of a car, and the trajectory you see is a combination of the car's linear movement and wheel's rotation. This is what I mean by a mechanical understanding.
I could study Maxwell's equations, but I know they wouldn't help. Do we have a 'mechanical' understanding of the motion of light, or just the equation description?
I remember you and I also discussed what it means to understand something, and I definitely sympathize and largely agree with your standard for what counts as "understanding". (I'll find the link to that discussion when I get a chance.)
My standard is that you understand something if and to the extent that:
1) You have a mathematical model that generates the observations with good success. (Not necessary here what labels you use -- this part can be "Chinese room"-ish.)
2) That model is deeply connected (via the entities it shares, quantities it uses, mutual interaction, etc.) to your model for everything else, and thus connected, ultimately, to your intuitive (raw, qualia-laden) model of the world.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is where you are: for light, you understand it in the sense of meeting 1), but don't meet it with respect to 2). Would you say that is accurate?