What if the big bang singularity is not the "beginning" of existence?
The initial singularity was not located "anywhere" nor at "any specific time". Temporo-spatiality applies to the universe as we know it, that is - after the big bang, after expansion, after entropy increased, where those dimensions came into play.
So where is the singularity? When is the singularity? If it is not in any specific location nor at any specific time, how can we say it "precedes" the big bang or "began" the universe. In what dimension would the singularity exist. Does it still exist?
For me an alternative explanation to newtonian mechanical physics could be a good fit. Perhaps, the singularity from which everything arises, is in a superposition with reality. That is, a double state, in one state the universe exists as a singularity, in the other it exists in the state we are familiar with, with causality and dimensions.
So where is the singularity? When is the singularity? If it is not in any specific location nor at any specific time, how can we say it "precedes" the big bang or "began" the universe. In what dimension would the singularity exist. Does it still exist?
For me an alternative explanation to newtonian mechanical physics could be a good fit. Perhaps, the singularity from which everything arises, is in a superposition with reality. That is, a double state, in one state the universe exists as a singularity, in the other it exists in the state we are familiar with, with causality and dimensions.
Comments (164)
Does it apply to the whole universe? Where and when is the whole universe located?
You are noting the limitations of materialistic traditional conventional language, for expressing immaterial novel unconventional conjectures of philosophy. In materialistic physics, everything is immanent, in time, in space. But in speculative philosophy, our minds are free to explore transcendent dimensions, such as the "time before Time". :smile:
PS___The speculative mathematics of String Theory found 10 or 11 dimensions to be necessary for their numbers to add-up. As ideal figments of Logic, it didn't matter "when" or "where" those dimensions were located in the "real" world. When & where does Mathematics exist?
PPS___For my own musings, I imagine the Singularity (associated with Big Bang) not as a space-time object, but as the mathematical definition (e.g. program) of a Potential (not yet actual) universe. This is a philosophical conjecture, not a scientific theory. It "still exists", as a general concept, whenever someone thinks of the Source or Cause of the Cosmic Bang that created the space-time we know and love.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/physicists/stephen-hawking3.htm#:~:text=Hawking%20likened%20his%20no%2Dboundary,you%20reach%20the%20South%20Pole.
In sum: modern cosmology accounts only for the development of the universe and, in its quantum gravity formulation, calls into question that it had a "beginning" (or that the BB was "the beginning of space and time"). Just as the Earth has no "edge", the universe might have had no beginning-point (i.e. "singularity") according to James Hartle, Stephen Hawking et al.
Some years ago, when Lawrence Krauss published A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing those who are well versed in both philosophy and physics were highly critical. They pointed out that his "nothing" was not nothing. Despite the title what he described is a universe from something,
Well, in math a singularity is roughly where a function goes haywire, but your interpretation is interesting.
(Pure mathematics I have dabbled with suggests the origins of the universe might never have had a "beginning point" in time, and that - in this weird perspective - virtually anything might have set up a causal chain at any point in early enough time.)
:100:
I am familiar with the mathematical definition. But some Futurists have borrowed the term for other applications, such as a technological Singularity where human tech "goes haywire", and may begin to dominate its creators.
As an Originist though, I was referring to the speculative non-mathematical philosophical notion of the Big Bang Singularity, as a creation event, to explain how Space-Time mysteriously emerged from Infinity-Eternity. Yet, a somewhat less inscrutable way to look at the inexplicable emergence of something-from-nothingness is to imagine a more familiar scenario.
For example, picture the Mathematical Singularity as a simple Algorithm, serving as the kernel of a program for creating a Cosmos via computational evolution. Energy/Causation was provided by the teleological Intention (goal, output) of the program, and Matter was defined numerically in the initial setup. In this story, the physical world is the computer which processes simple mathematical (and-or-not) functions into a recursive process of addition, subtraction, and multiplication of bits into bytes and gazillobytes of complex information, and of physical forms.
It's just a conjecture, but I find it interesting as an alternative to other pre-bang fantasies, such as Many Worlds, and Multiverses. :smile:
Where was matter before the big bang?
The initial singularity is a singularity predicted by some models of the Big Bang theory to have existed before the Big Bang and thought to have contained all the energy and spacetime of the Universe.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/605384/where-was-matter-before-the-big-bang
Physical Relationships among Matter, Energy and Information :
The three concepts matter, energy and information are related through scientific laws. Matter and energy relations are more thoroughly understood than relations involving information. At the level of data or signal difference is suggested as a more elementary term than information.
https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.gwu.edu/dist/d/257/files/2016/11/2007.SRBS_.MEI_.2col-2brsfmf.pdf
Quoting Banno
On an opinion-swapping Philosophy Forum, when amateur philosophers pretend to pontificate on material Physics, they are doing Science without the Matter, and Math without the Numbers. :nerd:
Quoting Gnomon
I would never weigh in on the content of empirical assertions by physicists and characterize my opinions as philosophical. I can only claim a philosophical stance when I remain neutral in this regard, that is, when I am careful not to offer any opinion on the veracity of facts generated within physics, and instead focus on the pre-empirical presuppositions grounding the way questions are posed in physics.
You should study a bit more physics to understand it.
Your questions are like when people where wondering where was the end of the planet earth because they thought it was flat... then we discovered it is a sphere and the question does not make sense anymore... same for your questions, make no sense!
That sounds like a reasonable philosophical approach to physical controversies. But some TPF posters challenge philosophical conjectures by insisting on verified empirical evidence. However, such hypotheses may presuppose later empirical evidence. For example, bending of light by gravity was a rational conclusion from Einstein's mathematical theory of gravitation, pending future astronomical confirmation.
Besides, "pre-empirical presuppositions" in mathematics are called "axioms" : presumed to be logically true until proven wrong by finding a black swan. Perhaps speculative philosophy has more in common with Platonic mathematics than with Pragmatic physics. :smile:
Axiom :
In formal mathematics an axiom is a formula or schema of formulas that is stipulated as true (and therefore not requiring proof). Axioms are the counterpart in mathematics of suppositions, assumptions, or premises in ordinary syllogistic logic.
https://platonicrealms.com/encyclopedia/axiom
Yes. I take his potent & creative nothingness argument as supportive of my own interpretation of BB theory : that Causal Energy and Limiting Laws necessarily pre-existed the Bang --- not physically, but Platonically.
Non-empirical Philosophical conjectures, such as Multiverse and Many Worlds, also seem to assume that "something" preceded the beginning of our little space-time bubble. However, they imply that the "something" was simply more-of-the-same in a tower-of-turtles all the way down to an eternal Material Motherlode. Ironically, in our part of the ontic bubble, ever-changing matter seems to be anything but eternal. So, a more likely candidate for everlasting existence may be Platonic Logic or Tegmark's Mathematics. :nerd:
Indeed and would agree with them in the sense that the concept of "nothing" is nothing without something. Excuse the pun.
They're relative. Its like trying to define light without darkness. You can't. Definition itself is distinction, delineation, separation, contrast. It needs at the very least A and B.
I agree with this as outlined in the OP.
However from what was space, time and thermodynamics being created from? For me the answer is Potential. As potential is not contingent on anything else but itself to "potentiate" the manifestation of emergent properties - such as time, space and thermodynamics.
As in potential is the the sum of all products. The big bang therefore would be the process of potential converting into time, energy, space and matter etc.
Entropy and thermodynamics would be the unwinding of potential into the manifest.
The ability to be (potential) and being (the realised) are a couple. Opposites of a sort.
I'm not surprised that a singularity is where a function goes haywire. Because a function requires components: input, function and output. A singularity by definition is singular, what it "does"and what it" is" are unified as one thing. There are no variables, no additional factors, as again variables are multiplicitous by nature of being variables. They vary, and so cannot be one singular entity.
Potential is that which is and does. It is because it does and it does because it is. A cartesian circle of causality because function and being are one and the same. Inseparable
Allow me to make it mathematical.
The singularity state = 0.
The manifest state (the universe) = +1 - 1.
Both are equivalent to one another.
+1 - 1 can be derived from 0 and 0 can be derived from +1 - 1. One state is a relativistic couple. Like 2 particles that can cancel eachother out/annihilate. The other is a singular entity that can only interact with itself, as its singular, there's nothing else it could interact with.
And the only interaction it can make of itself is derivation/ separation into mutual couples of opposites. As many as you like, so long as they're equal and opposite and all sum up to 0.
A superposition.
Per Kant:
"Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the minds nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally. (Ak 2: 403)"
This is also his view of time.
We require that events occur in space and time in order to be coherent, but those attributes are not objective properties but are subjective.
Questions about what happened before there were time or location fail not because they preexisted the physical world, but because they are entirely incoherent.
And this:Quoting Benj96
remains gobbledegook.
I will add speculations.
In zero dimensions there would be no where or when. So a when and a where can only be defined and begin when the four dimensions exist and can be.
Therefore, whatever expansion that exist within this universe, it expands into "nothing", and with nothing comes no space, no where and when.
This could possibly mean that we are expanding "into ourselves", as an expansion into no dimensions mean that those particles and universal laws have no direction, no where and when to expand into.
It might be that because of this non-dimensionality that we are "moving into", it becomes a feedback loop that can only move particles at the edge of our universe back into our universe since it's the only space and time position for a particle to exist in.
Speculatory, this may be part of the quantum weirdness that we experience; that the influx of looped particles/energy in this feedback, interfere with the particles actually there. It could then support why a singularity happened in the first place, either because it has always happened as a feedback loop, or that within this feedback loop, a special event, an extremely unlikely quantum event, intensified the feedback so much (like a mic/speaker sound feedback), that looped particles and regular particles fuses together, like matter and antimatter, and initiate a big bang.
So that at certain quantum states the universe basically "resets" itself. It could happen right after the big bang, or it could take billions of billions of years, it could happen the next second, or it happened a second ago with this universe being improbably close in causal probability to the universe that was existing before this one but that didn't last past this specific point. Infinite.
Of course, this is extremely speculatory and close to "fan fiction" writing of the nature of reality and the universe. But possibly the only non-paradoxical solutions to our reality and existence "beginning" anywhere in something that doesn't have "anywheres" or "beginnings", is if our reality feedbacks and loops into itself.
It may be that we are living within an ontological paradox consisting of variables that in a very specific condition resets itself and begins anew.
If not that, and with further speculation, it might be that we are an actual, literal bubble of a universe. Since energy and matter are one and the same, it may be that there's a dimensionless pure energy, a feedbacked energy that is fundamentally infinite, and from our perspective exists outside of our reality and universe. We know that light is the absolute speed limit for us, so maybe light is the point at which matter reaches the edge of the universe and our reality, and returns to this existence of infinite energy. When this energy slows down, it forms into matter and our dimensions, a form of lag of energy. And what do we know that "lags" energy? The Higgs field. It is part of why matter exists at all.
Could it then, in this scenario, be that we have infinite energy forming bubbles of Higgs fields that slows down energy trapped by the field, and in turn forming matter. And when these bubbles form, they form like inflations of energy slowing down and becoming matter. If that energy is infinite, due to a dimensionless energy not having a beginning, end or position, then there is an infinite possibility of events like inflations of this slowed energy occurring, and they would therefor occur constantly as there's not time.
All of this is unprovable with what we know in science right now. But just think of how the confirmation of the Higgs field opened up new possible hypotheses closer to validity. We don't know how close we are to new understandings of the universe, but it has only been a few years since the confirmation of the Higgs field, and just this year we confirmed gravitational waves.
So the time for all current theoretical physicists to adapt to new standards, work together and produce new theories haven't been long at all based on these confirmations being so recent. There might be theories right now being formulated and calculated based on these confirmations that we will hear about in just a few years.
For me, personally, I find this extremely exciting. That there's been confirmations of so many, "thought to be impossible to confirm"-theories means that new theoretical breakthroughs are more probable to occur than they've been for a long time now.
Given that sound arguments cannot be raised on the following basis, does it ever make sense to 'speculatively interpret' (i.e. philosophically, or categorically, generalize from) falsified or untestable claims about the universe / nature? If so, sir, explain why you think so. Thanks.
This is sort of what I was getting at yes. Like a torus. A kind of self folding geometric process, expanding into itself where spacetime is something of a strange fabric that is both contracting into and expanding from itself. From different relativistic vantage points. We are having issues with locking in on a definitive constant if expansion as there is disparity between measurements through time. It's strange indeed and yes very speculative
Precisely. We cannot ignore our own consciousness and the limitations that places on objective measurements. The universe wouldn't surprise me at all if it is fundamentally incoherent to it's own content (for example observers) which are restricted to experiencing time and space from a falsely standardised pov.
Please elaborate. I find lack of argument in favour of "just so" arguments weak. If you want to go with gobbledegook then please explain exactly why it's gobbledegook.
. I understand a lot of what I say can seems non intuitive
or abstract/obscure. It's difficult to articulate such metaphysical concepts with language based on a material world. And I'm happy to accept fault or error but only after you reason with me your own views so I can gain insight into why I may be talking arse.
But "that's wrong" is not an argument, it's an unqualified conclusion.
Consider this equation-free gloss on the Hartle-Hawking No-Boundary proposal (alternative to BB cosmology) ...
https://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/physicists/stephen-hawking3.htm#:~:text=Hawking%20likened%20his%20no%2Dboundary,you%20reach%20the%20South%20Pole.
In sum: modern cosmology accounts only for the development of the universe and, in its quantum gravity formulation, calls into question that it had a "beginning" (or that the BB was "the beginning of space and time"). Just as the Earth has no "edge", the universe might have had no beginning-point (i.e. "singularity") according to James Hartle, Stephen Hawking et al.
I linked to a substantive elaboration from Wolfram MathWorld.
Quoting Christoffer
That's a pretty close analogue. Is it harmless? It's not philosophy, not metaphysics, and not physics.
Yes, there's an epistemic problem to all of this. I'm somewhat knowledgeable about the implications for a number of theories in relativity physics, quantum physics and cosmology. But I do not have extensive knowledge of the math that connects them and their interlinking qualities.
At the same time, physicists and researchers usually work in a "locked in" fashion, in which they spend years focusing on a specific condition to either figure out as theoretical or form tests around established theories. So while they have a dense understanding of a specific part, there's less of a holistic point of view.
And on top of that, what is "outside" our universal bubble might only be possible to form emergent speculations about, since our theories and tests are locked into a universal bubble with defined laws and dimensions. If we lose dimensions or dimensions expand or change outside our universe, how can we form even a basis of a concept other than making creative extrapolations?
It's the same reason why we haven't been able to fully understand the inside of a black hole. The "edge" of our universe is referred to in a similar manner of event horizon, in which the laws and physics of our experienced reality breaks down.
So I think it is important to underline that any form of speculation about what was before the big bang, or what is outside of this universal bubble, is speculation. However rooted these speculations are in existing science, no one can fully claim a theory more valid than another as long as the effort put into it respects what we do know about this universal bubble.
It's also important to remember that creativity has always been part of theoretical physics. Many theories didn't start out as math calculations, they started out as creative reflections on observations and their implications. Einstein imagined a falling man and the relation between falling within a gravitational pull and being in zero gravity and how there's no difference. These weren't math calculations, they were creative concepts that had a rational and logical component that informed a path to conduct further study.
Applying that framework to this, I can never claim truth or validity in the concepts I've written down. But I can be creative, I can inspire new ideas for those who knows the math. Some of it may be nonsense, but some might trigger further thoughts. As long as non-physicists and philosophers understand that what they propose are highly speculative, then that's a good pillar to rest creative ideas upon. To inspire further questions, not to believe they give answers or that others think they are giving answers, but to ignite creative thinking that can inform paths.
What are the basic ideas that formed what I wrote?
The Higgs field slows energy and generate mass. Without the Higgs field, energy would not change over time since there's no friction for said energy to change into mass. So, the question that arise is, where does this Higgs field exist if the spacetime requires the existence of the Higgs field? Without spacetime there's no position, so there wouldn't be any position or point in time where energy would slow down if the position and time is generated out of the very event of slowing down energy within this field.
So if the problem is something from nothing. Then what about the opposite? Instead of nothing, which is essentially infinite in its absolute nothingness and rationally impossible to form anything, what if there's an absolute something? What, based on our understanding of our universe and reality, is the most absolute? That would be infinite energy. Massless energy that is infinitely absolute. A possible idea for how that could be is if there are no dimensions. Then a set of energy that exists without dimensions would exist in on itself, timeless, spaceless, as a feedback loop without beginning or end and no time to change. And within infinity of such zero dimensionality, there would be both infinite room for and lack of room for something to be. Then it's not impossible to imagine why our universe came from en infinitely small point as with no dimensions, size would not matter. And with the inflation of our universe, the big bang, from an infinitely dense point, it immediately started acting as energy slowing down and forming mass. So what is the Higgs field? What if our universe is wrongly defined as something from nothing, and should rather be thought of as a dimensionless Higgs field bubble, and by its dimensionless existence it slows down energy that infinite energy into the emergent reality that is our universal bubble?
This is creative writing and creative thinking that emerges out of the implications of the concepts we already know about. They're not answers, they are meant to inspire new pathways of thought and that's my limit in my ability to contribute to this scientific topic.
Essentially science has always worked best when acting as a pendulum. Swinging into speculation, creativity, fantasy, and then swinging back into verification, testing, research and calculation, to then swing back into creativity, then back into testing.
The most common traits that scientists who make breakthroughs have is that they are also highly creative, while those who are stuck working on the same thing all their life without any breakthroughs are usually never creative and usually act locked down by the conventions of what's already known. Like a writer who's always questioning his own ideas, always scrapping them because they won't fit into a pre-decided ideal.
I thinks it definitionally impossible for an event to occur outside of time and space, considering an event is defined as that which occurs somewhere at some time. If I were to tell you that Event A exists nowhere and it occurred at no time, we'd just say that Event A never occurred.
And yet, and yet, we have flat earthers. No pics from the edge? Interesting. :joke:
(or an instable kind of "nothing" a la Krauss & Co). Penrose's idea of cyclic eons seems interesting but I suppose it is too soon to pass it for knowledge.
I think this thread shows that mathematics is insufficient for explaining the reality of physical existence. That's why we've developed philosophy.
The philosophy is being done by the scientists, and some would call it speculation. Philosophical ideas seem to require ream after ream of supporting prattle. Physicists have better things to do. :cool:
This seems to be self-contradictory. If it is supporting the ideas, how could it be called "prattle"? That reams of material is required to support the philosophical ideas is a good thing, isn't it? That support is what makes the philosophy sound.
And without a hierarchy of moral values which only philosophy can provide, your own proposition itself, that "physicists have better things to do", is meaningless prattle. Such a proposition would require reams of support to justify it as sound.
Point scored for philosophy. :up:
While I concede that Science itself is not free from biases, but this is one area where the formal position is pretty respectable. This position defines the confirmed existence of the "Big Bang Theory" by the multiple stages of rapid expansion that we know the universe experienced in its first few seconds, days, and years. So we can (and do) know that the Big Bang happened immediately after the birth of the universe, but our knowledge can only get asymptomatically close to "t=0". Our current mathematical models extrapolate the existence of a singularity at t=0, but in every case where they come up, a singularity represents a transition point where our theories (or maybe just our current system of mathematics, or both) stop working and, as far as we can tell, no longer describe reality.
Not only do we not know if or how reality might work on the "other side" of any singularity, we don't know if or how reality might work *at* a singularity.
My point is that Science communicators may talk about the exciting, other-worldly implications of the extrapolating our mathematical models, the actual dominant position in the scientific community is that we can't say anything for sure about the universe before t = 10^-32 seconds or something like that.
Not only is it possible that we don't actually understand the birth of the universe, it is an established fact that we do not.
There is no shortage of scientific speculation about how the universe began, and what may have come before it, like:
- the implication of string theory (or maybe it was M-theory specifically) that two universes (or "branes") colliding within the multiverse could create a Big Bang event,
- the possibility of a "Big Crunch" end of the universe resulting in a collapse that would pull a universe back into a singularity which then inflates into a new Big Bang (and could do so over and over, maybe even indefinitely),
- I forget the formal name for it (and some of the other specifics), but the idea that the quantum foam that makes up our spacetime may have a Ground Energy level lower than we think, and the energy level of our spacetime itself may drop, thus resetting all universal constants and changing all current physical laws (which I think is somehow an even more drastic "reset" than the Big Crunch and Bang possibility),
- or the comparatively mundane idea that the difficulty of nailing down the ultimate reason for time-asymmetries that are not also space-asymmetries exists because time has a capacity to be spontaneously reversed, on occasion (I think this one is pretty unpopular, but honestly I'm running out of ideas).
However, while these kinds of theories are potentially consistent what we do know, no one yet knows how to prove or disprove any of them.
So my own conclusion - which I hope does not come across as a cop-out - is that the ultimate origin of our universe is unknown, and is potentially unknowable. And what (if anything) came before may have been some kind of reality that was a lot like ours - but considering that the nature of the universe at t=0 is fundamentally different to what our reality currently is, it seems very reasonable to expect that anything on the other side is likely to have been radically different to our current reality. Maybe even so different that we wouldn't even be able to understand it as anything "real".
There's a quote from J. B. S. Haldane that I like: "Not only is the universe queerer than we suppose - it may be queerer than we can suppose."
I thought you and others might enjoy knowing that most physicists regard String Theorists and other specialists in unprovable/unfalsifiable theories as not really being "physicists", and actually being "mathematical philosophers". ;)
It's a distinction that is not usually made with disrespect (philosophy is a huge part of foundational physics) - but as more of a demarcation of what should be allowed to be called "science".
What do you think of proposals such as Roger Penrose's CCC, with his supporting evidence of 'Hawking points?' My quals in physics only go as far as year 1, of my BSc(Hons) in Computing Science, (over 30 years ago). Do you assign any significant credence to any of the cyclical or oscillating universe proposals?
Quoting Jaded Scholar
As a 'fan' of string theory, I found this quite interesting. I wonder how someone like Brian Greene would respond to it, (if he has not already.)
I found this, based on a google search:
String Theory is currently not falsifiable. It does not make any testable predictions, and in the strictly positivist popperian view, it couldn't even be regarded as science. However, some physicists argue that string theory is falsifiable if an experiment shows quantum mechanics fails.
How would you respond to the last sentence, would your response be anything more than 'yeah ..... IF!'
Consider that every time we make a temporal measurement there is necessarily a t=0, the point at which the measurement starts. And, as you explain, "our knowledge can only get asymptomatically close to 't=0'". Because of this, the very same problem which we have in modeling the Big Bang, exists when we model any temporal reality. In Newtonian mechanics it manifests as an infinite acceleration at the precise moment a force is applied, and in wave mechanics it manifests as the uncertainty of the Fourier transform.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
So this is the problem with any supposed "point in time", it is a singularity and we cannot understand what exists at a point in time. Accepted conventions place the limit at about the Planck length, but that is dependent on the conventions.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Likewise, as explained above, we do not understand the universe at the present, at every moment of passing time.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I would classify that as metaphysical speculation. The issue with this speculation which is derived from mathematicians and physicists, is that it tends to rely heavily on the reality of mathematical ideals and geometrical figures. This is known as Pythagorean, or Platonic, idealism.
As a retired mathematician, a "mathematical philosopher" resonates more as someone indulging in mathematical foundations - a topic at the heart of the subject, but one many if not most practitioners have little concern over.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree.
I hope you stick around. Actual scientists are a rarity here, as are math people. The intersections of science and philosophy can be an entertaining circus. :cool:
Overall, I've never found cyclical models particularly appealing, for two (somewhat personal) reasons:
1. It feels... almost anthropocentric to focus too much on the idea that what exists before/after our universe is just a kind of continuation of our universe. It feels a bit like we're just recreating the 19th(?) century assumption that our universe is static and eternal (maybe because that saves us from imagining something different?).
2. Almost all cyclical models I've heard about rely on the assumption that each iteration ends with a big crunch or a big rip (sorry, I'm gonna make any interested parties wiki some things rather than spend even longer defining terms). But the experimental measurements of our universe keep indicating that our fate is *probably* exactly in between those, and unlikely to encounter either. It's very possible that that's not the case, but I think it's too coincidental to not be seen as meaningful that as our measurements get better and better, they generally keep telling us "Yeah, we could be on either side of this knife edge, but it still seems like we're exactly in the middle". So while I think we shouldn't assume every other universe is like we think ours is, it seems even more tenuous to assume that every other universe is unlike ours.
That said, I actually wasn't familiar with Penrose's CCC theory. I've read a bit about it, and can't claim to fully understand it yet, but it's probably my favourite cyclical model so far. It doesn't have problem #2 above, and while it doesn't have any supporting evidence yet (I learned that the "Hawking points" evidence has been refuted as something that is explainable by our current universe's cosmology), the fact that it is potentially provable/falsifiable... doesn't necessarily make it more or less likely to be true, but it does make me like it more.
Quoting universeness
Haha, thank you for bringing that up - I hadn't heard that argument before. Your guess at my response is pretty accurate! I've given it some thought, and the best comparison I can think of is that we could say "If someone proves that mathematics itself is broken, that would mean that String Theory is too! So technically, it is falsifiable."
Admittedly, that example gives Quantum Mechanics too much credit (and String Theory too little) but the above statement is much closer to this than it is to any serious claim of falsifiability.
Interesting. That connotation is pretty much what I meant, just with fewer steps - as crucial as mathematics is to literally every area of physics, the only areas where it gets close to centre stage are the foundational ones, generally.
Quoting jgill
Thanks! :)
And I completely agree. I've often enjoyed being able to expand or refine philosophies that touch on my area of expertise, and look forward to finding out how reasonable/full-of-it those ideas are. At any rate, I'm sure it'll be more worthwhile than just privately scoffing at, say, William James, and never finding out if I'm justified in doing so.
Curious, are you familiar with Max Tegmarks ideas on Levels 1-4 multiverses? His general metaphysical theory is that the physical world (what we human animals perceive anyways) is basically mathematical structure all the way down. He argues further, that ours is a computable mathematical world though this gets thorny when considering Godels paradox.
He has ideas on consciousness too, and how its about bring a mathematical pattern similar to Tononis ideas of integrated information theory or phi, but thats probably stepping further out of his specialty. Perhaps thats needed though.
Ditto!
I tried to read the actual published papers from Penrose and his team but they soon overwhelmed my grasp of physics. I was intrigued by the point that the 4 hawking points he is confident of, are residuals of large galaxy clusters from a previous aeon, and are supported by the WMAP and Planck project data.
I watched the debate between him and Alan Guth:
Really worth the watch, if you have not already watched it. Guth talks about alternative explanations for Hawking points but I think Roger insists that the evidence for these alternatives is not as robust as his evidence for the cause of these hawking points.
I can follow the general logic of CCC and the 'heat death' of the universe via the entropy model.
The difference between 'heat death' and 'big rip' being:
Heat Death is the slow dissipation of all matter into entropy and the Big Rip is the tearing apart of all matter and the fabric of spacetime.
The bit I struggle with, conceptually, is the final 'state' before the 'new Aeon/Big Bang,' begins.
The universe has expanded to the point where any remaining content (energy) is unable to do work.
At this point, the vast size of the universe loses all significance (whatever that means?) and the perception of 'big' and 'small' become indistinguishable. At that moment, time resets to zero and a new big band/Aeon begins? Any thought about that?
Could you also help me understand a little more as to why any loop quantum gravity quanta could not turn out to be just another vibrating string state?
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Does this mean you favour the many worlds proposal, supported by such as Sean Carroll and Alan Guth et al.
I love listening to Max Tegmark, he is a fascinating thinker. I think he is, however considered very fringe, by the physics/cosmology community. I have watched a few youtube videos about his 4 levels of multiverse. Including this discussion between him and Brian Greene:
All I can honestly say is that I prefer the musings of max, regarding reality, compared to the insistences that theists claim are facts about the universe/multiverse. They will always add 'yeah and if Max turns out to be correct, then that's just the way god made it.'
Exemplified by the theist who recently quoted a line at me, from 'all things bright and beautiful,' when I asked for a comment about his god, and the proposal that a multiverse existed.
"Well, if the multiverse exists, then 'The lord god made them all'" :broken:
A lot of scientists other than neuroscientists seem to be jumping on and off the 'consciousness' bandwagon. Have you watched any of the youtube stuff with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff on consciousness and quantum mechanics? Such as:
I want to give a disclaimer that your comment irked me. I'm not certain exactly why, therefore I'm not sure if it was for a good reason or a bad one, hence the disclaimer.
I think it's because I think everything you said is generally on the right track, but is either not entirely accurate or not entirely applicable to what *I* said.
For instance:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When I say "t=0" in this case, I'm using it as a shorthand for the much more difficult-to-characterise hypothetical boundary where our mathematical models interpolate the existence of spacetime itself, as we know it, to exist on this side, and to not be able to exist on the other side. This is very different from what you are talking about; the arbitrary assignment of t=0 on a number line to define the subset of a Cartesian plane that we care about. Though I admit that I did not communicate that at all (in fact, I deliberately avoided it).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This claim about Newtonian mechanics does not make sense. It confused me so much that I honestly think you can't be as wrong as I think and you are more likely to be referring to something I'm not getting. One of the biggest benefits of Newtonian mechanics over pre-Newtonian classical mechanics was that the second law eliminated the artefact of infinite acceleration (except for massless particles).
But I am confident that in your next line you really are just misinterpreting the nature of wave mechanics and/or Fourier transformation. The temporal uncertainty you refer to here has nothing to do with time itself, and is a straightforward result of transformation between any given noncommutative dimensions - none of which are *necessarily* time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't want to say that it's not worthwhile to argue about the physical reality/unreality of "a point in time", and reference the suggested limits of its quantisation, but I do think that it's not actually relevant to what I was talking about.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, I agree, but do not think this is actually meaningful here, and comes across as actively un-meaningful. Along the lines of: "Sure, we don't understand the Big Bang, but like, do we really understand ANYTHING, man?".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am happy to end on this note, because although your specific criticism is several centuries out of date, I agree completely with the general spirit of this objection.
Most modern physics is grounded in the mathematical framework of Complex Theory, which requires having no hierarchy of validity - real and imaginary numbers have no distinction except the planes they define (sadly, though, the label of "imaginary numbers" has still stuck, despite that name being given to them not by their creators, but by critics who wanted to ridicule the idea of unphysical numbers), and the dimensionalities of objects and planes that get discussed most are discussed because they're most interesting and strange. In Physics, we get mathematical results that can be called "unphysical", but I don't recall any such qualification given a single time in my Complex Theory lectures.
But even in Physics, there is no arrogance behind this label - such a finding is not unwelcome, but rather, is often the most exciting thing. Many unphysical results are known to model phenomena that really exist, and we just don't fully understand yet - like quantum tunnelling, where a particle can bypass any otherwise impenetrable barrier if the circumstances allow it to have a speed that is an imaginary number.
So I'm incredibly confident that the problem of Platonic idealism has been solved, as far as it applies to our mathematical and scientific culture.
But humans still have limits to our imagination, even if we have pushed those limits farther than our predecessors.
We can imagine living on a mobius strip or a cyclical universe. But can we imagine what an "imaginary number" would even mean in the world of our every day existence? What does an "imaginary velocity" actually represent? Or what would our perceptions be like if they could undergo a Fourier transformation (or other dimensional transformation) just like our numbers?
There are clearly limits to what we can imagine. And it follows that there are also greater limits to reality than what we can currently imagine. Mathematics provides a powerful bridge between what we can imagine and what is real. But I think we should assume that there are limits on what mathematics we can imagine, and on how well the nature of the universe itself can fit within any framework constructed from our invented mathematics.
I think it is both safe and responsible to assume that one of the fundamental barriers to our full understanding of the universe is that mathematics itself may not yet be sophisticated enough.
Whatever the gaps are, they are not what you described - if we could label them, we could have fixed them by now. But I think the general principle that our blind spots are probably rooted in our difficulty understanding things that don't exist in our macroscopic perceptions of the world (and/or the often-accompanying unwillingness to accept such things as potentially "real") - which I take to be part of the spirit behind your objection - is a very, very good guess.
I have heard about Tegmark's 4 levels of multiverses. It seems like a worthwhile classification system for how different kinds of mathematical models nest within each other, but it's never really struck me as anything more significant than that.
I appreciate that Tegmark seems dedicated to anti-dualism (I was about to say "Monism", but after a quick search, I think that term has more baggage than I want to accidentally reference), especially given the human history of dualistic metaphysics always[citation needed] smuggling in some kind of cultural virtue disguised as a law of nature, and given the power of mathematics to describe reality more accurately than literally any non-mathematical approach. But I think he goes a little too far, and in doing so, glosses over too many flaws and incompatibilities within the mathematical models that he just assumes are going to work themselves out at some point (or so I gather).
The power of modern maths is unprecedented, and I am happy to have science popularisers talking about that, but ... less happy to have them included in academia, where I think more people should be realistically considering that some of our gaps could be the result of fundamental problems with mathematics itself.
Similarly, his (and Tononi's) ideas on consciousness seem like they provide interesting opportunities to quantify our observations in a sophistocated way, but if they are useful at all, I think it will be in identifying the specific kinds of mathematics we observe, and allowing us to use that to infer the underlying mechanisms - and nothing like the validation of the metaphysics used to construct those models.
Thanks - I will check out that debate between Penrose and Guth.
Quoting universeness
To be honest, I still do not understand it either. I have read a little more about it, and I'm pretty sure that it would take a lot more work than I'm able to put in (certainly in the short term). I'm a quantum physicist, and while I have a passable understanding of general relativity, the only time where I have ever felt like I fully understood general relativity was during the year where I intensively studied it in my Honours degree. It takes a LOT of work to really get your head around space and time being the same thing, and gain an intuition for what the dynamics are that the field equations are describing (it did for me, anyway), and I feel like that's basically what I'd need to do to understand how that conformal boundary trick works.
Quoting universeness
This one, I actually can!
String theory was really born out of QM particle physics, where the quantisation of universal forces (like gravity) results in them being mediated by messenger particles (the messenger particle for gravity being the graviton, as I'm sure you know). Obviously, in String Theory, these are constructed from strings using more complex laws, but still, these messenger particles and the strings themselves are objects that travel through spacetime (and/or other available degrees of freedom).
But LQG is based on a modification of general relativity, and in GR, gravity is a force both created and enacted by spacetime itself. In a sense, it's not even accurate to describe gravity as a "force" in this setting. LQG attempts to unify GR with QM by quantising spacetime itself. So LQG quanta are not just the mediators of gravity, they are also, in a way, the origin of gravity and the medium in which its effects occur.
So the results they generate should be the same, but the mathematical mechanisms they use to do so are almost mutually exclusive. If one of them really exists, the other won't.
Quoting universeness
I'm sorry, but I don't. I enjoy scientific speculation about what multiverses might exist, but in much the same way that I enjoy other speculation of what's technically possible, within what we know. (One of my favourite speculations is Feynmann's idea that, because a positron effectively behaves the same as a time-reversed electron, it's technically possible that what we perceive as annihilation events are actually time-reversal events, and there is actually only one electron in the entire universe, just flipping between going backwards and forwards through time on a number of events somewhere between 10^80 and infinity - which would explain why all electrons are identical.)
In terms of actual interpretations of quantum mechanics, I'm fairly vanilla, and am most happy with the Copenhagen interpretation. Overall, I'm not really a fan of manyworlds interpretations of QM because they seem to be based on a desire to eliminate the reality of quantum uncertainty (the original german term translates more closely to "indeterminability" than "uncertainty", which I would prefer, but I don't want to be confusing by not using the accepted name). I think it's kind of profound to observe that quantum randomness seems to be a real thing - that the universe doesn't bother figuring out the result of *any* random event until some physical process needs to actually use that result. There have been several interpretations of QM that seek to eliminate this unintuitive feature, the earliest being Einstein's Local Hidden Variable theory, which was experimentally disproven in 1987 when we were first able to confirm the existence of quantum entanglement. But many other theories - like manyworlds, pilot wave theory/other Bohmian interpretations, and certainly several others I can't remember - are still based on this same idea that we need to find some way around the "unnatural" implication that quantum randomness and quantum nonlocality are real (those quote marks apply to Einstein's description, not just me transcribing air-quotes ... in this case). In the case of manyworlds (Everett's original version, and most, but not all, other variants), this is done by simply shifting the causality of the dice-roll: the universe assigns "real" values to every aspect of a quantum object at its creation, and doesn't actually procrastinate on deciding any of them only at the point where they are measured - it actually just creates a new universe for every possible value. The randomness that gets resolved at measurement is not quantum uncertainty - it's simply the uncertainty of which one of the infinite number of universes we are in. This seems to me like a whole lot more complication purely for the sake of not accepting that reality itself is not as "real" as we like to think it is.
I think that being a good scientist has the same fundamental ingredients as being a good philosopher - to be always be open to the possibility that you are wrong about something (or everything), and to not complicate things any more (or any less) than is necessary. So I much prefer interpretations that accept the possible reality of bizarre mathematical implications, and don't spend any mathematical overhead on merging those implications into a kind of reality that is more intuitive to humans (instead of actually challenging those intuitions).
What I\m talking about is better understood through principles of calculus. The "t=0" represents the limit, and the problem is in approaching the limit. We use a t=0 for any type of temporal measurement, so any measurement made very close to t=0, i.e. a short period of time, has that problem.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Suppose something is at rest. Then it is moving because it has been subjected to a force. There is a point in time, when it changes from being at rest, to being in motion. At this point in time, its rate of acceleration must be infinite.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I believe the uncertainty is based in a time/frequency relation.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Exactly, our understanding of anything is incomplete, therefore deficient, lacking,
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I don't think so. Set theory in general, presupposes that numbers are objects, Platonic Idealism. This results in numerous problems starting with the empty set, and the infinite set, and stuff like Russel's paradox. Set theory is relatively modern, the problems have not been solved only made more complex by attempts to cover them up through the introduction of more and more axioms.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I agree with this to an extent. But I do not think that it is sophistication which makes good math, I think the opposite. Good math is based in simple principles with universal applicability. When the principles are lacking in universal applicability, instead of throwing them away and starting at the bottom with more applicable ones, the tendency is just to adapt the old, add a few new axioms to make things work in the difficult areas. This works for a while, until new problems present themselves, so new axioms are added. The mathematics gets more and more sophisticated, but the sophistication is not evidence of good principles, but the contrary, it is evidence of basic principles which are faulty, not universally applicable. So they require addendums to work in different areas.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
The problem is that no one wants to fix them. The principles work in most situations, so they do not need fixing. Then for the places where they do not work, keep using them and add some more principles to make them sort of work. Look, thousands of years ago Pythagoras label pi and the diagonal of a square as "irrational". To me, this indicates that there is something fundamentally wrong with the dimensional representation of space. But who cares, the principles work, and when it turns out that real circles in the real world are not actually circular, but ellipses and things like that, we just adapt "the circle" and pi principles to make them work in the real world. But you cannot say that these problems haven't been labeled.
I have never thought of boundaries of spacetime. Since both space and time are in essence metaphysical concepts through which we nevertheless function, the idea of "boundaries" might refer mostly to mathematical models. The Big Bang being possibly an exception. MU has argued before about the notion of a point in time, and his arguments are similar to those of Peter Lynds, who denies the existence of such points in favor of duration or intervals, somewhat like Bergson.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
That's something for me to chew on. Fifty years ago I wrote a paper concerning limits of infinite compositions of Mobius transformations. There was a strong connection with analytic continued fractions, and these can be used somewhere in physics. Later, I found that such expansions might be accelerated or analytically continued through fixed points. If you think infinite compositions of complex functions theory might find a niche in physics, let me know!
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Perhaps. But ArXiv.org receives hundreds of original math papers each day, every day. 26,000 math topics in Wikipedia. However, applications to the "real" world is another matter. I never went that direction.
Since you both brought up consciousness, I wanted to talk about that too - but also wanted to stress from the beginning that while I have been fascinated by this subject since first-year university, I have not done any actual research in this field, and the views I hold are mostly the result of recreational reading and not actual scientific experience. But now that I been responsible and warned you of the possibility that this might be a Sermon from Mount Stupid:
I think my own views on consciousness have been shaped most by two things:
1. A series of philosophers and physicists that can't seem to analyse the concept without introducing something innately "special", and devolving into ridiculous theories like panpsychism.
2. A single biology paper I read last year about sleep (after that ranty intro about intellectual honesty, I guess I should admit that I read a series of articles on it and just skimmed the paper itself).
https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-sleeps-brainless-creatures-shed-light-why-we-slumber
A key quote being:
I think if its alive, it sleeps, says Paul Shaw, a neuroscientist from Washington University in St. Louis. The earliest life forms were unresponsive until they evolved ways to react to their environment, he suggests, and sleep is a return to the default state. I think we didnt evolve sleep, we evolved wakefulness.
This was one of those revelations to me that I had never come close to realising, but once I heard it, it made perfect sense to me.
Conscious interaction with the world is a more resource-intensive and more adaptive extension of unconscious interaction with the world, observed only in living things, and - if you allow a generously broad definition - is observed in all living things, to an extent. The thing I find beautiful about this interpretation is that I think it fits so well into what life itself is: a complex chemical reaction that is particularly persistent because it is particularly adaptive. In that sense, consciousness is just "the same, but moreso".
So I think the question "what is consciousness?" can only be answered as an extension of the question "what is life?". We have some definitions for that, but they're all incredibly post-hoc, and I have found them to be either so specific as to be meaningless or so vague as to be meaningless (as much as I like it, I do have to admit the the one I gave in the last paragraph does fall into the latter category).
The question "what is life?" is an enormous one that I think does not get as much attention as it deserves - maybe because it's so easy to be shuffled into the category of "I don't know but I know it when I see it", and there's not much attention to be gained by treating it like a mystery just because we can't actually define it well. Whatever the reason, I think it makes complete sense that any complete definition of consciousness will involve little to no extra "specialness" than a complete definition of life - and if I'm right, then it's a sign of pretty slow progress that our culture is supposedly on the brink of creating artificial life forms, yet our discourse is focussed almost entirely on consciousness instead of life.
Of course I may not be right. But of course, being human, I think I probably am.
Along with its bed mate? :cool:
Could you elaborate a bit on that on what that means conceptually? Are we just talking the inability to unify GR math and QM math?
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Indeed, this seems to be the weird difference. What does Tegmark mean that the unvierse IS math rather than just a model of the terrain? What does it mean for mathematical structures to be "real"?
From the perspective of a mathematician, I would say examples exist. Not necessarily physical. If a function is "real" (not a real function) examples within mathematics must exist.
Physics? Well, we will see . . .
For me, it's such a pleasant breeze of cool fresh air on a hot and sticky day, to read your posts.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
That's not something I had considered before. I assumed some string or perhaps superstring states, were responsible for the actual (for want of a better term) 'fabric' of spacetime itself. I thought that's part of the reason why supersymmetric particles were so sought after at the LHC?
String theory/Mtheory was/is a possible t.o.e, is it not, and as such, does it not also suggest that spacetime is quantisable? If QFT is correct, is it not that string states, would be the same as field disturbances, rather than be free travelling particles/strings? Rather than the concept of a single electron (as such), we would have an electron as a string state/field disturbance?
I hope I am not frustrating you too much with my poor grasp of the details involved here.
Can you explain a little more about where I maybe making mistakes above in my attempts to connect string theory with QFT, for example?
Quoting Jaded Scholar
So is the difference between String theory and LQG, your earlier point that in string theory, all proposed string states exist WITHIN spacetime. Spacetime would thus be a 'container,' for all string/superstring states, so, LQG includes spacetime and string/superstring theory does not? This seems to clash with my own (probably incorrect) interpretations of the Sabine Hossenfelder article below:
The article from Sabine. String Theory Meets Loop Quantum Gravity. Two leading candidates for a theory of everything, long thought incompatible, may be two sides of the same coin.
She makes the following comments:
[I]"Among the attempts to unify quantum theory and gravity, string theory has attracted the most attention. Its premise is simple: Everything is made of tiny strings. The strings may be closed unto themselves or have loose ends; they can vibrate, stretch, join or split. And in these manifold appearances lie the explanations for all phenomena we observe, both matter and space-time included."[/I]
[I]"Loop quantum gravity, by contrast, is concerned less with the matter that inhabits space-time than with the quantum properties of space-time itself. In loop quantum gravity, or LQG, space-time is a network. The smooth background of Einsteins theory of gravity is replaced by nodes and links to which quantum properties are assigned. In this way, space is built up of discrete chunks. LQG is in large part a study of these chunks."[/I]
As Sabine goes on to describe the main differences between the two theories, such as string theory suggests supersymmetry and vibrations in 10 dimensions, whereas LQG suggests neither of these.
I can grasp these basic differences, but I don't get the node/link network imagery of LQG! I am a computer scientist, I understand network topologies very well, computers can be nodes in a network and can be connected via links, but such a notion occurs 'within a container,' within a space and cannot describe that space itself. So again, I get lost!
I read Sabines article 4 times and tried to grasp the main points she was making in paragraphs such as:
[i]But this isnt a conundrum only for string theorists. This whole discussion about the black hole firewalls took place mostly within the string theory community, which I dont understand, Verlinde said. These questions about quantum information, and entanglement, and how to construct a [mathematical] Hilbert space thats exactly what people in loop quantum gravity have been working on for a long time.[/I]
My grasp of physics was just not up to the task, even with Sabine's attempt to simplify the concepts involved for folks like me.
It's not a long article, so it would be great if you could have a look at it and give your opinion on it.
I absolutely understand, if you just don't have the time to try to explain this stuff in lay terms, when folks like Sabine have already attempted to do so. I am willing to plod on in my running through strong setting glue, towards my own eureka moments, on this stuff, that always seem just a bit beyond my abilities in physics. :blush:
The essential singularity of complex analysis would seem strange enough it might provide some clues about how math diverges from reality in a spectacular way and how our ideas of reality could shift. Particularly since the exponential function is fundamental in physics. Just idle thoughts. Good you are around.
Thanks so much, for your encouraging words sir. I am happiest when I can spend time pondering such stuff. It seem to me that it is my best experience of being a human and living the human condition.
Sure, I will always have to accept that the nihilists, the doomsters and the pessimists have a valid case, but experiencing the wonder I sometimes do, like a child, when I think about seeking truths and I get to read the words of mathematicians like yourself or physicists like @Jaded Scholar(whose handle I disapprove of, but whose knowledge I envy,) means that we are not a lost cause of a species.
We are an infant species, when you consider the cosmic calendar scale.
Do you not think that we truly are, as Carl Sagan suggested, in the title of his first episode of the series COSMOS, 'on the shores of the cosmic ocean?'
Eloquent.
I've given myself permission to be quite rude in this comment, which I'm hesitant to do in a forum where I'm pretty new, but the points you are holding fast to are so flawed that they're almost actively anti-intellectual. And that's the main reason I'm responding at all.
I've approached you with the assumption that we have different areas of expertise that lead to different interpretations of modern physics. But your last comment has clarified things for me: you obviously just don't understand anything about modern or classical physics and are just parroting random critiques of physics and maths from throughout the ages, which were all valid at the time, but have been turned into jibberish by your comprehensive ignorance of the actual contexts they apply to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a sentence that I think could only be written by someone who has never studied calculus. A year 10 calculus student would recognise this as literal nonsense. The "problem" you describe was solved by calculus.
At the very least, you are right in linking it to this nonsense:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I literally just detailed in my last response that you are describing a problem that existed in pre-Newtonian classical physics which was solved by Newtonian physics. Newton's second law, often symbolised as "F=ma", clearly prohibits infinite acceleration in every case except with infinite force or massless objects. This is not some artificial curb placed upon the results of calculus in this area, but an emergent property.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah, thanks for (again) confirming that you don't know what you're talking about. Within Fourier transforms, there is intrinsic uncertainty within first-order terms between time and frequency for the exact same reason that any other integral transformation has an intrinsic uncertainty between conjugate variables, be it time/frequency, position/momentum, gravitational potential/mass density, voltage/charge, etc. There is nothing remotely unique to time itself in this line of argument.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
...Some moreso than others.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again.
What you are saying is a collection of truth-adjacent things, which you have combined into something that is just not true. And you could easily have avoided asserting something this ridiculous if you were interested enough in what you're talking about to spend 30 seconds looking it up online.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't agree with your definition of "sophistication", which seems to be equivalent to "complexity". My meaning of it in this context was more like "advanced"/"accurate"/etc. If two systems were equally universally applicable, and one was more complex and the other less complex, I'd apply the label of "more sophisticated" to to the simpler one. However, on looking up dictionary definitions of the word, your usage of it seems to be a more common interpretation than mine, so saying that you have misunderstood me here is not as reasonable as saying that I have miscommunicated.
I do slightly object to the value label of "good" maths systems being those which are better tools for modelling our specific reality, but then again, that's the whole point of maths, so it's probably not worth quibbling about here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This commentary is a completely valid critique of ancient Greek mathematics. I was just looking up the actual label they applied to irrational numbers ("alogos", meaning "inexpressable"), and learned that the first proof of their existence was attributed to Hippasus of Metapontum, who made the discovery while at sea, and was thrown overboard by his fellow Pythagoreans for it. But in keeping with the theme of my rebuttals, both maths itself and our scientific culture have changed a bit since then!
The most lauded contemporary mathematicians and scientists are the ones who completely break, fix, or replace flawed systems! I went on at length previously about the current state of the field not remotely rejecting, but actively embracing things like irrational and imaginary numbers because they are necessary for new kinds of maths and necessary for modelling reality.
Moreover, one of the reasons for modern mathematics no longer being merged with the field of physics is that - as I also mentioned previously - assumptions and value judgements about physicality or "reality" are outside the field of mathematics, which is now primarily directed with finding and fleshing out any and every mathematical system we can think of. This is closest to an actual reason for the abundance of complexity and axioms that you lament: the field is not defined by or limited by an attempt to describe our perceived reality. It seeks to describe all possible mathematical systems. Each of which require axioms to define.
And I don't even know what you're trying to say with your circle argument. I'm just as critical of the "world of forms" as you (if not moreso), but I don't see what there is to fault about the idea - or rather, the empirical observation! - that the macroscopic world of our everyday experience is more complicated than an empty Euclidean plane.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you feel the need to reply again, then I challenge you to point out one such problem that has been labelled, and is not something that modern mathematicians want solved (or have already solved).
I think mathematics and science are not perfect tools for modelling the real world. And nailing down the exact nature of their problems is both important and difficult. And I think it does a great disservice to these very valuable pursuits if we pretend that the long-solved problems of their forebears are some kind of inescapable black mark upon them. It can be highly useful to learn from the problems of the past, but the most instructive part of that kind of analysis is how they were solved - another reason it's counterproductive to ignore the fact that those solutions exist.
It's like pretending that all criticisms of horse-drawn carriages are equally valid criticisms of cars. You're not accomplishing anything worthwhile when you muddy the debate by saying that cars are good, but all of the horse dung is a real problem. That's the problem with you doubling down on arguments like "Oh, the problems are clear - they just can't get over [method of thinking they got over a millennia ago]."
Of course, I'm probably wasting my time by spelling out the problems with your approach. All of the arguments you have doubled down on by basically just repeating yourself and ignoring my refutations (and any other easily accessible information on them) are a series of data points suggesting that you don't actually care about the truth or falsehood of the arguments you are summoning and, for some reason, are primarily motivated by a desire to disagree, and not remotely motivated by any desire to seek out actual truths.
When I started writing this response, I was intending to liken your responses to that of a LLM like Chat GPT-4 - nominally referencing a rich variety of information sources, but demonstrating no contextual understanding of any of them - but after a more thorough read of your commentary, I'm quite confident of your humanity. LLMs haven't yet got the exact register we see in humans with nothing to say and a determination to say it as loudly as possible.
Quoting universeness
What a lovely thing to say! Thank you! :D
Quoting universeness
To be honest, I needed to brush up on many things to answer your previous questions, and that article was one of the things I read for that, haha.
Quoting universeness
I wanted to quote and address that line about your grasp of the details, to note that in my last comment, I almost brought up the caveat of string theory being set up to have relativistic spacetime emerge from it, but left it out because I didn't fully understand that mechanism - and you have immediately honed in on that missing part of the picture. So your grasp of the problem is demonstrably better than you give yourself credit for.
So in the hopes that my poor grasp of the details wasn't leading you astray - I'm a quantum physicist, but have never done any actual work with String Theory - I've read several more articles (from both arXiv and the good folks over at physics.stackexchange.com), and I think I've got the gist.
In string theory, strings exist within a continuous spacetime that has various dimensionalities (usually 11 dimensions, courtesy of M-theory's unification of superstring theories) and other properties that allow strings to generate a reality like ours. However, this spacetime is not the spacetime we experience. Gravitons distort everything's interaction with the underlying spacetime, and produce gravitational dynamics that match the dynamics of relativistic spacetime. In the perturbative interpretation that leads to String Field Theory (the direct analogue of QFT), this leads to a field that does the same job - and that field can indeed be quantised in a version of string theory called "background independent open string field theory" (though I think this version has some large and unresolved problems). And we can even think of that field as our spacetime, which is distinct from the underlying spacetime in which strings are defined.
However, in every version of string theory, this formal spacetime is dependent on the a priori spacetime in which strings are defined. It has never been able to (successfully) build spacetime from scratch.
So you are onto something with your intuition to extend string theory into SFT, and doing so has the potential to resolve the problem of non-emergent spacetime, but as I understand it (I. E. Very vaguely), all current attempts along these lines result in some physical implications that are incompatible with our measurements of our own universe.
Relatedly, I also did not understand the specific need for supersymmetry, which this paper helped me most with: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0410049
Horowitz plainly notes one big instantiation of the problems that arise in string theory without supersymmetry is that, in that case, the ground state of every string becomes a tachyon. Admittedly, I don't understand specifically why that's a problem, but it definitely seems like it should be a big problem. A more detailed problem is that supersymmetry is required to construct Minkowski spacetime - the metric where time is the same kind of dimension as space. Otherwise your theory can't obey general relativity.
To get back to your next question:
Quoting universeness
I think this comment is accurate, but the language of the second sentence throws me a little. I really don't want to come off like I'm the grammar police (maybe something more like "the physical interpretation social worker"?) when I say that I don't really like the language here that LQG "includes" spacetime and string theory does not. I think it's a more useful interpretation to say that LQG constructs spacetime as an emergent property of its laws, whereas string theory is built upon the assumption of the pre-existence of spacetime, which makes it (almost) impossible to say anything about the fundamental nature of spacetime itself within that framework.
(Sorry, that ended up not being the simple replacement of "includes" that I had in mind when I started that sentence.)
On Sabine's article itself, I admit that it also took me some re-reading to understand the overarching point, but I think it's just that - despite the general disunity within the scientific community between advocates of LQG and String theory - there are several researchers who think we shouldn't necessarily assume that the two cannot be unified. I think the hope is to look at places where String theory and LQG don't disagree with each other, and therefore you can formulate both of them at the same time, and then you have a starting point to figure out what modifications you could make to either theory to achieve compatibility between them in other examples (and eventually, in the general case).
The first example being the AdS/CFT conjecture, a theoretical spacetime configuration which achieves the limiting case where strings do not affect the shape of spacetime, so you can have both strings and LQG without one conflicting with the other - the hard part being that someone still has to figure out how String theory could possibly reduce to LQG in that setting (or vice versa).
The other examples of the black hole firewall problem and supersymmetry/extra dimensions are a different kind of point of potential compatibility - more of an observation that several of the problems and methodologies in String theory have a very comparable counterpart in LQG, and vice versa. So both camps could benefit a lot from a more inclusive attitude towards the other.
Overall, it's not an actual argument that these points of compatibility necessarily imply the potential unification of both theories; it's more of an argument that both theories are very incomplete, and the path towards a true TOE would be better served by scientists not backing one horse or the other at this early stage, and being more open to the possibility that the truth may lie somewhere in between. That's my take on it.
Phew. It was a bit challenging to research all of that, but it was a very fulfilling challenge! I hope the above makes sense, and please don't hesitate to point out any parts that don't - especially because you have demonstrated an excellent radar for asking the right questions about these theories! And I meant to say above, but another point to your credit is that the parts which confused both you and I most were around the emergence of spacetime from String theory, which was mostly so difficult to research because it's a very problematic part of the theory that most people just kind of ignore (in one stackexchange post, someone mentioned asking Brian Greene in a Q&A in 2012, basically, why it was so hard to find papers on the nature of spacetime in string theory and BG said "you aren't missing anything, we just don't know").
Quoting jgill
Good commentary! It would be a bit hypocritical of me to not be equally open to unphysical results being either a breakdown of mathematical modelling or just a breakdown in our capacity to interpret how they could be an accurate reflection of reality. Especially since, as you note, they tend to pop up all over the place in physics.
You know, I actually didn't give much thought to my username here! I came up with the Jaded Scholar username about 15 years ago and have been using it in a variety of settings ever since (which I expected to doxx me a little, but apparently my presence here is the only one that I can see in any search engine results). On reflection, I have to say that I am actually much less jaded than I was back then, especially due to all the things I have learned which convinced me that humans really are a lot more ... good (for lack of a more accurate word) than any capitalist, economist, or powerbroker would like us to believe.
Quoting universeness
Oh, man, you have just hit on something that has been rattling around my head for a few months now, and I have to rant about it to you. It'd probably be more appropriate to start a new thread for a tangent this tangential, but whatever.
While thinking about the Fermi paradox (another thing I love thinking and ranting about), I recently looked up some estimates on how much longer the universe is likely to continue birthing new stars and the expected elemental proportions of those stars (and thus, the worlds that are born with them). I'll resist the urge to talk about the answers to the Fermi paradox that I find most plausible, but what occurred to me affects almost all such answers. I hadn't previously appreciated that our universe is very, very young. Incredibly so, for the scales of this question.
It's 14 billion years old, and our solar system is 4.5 billion years old, and most solar systems older than that wouldn't have a lot of the elements necessary for our kind of life. In broad terms, there have been about three generations of stars in the history of the universe (and thus, three generations of solar systems) - ours being born in the third generation, which are the only ones which commonly have enough elements for our kind of life. We have those elements because our star and its planets are made from dead stars from gen 1 and 2 (they're actually called Population II and III, the numbering going backwards from us at #1, as per human nature). Note that not all Population II and III stars have died! The 3s probably have, but many 2s still burn!
Anyway, it was very possible for solar systems older than ours to be as high-metallicity (high-carbon) - recent evidence suggests it was possible as early as 12.5b years ago - but I think ours is from right around when it stopped being rare to have the elemental profile needed for human life to emerge.
Conversely, life on earth emerged pretty much as soon as it was possible for life to emerge! Current estimates have pushed that point to about 4bn years ago, not long after the earth's crust formed - I. E. as soon the surface of the earth stopped being molten rock. That part is really impressive, and is important when we note that, as far as we can tell, we are the first civilisation to emerge on Earth. It apparently took 4bn years for life to randomly produce communal, intelligent creatures like us.
I want to mention that we should absolutely assume that life (as ill-defined as that term is) can arise in completely different ways to how it arose on Earth. But also, the fact that DNA-based life emerged on Earth basically as soon as possible, and that this is unlikely to be a coincidence since the elemental availability at the birth of our solar system made it so easy to form amino acids (as they say, "the building blocks of DNA") that we have even observed them in meteorites that predate the formation of the Earth's crust. It's impossible to say how prevalent any other form of life is likely to be, but we can definitely say that our kind of life seems very likely to arise as soon as an environment like ours does.
The point I'm trying to qualify is that I think there are very, very few alternate timelines where a human-like civilisation could have emerged very much earlier than ours did. We don't know how probable it would be to have something like us arise a billion years earlier or so, but we know that anything emerging significantly earlier than that (on Earth or anywhere in the universe) would be much, much less likely. I know my logic is getting a bit tenuous, so to generalise it a bit: We can reasonably expect that other life exists throughout the universe, but I think we can also expect that if we could group the emergence of intelligent civilisation into generations like our stars, then you'd be hard pressed to put ours into anything except the very first generation.
But the point that I'm really getting at is this: current estimates posit that our universe is going to keep forming new generations of stars for about 100 trillion more years.
If that number was 100 billion years, we would have emerged 14% of the way into the lifespan of the universe. But it's 1000 times that. We have emerged 0.014% of the way into that lifespan. 99.986% of it remains, and all of that will be even more likely to produce life than most of the 0.014% of time that's already passed.
Even if the most generous estimates for the Drake equation are somehow still too conservative, and life already teems beyond our greatest estimates - even then, we are still pioneers at the very, very forefront of the existence of life. Not just the existence of life on Earth (though we also are), or the existence of life in our galaxy (though we also are), but forefront of the existence of life anywhere in all of reality.
It's a very big thought.
It makes me feel a little better about human civilisation acting like a bunch of idiot babies, compared to what (I think/hope) we're capable of. On a cosmological scale, we ARE babies. And what's more, we're the very first ones, with no earlier pioneers we can possibly look to for guidance as we figure out our baby steps on our own - and to quote another sentiment that lives rent-free in my head: "I always love it when people say 'baby steps!' to imply they're being tentative, when actually baby steps are a great unbalanced, wholehearted, enthusiastic lurch into the unknown."
It also makes me feel a little more hopeful and future-focussed on what I (and all of us) can contribute to our countless distant relatives in the very, very long future that lies ahead of us.
:clap: What is sooooooo important about your post to @Metaphysician Undercover is not the hope that he will, at last, gain some better understanding of the scientific method but that other readers of your response to him will. Imo, he may well be fully cooked and lost in a miasma of his own creation, but debunking him so effectively, imo, may assist others.
I hope you don't mind this 'heads up,' to @180 Proof. It's just that I would like his opinion on your response to MU.
:100:
Welcome to TPF!
Thanks for your kind and encouraging words. They help me believe that I can perhaps even 'quantum tunnel,' :joke: through some of the solid barriers that my limited maths and physics skills present me with.
You have given me lots of 'pathways,' I can wander down, in attempting to improve my understanding and pursuit of the greatest activity any human can have the privilege to take part in. That of 'truth seeking.' Most folks are too busy trying to just survive day to day.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Quoting Jaded Scholar
are two example of the paths I am referring to.
I have found the supersymmetry aspect hard to follow, along with the extra 'wrapped' dimensions.
I get the 'wrapped' idea, by thinking about a 3D pipe viewed from above, so that it looks like a 2D shape, with the 3rd dimension wrapped around. So the extra dimensions of string theory are tiny and are wrapped around every coordinate in our 3D existence.
Do you get any further understanding based on the Calabi-yau manifolds?
Have you watched this lecture by Ed Witten? He is the main genius in string theory imo.
I have watched it twice but I think I need to watch it again and again to try to analyse each sentence Ed utters! :lol: :scream:
Quoting Jaded Scholar
So, just to clarify the implication here, without supersymmetry, the ground state (or lowest energy state) of every string would have to have a 'faster than light speed' potential (or actual?).
This confuses me more, but I wonder if I am conflating two ideas here? The motion of a string within spacetime and its 'inter-dimensional vibrational velocity.'
Sentences like the following form the beginnings of the basis of my confusion:
"In quantum mechanics waves and particles are dual aspects of the same phenomenon, and so each vibrational mode of a string corresponds to a particle. The vibrational frequency of the mode determines the energy of the particle and hence its mass."
So, this suggest to me that a string that 'vibrates' in multiple dimensions is 'excited' and would produce mass, is this not the case?
Anything with mass cannot travel at light speed, never mind superluminal speed (as in the case of the elusive tachyon).
I know that a 'ground state' is a 'non-excited' state, ( and a state with an absolute zero temperature) so how can such a state vibrate? I must be missing something quite obvious here!
So, does this mean that the inter-dimensional string vibrations, would not create any mass?
I know that the 'tachyon' ground state is part of the 'bosonic string theory,' and I have read such as this, from a discussion on the physics stack exchange (although the maths involved in the actual entry is currently beyond me):
"The zero mode of the set of harmonic oscillators (the string excitation) gives a negative energy for each dimension. So the ground state has a negative energy (if the "classical" center-of-mass momentum is zero) and a negative squared mass. For the coherence of the theory (there are ?2 excited states at first level, so it it a representation of ( ?2) which must be massless."
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I read many of the exchanges on the physics stack exchange. One of the TPF members @noAxioms is/was a moderator on a physics site, but I can't remember if it was the physics stack exchange.
They certainly offer quick annihilation, to any peddlers of woo woo, on that site. It is a very good site, imo.
:grin: happy moments!
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I would like to hear them sometimes! For me, I am content with even the thought that 'someone has to be first,' so why not us, as unlikely as that seems in such a vast universe. I love this quote from Carl Sagan's film Contact:
The original source:
Quoting Jaded Scholar
:clap: :clap: This is part of why I say to the doomsters, the nihilists and the pessimists, that despite their very justified complaints about our bloody history, our very poor stewardship of this planet, that we had better reverse or be made extinct, and our current horrifically bad record of disunity and inhumanity towards our own and other species, they must also realise, that we have only been around for the last couple of seconds in the cosmic calendar scale, SO GIVE US A F****** CHANCE!!!!!!!!!
Btw: After 15 years of labelling yourself 'Jaded,' it's time you changed. How about 'Eager scholar', 'Inquiring scholar' or 'Musing scholar?'
@180 Proof (No! I am not again calling you a doomster, a nihilist or a pessimist! I just included you here, to ask you for a little less affection for your 2001 monolith and a little more for your fellow meat bags :grin: )
Oh what the hell, I might as well include @Vera Mont as well ..... you never know ....... it might at least make her chuckle! ..... of course .... she might also throw something sharp and deadly in my general direction! :scream:
Some time back on this forum I mentioned that October of 1958 when I started a postgraduate curriculum for the USAF at the U of Chicago I found that the mathematics department would no longer offer courses to the physics department, the latter offering all physics math courses. The rift went beyond the obvious differences in notation and symbolism (which I find annoying and distracting) and probably had something to do with differing attitudes about proofs. And the foundational stuff about mathematical systems.
I am an old guy, and when I go to one of 26K pages on math on Wikipedia I'm not sure what is being discussed. Even most of modern complex analysis seems foreign.
I enjoyed reading your rebuttal to MU. Amusing and entertaining, unlike so much on the forum that rehashes and compares what classical philosophers had to say.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
This is "The Lounge", rudeness is accepted and expected. I understand that it's all good hearted and meant for improvement, self and other, and I hope you do too.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Sound criticism can never be turned into gibberish. It seems you haven't studied philosophy and therefore have no understanding "of the actual contexts they apply to". I have, and do understand the context. Sorry jaded, but it is you whose talk is gibberish in this context.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
The problem was never solved, as is clear from the evidence I cited, the time/frequency uncertainty of the Fourier transform. As I've told others already on this forum, calculus provided a "workaround" for the problem, which was sufficient in the context of the physical problems of the time period, but it was not long before the physicists reached the limits of the applicability of that workaround, and so, the same problem reappeared.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I see you have yet to produce a good response to this issue, only to say that the problem which is derived from a failure in our representation of time is not limited to time. The so-called "discipline" of physics has managed to spread the problem around to all sorts of spatial concepts, producing a more general "uncertainty principle", through its conventional ways of relating space and time.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Are you aware of the history of the term "sophistic"? Why are you intent on portraying sophistry as "advanced", "accurate". In reality, sophistication is the oldest form of deception. Add as many slights of the hand as possible, to make things appear to be advanced and accurate, in order to hide the trickery which is really going on underneath. Simply put, "sophisticated" does not imply "advanced" or "accurate", and you definition is a hope filled fantasy, to portray sophistication as advanced and accurate, instead of as an affront to Occam's razor.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Come on Mr. Scholar, what the fuck are you even talking about here? What the hell is a "truth-adjacent thing? (Excuse the rudeness please, but this is The Lounge.) Either it's true or it's false, or would you prefer that we sink ourselves into a world of probabilities, with nothing to ground what is actually the case?
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Excellent! We almost have agreement on something, except you would overrule my "good" with something "better". What if I overrule your "better" with "The Greatest" (that would be God).
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Yes, math has changed "a bit". Unfortunately the fundamentals of circles and angles remain the same, and the glaring contradiction of discrete units within a continuity, just does not want to go away.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Here we go... Instead of grounding the mathematical principles (axioms) in what is actually the case, truth, as philosophers do with "self-evident" truths, you'd prefer to waste time looking at an infinite number of "possible mathematical systems". Good luck with that endeavour, you can find me in The Lounge sipping some whisky, and from time to time some whiskey.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
That's not the issue. You said:Quoting Jaded Scholar
Now you're changing your tune to say that the ones which are labeled, "mathematicians want solved". I would urge you to take another step further, if you're truly a scholar who is jaded, and make a critical inspection of all those problems which have been labeled and which you seem to think mathematicians "have already solved". Creating a sophisticated workaround, which is useful in a multitude of situations, but then fails when physics needs a more precise approach to the relation between space and time is not a true solution. And when the mathemagicians use smoke and mirrors in an attempt to demonstrate that the workaround is a true resolution, that is nothing but sophistry.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
You are jumping to conclusion. You approach with prejudice, a preconceive bias, that these problems have been "solved". That is what you state "they were solved". But when you approach these problems, Zeno's paradoxes for example, and the irrationality of pi and the square root of 2, with the attitude that these problems have already been solved, you do not look at them as real problems, they are pseudo-problems, because you have presupposed that they are solved.
Instead, you need to approach the problems as they are expressed, exactly as presented at the time, as real problems, and come to understand them as real problems. Then you are in a position to look at the proposed solutions, and judge them as to whether they are real solutions, or just convenient workarounds. You clearly approach from the preconceived idea that the problems have been resolved, and therefore do not understand them as real problems. Newton's law prohibits infinite acceleration, but prohibiting a problem does not resolve the problem.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
This makes no sense. Both cars and carriages have wheels and bearings, so they share the same fundamental problems of friction and inefficiency. Also, cars pollute at least as much as horses do, so the mention of "horse dung" is just a sophistic trick. You might argue that the car is "better" because the very specific issue of "horse dung" is avoided, but the more general problem of "pollution" remains, as the specific "horse dung" is replaced with other forms of the same problem "pollution".
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I haven't seen any refutation from you yet, only false premises, and a refusal to accept the truth, through a veiled appeal to possible worlds as somehow more real that actual truth.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Jesus Christ! Likening my work to GPT-4, or LLMs in general, that's the highest compliment you could give anyone. Then you even go one step further, in saying that I actually add a touch of humanity. Thank you very much Jaded Scholar, you live up to your name very well, and welcome to the ideology of skepticism. You are ready to roll.
Work-arounds were in existence 3,600 years ago and have improved over the eras since. And, yes, 2,600 years ago there was considerable dismay among the ancients. You have confirmed what is seen frequently here that when one turns philosophical on an issue one goes back in time to see what the Greeks had to say, and to join them across the ages in their despair.
I would think intuitionism might appeal to you. But even there the obvious imperfections are swept into a corner and allowed to exist.
Out of curiosity, are you an old guy like me, middle aged, or a "youngster"?
Just filling in space until JS reappears. :cool:
We look back in time to see how the problems which exist today developed over time. And when we look back we see others who have looked back, and we learn from them. I would not call this an act of despair, but rather the propagation of hope. The denial, which appears more common, that the problems exist today, and the relationship between the past manifestations of the same problems, appears more like despair to me.
Quoting jgill
I've seen you state your age, and I'm not that old, but I'm by no means a youngster.
What makes these "problems" unsolved and real? :chin:
The principal problem expressed in Zeno's paradoxes, involves an issue with the way that we relate space and time, and this problem manifests today in the Fourier transform, as the uncertainty relation between time and frequency.*
The irrationality of pi and the square root of two indicates a problem with the way that we represent space with distinct dimensions. Modern physics demonstrates that these dimensions are not sufficient for a true and accurate understanding of spatial activity. So "string theory" for example proposes a number of extra dimensions, and "quantum gravity" may be viewed as an attempt to avoid dimensions altogether.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.05417.pdf
*Added by edit: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/prof/fgdp/c4/paper_html/node2.html
Thanks for the links. Particularly the one concerning a reduction of ST dimensions to two at quantum scales.( I continue to dabble in the complex plane where the world is two dimensional.) :cool:
I don't know if you can accurately say that is "the world". Isn't it more like two distinct perpendicular worlds, the world of real numbers and the world of imaginary numbers?
It's a world in which a being embodies the characteristics of two genres, the rational and the imaginative. A bit like mankind.
"Two genres", I like that. The main criticism with this, or difference I would request, is that I would replace "rational" and "imaginative" with "true" and "fantasy".
Now, we have the "true world" on one plane of existence, one genre, and that consists of everything which is, and must necessarily be, as it what is real by the status or the true physical world. Therefore possible expressions concerning the true plane are restricted by the reality of the physical world. On the other plane of existence, the other genre, we have the fantasy world, and the only restrictions here are the mental capacities, of the human mind. So this plane consists of all the things we want and desire of the world, and in a very fundamental way it is free and unrestricted by that plane of truth and reality.
However, the two planes intersect, the two are orthogonal. Therefore, what we apprehend as the true plane of existence, all the realities of the physical world, must have a logical bearing on the imaginary, all the things we want and desire from the world, or what we want the world to be. And in this way the imaginary plane is truly restricted. I caution you though, be extremely wary because the relation is not defined as unidirectional, therefore it might just as well invert itself, and the imaginary world of all the things we want and desire, and how we want the world to be, might reflect back onto the perpendicular "true world" influencing the way that we apprehend and represent the "true world". Then the axioms for our understanding of that plane would become more representative of how we want things to be rather than how we actually perceive things to be.
Here is what I think is a very good way to look at these two planes. They are temporal in nature, the true world is the past, and this world imposes restrictions on the future world of possibilities, which is the imaginary plane. Notice that if we understand this relation as temporal, unidirectionality is enforced by our understanding of time. However, we cannot place this understanding of time on either of the two planes, because that would restrict it according to the axioms of that plane, disallowing its superiority and ability to order both planes relative to each other. Therefore we must put time as outside any planes, or such a spatial form of representation.
An entertaining and fanciful philosophical abstraction of a bit of mathematics. But we are looking at two lines, not planes. The real axis and the imaginary axis - producing the complex plane. :cool:
For me, this feeds in a little to the string theory concept. A string is posited either as linear, (open) (1D) (1 axis), at any moment in time, or a closed (loop) (2D) and vibrating, and it is the vibration that creates the other macro/extended dimension(s) of 3D space. The extra (tiny) dimensions, required in string theory are 'wrapped around' every coordinate in 3D space. Maths allows this in the way it is demonstrated in Computing (I think). In the vast majority of programming languages, you can declare an array data structure. A linear array might be just declared as Numbers[10], so a list of 10 storage locations, with an associated type, such as REAL. So, 10 empty boxes that you can store 10 real numbers in for the purpose of reading/writing/editing the 'real number' content at those 10 locations (normally contiguous locations). A 2D array could just be declared as Numbers[10][10] and 3D as Numbers{10][10][10].
So mathematically, you can create an nth dimensional array, and such an array would exist in reality, but cannot be geometrically displayed in 3D. Apart from in abstractions, such as the calabi-yau manifolds (I think). When you describe a mathematical axis such as 'imaginary,' etc. Is there any geometric consideration involved in such projections? If pushed, would a mathematician be willing to say something such as 'well you could think of the 'imaginary number line,' as in a sense, 'wrapped around' every coordinate in a standard 3D coordinate system, such as (x,y,z), or (x,y,z,t), t being time.
So a coordinate such as (w,x,y,z,t) would indicate that w is a 4th geometric dimension which is a 'tiny/micro extension, ''surrounding?' every (x,y,z,t) macro coordinate in our 3D existence?
Does this have any credence level with you or is my musing here, no more than pure speculation?
I thought this might also be of some use, as an aid to thinking about this:
"Dimensional disaster
In string theory, little loops of vibrating stringiness (in the theory, they are the fundamental object of reality) manifest as the different particles (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.) and as the force-carriers of nature (photons, gluons, gravitons, etc.). The way they do this is through their vibrations. Each string is so tiny that it appears to us as nothing more than a point-like particle, but each string can vibrate with different modes, the same way you can get different notes out of a guitar string.
Each vibration mode is thought to relate to a different kind of particle. So all the strings vibrating one way look like electrons, all the strings vibrating another way look like photons, and so on. What we see as particle collisions are, in the string theory view, a bunch of strings merging together and splitting apart.
But for the math to work, there have to be more than four dimensions in our universe. This is because our usual space-time doesn't give the strings enough "room" to vibrate in all the ways they need to in order to fully express themselves as all the varieties of particles in the world. They're just too constrained.
In other words, the strings don't just wiggle, they wiggle hyperdimensionally.
Current versions of string theory require 10 dimensions total, while an even more hypothetical über-string theory known as M-theory requires 11. But when we look around the universe, we only ever see the usual three spatial dimensions plus the dimension of time. We're pretty sure that if the universe had more than four dimensions, we would've noticed by now.
How can the string theory's requirement for extra dimensions possibly be reconciled with our everyday experiences in the universe?
Curled up and compact
Thankfully, string theorists were able to point to a historical antecedent for this seemingly radical notion.
Back in 1919, shortly after Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, the mathematician and physicist Theodor Kaluza was playing around with the equations, just for fun. And he found something especially interesting when he added a fifth dimension to the equations nothing happened. The equations of relativity don't really care about the number of dimensions; it's something you have to add in to make the theory applicable to our universe.
But then Kaluza added a special twist to that fifth dimension, making it wrap around itself in what he called the "cylinder condition." This requirement made something new pop out: Kaluza recovered the usual equations of general relativity in the usual four dimensions, plus a new equation that replicated the expressions of electromagnetism.
It looked like adding dimensions could potentially unify physics.
In retrospect, this was a bit of a red herring.
Still, a couple of decades later another physicist, Oskar Klein, tried to give Kaluza's idea an interpretation in terms of quantum mechanics. He found that if this fifth dimension existed and was responsible in some way for electromagnetism, that dimension had to be scrunched down, wrapping back around itself (just like in Kaluzas original idea), but way smaller, down to a bare 10^-35 meters.
The many manifolds of string theory
If an extra dimension (or dimensions) is really that small, we wouldn't have noticed by now. It's so small that we couldn't possibly hope to directly probe it with our high-energy experiments. And if those dimensions are wrapped up on themselves, then every time you move around in four-dimensional space, you're really circumnavigating those extra dimensions billions upon billions of times.
And those are the dimensions where the strings of string theory live.
With further mathematical insight, it was found that the extra six spatial dimensions needed in string theory have to be wrapped up in a particular set of configurations, known as Calabi-Yau manifolds, after two prominent physicists. But there isn't one unique manifold that's allowed by string theory.
There's around 10^200,000.
It turns out that when you need six dimensions to curl up on themselves, and give them almost any possible way to do it, it adds up.
That's a lot of different ways to wrap those extra dimensions in on themselves. And each possible configuration will affect the ways the strings inside them vibrate. Since the ways that strings vibrate determine how they behave up here in the macroscopic world, each choice of manifold leads to a distinct universe with its own set of physics.
So only one manifold can give rise to the world as we experience it. But which one?
Unfortunately, string theory can't give us an answer, at least not yet. The trouble is that string theory isn't done we only have various approximation methods that we hope get close to the real thing, but right now we have no idea how right we are. So we have no mathematical technology for following the chain, from specific manifold to specific string vibration to the physics of the universe.
The response from string theorists is something called the Landscape, a multiverse of all possible universes predicted by the various manifolds, with our universe as just one point among many.
And that's where string theory sits today, somewhere on the Landscape."
Yeah I know, but the imagery of the metaphor works better to talk about "planes of existence" rather than lines of existence. The representation of the real numbers as a line is just an analogy in the first place. The numbers have a corresponding value, and unless something provides real position to the number line, nothing justifies the assigned order. Placing the perpendicular line at zero, the origin, the Cartesian method, provides a grounding for order, negatives one side, positives the other. I believe that the imaginary part of a complex number produces the need for separate rules of ordination. This alters the relationship between the spatial representation (the line) and the numerical value assigned to the number, leaving the values without fixed location on the line.
At the end of my metaphor, it all gets reduced to the temporal dimension being outside any spatial concepts anyway. I believe that is the only true way to deal with the human urge demonstrated by mathematicians, to escape the boundaries of spatial constraints (and this need is demonstrated to be very real in the local/nonlocal problem of quantum physics), yet still maintain some sort of logical order. The order must be based in a temporal representation, which allows the spatial features to emerge. In this way, spatial order which appears to be illogical from our current representations can be provided for with the appropriate temporally based logic.
Quoting universeness
Some physicists, like Smolin would say that string theory is done. It cannot give us an answer ever, because it has run into a dead end. The next foray is quantum loop gravity, but this appears to be headed toward a similar dead end.
Done all the time: n-dimensional vector spaces. I think the Hilbert space ( a special kind of vector space) in quantum mechanics may be infinite dimensional. Then some kind of linear operators are defined on it.
Quoting universeness
Sure. There are no limits to how bizarre math can become. This doesn't seem so outlandish.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:up:
The wait for someone to point the way to the path of progress!
It seems professionals in science or math become uncomfortable in this environment. My own experience is my first thread about the diagonal paradox, to which there were some negative replies going beyond mere analytical comments to what seemed personal attacks. But, at least in those days science or math topics were not relocated to the Lounge.
At that time there were a couple of grad level math people here, but after a while they experienced the fatigue of constantly arguing with members who were minimally acquainted with the subject, but held strong views against accepted perspectives. When the competent are belittled by the unknowledgeable the former tend to move on to other conversational pastures.
I'm so old I don't really care. When MU pops up with his highly literate arguments about mathematics I indulge and appreciate his perspective if I can. But I also know that if I open my TPF mouth about QT I wander into unknown territory and my thoughts are trivial.
If those who wished to argue science were Gentlemen, like you my friend, or Ladies, some of those who left might have stayed. But this is all conjecture. And philosophy is all about argument.
Thank you for the validation that I wasn't wasting my time with MU! I don't want to derail a worthwhile conversation with swatting trolls, but I agree that it feels like part of that includes pointing things out like "no no, this guy is not Jean-Paul Sartre, he Deepak Chopra" for the sake of lurkers/newcomers.
Quoting jgill
Thank you for that! And also for the warning, I suppose! :lol:
I admire the level of patience you have for fools, but at the same time, I am kind of glad that I will probably never attain it myself.
Pleased to make your acquaintance! Less pleased to share your experiences with MU, but I am certainly heartened to know that my experience is not anything new.
I'll get to you later.
I agree 100%! When I joined this forum, I anticipated making many rants to this effect, but in short (*for now*), I want to express my feelings that this is absolutely the best thing we can do with our free time, and I think this is the main reason that "free time" has been made such a restricted commodity for most humans.
And I'd love to talk about the Fermi paradox sometime! Maybe one of us should start a whole new thread on it. :)
Thank you for sharing the line from that Carl Sagan directly! It's such a good one! Especially with delightful sarcasm of the original source, and Carl's commentary after it.
Quoting universeness
Absolutely. A good friend of mine went through a bit of an existential crisis semi-recently about the cruelty of the universe, and the apparently always increasing cruelty of humans towards each other and everything else, and I was honoured to be able to help her through it with discussions of both this and of Hegel's cyclical theory of history. Even if we are mostly just making everything worse, that can still drive longer-term positive progress, and moreoever, it's not even possible to make progress at all when you're really brand new at something and have almost nothing to learn from except your mistakes.
I think I don't want to create a new profile here, but the next time I create a new username, I think will choose something different. I do like the virtues of being an eager, inquiring, or musing scholar, but on reflection, I might go with something like ForeverScholar. It's always been important to me to constantly update my understanding wherever possible (I like to say that at every point in my life, I could look back on myself ten years ago and cringe at how mistaken he was in some way, and if I ever stop doing that, it'll mean I've stopped growing). There is literally always more to learn (in both the expansion of knowledge and the correction of errors), and literally always more and deeper layers of internalised biases that we can uncover within our own thinking, and in doing so, see everything a little more clearly. Both of those are deeply important to me, and I've been reminded of that by the stark contrast in this thread between your thirst to expand your knowledge and MU's determination to avoid doing so.
But getting back to your other comment (I didn't mean to mush my replies to them together, but here we are):
Quoting universeness
The short version is that both of these things are really just necessary for string theory to work (or rather, to not violate known, observable physical laws), and I dont think theres very much thats particularly profound about them (unless we can prove they are true, of course).
Supersymmetry has a lot of implications, some of which I definitely am not familiar with (especially, as I mentioned, in the context of string theory), but at its core, I think it boils down to this: Supersymmetry is just the proposition that the quantum spin property of any quantum object/string shouldnt be restricted (to be necessarily integer or half-integer) by any of the other properties of that object/string. Or: Theres no reason that, for every boson, a fermion with every other property otherwise identical to the boson cant theoretically exist (and vice versa).
Im sure youve learned some things about Spin, but its always been kind of hard for me to be certain I understand what it physically means (despite having used it in the majority of my research). Its kind of like the rotational momentum of an objects entire quantum field. However, I just learned that Spin is one of those rare things which is actually simpler to describe in string theory than standard quantum mechanics: its defined by the frequency of a strings rotation around its one-dimensional axis. More on this when we get to tachyons again.
The compactified dimensions involve some much more complex maths (as those manifold images persuasively indicate!), but has always been a very simple idea, at its core. String theory needs more than 4 spacetime dimensions to work, but needs to reduce to 4-space at large scales because relativity would make gravity behave very differently to observed results otherwise. So you need to avoid letting any of those extra dimensions get too big (actually, another thing I just learned is that you dont have to but if you dont, then you need to tweak basically everything else in the maths to make it work again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_extra_dimensions). So you compactify those dimensions such that its not really possible for them to have any effect on the 4-space formulation of our physical laws. In our three spatial dimensions, you can always keep going and going in one of them, and this will take you farther from where you started. Maybe theyre not actually infinite lines its possible that the edges of our universe join up, and that a random straight line will eventually lead back to where you started, but that doesnt change anything on a local scale. However, what if some of our spatial dimensions span different scales, and if you changed the orientation of that trajectory by 90 degrees, you might only need to travel half the distance to cross the universe that way? It still makes no difference locally, but I like it as a stepping stone to imagining that theres some other spatial dimension where, if you rotate another 90 degrees, to move into its plane, it only takes you two steps before you end up back where you started? What if it was so short a loop that it could be lapped even by the vibration of our molecules at room temperature? Or even smaller? No matter how far you travel in that dimension (i.e. how many times you lap around it), youll feel the exact same forces from the suns gravity, from a nearby magnet, or from any passing photon. It can be small enough so that it is negligible to everything in the universe except the mathematical degrees of freedom of a strings vibrations.
The Calabi-Yau manifolds and their ilk admittedly involve some incredibly complex maths to add many of these compactified dimensions without changing strings behaviour in ways that we dont want; because when you compactify several dimensions, that can cause strings to affect each other in different kinds of ways, depending on the particular compactifications. Calabi-Yau manifolds are a solution that cleverly balances those complications to return conditions on the behaviour of strings within them to be similar to that of regular 4-space.
Quoting universeness
I watched some of that Ed Witten lecture, and it does have some very good summaries of the maths that links many things I understand (or partially understand) to many things I dont, but I feel like Id need to find the lecture notes and/or a transcript (and even more spare time than I can possibly scrounge, haha) to help me skim past the stuff I want to and help me drill into the stuff I need to. Some of the things I simultaneously do and dont miss about uni!
Quoting universeness
Yes and no. I mean, yes, you are, but there is some degree to which it is accurate to conflate them. If I understand it, both of these kinds of motion use the same dimensions, but the motion of the string is the change in where, in spacetime, the string is located, and the vibrational velocity is how fast the oscillations of the string itself are moving. For a silly (and hopefully clearer) example, if you stand up with your feet planted on the ground and wiggle your hips from side to side, your motion in spacetime (as defined by the position of your feet, at least) is zero, but you have a nonzero vibrational velocity. If you stop wiggling but take a jump to the left, then you have moved within spacetime, but have zero vibrational velocity.
Im less confident on the inter-dimensional qualifier, but my guess is that it refers to either the velocity of the vibration between modes in different dimensions/directions, or (more likely) the total vector velocity of the vibration itself (and not the potentially smaller portion of velocity that you get from an inner product with any specific spatial dimension).
Quoting universeness
I think these two sentences are just genuinely confusing ones because of how much ground they shortcut to fit into two sentences. There is a lot of missing logic needed to link QM wave-particle duality to string waves necessarily representing "particles", or to link energy and mass in string theory.
As I understand it, yes, any vibrations in any dimensions should do this, but the cases where they do not are kind of at the crux of your other questions.
The place to start is in the definition of a ground state. The ground state of any quantum system is the lowest-energy state, which is necessarily a zero-mode wavefunction, but not necessarily a zero-energy state. In string theory, the string's vibrational modes are different to the modes of QM wavefunctions, but obey similar rules, I think - most relevant is that they are complex functions that can evaluate to complex numbers for the physical attributes they represent.
This means that the lowest-energy state has no vibrations (and yes, zero temperature) but can potentially have an energy level that is positive or even negative. The latter is what emerges in bosonic string theory, and in that context, negative-energy vibrational modes give rise to negative-squared (imaginary number) values for mass. I.e. tachyons.
The rest of the tachyon-related questions kind of follow on from here and are, I think, easier to answer without quotes, haha.
In every source I checked, the theory on this is kind of buried beneath a whole lot of maths that kind of obscures some of the basics. Two things I learned that helped me piece more together are:
1) String theory seems to have an inextricable relationship between the spin and mass of a particle, mostly in just needing the space of spin states to not be purely bosonic (integers) in order to have a stable ground state of mass/energy (which, more specifically, doesnt result in a mass that is an imaginary number).
2) Tachyons are what you get when a quantum object has an imaginary mass. They are not a problem per se, since they dont necessarily break causality despite being nonrelativistic, but they are a big problem if everything can decay into a tachyonic state because an object with imaginary mass actually increases in speed as its energy decreases, and to slow it down to the speed of light (the bare maximum for creating most particles) would require an infinite amount of energy.
So yeah, clearly an absolutely rubbish ground state to emerge from your theory.
If your system can be specified with a meaningful number of strings in high-energy states, you can still get some reasonable results from it, but if every ground state can only be excited by giving it an infinite amount of energy, you're never going to be able to accurately model our actual universe, in which we see no obvious sinks of infinite free energy and no observations of tachyons at any of the countless particule creation and annihilation events we've ever observed.
I'm sure you still have questions about how the zero-mode state can somehow still have nonzero (if non-positive) vibrational states, and I preemptively admit that I am not sure. I think the answer lies in the need for the (complex-number) wavefunctions to sometimes resolve into non-Real expectation values for mass when their phase space is restricted to only integer spin values, which we know is not realistic. Kind of like how tunneling particles don't have any physical velocity while they are tunneling, but if you force their speed to resolve into a number, it comes out as an imaginary number too.
But that's just a guess, which I have not remotely fleshed out mathematically. I hope it makes you feel better to know that the maths involved in this is absolutely beyond my current capacity too.
Based on the things that allowed me to connect the most dots while writing this, I think that if I were to suggest a direction for you to research to better understand quantum theory and string theory is this: the simple harmonic oscillator. It is one of the most foundational concepts in Physics as a whole, but especially so in QM, and I think even moreso in String Theory. Like these theories themselves, the maths for it starts out very simple, but can get incredibly complex (even before you add 9 other dimensions to it).
P.S. I forgot to work it into my response, but I enjoyed the tunnelling and annihilation puns. :D
Man, that's recent. I feel like speculating that it could be partly to do with separate departments wanting to not share the funding they received for(/from) their postgrads, or the required kinds of maths being more diverse than would be manageable with maths-only courses for each one, etc. but even with any mitigating factors like that, it seems like a very problematic approach. Or at the least, an approach that unnecessarily limits the potential to collaborate.
As I've said, I'm sure there are some ideological biases in maths and science that I haven't noticed, but I'm glad that the only thing I've ever experienced on this front is when physicists semi-jokingly check the room for mathematicians before writing (?x)² ? 0 or sin(?) ? ? for ?<<1.
I am happy to hear that. If we have no other common ground, then I'm glad we at least have this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I may not (re-)respond to every one of your arguments, so I'm glad you started with this one. It's a perfect micrcosm of your position.
I actually have studied philosophy. And science. And maths. And I learned several things about these arguments from studying philosophy, but - and this may astound you - I actually learned much more about the history of maths and science from my studies in maths and science.
The whole point is that you think your arguments are not jibberish because you don't understand what you are talking about. You have learned *just* enough to reach the peak of Mt Stupid on the Dunning-Kruger graph, and it absolutely shows.
To repeat myself somwhat, the way in which you have turned sound criticism into jibberish is by applying it to a context where it doesn't make sense, and then pretending that you're the cleverest person in the room because you also don't understand any of the evidence that what you're saying is insanely stupid, and you don't want to.
Arguing with you is like arguing with someone who doesn't believe that the sky is blue. At a certain point, you can really boil the argument down to the "blue-sky" person asking the other to just go outside and LOOK. I asked you to provide a single example of one of these problems you claim are rife within mathematics, and you refused.
Maybe this was motivated by your indomitable and unsubstantiated confidence, but maybe you refused to do so because you actually know you can't.
So I guess I should speak to the contortion you pulled out to defend against that. My earlier quote had the preceding sentence "I think it is both safe and responsible to assume that one of the fundamental barriers to our full understanding of the universe is that mathematics itself may not yet be sophisticated enough. Whatever the gaps are, they are not what you described - if we could label them, we could have fixed them by now.", so I was clearly referring to actual gaps in the capabilities of mathematics. The scope of that conversation changed when you replied with "The problem is that no one wants to fix them.", and cited a historically inaccurate reference to irrational numbers, a misinterpretation of their nature as a problem with maths instead of mathematicians, and a ridiculous statement about circles that seems to be an attempt to apply one of Plato's arguments for the World of Forms as though it makes any sense here. You finish with "But you cannot say that these problems haven't been labeled."
Your reply was broad and unhinged and its scope referred to more than just problems with mathematics itself as I was speaking about. So I accepted the expanded scope, or rather, sought to levy my challenge to not only include the problems I was talking about but also include any kind of the problems you were talking about. When I said "If you feel the need to reply again, then I challenge you to point out one such problem that has been labelled, and is not something that modern mathematicians want solved (or have already solved).", it's pretty clear that the word "such" referred to what you wrote, and was not a reply to what I wrote myself.
Moreover, despite your dishonest framing that I'm spontaneously "changing [my] tune to say that the ones which are labeled, "mathematicians want solved".", I'm directly addressing your statement that "The problem is that no one wants to fix them.", which - pro tip - you can tell I was doing because my challenge was a direct response to the paragraph where you said that.
Hopefully we can now agree on the words we both said, the order which they were said, and the meanings of those words (here, anyway).
So if you like, I'm happy to roll the premise back to that of my original statement - fundamental gaps in mathematics that prevent it from describing reality - or we can even kick it back down to easy mode for you and talk about problems that only apply to mathematics itself. And I challenge you to find any such problem (that is unsolved) where there is any evidence whatsoever to suggest that the global community of maths and science - in the year 2023 - does not want it solved. You claim that the field is rife with these problems. How hard can it be to find just one?
Just to be extra clear, I mean 2023 CE, not BCE.
If you do undertake this challenge, then I must warn you that it will almost certainly involve you (*gasp*) actually learning something. In which case, I am sorry for your loss, or whatever makes you so averse to that.
Ugh, speaking of which, if you do honestly try to meet my challenge (I expect you won't), then I do ask that you stop embarrassing yourself with that foolishness about irrational numbers (which were never a problem for maths, only for mathematicians) or Newton's law prohibiting infinte acceleration (F=ma, you absolute and utter muppet - I already showed you those, four characters, which is all that anyone needs to see to understand that. Except the genuinely mathematically illiterate, I guess. Case in point.).
Ideally, if you could find some kind of claim that I can't completely refute with more than a short sentence or a single equation, that would give me some hope for you. And no, my refutations still count as refutations even in the face of your standard strategy of making some idiotic claim and then putting your fingers in your ears and yell "LALALA, YOU CAN'T PROVE ME WRONG IF I'M NOT LISTENING."
But it's okay with me if that's a dealbreaker for you. Come to think of it, I'll probably be happier if I don't have to read any more of you talking about the "unsolved problem" of irrational numbers existing, which is not actually a problem - because the only real problem was in mathematicians not accepting their existence. And at the same time, you pretend that the acceptance of their existence is part of the problem. And if you had half a clue, you could easily pivot that to an ACTUAL problem that we have, like us having no real conception of the square root of -1, and all we have is the knowledge that it is absolutely necessary for accurate mathematical modelling of reality (for lack of a better word). But I guess that's the whole theme here - you are avoiding any interesting ideas for the sake of arguing about whether the sky is blue.
...
Anyway, I'm slightly compelled to try and quickly cover the rest of the stupid things you said.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Haha, of course you think that. I've done a bit of work in the AI/ML field and it's common knowledge there that LLMs mimic human writing well but, by their very nature, understand nothing they say. This becomes apparent in anything they write beyond a simple recitation of facts they were shown - they combine concepts in a way that is driven by imitating human speech/writing, and not by conceptual logic, so virtually every single time they say anything remotely complex, they end up saying things that anyone who actually understands them can see are obviously wrong. Just like the things you say!
Anyway, it serves me right for trying to insult your dedication to not understanding anything in a way that assumes you understand something. But I'm glad that you're proud to be someone who basically got a C- on the Turing Test.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it was. I've explained it several times. The failure to understand is yours alone. You could probably understand it if you weren't trying so hard not to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Pretty sure I have. You could probably understand it if you weren't trying so hard not to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, you have. You could probably understand them if you weren't trying so hard not to. Your refusal to open your eyes does not mean the light does not exist.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, I am aware. And that is not what I'm doing, as you can tell from the other words that I wrote after the ones you quoted. Both definitions are ascribed to the word today, regardless of the etymology of the word (which, tbh, I think you only guessed correctly because a broken clock is still right twice a day). I was simply trying to be fair to you in identifying one thing you misunderstood not because of your passion for misunderstanding things, but because of the multiple definitions of a word I used.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Something that was true when it was written, was true when you read it, was kind of true when you remembered it, and less so but still kind of true when you applied it, and then you made a conclusion that completely misinterpreted it. You know, like pretty much every argument you make.
Like taking a valid criticism of horse-drawn carriages (e.g. horse dung) and applying it to cars - you've taken a true thing, but removed it from a context where it is true, and by putting it into an invalid context, it is now untrue, even if the original idea was kind of true. I think "truth-adjacent" is a pretty descriptive label to give that (if a tiny bit too charitable, perhaps).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
My poor metaphysician. True and False are useful concepts, and we can't help but use them, but they are indeed illusions. So yes, I think we should try to "sink ourselves into a world of probabilities, with nothing to ground what is actually the case", because that is the world we live in. That's not what I am actively doing here, but nonetheless, here's some advice that is exceedingly relevant to your misshapen worldview:
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This just makes it even sadder that you acknowledge that the foundations of mathematics are thousands of years old, and you still can't be bothered to actually learn anything about them. At this point, you're just throwing together relevant words and hoping your throw hits some rhetorical bullseye.
So yeah, do tell: explain "the glaring contradiction of discrete units within a continuity". What is the nature of this problem and what are its implications? Oh my goodness, what affront to mathematics are we engaging in every time we cut a pie into slices?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ah, yes, you have clearly studied and understood philosophy better than me. How could I forget the proud tradition of philosophers never bothering to think about what might be, what could be, how might one live, what hidden systems might govern this world that we can identify by imagining what systems govern all possible worlds? A good philosopher - a REAL philosopher - only concerns themself with "self-evident" truths.
Some of the things that make you such a skilled troll would make you an absolutely atrocious philosopher. Just the worst ever. Unless you're one of those people who counts Ayn Rand as a philosopher. Then you'd probably be only the second worst.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You know, that actually explains a lot about a lot of the things you say.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Note that the specific problems I'm talking about are "problems that are now solved". Zero of these conclusions have been jumped to - they have all been methodically reasoned and calculated to - some of them over the course of many centuries. But yeah, it's possible that you are accidentally stumbling onto a slightly meaningful bias I have in assuming that problems that have been solved are problems that have been solved. But as the saying goes, "a fool may occasionally stumble onto a truth now and then by chance alone, but he will generally pick himself up and continue on", and true enough, this is what you have done. Where you stumbled onwards to is the clearly much more problematic position where you assume (quite explicity!) that every single problem that has ever arisen in the field of mathematics is completely unsolved, and every advancement or revolution in the field has been a communal act of self-delusion.
I'm upgrading my judgement of you from "almost anti-intellectual" to "deliberately anti-intellectual".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Hahaha, oh, I see! Horse dung is literally the exact same thing as carbon dioxide emissions, and I'm being sophistic and dishonest in claiming that not all criticisms of horse-drawn carriages apply equally to cars and vice versa. Whereas you are noting insightful truths when you say that the category of "solved mathematical problems" has zero overlap with the completely separate category of "solved mathematical problems", or when you claim that the word "sophisticated" means exactly the same thing as "sophistic", and nothing more, regardless of what those knaves who write our dictionaries will tell you.
As I have said: The things that make you such a skilled troll would make you an absolutely atrocious philosopher.
You pretend that distinctions with zero difference matter, and pretend that distinctions with a world of difference don't matter. You show no respect towards logic, and direct all of your attention towards rhetoric. I trust that you have studied enough philosophy to know the gravity of the insult when I say: you, sir, are nothing but a sophist.
Actually, you're worse. They, at least, sought to contort and abuse truth itself for the sake of making a living out of it. But you do it for free. Apparently just for the passion of saying nothing as loudly as possible, to stifle any possible transfer or generation of knowledge, to chase the feeling of being right about everything, caring nothing at all that the price of that is for you to actually be right about virtually nothing.
You care nothing for the subject nor substance of your arguments, you care only for the argument itself. You seem to have read a lot of things and you consciously decide - day after day - to employ that knowledge for only the most pointless goals you can find. I think you have a lot of intellectual potential and I am somewhat disgusted that you choose to waste it all on aimless vanity.
I wish my brain as amazing as some of y'alls!!
Thanks for your kind words and your willingness to share some of your mathematical insights with those who are not expert in the field, despite the exasperating responses you will inevitably receive from those who have their own (sometimes rather sinister) sometimes eccentric, agenda or those who are just pathological trolls and just get a buzz from trying to 'dis' an expert on their own field of expertise.
I think your points are well made and ring true, to me at least. I personally think that all philosophical musings and statements require scientific contribution, otherwise they face the 'pure woo woo,' or 'total speculation' accusation. If they don't welcome scientific input then, imo, this will always push philosophy and philosophers into a second class league of thinking and thinkers (this is of-course, perhaps from only my own notion of such 'leagues.') at least this puts philosophical musing ahead of a third class notional league of thinkers, which would include theists and theosophists, imo.
This leaves me open to accusations of 'scientism' or 'favouritism,' as I imply that those who prioritise scientific thinking and use of the scientific method, are 'first class thinkers.' I can only accept such criticism with agreement, and a large grin of personal contentment.
I am a member of some more science based sites and I enjoy the different emphasis from the membership of those sites compared to TPF, but those sites tend to not include the social. political (including realpolitik), humanist, religious and psychological aspects of the topic under discussion, that you get here on TPF. So experiencing as wide a range of responders to your own worldview, is I think very demanding but also potentially very valuable in trying to become a wiser person yourself.
I am personally grateful for the presence and contribution of subject specific expertise, such as yourself, (including of-course those who have academic expertise in the philosophy field) on TPF, as it tends to be a presence and contribution that effectively counters the more eccentric and woo woo peddlers, that are also here on TPF and would otherwise, turn this site into something akin to fox/fake news.
Yay you're back! Sorry to hear you got that flipping Covid! I have had it twice myself. Fortunately, only after I had been jabbed, so I survived both and no long-covid. Thank you sooooooooo much for the time and effort you took to answer my questions as well as you did.
I need to take the time required to unpack your response and do my own further research before I respond with the depth necessary to be able to progress from the rally points you have set.
There are a lot of LED style (soft lighting) points that I can see, have illuminated some distant pathways in my head, based on the main points you laid out in your response. I will move towards them slowly and carefully and investigate. It will take a while but you have given me enough 'trigger points' for me to be hopefully directed correctly. My responses will trickle towards this thread, slowly but surely. I hope you will indulge them and enjoy them.
Here is my plan of action:
Quoting Jaded Scholar
This affords me some conformation of how 'consequentialism,' plays such a large role in the scientific method. 'String theory/Superstring theory/Mtheory have an aesthetic beauty imo, that make many of us sooooo hope that them or such as them, are 'true.' So the 'what do we need to be true, for this idea to work,' becomes a motivation. This is not a criticism of science or scientists, but more a celebration of the robustness and honesty of the method applied. For string theory to be correct, this, and this, and this, etc are the consequentials that MUST follow, based on our current understanding of the workings and structure of the Universe. You have helped to make that fundamental 'scene' and 'big picture,' crystal clear, in my psyche. A good starting point imo.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
So I need to look a little more into the concept of the colloquially named 'spin,' or 'angular momentum,' and understand how that seems to govern the findings that
1. Fermions have antiparticles and bosons don't.
2. The Pauli exclusion principle only applies to fermions.
3. Supersymmetry is a fermionboson symmetry, postulating that multiplets of fundamental particles contain both fermions and bosons. Thus, for example, since electrons exist there should also be selectrons
Understanding how 1,2 and 3 apply to string theory are key, I think. Would you agree?
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I need to learn more about where my imagery is incorrect when I try to relate strings moving within spacetime and strings creating spacetime. A string as a 1D extension and as a closed loop. In my research so far I have came up against such as Weyl Symmetry and Conformal field theory, so I get quickly swamped, but its great fun, trying to process my understanding and your insights help me direct my efforts in the right directions.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Yes, the best image I have of that so far is 'wriggle room,' which I have tried to cognise as 'vibrating in three directions is not enough to make the workings and structure of this universe and cause every object that exists in it,' so a string has to vibrate in more than 3 physical dimensions. But I would probably need a maths skill level like that of @jgill to be able to start to understand, exactly why!
I don't like very long posts that folks have to scroll through too much so I will end this post here and break things up into smaller more manageable 'chunks.'
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Interesting, and this reminds me of an aspect of Computing Science in the ADITDEM cyclical model for software development. The further back in the analysis, design, implementation, testing, documentation, evaluation, maintenance you find weakness or error, the more 'cascade effect' you will have to deal with. If the weakness or error is found to be at the analysis stage then the entire code may be seriously impacted.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Well, in sci-fi they certainly use such notions as subspace and hyperspace. I have often wondered how these are proposed, when it comes to extension? Sci-fi shows seem to suggest travel through subspace or hyperspace without any alteration to an objects 3D extensions. If when we move, we are actually traversing 10D space, then we can't get from A to B any faster than our current tech permits. So I can't currently imagine a tiny dimension that a 3D extended (macro) object can enter and traverse, and by doing so, travel (tachyon style) faster than light. Something smaller than the planck size can only exist within a black hole, is that not true? So this is another area I need to learn a lot more about.
I have great difficulty trying to imagine a tiny extra wrapped (compactified) dimension as a 'continuum of space.' I can understand using a coordinate to represent a point in that space but that's about it.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Yeah but is the main problem not that there are [math]{10^{200,000}}[/math] possible configurations and we don't know which one is our universe?
Quoting Jaded Scholar
That's a very interesting comparison. Are you posing a 1D open string state that may be 'anchored' at one or both ends, but vibrating along its extension, and a 1D open string state that is a 'free' moving object but is not vibrating?
I have had a different imagery of strings. I imagine a spacetime of continuous tiny guitar strings, that have no 'rest state' other than a potential one (the heat death of the universe via entropy).
If you observe a human 'Mexican wave' the waveform is created via each human involved, just standing up and sitting back down again. It's the undulations of the 'point particle' or 'individual humans acting like an aspect of a string,' that causes the waveform. In a similar way, strings vibrate and cause waveforms or field excitations etc. I imagine that an object can move in this underlying structure by being passed from human to human along the wave form. Now I struggle a lot more when I have to appreciate that the moving object being passed along the string vibrations is itself made of string vibrations, so I know my imagery is wrong, so I need to learn a lot more about possible 'string states.' But are you suggesting that a non-vibrating string state is a valid possibility within string theory?
Would that not mean that there is something in the universe that does not move, relative to anything?
I bolded the words that impact my current understanding the most.
As you suggest, a lowest-energy state is not a zero energy state, so my question then becomes (or perhaps what I need to research more is) is there an example in physics of an energy state that involves an object being completely at rest relative to every other object in the universe, including an 'expanding' spacetime? I know such as this:
"Some might think that at absolute zero particles lose all energy and stop moving. This is not correct. In quantum physics there is something called zero point energy, which means that even after all the energy from particles has been removed, the particles still have some energy."
but I don't currently really understand it, other than assuming that the remaining energy being referred to is a potential energy, that exists because something is present rather than 'nothing' (whatever that label refers to within any notion of 'real.') I need to learn a lot more about a posited string state that is not vibrating and is not moving in any way.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Yeah, it's never a good sign when any kind of infinity shows up in a theory.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
It's comforting that you can so easily and correctly predict where your comments will send my thinking, as it reassures me that there is no surprise amongst the experts when lay folks like myself stumble so easily on this stuff. I also hope that you realise that the time and effort you have spent in trying to explain some of the fundamental ideas involved here are very much appreciated by many lay folks who are very interested in truth seeking.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Oh absafragginlootly! I have encountered the 'harmonic oscillator,' so many times in my general research into this stuff. I have watched this a few times. It's a very good beginning imo.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
it's important to always leave room for a wee giggle or two! otherwise we might become too prone to despair when dealing with the sophistry that can seem so ossified and so deep rooted in the place of mind where folks like MU decide to anchor and vibrate from.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Seem's to me that you also have a good plan of action!
Thanks again for all the help you have offered so far! :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :flower:
Hey, I use that. The wiggle makes it true. :smile:
Your discussion with Uni is the best thing I have seen on this site.
Quoting universeness
Hey, I love Bret Baier ! :cool:
Just off the top of your head, can you think of instances where complex functions are composed? I appreciate your comments about string theory and spin in that subject, in particular. I'm looking into compositions of contours in C and I have wondered about compositions of strings.
I will happily fulfill your expectations. Your separation of maths from the mathematicians who practise the art, is a premise I cannot accept. Furthermore, ad hominem doesn't interest me, and that seems to be all you have to offer me.
See ya, wouldn't want to be ya.
Huh. You surprise me. I'll resist arguing with anything you just said, and will instead follow your example. :up:
:lol: I love that. I forgot to mention that physicists don't just use that, but sometimes use it in proofs (non-foundational ones, but still). But now that I've gotten a mathematician's blessing, you can't take it back. :joke:
Quoting jgill
Thank you kindly! It's certainly the most that my physics knowledge has been challenged in a while!
Quoting jgill
I just learned who that is and I hope this is fake news. :joke:
Quoting jgill
I have to admit that I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Do you mean practical applications outside of theoretical maths/physics? I know they are used in quantum computation and other programming for QM research, but the only non-research application I can think of outside of that is in devices used for troubleshooting electronic circuits - I am not certain, but I think some of those need to use complex functions to model electronic circuits. Let me know if I'm way off base in terms of what you're actually asking. I think you mentioned something close to this earlier that I also sidestepped because I wasn't sure exactly what you meant.
And you probably are, but I wanted to ask if you were aware of Matlab? It's a program/programming language that is basically C, but combined with some Java to build higher-level functionality that makes it way better for programming with matrices, tensors, and other multidimensional features (the name is short for "Matrix Laboratory"). It's what I used in my PhD and gave me my jumping off point into C and other more conventional programming languages.
Thanks - this is also my second time. I got it the first time juuust before I was due for my booster needle, so at least it was much less intense this time around.
And you're very welcome! Apologies if I take a lot longer to reply fully, but I'm happy that what I've said makes sense and has given you some good directions for research! :)
I'll reply to everything I can in full, but for now, I had two things that I wrote as soon as I read your comments, and wanted to finish now instead of later:
Quoting universeness
The accuracy of my prediction is not at all because you're a layperson - it's because I noticed your tendency to zero in on the gaps in the logic. You're the sort of person who, for example, reads something like my comment in the Thought Experiments thread where I said something like "This is how the framework of QFT consistently works with special relativity (with one weird potential edge case called the ReehSchlieder theorem, which is so mathematically complex that I don't understand it and can't explain it myself), and this is what that means for the question you have raised." and your immediate reaction is "NEVER MIND THAT - I MUST LEARN MORE OF THE REEHSCHLIEDER THEOREM.". :lol:
Quoting universeness
I feel the need to mention again that I am nowhere near an expert on string theory, because I started my reply to this with "I don't think so", then changed it to "yes and no", and basically I think all I can say is that I think I have several fragments of the answer :lol:. Firstly, I'm pretty sure that there's nothing that strictly says that those dimensions need to compactify in the same way in every part of our universe, aside from the consistency of our physical laws strongly indicating that it would need to (to reproduce those laws*). On that note, I'm also pretty sure that the vast, vast majority of those possible configurations lead to string behaviour that doesn't reproduce our kind of universe. That's the real benefit of Calabi-Yau manifolds: they're one of the only variants we have discovered that definitely aren't garbage.
*I want to take a minute to devolve into wild speculation. If I'm right (which I may not be - I need to research that) about it being possible for different compactifications to exist in different parts of the same universe, then that would lead to a lot of potential universes where the physical laws are different in different regions. A perfectly stable hydrogen atom in one region may decay into a puff of light or a micro black hole if it wanders into a region with vastly different, say, scale factors of the four fundamental forces. So a consistent compactification of our spacetime might exist by virtue of the anthropic principle - we could only possibly exist in one of the more stable possibilities. But ... what if our universe is dotted with regions where "normal" matter is mostly unaffected, but things like sfermions rapidly decay or something? That might be a potential answer to the how those particles can be functionally absent from our universe without necessarily breaking supersymmetry? I'm sure that doesn't make it any easier to test or anything, but it could be interesting if it were possible.
If I ever meet a real string theorist, I might ask them whether that idea is horribly misguided or not. :)
My wife and I usually vote moderate conservative these days, and we both enjoy the evening news with Bret. A tilt to the right, but maybe less than CNN's tilt to the left. The Fox commentators is another matter. Hannity and his ilk are way off my radar.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I meant the complex plane, C. Not a programming language. And I'm actually talking about
[math]{{F}_{n}}(z)=\underset{k=1}{\overset{n}{\mathop{\Re }}}\,{{f}_{k}}(z)={{f}_{1}}\circ {{f}_{2}}\circ \cdots \circ {{f}_{n}}(z)[/math] , [math]F(z)=\underset{n\to \infty }{\mathop{\lim }}\,{{F}_{n}}(z)[/math]
And going the other way, as well, in physics (mathematical) research? A contour in C looks like [math]z(t)=u(t)+iv(t)[/math] , t = time.
Ah, I see. I don't live in the US, so my superficial impression of Fox is shaped by 1) the overt bias in the Murdoch-owned outlets in my country and 2) the people on the internet who make "Fox News" a core part of their personality. So I will definitely offer you the benefit of the doubt.
Quoting jgill
Oh my goodness, I am deeply embarrassed. In my defence, I've never really spoken about the complex plane outside of tex-enabled (or whiteboard-enabled) environments, so I honestly have never represented it or seen it represented as anything except:
Also, I only just learned that this environment is tex-enabled too, so that's nice. Can I ask how you did that? I can't seem to figure it out.
To answer the actual question, it's hard to summon up specific examples, but I think I have seen countless compositions that fit this general form. It's been a while since I've done any serious maths, so apologies if what I can recall is a bit trivial to you or doesn't exactly hit the mark, but my QM maths virtually always involved converting operators (which were not always, but almost always complex functions) into their Taylor series or some other infinite composition. There were other infinite-series transformations that were very handy, but Taylor series were especially useful because, for well-defined operators, each term usually meant something almost physical (like the separation of an object's energy into different kinds of energy relating to their rest mass, their kinetic energy, their kinetic potential energy - apologies for the fuzziness of that example too - and separately dictated their evolutions). The cases where the expansion actually made use of every term up to n=? generally didn't have that property, but those were rare and (frustratingly) interesting too. Since QM is not so much a self-consistent theory, but a huge bag of complex tricks, almost every time you want to get something useful out of it, you end up hitting a wall of impossible complexity that you can best get out of by applying some expansion or transformation - the Bogoliubov transformation is another one that comes to mind from how often I made use of it, and it also involved decomposing your operators into an infinite series (usually infinite, anyway) of operators defined in a different reference frame that hopefully simplifies the actual problem.
If this is closer to what you mean (and not entirely trivial), I'll dig up my old research work to look for some more specific functions for you.
The first thing that actually came to mind was an incredibly interesting paper I once read about trying to define quantum operators in an infinite-dimensional version of the complex plane involving not just the square root of -1 but all (integer) roots from -1 to -?, but alas, I cannot find that right now.
You complain about getting compared to a muppet and then you insult all mathematicians by calling their science an art. Stealth insults are still insults. You continue to focus on complaining about what science still does not know for sure, and you then assume that this gives you legitimacy, when you offer your own very weak claims and pure speculations about what you claim must be true. You will only ever gain followers who are easily fooled but that will only ever be some of the people, some or all of the time. You have no solutions, and you offer no methodology that is even part of the solutions our species need. You remain part of the problem as you are ossified in your anti-science stance. That is a very unfortunate legacy to burden the more easily mislead members of the next generation with, imo.
An interesting idea but would such not mean that the cosmological principle was not true a.k.a a homogenous and isotropic universe would be untrue? That would have very big consequentials, would it not? Such as every constant might be not be a constant within certain regions of space, such as light speed or even the expansion rate and the temperature of the cosmic background radiation?
Is the idea of different laws of physics applying to different regions not part of the basis of the many world theory and the 'bubble' universe as a label for 'conceptually' different universes in a multi-verse or different 'regions' in an alternate use of a label such as 'Cosmos?'
BTW, I plan to spend some of my free time researching under the keywords of 'string/superstring states.' I hope that will gain me some more insight and prompt questions. I often try to email questions to folks who offer their help on sites such as 'ask an astrophysicist' or 'ask a mathematician,' etc. I have had some very useful responses in the past. I have not came across an 'ask a string theorist,' site yet. I have also tried to directly email folks like Ed Witten, Brian Greene and other known popular scientists such as Sean Carroll, Lee Smolin etc. Sean has his monthly 'ask me anything podcasts,' such as the most recent one below, but I have not tried to use that avenue yet. These are over 3 hours long, so good to fall asleep to at night, when the TV is so crap! :blush:
:scream: :lol:
I am a leftie democratic socialist Mr Gill, I hope that does not lower your opinion of me too much.
I complained about JS's use of ad hominem, which is abundant throughout the post, everywhere. The muppet comment I could not even grasp so it has no bearing.
Mathematics is commonly classified by philosophers as a form of art. There is no insult here, just a statement of truth.
Quoting universeness
Jaded Scholar is an odd sort, first engaging me with Quoting Jaded Scholar Then,Quoting Jaded ScholarandQuoting Jaded Scholar
And when I pointed out that Jaded Scholar's tune was changed as we proceeded, this seemed to cause some sort of ill-temper. Now Jaded Scholar has become completely "unhinged", a word directed at me above. There is an extensive post as a reply to me, with nothing of substance, merely one insult after the other. There is nothing there for me to reply to without stooping to the JS's schoolyard level. It would be like "you're an asshole", "no I'm not". What's the point? I mean this is the lounge, but it's just not my type of entertainment.
I am not suggesting or recommending that you engage in tit for tat ad hominems, as fun as I personally find that at times on TPF, depending who I am dealing with. I was merely pointing out that in general, I do not find you a good interlocutor or an impressive thinker. I fully accept that you feel the same way about me and perhaps some other members of TPF, would agree with me or with you. So there it is, and on the universe goes, regardless of our little disputes. As far as I am concerned, I will continue to read what you type, when perusing threads and I will consider what you type, and respond if I feel it's important to do so, based on my own worldviews. For me, that's just 'my usual approach,' for discussion forums. So, you are not a good interlocutor imo, and I think your approach and the worldviews you offer, in what I have read from you so far, exacerbate the problematic rather than aid the solutions I think our species need. I expect your response to be 'I don't give a f*** what your opinion is of me,' and I feel the same way, so, we all move on. Who knows MU, there have been many occasions when a person on a forum quickly becomes a perceived enemy, then due to some identification of some unexpected common ground, they become more like a frenemy and then on occasion, almost a friend, and then on another occasion, right back to a full enemy and then sometimes such folks even get married and have children or the very same people might choose to kill each other in a field of battle, a terrorist act, or in a marital home. Individual human psyche is rarely boring when you drill down deep enough.
Wife & I are still registered Democrats. You might be surprised at where we would agree on politics. For example, I have always felt there should be free education all the way to professional degrees and PhDs, and there should be free health care for all. I firmly support Medicare and Social Security, along with defined benefit retirement plans. The USAF made me a meteorologist at the U of Chicago, free of charge and fully financially supported, then, later, the GI Bill helped with my terminal degree. :cool:
But our country's immigration catastrophe and a few other issues, like overly liberal law and order policies, pull us to the moderate right at times.
OK. So much for all that. My opinion of you is very, very high, Buddy ! :smile:
That's some good and wide common ground we are on sir! I would be proud to stand firm beside you in any fight on any of those issues.
Quoting jgill
Well, I can only hope I never let you down. Thanks for the boost, we all need a little of that sometimes.
I have valued every exchange we have had so far and I really enjoy reading your posts.
You and I have our differences, but here I am more or less in agreement. Mathematics is a practice, a device used by the sciences, etc., but mathematicians would largely agree it is a kind of art, requiring imaginative progress - the canvas upon which I apply my mental brush is the complex plane.
As for failure in mathematics, le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
I use MathType, what you see is what you get. Then copy and paste to this forum, changing "<" to "[" and so on. But there is a tutorial here on MathJax I think. Enter the word in the search box.
Thank you for your comments about the use of series in physics. A power series is one kind of infinite composition of complex functions. I got started in the subject with another, continued fractions. Then there are infinite product expansions. Finally, examples I came up with after a colleague pointed the direction, elementary functions
The Bogoliubov transformation is a new one for me. Not quite sure how to decipher it in Wikipedia. Some symbols probably physics related.
When I got my degree fifty years ago, a professor told us that we would never know as much math as we did then. He was correct. As the years flow by we mathematicians get more and more entrenched in our specialty, and don't get off that path very much, allowing progress in math to surge past us. At my age I'm lucky to remember elementary topology or group theory. :worry:
The issue here is not the relationship between you and I, rather it is an issue of how Jaded Scholar and I both relate to some current problems of physics, in specific, the zero point in time. Let me paraphrase our discussion like this.
JS: The zero point in time, i.e. the point at the beginning of time, is a problem for physicists.
MU: Not only is the supposed zero point at the beginning of time problematic, but in any measurement of motion there is an assumed zero point which starts the measured duration, and this is also problematic, as described in Zeno's paradoxes.
JS: There is no current problem with this, because mathematicians have solved that problem.
MU: Mathematicians have only produced a sufficient workaround for the problem, and the same problem has reemerged as the time/frequency uncertainty relation of the Fourier transform.
JS: The time/frequency uncertainty relation is no different from any other uncertainty relation of conjugate variables.
MU: The time/frequency uncertainty relation is the basic uncertainty of the Fourier transform, from which the others are derived.
JS: Ad hominem galore.
Man, I was happy to leave "well enough" alone, but you drag me back in.
I had to rewrite how I first drafted this response, because you have actually produced a pretty accurate summary of these particular talking points. The beef I have is the same re-heated beef that I have been talking about in more and more detail.
The claims you are making about the mathematical implications of Zeno's paradox and the Fourier transform are ridiculous and inaccurate, and it is frustrating that you seemingly refuse to even try to understand why I keep saying this - you just keep saying some version of "I have skimmed what you wrote, I don't understand it, and I don't intend to, but the implication is that you disagree with me, so the only conclusion I'm willing to accept is that you're wrong.".
To more specifically address Zeno's paradox/es: The mathematical implications of these questions were not solved by adding some extra features, but in the exact opposite of what you claim. These problem(s) emerged from Zeno's problematic and ideologically-motivated additions to the axioms of conventional mathematics (around his opinion that we should actively avoid every treating "the many" and "the one" in similar ways, mathematically - he was specifically trying to attack the mathematical operations of multiplication and division for ideological reasons, not academic reasons). And these problems were solved by removing his deliberately problematic axioms. And this was highlighted not just in modernity, but by Zeno's contemporaries too!
This is not to say that his paradox(es) are not still interesting metaphysical questions - they definitely are. And mathematicians still play around with new solutions for them every few decades. But in terms of the actual mathematical "problem": all versions of Zeno's paradox are rooted in the assumption that when you divide a finite number by infinity, each division is also a finite number, not an infinitessimal one, which arose from Zeno's preferred mathematical axioms. It's very clearly solved by abandoning his restrictions on what kind of infinities you can use, and then seeing that when you divide a finite number by infinity, you get an infinite number of infinitessimal numbers, not an infinite number of finite numbers, i.e. x*?/? = x, not x*?/? = ?.
The INTERESTING part is whether or not there is a mathematical interpretation that literally describes reality, because that question applies to the entirety of mathematics itself, which I have repeatedly said, and you seem to have no interest in. But there is literally no problem with describing the observable dynamics of the situations you are talking about.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Good grief, if you are so married to this insane idea, then please, please dig up some tiny shred of logic that actually connects these ideas instead of just baselessly asserting that they are somehow related, and straight-up ignoring every single piece of evidence for why you are wrong.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
See above. It's one of the earliest integral transforms to be derived, but it's completely ridiculous to claim that the attributes of the general case are derived from the attributes of one narrow specific case, and not vice versa. It's like you've found some unintuitive issue in a grey car, and the manufacturer tells you "yeah, sorry, the exact same issue exists in all of our cars", and your reply is to say "I see! You have somehow taken this uniquely grey-car issue and spread it to all of the other colours of cars!". Even if the first car their assembly line produced was a grey one, you're still being obtuse and ridiculous.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Is it really an "ad hominem" attack when literally all I know about you and all I am referencing are the actual arguments you are making? Sure, it's kind of rude to say "You keep saying dumb things, and responding to arguments that those claims are dumb by simply ignoring those arguments and reiterating the exact same dumb things, so maybe you're kind of dumb?"*, but it's not like I started out by saying "only an idiot would say this". We really worked up to it by me providing clear refutations and directions for you to investigate which of us was really accurate or not, and after you responded to multiple arguments for, like, the third time each by just ignoring any additional information and saying "I see you disagree with me, which means that you are wrong", then I think it's not unreasonable to posit that the actual core of the contention is that you don't care what's true and you just want to argue until you can convince yourself that you've "won".
I am not sure if using insults like calling you a "muppet" or "mathematically illiterate" really count as "ad hominem" arguments, but even if they technically do, I think it is a dishonest framing to call them as such here, because every instance was very explicitly motivated by my frustration at you deliberately refusing to consider any single scrap of information that wasn't already a part of your own position, deliberately refusing to admit to any possible error in any statement you have ever made (no matter how obvious those errors were). Maybe you'd prefer it if I played the game the way you do, just endlessly rewording the same arguments instead of asking why you do nothing except endlessly rewording the same arguments, but if me refusing to do that is what you call an "ad hominem" argument, then I'd much rather do that than the alternative.
*(in other words: You keep saying things that don't make sense - over and over - and keep refusing to try and understand the counter-arguments, instead just relying on repetition ad nauseam and deliberately misconstruing my statements, so it seems like you really don't care for knowledge or logic at all, and you really only care for "winning" arguments or something.)
Zeno's paradoxes involve problems with the human understanding (misunderstanding) of the relationship between time and space, which creates the appearance of infinity in the human attempts to represent motion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes
Quoting Jaded Scholar
See below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
[quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle]Indeed, the uncertainty principle has its roots in how we apply calculus to write the basic equations of mechanics.[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform
[quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform]Functions that are localized in the time domain have Fourier transforms that are spread out across the frequency domain and vice versa, a phenomenon known as the uncertainty principle. [/quote]
https://math.unm.edu/~crisp/courses/wavelets/fall16/ChrisJasonUncertaintyPple.pdf
[quote=https://math.unm.edu/~crisp/courses/wavelets/fall16/ChrisJasonUncertaintyPple.pdf]
1 Introduction
Fourier Analysis is among the largest areas of applied mathematics and can
be found in all areas of engineering and physics. Atomic physicists use the
Fourier transform to characterize and understand molecular structures, optical
physicist use Fourier series to decompose and resconstruct ultrafast photonic
pulses and particle physicsts use the ideas of orthogonal basis and Fourier coefficients to describe the wave functions of particle states.
One of the most well known concepts in modern physics is the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle which tells us that we cannot know both the position and
momentum of a subatomic particle within a certain accuracy. To understand
this principle in some detail, we look to the subject of Fourier analysis. We
begin by motivating the idea that such a mathematical relationship exists and
then proceed to derive and describe the uncertainty principle in the formal setting of Fourier analysis. After this, we discuss Fourier analysis as it is used and
understoof by physicists in quantum mechanics for several simple examples. Finally, we will attempt to see the relationship between our formal discussion of
the principle and some of the physical laws that govern the natural world.[/quote]
https://www.math.uga.edu/sites/default/files/uncertainty.pdf
[quote=https://www.math.uga.edu/sites/default/files/uncertainty.pdf]In Harmonic Analysis, the uncertainty principle can be succinctly stated as follows: a nonzero function and its Fourier transform cannot both be sharply localised. That is, if a function is restricted to a narrow region of the physical space, then its Fourier transform must spread (be essentially constant) over a broad region of the frequency space. It then expresses a limitation on the extent to which a signal can be both time-limited and band-limited. [/quote]
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uncertainty-principle-derivation-from-fourier-emanuele-pesares
[quote=https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uncertainty-principle-derivation-from-fourier-emanuele-pesaresi]When applying this reasoning to filters, it is not possible to achieve high temporal resolution and frequency resolution at the same time; a common exemplification is the resolution issues of the short-time Fourier transform. Namely, if one uses a wide window, it is possible to achieve good frequency resolution at the cost of temporal resolution, while a narrow window has the opposite characteristics.[/quote]
https://towardsdatascience.com/how-does-the-uncertainty-principle-limit-time-series-analysis-c94c442ba953
[quote=https://towardsdatascience.com/how-does-the-uncertainty-principle-limit-time-series-analysis-c94c442ba953]However, the Fourier Transform (FT) comes with a trade-off: it strips away temporal information as the uncertainty principle shows, rendering us unaware of when these frequencies manifest in the series. This is where the uncertainty principle steps in. Instead of pursuing infinite accuracy in either frequency or time, we can harness the uncertainty principle, allowing us to gain insights into both quantities at a reduced resolution, all the while maintaining balance. [/quote]
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/FourierSeries.html]
[quote=https://mathworld.wolfram.com/FourierSeries.html]A Fourier series is an expansion of a periodic function f(x) in terms of an infinite sum of sines and cosines. Fourier series make use of the orthogonality relationships of the sine and cosine functions. The computation and study of Fourier series is known as harmonic analysis and is extremely useful as a way to break up an arbitrary periodic function into a set of simple terms that can be plugged in, solved individually, and then recombined to obtain the solution to the original problem or an approximation to it to whatever accuracy is desired or practical. Examples of successive approximations to common functions using Fourier series are illustrated above.
In particular, since the superposition principle holds for solutions of a linear homogeneous ordinary differential equation, if such an equation can be solved in the case of a single sinusoid, the solution for an arbitrary function is immediately available by expressing the original function as a Fourier series and then plugging in the solution for each sinusoidal component. In some special cases where the Fourier series can be summed in closed form, this technique can even yield analytic solutions.
Any set of functions that form a complete orthogonal system have a corresponding generalized Fourier series analogous to the Fourier series. For example, using orthogonality of the roots of a Bessel function of the first kind gives a so-called Fourier-Bessel series.[/quote]
Notice the use of "analogous" in the last paragraph: "Any set of functions that form a complete orthogonal system have a corresponding generalized Fourier series analogous to the Fourier series." It is not as you say, that the particular is derived from the general. It is a simple procedure of inductive reasoning whereby the general is derived from the particular. The Fourier transform provides a mathematical principle for time/frequency relations, and this is extended to many domains such as position/momentum, which can be expressed in the required, related, terms.
As I sit on the sidelines I find this conversation fascinating, and I am learning some math as well. I've never worked with formal integral transforms and am surprised at how many there are. I now understand a bit more about the uncertainty principle.
(IMO Zeno should be dead and buried)
Hey, you did some research! That's great! :)
It's a shame you only did so - as the saying goes - like a drunk uses a lightpost: for support instead of illumination. But it gives me hope that you might take that leap one day.
You even stuck to reputable websites for your references too! LinkedIn is kind of hit-and-miss, and I have not previously checked out towardsdatascience.com, but if those ones check out, then I won't be able to find any fault with your sources. :)
However, I am pretty confident that all of those sources are consistent with what I have claimed, and do not support the connection you are trying to defend. Even if you did cherry-pick some pages with wording that kind of fits the point you're trying to make, it still seems like you haven't found any genuine weakness with my claim that the general case of integral transforms isn't somehow intrinsically limited by the features of the specific cases that were derived earliest.
But I will read up on it more thoroughly and get back to you. Among all of the other points that you were wrong about, it's possible that the one you're defending hardest is one that I'm indeed over simplifying or mischaracterising. The way I'd most like to differentiate myself from you is not by being more right, but by being less egocentric. So I'll flesh out the data before getting back to dunking on you and, for my own sake, will honestly confirm whether I'm right or wrong or somewhere in between.
However, I am going to stick to my other stated principles and am now going to do my best to ignore you until after I have time to fully reply to universeness and jgill, because they seem, like me, to be primarily motivated by the desire to learn, instead of your objective of, like, pwning noobs or whatever it is.
I think this is another one of those "yes and no" answers, haha! The cosmological principle could still hold (since it is often stated with a condition of "on average/on large enough scales" etc.) if the anisotropies, however rare, are fairly evenly distributed throughout the universe. And the cosmological principle is a rational assumption you need to make to start investigating the universe, but is still an assumption, so I think it's not a death nail in this weird idea if it implies that the principal holds for almost every observable behaviour, but not quite all of them. :)
Quoting universeness
I don't think so - that it's not the basis, at least - but tbh, there are so many different multiverse formulations that this is probably true for some of them. The breadth of those theories is probably something that you know more of than me, since my experience, if more technical, is much more focussed.
The first multiverse theories (namely, Everett's) were founded wholly on the goal of finding some interpretation of quantum uncertainty that did not result in genuine randomness being a feature of nature. I. E. Reinterpreting quantum randomness not as randomness in the outcomes of physical laws, but in seemingly-randomised measurements actually giving every possible result by bifurcating our universe at every such measurement point, and the true randomness being just in which one of those universes we "observers" happen to be in.
I think that most multiverse theories involving different physical laws/constants have those arise from their breadth of "all possible universes", and include that kind of diversity on that basis. However, I think the last part you refer to - multiverses where the "bubble" universes are spatially or otherwise traversable - probably are defined by this kind of thing. But if that idea were combined with my weird hypothesis, we would probably see indications of inhomogeneity when we look to different sides of the observable universe, which I don't think we do
And I applaud your exploration of directly emailing those physicists! I do like to repeat/repost that thing about most scientists being happy to talk or share articles - especially if you come up against a paywall in seeking their research - but I've never done so myself (probably mostly because I could usually just directly ask people I know, but most of them are in quantum foundations and none of them are string theorists). But it might be worth making use of Sean Carroll's AMAs - I feel like he kind of owes me one anyway since I was obligated to buy his astrophysics textbook twice because Pluto's demotion happened during my undergraduate degree.
I am not sure if you only recently edited your comment to say this, or I only just noticed it, but I was very happy to see it.
I second that emotion! Especially when we all know that you can get from point A to point B, despite Zeno's rather boring thought experiment. All Zeno did, was the very trivial finding that the concept of infinity is problematic. No shit Sherlock!
Quoting universeness
That is very relieving to read! I accidentally found your identity while briefly researching more detail on the questions you asked me (which I would not mention if it weren't clear that you aren't trying to hide it), and was already preparing to accept/avoid discussing the "moderate conservative" thing with justifications about what I'm here for and the demographical differences in our Overton windows (apologies for that), and I am very grateful for the knowledge that we are much closer than I first thought in our political positions.
To both you and , I may as well show my own hand too, and say that my own political position is in support of all the policies you have both stated you are, and is probably a bit more to the left of both of yours in terms of the other policies I support. (I struggled to find the least wanky way to summarise that, but that was the best I could do.) A higher-level summary is that I support most of the goals of socialism, oppose most of the goals of capitalism, but think that both of those approaches focus too much on using politics as a means towards economic goals, and I think we are in dire need of an approach that, instead, uses economics as a means towards political goals (I stole this rhetoric from Hannah Arendt, but have developed it further in my own life). I think democracy should be something ingrained in and emerging from our society itself, rather than just a tick-box exercise we partake in for a single day every four years.
Anyway, I hate to be cryptic, but I also don't want to spend too long talking about my expansive political opinions in this particular thread! I just wanted to join the equal ground in declaring them, not write a manifesto.
I doubt it, but would probably have even more political common ground with you than with jgill, (I also only base that on his 'moderate conservative' dalliance.) if you are very left wing. I am a democratic socialist and I fully support such tenets as:
'To secure for the workers, by hand or by brain, the full fruits of their industry and full control over the means of production, distribution and exchange.'
'From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.' etc, etc.
I am totally against all 'free market economy' on a national, international or global scale (but I am ok with it at a controlled local scale). So I am fully against any form of unfettered capitalism.
No billionaire's or multi-millionaires allowed in the system I would favour but I am okay with small localised capitalism and I support personal freedom and entrepreneurialism as much as such can be supported within an socioeconomic system that is as fair as it can possibly be to all stakeholders involved.
I support UBI for now and an eventual conversion to a money free resource based global economy within a united planet.
I would like to see the end of the notion of 'countries.'
I would like to see the end of all party politics. You vote for a person, not a party!
I was very politically active in my youth, and was a member of left wing political groups, Young Socialists, The UK Labour party, The Co-operative Labour party, etc.
The Tony Blair years made me leave the labour party and I have been against party politics ever since.
I am currently a member of progressive political groups such as 'Compass,' from where I live in Scotland, in this Ununited Kingdom.
Sorry JS, my rant does sound a little like a political manifesto, but at least it helps make our political positions clear and we can get back to our science chat.
:smile: I bought Sean's book Space, Time and Motion. I am working between that and my second reading of Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, which I first read around 15 years ago. I have also started a wee book called 'The little book of Philosophy,' by Rachel Poulton. :grin: So far, so good!
I intend to buy Sean's next two books in this series of 3.
My 86 year old mother, who stays with me, is not doing well at the moment however, so I have to dedicate a lot more of my time to her needs. Such is the way of things.
Good idea! Time for you to read a bit ,instead of spouting your mouth off in ignorance. Regardless of whether you hold the degree you claim, it's never a good idea to make assertive claims of certainty about that which you know not. Like I've pointed out, this attitude of conceit has already led you to "change your tune" significantly, concerning the problem which mathematicians have and have not resolved.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Your "other stated principles" are nothing but insults. Now I have one for you. You are a pompously conceited ass hole. And unlike your use of ad hominem, mine is fully justified and true.
"Pwning noobs", haha I like that. Maybe I should change my moniker to "Noob pwner". I bet if we met in a real lounge, with a couple of real drinks we'd turn out to be best of friends, instead of meeting here where it seems like everyone has to pretend to be what they are not.
Merry Christmas!
Quoting Jaded Scholar
Start reading boss. "Indeed, the uncertainty principle has its roots in how we apply calculus to write the basic equations of mechanics." There is a fundamental incompatibility between a describable state of "being", and an active event of "becoming", which is well demonstrated by Zeno in his arrow paradox. This produces an appeal to "infinite" in any attempt to reconcile the difference, bridge the gap. This is what creates the need for an infinite rate of acceleration at the moment when an object changes from being at rest to being in motion, which I referred to.
Quoting universeness
I would not be so adamant with such a misleading statement universeness. Of course, it appears to be an obvious truth, "we all know that you can get from point A to point B. However, we cannot truthfully model this procedure, getting from being at one point to being at another point, mathematically. That's exactly what makes Zeno's paradoxes so compelling, the mathematics cannot represent what appears to be so obvious to us.
"Change" has elements which are fundamentally unintelligible, and cannot be represented by human mathematics. This casts the doubt of skepticism on the description of "change". To begin with, we can ask whether it's really true to say that one is at point A, or at point B. And then we see that this is just an over simplification, an approximation. The physical principles of relativity are premised on the proposition that we cannot know anything to be at any specific point. Then we must concede that it's not really true that "you can get from point A to point B" because one is never truly at point A or point B.
Now, I'll leave you noobs to your useless ponderings, based in false premises, and your senseless pandering, and instead indulge myself in some good old fashioned Christmas cheer.
You are a flim flam artist, all smoke and mirrors and no substance. @Jaded Scholar has tried and tried again to clarify his points to you and imo, all you do is release more smoke to hide in. Again, all you do is point out what science does not know for sure yet, and you imagine that in some way, that means you know what you are talking about. Science follows where the evidence takes it, you follow your imaginings and think that will lead you to the truth of all things, instead of merely leading you right back to your own imaginings. You type like a deluded diva. You need a long holiday from your own conceit.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yet another example of the absolute BS you offer. There is no infinite rate of acceleration. When I move from A to B I do not need to infinity accelerate to get there, or else I would never get from my seat to the toilet! As I am incapable of infinite acceleration, so stop positing absolute piffle!!!!!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's only misleading in YOUR imagination sir! I don't need to model that which I can DEMONSTRATE!!!!
Zeno's paradoxes may be impressive to your esoteric thinking but I don't find any paradox compelling, just like I don't find any placeholders compelling like, god, infinite, nothing, omnipotent, omniscient or any other omni, supernatural, etc, etc. I can decide to amuse myself by thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking that I might not be really thinking or I can settle for I think therefore I am and move on. You can exist amongst the parade of available paradoxes if you wish to but please try to stop attempting to infect others which such staid thinking.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I create purpose and I create meaning so I can assign point A and point B.
So, Yeah, nae bother pal!, and on the way to your funny farm, you can always try to find out what it's like to BE the spoon rather than just accept that there is no spoon or else perhaps you could just use the spoon to eat yer cornflakes and stop typing esoteric, woo woo pish!
All I'm talking about here, is what science does not know. I have no pretense of holding the solutions to these unknowns. Therefore it looks like I really do know what I'm talking about, as you say, I have accurately pointed out what science does not know. But I have no idea of what you're talking about. Your words are not making very much sense.
In no way has Jaded Scholar shown me that all the problems in mathematics which have been labeled, have been fixed. That is what JS claimed. And, I've provided a multitude of references which demonstrate that the uncertainty principle is a problem which is a result of the mathematics employed. This problem is clearly labeled "uncertainty". Therefore the evidence is quite strong that I have gone ahead and proven JS to be wrong in those assertions made.
Quoting universeness
Your seat is a seat, and your toilet is a toilet. Neither is a "point", so this in no way qualifies as moving from point A to point B.
Quoting universeness
You can define "point A" and "point B" in any way that you please. But if you stray from the mathematical definition of "point", then you argue by equivocation, because problems of mathematics is what we are discussing here. Therefore your argument is bogus, and irrelevant, as being nothing but an equivocation fallacy.
Quoting Jaded Scholar
I should have addressed this as well. What I did was not "research", but a matter of "Google search" to produce references for what I already knew, due to past research. There is a big difference between researching to expand one's knowledge, as i did in the past when I wanted to better understand the uncertainty principle, and searching to find authorities to support one's prejudice. Now, I will continue to support my prejudice, since conventional knowledge seems to agree with me, and the research I did, which created my current prejudice, seems to have served me well, according to the references from my Google search. And you have provided nothing but hot air, toward making me want to reconsider.
You it appears, like to make all sorts of assertions concerning things you know nothing about, holding up a card with an embossed "PhD in Physics", to create the illusion of authority.
I suggest you would be happiest moving in this direction in your future studies. You might find it more akin to your reality.
:rofl: :rofl:
That's gold.
MU is not worth your learned time or effort. He is a fully cooked noodnik, who does not accept any scientific findings about the origin, structure and workings of the universe, based purely on the fact that science cannot prove every woo woo conjecture about the origin, structure and workings of the universe wrong. He just points at ever reducing gaps and exclaims 'look! everyone! look, look look! gap there, gap there, gap there! I must keep screaming, gap there! Why won't the world recognise my genius for telling everyone about this!! GAP THERE!'
Most people appreciate having the gaps in their thought pointed out to them, that's a sign of healthy intellectualism, and the route to self-improvement. Unfortunately, some do not appreciate this; they turn away, attempting to deny the reality of the gaps which are obvious. Some may even insult and ridicule the one who is pointing to the gaps. That is a symptom of conceit, which I mentioned above.
In my naive fantasies I wonder if our macro world is indeed a simulation wherein the creative mechanisms are intentionally hidden from us in the quantum realms. With math we are able to manipulate results down there to some extent but remain puzzled at non-locality - a feature of that realm where scales of measurements and dimensions might be easily manipulated by our overlords. :roll:
In relativity theory it seems there is possible the passage of time without any physical change. Time being completely independent of change seems peculiar. This, unfortunately, puts me somewhat in MU's camp: we don't truly understand either time or space. But I am old and have lost brain cells. :chin:
So do you think that a point in spacetime designated A and another point in spacetime designated B is not scientifically rigorous? and we should accept that in mathematical terms, the distance between A and B cannot be traversed unless 'infinite acceleration' is a real thing? If you do then sure, sometimes your thinking is imo, unfortunate. But I don't think anyone could accuse you of being anti-science, whereas I think that is a fair criticism of MU and his woo woo.
Sure, if it's pointed out by those who are working hard to close/narrow such gaps, but not when it comes from the 'na na na na na,' crowd of noodnik thinkers who do nothing to help and everything they can to hinder because they are so envious of the real experts that they utterly failed to become.
What significant academic quals do you hold MU and what field of expertise do you have that others may benefit from? Would you rather stay under the covers?
I don't brag about owning titles. If I was charging you a fee for my work I would show you credentials so that you'd feel confident in paying me. But I'm not, and I offer you my work on a take it or leave it basis, the choice is yours. You'll have to judge my work for yourself however, or else you just demonstrate prejudice, and this judgement requires critical analysis which you are showing a lack of in your rejection. Either that or you haven't read it and your judgement is just common prejudice. Did you even take the short time required to read the references which justify the position I'm arguing?
Here, I'll explain in simple terms for simple minds. Zeno's arrow paradox shows that there is an incompatibility between occupying a space (having a location), and being in motion. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in its common representation, says that the more accurately a particle's position (location) is known, the less accurately its momentum (a property inherent to its motion) can be known, and vise versa. Do you see the resemblance between these two? Zeno said that the arrow cannot be both moving, and also have a location, at the same time, because this is contradictory. The uncertainty principle validates this, because it shows that if we know one of these, either the particle's position, or the particle's motion (momentum) with a very high degree of certainty, we cannot know the other at all.
The mathematics of calculus with the Fourier series provides a system of balance between these two, as explained in my reference above.
It is clearly not the case that the mathematicians have resolved Zeno's arrow paradox. They have produced a workaround which is adequate for many applications, but the consequence of this workaround is the uncertainty principle. The very problem which Zeno pointed out more than 2000 years ago persists today as the uncertainty principle.
The way you put that sentence, seems to me like an attempt to conflate a title such as doctor or professor with a title such as Earl, Duke or Lord. So I just include this sentence to dilute that possible conflation as much as possible. Doctor or professor is a merit based title, Earl, Duke, Lord or Knight, never has been imo, and never will be. Just saying!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What field of expertise can you offer service in which is worth anyone paying for?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So you do realise then that I already rejected your so called 'work,' ages ago. You are now just trying to special plead that I consider it more fully on threat of you thinking that I am prejudiced against you and i have not critically analysed your viewpoints to YOUR satisfaction. Perhaps you now know what I meant when I suggested that you were a bit of a deluded diva.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:lol: This from the guy who does not engage in ad hominem.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:lol: What is laughable, is that you really do think you are making a really important statement here!
Any uncertainty principle shows a current problem that we have no current solution to Sherlock. It does not mean that science is absolutely incapable of ever finding a work around or a direct solution to such issues. You make mundane points that most on TPF are already very familiar with and you think you are being deep and profound. The uncertainty principle does not stop me from traversing a distance without any demonstration that I need infinite acceleration to do so, under some mathematical model of an ancient like Zeno, who lived during a relative mathematical infancy.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is not an impenetrable impedance to all future scientific attempts to progress in our understandings of the origins, workings and structure of the universe.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So what? Who cares? We keep going ya muppet! (since you have let ad hominem back in)
We have progressed from Zeno to Heisenberg. Do you really think our scientific findings will end there?
Get with the program you surrender monkey!
:lol:
But, in Minkowski spacetime it seems progression in the time variable requires no movement in space. I think of time as being in some ways linked to movement - a philosophical perspective. Just a feeling. JS might be able to address this issue, which is probably a triviality on my part.
I found this from wiki, an interesting point of pause and consideration:
[b]Minkowski, aware of the fundamental restatement of the theory which he had made, said
The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth, space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
?Hermann Minkowski, 1908, 1909[6]
Though Minkowski took an important step for physics, Albert Einstein saw its limitation:
At a time when Minkowski was giving the geometrical interpretation of special relativity by extending the Euclidean three-space to a quasi-Euclidean four-space that included time, Einstein was already aware that this is not valid, because it excludes the phenomenon of gravitation. He was still far from the study of curvilinear coordinates and Riemannian geometry, and the heavy mathematical apparatus entailed.[/b]
So does:
In mathematical physics, Minkowski space (or Minkowski spacetime) combines inertial space and time manifolds with a non-inertial reference frame of space and time into a four-dimensional model relating a position (inertial frame of reference) to the field.
That combines a non-accelerating reference frame with a reference frame that does consider acceleration fully hold up, if spacetime is curved?
Quoting jgill
But the space itself is expanding within any duration of time. Is it more accurate to say that every 4D coordinate is moving away from its adjacent points during every time duration or that 'new' 4D spacetime coordinates are being formed in Minkowski spacetime, within any instant of time duration? So what is 'no movement in space,' really referring to. I will understand If I am making some physics or maths 101 errors here. I appreciate your tolerance, if that is the case and I hope I am not causing you too much exasperation.
What makes you think that I believe myself to be making a really important statement? That's an unjustified conclusion, and this is the lounge. I am actually making, and believe myself to be making, a statement of trivial fact.
The bizarre thing is that there are people here who incessantly deny the truth of such a trivial, yet basic, fact of reality. What could be the motivation for such a denial? Denial of trivial fact does not advance one's knowledge, nor does it advance one's social status. So how could it be becoming of one who holds a title, to deny the reality of a basic, trivial fact?
The point was that Jaded Scholar insisted that these problems pointed to by Zeno had been solved by mathematics. The uncertainty of "the uncertainty principle" demonstrates very clearly that the problem described in "the arrow paradox" has not been solved.
Quoting universeness
Same problem, different name. Now if the PhD's in Physics of the world deny that the uncertainty principle is a problem, and thereby refuse to develop an understanding of that problem, then yes, scientific findings will end there. No physicist would ever develop a true understanding of the real relation between space and time. Then the issue would no longer be trivial. In this way, the matter of "denial" turns a very trivial fact into a substantial problem.
Quoting universeness
My understanding is that two objects move further apart with time; space itself (whatever it is) doesn't change. Some of this stuff is assumed axiomatically.
Hope you enjoyed/are still enjoying, any celebrations, get-togethers you had with family and friends!
I don't think there is anything left in the tube for you to squeeze out, regarding our exchange on this thread or the exchange you have had with @Jaded Scholar
My opinion remains that he shot you down in flames, and you have been trying to pick up little trivial pieces since. Your anti-science stance, or perhaps a more accurate description would be, your negativity / lack of confidence, towards / in, scientific findings, rate of progress and future projections, hold almost no value or significance for me. I am sure you will find others on TPF who can find some more common ground with you than I can, or am ever likely to.
However, I don't think it is proper to call this "motion" because the activity known as spatial expansion is not consistent with our conceptions of "motion", and the physical laws which describe "motion".
Quoting universeness
I think we'll just have to wait to see what JS says after reading up on it more thoroughly. JS already said "The 'problem' you describe was solved by calculus". But I suspect that JS will be changing tune again, as the uncertainty of the uncertainty principle clearly demonstrates that the 'problem' is yet to be resolved.
Remember, JS's tune has been changing ever since we first engaged. First JS said, "Whatever the gaps are, they are not what you described - if we could label them, we could have fixed them by now". But then what was said was: "I challenge you to point out one such problem that has been labelled, and is not something that modern mathematicians want solved...". Obviously there is a big difference between 'if they were labeled they'd be fixed', and 'if they are labeled mathematicians want to fix them'.
Only in that he tried his best to show you a little more patience, despite your constant strawmannirg of the points he was making. You have already agreed that the point you made about 'uncertainty' in science is trivial, and it also may be simply down to the currently available tech, methodology or understanding needed to completely solve most or all levels/manifestations of uncertainty.
Despite this, you continue to way overblow the significance of such points and you also hold up esoteric style shinies to distract from your unimportant points, such as:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:rofl: I have bolded some of the utter piffle from the quote above, as an example of the type of nonsense shiny you hold up!
All the points I have been making are trivial, accept the point about JS's denial. The indicated problems are trivial, but denying that a trivial problem is a real problem, turns a trivial problem into something substantial. O, what a tangled web we weave...
Quoting universeness
What I have been doing precisely, is to emphasize that the problems I refer to are very real problems, regardless of how trivial these problems are. The degree of triviality of the problem is irrelevant. That the problem is very real is all that matters.
So when truth is replaced with a stand-in, because there is a trivial problem which prevents a statement of the truth, and the stand-in is accepted as the truth, rather than recognized for what it is, a stand-in rather than the truth, then a very trivial problem can develop into a significant problem. That is because we are inclined to forego the search for truth because the stand-in is already accepted as the truth.
Quoting universeness
I'm still waiting for your rebuttal, to demonstrate why you think my statement is "nonsense". Clearly, nothing is ever really at point A or point B, according to the principles employed in modern physics. Obviously it's your talk about moving from point A to point B which is nonsense.
From BingAI:
Does "simply move apart" imply motion in the common sense? Can something move without motion?
Whether a thing is a problem or not is a societal decision. If the vast majority do not consider it a problem, it likely is not.
AI:
:grin: Well, when it comes to your posts, I agree that there is a very real problem, and it is in the big scheme of things, very trivial. The very real problem, is your irrational worldview of the past, current and future efficacy of all scientific endeavours. You are simply a science pessimist and folks like @Jaded Scholar (and I think, @jgill, at least, most of the time, despite his sometimes protestation that he is too old now (nonsense) to be able to still be a significant mathematical force.) and I, are science optimists or perhaps even science celebrants.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No science field or scientist (worthy of the label,) would ever, ever, ever do this. To do so would be anti-science. Unlike theists, scientists are 'real' truth seekers who MUST have no 100% 'loyalty' to ANY scientific /theory/principle or law. Again, you are making totally false claims.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again we see your lies. We all know we can assign point A and B and we can traverse the distance between them. You accept that demonstration but you will not accept that demonstration as proof that your statement of:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover is therefore piffle and nonsense.
This makes you a liar, a fake, a dishonest interlocutor.
The problem though, as I've read, is that this "moving apart" can be much faster than the speed of light. And since the motion of objects is limited by the speed of light in relativity theory, this "moving apart" cannot be categorized as motion, in order to avoid contradiction. So in the following example, a galaxy can be observed to be "...receding from us well in excess of the speed of light...", bit in reality, that galaxy is "...hardly moving at all!', "...moving through space at ~2% the speed of light or less...".
[quote=https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/06/12/ask-ethan-how-does-the-fabric-of-spacetime-expand-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/?sh=1753c4723b5f]If we were to ask, from our perspective, what this means for the speed of this distant galaxy that we're only now observing, we'd conclude that this galaxy is receding from us well in excess of the speed of light. But in reality, not only is that galaxy not moving through the Universe at a relativistically impossible speed, but it's hardly moving at all! Instead of speeds exceeding 299,792 km/s (the speed of light in a vacuum), these galaxies are only moving through space at ~2% the speed of light or less.
But space itself is expanding, and that accounts for the overwhelming majority of the redshift we see. And space doesn't expand at a speed; it expands at a speed-per-unit-distance: a very different kind of rate. When you see numbers like 67 km/s/Mpc or 73 km/s/Mpc (the two most common values that cosmologists measure), these are speeds (km/s) per unit distance (Mpc, or about 3.3 million light-years).
The restriction that "nothing can move faster than light" only applies to the motion of objects through space. The rate at which space itself expands this speed-per-unit-distance has no physical bounds on its upper limit.[/quote]
Quoting universeness
This is not at all true, I have very real respect for sicentific endeavours, and I am truly amazed, even awed by the great achievements derived from scientific knowledge. The fact that I practise philosophical skepticism has little if any bearing, on the great respect that I have for the scientific method.
You, on the other hand, profess a false premise that philosophical skepticism is derived from an "irrational worldview".
Quoting universeness
I did not accept your demonstration, I proved it to be equivocation. Your seat and your toilet can not be said to be "points", in any rigorous logic. Since we are concerned with the rigorous logic of mathematics, your use of "point" here is equivocal.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
[quote=https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Point.html]A point is a 0-dimensional mathematical object which can be specified in n-dimensional space using an n-tuple (x_1, x_2, ..., x_n) consisting of n coordinates. In dimensions greater than or equal to two, points are sometimes considered synonymous with vectors and so points in n-dimensional space are sometimes called n-vectors. Although the notion of a point is intuitively rather clear, the mathematical machinery used to deal with points and point-like objects can be surprisingly slippery. This difficulty was encountered by none other than Euclid himself who, in his Elements, gave the vague definition of a point as "that which has no part."
The basic geometric structures of higher dimensional geometry--the line, plane, space, and hyperspace--are all built up of infinite numbers of points arranged in particular ways.
These facts lead to the mathematical pun, "without geometry, life is pointless."
The decimal point in a decimal expansion is voiced as "point" in the United States, e.g., 3.1415 is voiced "three point one four one five," whereas a comma is used for this purpose in continental Europe.[/quote]
Your "demonstration" was very obviously an argument through equivocation, and therefore invalid. So I am still waiting for a proper rebuttal, something more substantial than a hurling of insults.
This is like trying to reason with a Kent Hovind or Ken Ham style sophist.
You are not worth any more of my time. You offer nothing more than a Pantomime style exchange:
MU: Oh no I don't! and oh no 'it' isn't!
Rational Thinkers: Oh yes you do! and oh yes 'it' is.
Ad Nauseam! bye bye!
Yes. I stand corrected. The limits due to the speed of light seemed contradictory. It's difficult to imagine "nothing" expanding. It's an age of discovery and conjecture where our intuitions - formed by everyday experiences - must give way to a deeper reality in which math replaces direct sensations. And perhaps a newer, emerging math replaces that which has served so well up to this point.
Points and continuums, space and time . . . . . remain beyond complete understanding, although we manipulate them confidently. When I asked an old friend, an analytic number theorist, what he thinks of real analysis, he says, "It's very, very complicated and it starts with a metaphysical notion, points."
Remember that the proposal that the edge of the universe may be expanding at a superluminal speed, is a 'relative' measure. The result comes out of consideration of speed 'relative to our position.' It is not an actual speed. If you were at the edge of the universe, you would not be travelling at a superluminal speed.
That's what I'm talking about, a mind open to the possibility of solving the problems rather than denying that the problems exist.
Quoting universeness
This image you propose, of an expanding "edge" of the universe presents a misunderstanding of "expansion". It makes no sense to say "If you were at the edge of the universe". And your mention of "speed' relative to our position'...not an actual speed" is utter nonsense, because all speed is "relative", and this leaves your "actual speed" as totally meaningless. That's the point of relativity theory.
[quote=https://history.nasa.gov/EP-177/ch4-9.html]The more we learn about it, the more complicated the expansion of the universe seems to be. In the region near our galaxy, the expansion seems less rapid than for the universe as a whole. In fact, it appears that the combined gravitational pull of a very large cluster of galaxies in the constellation Virgo is actually retarding the local rate of expansion to half the rate for the universe as a whole. We're finding evidence of how gravity attracts even over distances of hundreds of millions of light years. Although there must be many very distant galaxies and quasars that we are not yet able to detect, astronomers have observed radiation from an even more remote source, literally at the edge of the observable universe.[/quote]
There is a limit to how far we can "see", or observe, within the universe, determined by the speed of light, and the amount of time that the universe is known to have existed for. This is known as the cosmological horizon, "the edge of the observable universe". It could be called a temporal edge:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/22/what-is-it-like-as-you-approach-the-edge-of-the-universe/?sh=43e638da7152
Or, it might be said to be not an edge at all, just the illusion of an edge:
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/does-universe-have-edge
Yeah, sure, woo woo boy, the speed of light is relative :roll: How about 'proper speed,' is that also relative in your wee esoteric world? I respond to you just for the benefit of others who might be mislead by YOUR
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
According to Wikipedia, "proper speed" is the speed from the observer's frame of reference, which in your example, would be equivalent to "relative to our position". So if "actual speed" is meant to be "proper speed", there is no difference between the speed relative to our position, and the actual speed. That is what leaves your statement as utter nonsense:
Quoting universeness
See how you completely dodged my 'the speed of light is not relative,' response to your 'all speeds are relative BS.' You did a quick Wiki search about 'proper speed' and then demonstrated your lack of understanding of the use of the concept. :lol:
Can't you ever say anything intelligent?
The issue I see with the "expansion of space", is that in order to conceive of numerous distinct locations from which everything is receding, it is necessary to assume that these locations are "points" in space which have real substantial existence. These points are not particles of mass or any form of elementary substance, but points of space itself. So this requires a type of understanding of space which allows for real points (as opposed to arbitrarily assigned points of location), and a determination of the characteristics of these points which would allow them to be identified.
The speed of light is a universal constant you complete idiot!
Sure, the speed of light is constant, but as is the case with all motion, the speed is always relative to a frame of reference. That's why your statement ("The result comes out of consideration of speed 'relative to our position.' It is not an actual speed") is nonsense. All speed is relative, and to distinguish "actual speed" is nonsense.
I suppose you are going to argue that the speed of light is relative to nothing, and this makes it an actual speed rather than a relative speed?
No, as you are too far gone!