Further Adventures with Adolf Grünbaum: Response to Grünbaum

On habermas and gadamer's important argument that psycho-analysis is fundamentally different from physics because the phenomena of physics are ahistorical and context independent, I emphasize that they are entirely correct. Physics deals with timeless forms of matter that appeared early in the evolution of the universe. As opposed to the phenomena of biology, the phenomena of physics are universal, independent of their location in space and time (context). One of the most important properties of the electron is that each electron is indistinguishable from all other electrons in the universe—a property that has as one consequence the periodic table of the chemical elements. The timeless universality of inanimate matter allows the construction of the great general laws of nature, of which physics can be justifiably proud.

As for Grünbaum's presentation of the physics of the so-called complete electromagnetic field and the hysteresis loop of a permanent magnet as counterexamples, I can in this space only reiterate the fact that there is no cumulative history in these systems as there is with DNA in its cellular environment. At any single point in time and space, the electromagnetic field created by a moving charge depends only on the position, velocity, and acceleration of the electric charge at a single previous time. Grünbaum's mistake is to assign historical significance to the fact that a specification of the electromagnetic field at every point in space at a given time—the so-called complete field—requires a knowledge of the past trajectory of the charge. At no point in space-time is the electric field cumulative. As for the hysteresis loop in permanent magnets, as I said previously, a piece of iron is