Who is your favorite Physicist?

@fresco,

Dear Fresco, I just mentioned you in that thread on The tolerant atheist, that you are one of the hateful posters here, who react to my posting, not with contribution to the mutual resolution of an issue, like God exists in concept as first and foremost the creator cause of everything with a beginning, but with hatred and fear and to the core nothing but fake argumentation which consists in essentially evasiveness, i.e. running away from the issue itself

Okay, show yourself to be a true man, come forth and contribute your best thinking to the mutual resolution of the issue, God exists or not, in concept as first and foremost the creator cause of everything with a beginning.

Okay, dear readers here, you have a ring side seat to watch the competition of wit and learning between yours truly, and one Fresco.

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@Susmariosep,

Quote:

For more than a century physicists have hoped that they were closing in on the Holy Grail of modern science: a unified theory that would make sense of the entire physical world, from the subnuclear realm of quarks and gluons to the very moment of creation of the universe.

[…] the attempts to find such a “theory of everything”; a forceful argument it will never be found; and a warning that the compromises necessary to produce a final theory may well undermine the rules of good science.

At the heart […] is the rise of the particle physicists and their attempts to reach far out into the cosmos for a unifying theory.

Working beyond the grasp of the largest telescopes or the most powerful particle accelerators, and unable to subject their findings and theories to experimental scrutiny, they have moved into a world governed entirely by mathematical and highly speculative theorizing, none of which can be empirically verified.

[…] a theory of everything derived from particle physics will be full of untested—and untestable— assumptions.

And if physicists yield to such speculation, the field will retreat from the high ground of science, becoming instead a modern mythology.

This would mean the end of physics as we know it.

Click here. [ If this does not work, send me a pm. ]

0 Replies

Previous • Post: # 6,492,801 • NextView Profile centrox

Are you Roman Catholic, you sound like the church during Galileo's time.

The Physicists I am watching today doing real exeriments with emperical data are. They are Erik Verlinde, and Alessandro Sergi.

1 Reply

@brianjakub,

Quote:

Why isn't recent modelling open to picturing[?]

Totally agree. If you can't explain your concept in plain English and metaphorical pictures it means you don't really understand it yourself.

2 Replies

@Leadfoot,

The principle target of criticism for pragmatists(Dewey, Rorty et al) is the concept of epistemology as representation of a 'mind independent reality' or 'verbally painting a picture'. But like Nietzshe, pragmatists argue that there is no way to seperate 'description' from 'reality'...there are only descriptions experienced phenomena of greater or lesser utility for particular purposes.
If you understand this (the prevailing nonrepresentationalist view) then it is easy to accept that seemingly contradictory 'pictures' can be applied to the same phenomenon (such as the wave vs particle views of 'electrons').
If you read Rorty's 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" you can follow his argument about how we came to favour 'pictures' as explanatory devices..a line we inherited from the Greeks. And indeed modern physics has moved on from there by employing far more abstract modelling such as non Euclidean geometry. The simplistic 'error' is to always equate 'seeing' with 'understanding'.

(NB. A possible extrapolation of the idea of mathematical models as 'metaphor' rather than 'pictures' can be pursued via Lakoff and Nunez "Where Mathematics Comes From").

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@Leadfoot,

BTW another aspect of nonrepresentationalism is its reference to 'the coherence theory of truth as opposed to 'the correspondence theory of truth'. I mention this because your question about 'understanding' is addressed by the word 'coherence'.

1 Reply

@fresco,

Quote:

If you understand this (the prevailing nonrepresentationalist view) then it is easy to accept that seemingly contradictory 'pictures' can be applied to the same phenomenon (such as the wave vs particle views of 'electrons').

I'd respond by saying 'Nah, it just means you haven't got the right picture yet'.

For your example, just picture the electron as a vibrating particle (or string if you prefer). The particle then makes a wave as it travels. That picture could possibly explain it's behavior as it goes through the proverbial slots too.

1 Reply

@Leadfoot,

There is no 'right picture'.
Your tendency to religious absolutism is showing !

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@fresco,

Sorry, I don't play the - 'Is not! - Is too!' game.

If you can offer an argument you can explain, I'll listen. Otherwise...

1 Reply

@Leadfoot,

Sorry ! Nor do I ! That's why I've just gone out of my way to give you chapter and verse on arguments which explain the point. I can do no more than suggest you read the basic works yourself, but unless you can at least temporarily suspend your faith in a concept of 'absolute reality' you will get nowhere with them.

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@fresco,

Quote:

If you read Rorty's 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" you can follow his argument about how we came to favour 'pictures' as explanatory devices..a line we inherited from the Greeks. And indeed modern physics has moved on from there by employing far more abstract modelling such as non Euclidean geometry. The simplistic 'error' is to always equate 'seeing' with 'understanding'

Could you give me an explanation of this simplistic error. I think in pictures of reality, and learned it by living and using common sense and logic. I didn't learn it from the Greeks. I think it's part of human nature.

1 Reply

@brianjakub,

The point about 'seeing' is that we imagine/experience looking 'out to an external world'. We can then cognitively impose 'order' from the familiar /known to the unknown. This is the basis of modelling. So we 'understand' the movement of the tides (say) by experience of seeing the actions of magnets (say). The visual sense is important because it allows for contactless interaction at a distance, and 'getting a vantage point'. Rorty expands on this but points out not only that other senses are equally important, but that cognition via language is essential for focussing the senses on 'aspects that matter'. For example the word 'force' unites our 'seeing of magnets' with our 'seeing the tide'. Note however that the earlier word 'force' is no longer operative as such in field theory. Nor is 'contactless' a valid description at the quantum level.
What you call 'common sense' and 'logic' are culturally inherited aspects of semantics. (There are arguments about the inapplicability of traditional logic to dynamic systems as it is based on static set theory. It is the abstract permanence of words rather than transience of 'things' that allows us to apply logic to what we see)
I agree that 'human nature' is a good label under which we can put our cognitive tendencies, but I suggest that underlying cognition is 'language'. And whereas 'common sense' is captured by ordinary /lay language about'things out there', counterintuitive aspects of modelling is tied to the abstractions of the metalanguage we call 'mathematics'.

(Here's a critical link to the Rorty point about the Greeks. It does not include his linguistic extrapolation which comes later in his own book).
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V9J8AgAAQBAJ&pg=PT74&lpg=PT74&dq=Rorty+Greeks+vision&source=bl&ots=5OnQmYoBrT&sig=DUoPKYdy0c3MFNHpRrrgsx89GS8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi9pPHdsvrVAhXjK8AKHeVkCjYQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=Rorty%20Greeks%20vision&f=false

1 Reply

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

BTW another aspect of nonrepresentationalism is its reference to 'the coherence theory of truth as opposed to 'the correspondence theory of truth'. I mention this because your question about 'understanding' is addressed by the word 'coherence'.

Sorry for the interjection but there MUST be SOMETHING the language can represent. The concepts we use have meaning, recorded somewhat objectively in dictionaries. Maybe these meanings do not correspond to real objects and maybe they do. In any case, there exist mental images that are documented by language. Language means something.

They are such things as representations, therefore, and they are one of the functions of any language. I think it's important to acknowledge that. And indeed they normally need to be internally coherent.

Which is why, in the wave and particle "dualism" question, it's important to be able to articulate a relation between these two "images": the wave and the particle. In particular, it's useful to explain the conditions in which a wave function can collapse into a particle. In doing so, one needs to articulate a workable synthesis between the two visions.

And even if there are only phenomenons and no "objects", there still exist also representations, and sometimes, useful representations of phenomena. By language.

1 Reply

@brianjakub,

Dear Brian, you ask me:
"Are you Roman Catholic, you sound like the church during Galileo's time."

If I may, I see that you are into the wrong mentality that anything of the past is already to be abandoned.

I am now a diy Christian, that means that I observe my faith according to my very own personal discretion, in regard to what to 'believe' in and what not, and also what to observe in personal morality and also in social morality.

Dear Brian, you are really a civil poster here, which is a very rare bird here.

I will tell you as I said already in public forums that I am not a mathematician nor a scientist, but I know how to think critically, and I keep to truths, facts, logic, and the best thoughts of mankind from since the dawn of man's conscious intelligence.

I kind of see myself as that I could best handle atheists' thinking pretty well, because atheists don't think at all, that is why they are always conducting themselves in evasiveness: they don't think at all, they emote, often with profanities.

Here is an experiment, read carefully:

@Fresco [if you be an atheist] and all atheists, as you think you are so smart and you go about with such chutzpah, please come and exchange thoughts with me on the issue:
"God exists or not, in concept first and foremost as the creator cause of everything with a beginning."

They will call me a dickhead instead of getting busy with their best explanations on how they come to not accept the existence of God, in concept as first and foremost the creator cause of everything with a beginning.

There, dear Brian, you have now my disclosures, so you know in advance how I am going to react to your thinking.

This here a2k is the best forum I have ever been to in my history of sojourning in web forums, because it does not ban me, so far; I have been banned almost everywhere I have been to, in most particular in atheists owned and operated forums.

And all I did was to do what I do here.

Even in Christian forums, basically the way I see it, Christian forums want to coddle atheists and all kinds of blasphemous characters, in order to save them from losing their 'soul'.

Hehehehehehe, and I make them atheists and all kinds of blasphemous creatures, even more damnable, hehehehehehe.

0 Replies

@fresco,

Quote:

The point about 'seeing' is that we imagine/experience looking 'out to an external world'. We can then cognitively impose 'order' from the familiar /known to the unknown. This is the basis of modelling.

I don't think we cognitively impose order, we cognitively understand order. The order was always there, even before we understood it.

Quote:

I agree that 'human nature' is a good label under which we can put our cognitive tendencies, but I suggest that underlying cognition is 'language'. And whereas 'common sense' is captured by ordinary /lay language about'things out there', counterintuitive aspects of modelling is tied to the abstractions of the metalanguage we call 'mathematics'.

So, mathematics doesn't impose order, the order is always there. Mathematics isn't a language anymore than the alphabet is, it is a bunch of symbols we use to express ideas. There really is only one language, the problem is nobody on Earth knows the whole language of everybody on earth. There are a few people that can do extraordinarily complex math, and there are people that have a huge vocabulary. That helps them express their understanding of the reality that their ideas are imagining(or bull crap if they are lying or simply wrong).

In the end words exist to express the truth about what we are experiencing. What we are experiencing is a real and intuitive understanding of the universe. When ever someone says, "that is counter intuitive", they really are saying, "I don't understand what I am observing well enough yet for me to just look at, and instinctively explain how it works". If a person could understand everything, it would all be intuitive to that person. That person would have to be omnipotent though. So what is counter intuitive and hard to imagine as a picture today in physics will be intuitive and as real as an atom or rock tomorrow.

Just remember it is much easier to understand and explain how an airplane works if you can draw a picture of the airflow around the wings, than just using math describing hydraulics, pressures and densities. That's all electronuclear forces are describing. Hydraulics, pressures and densities of the fields inside and outside of atoms. Not much different than aerodynamics. The main difference the fields smaller, and I think layers of fields deep (or universes deep for those string theorists out there) as we cross over from the center of a Higgs boson embedded in the Higgs field of space to the center of a proton or neutron in matter. I suggest reading the work of another of my favorite physicists Konstantin Zloshchastiev, who is working on Bose Einstein condensates. Near zero degrees K is where all the order in the fields are revealed, and becomes something we can really sense.

2 Replies

@brianjakub,

Dear readers here, I am still waiting for Brian to react to my post, see below.

Oh, I love this!

Quote:

• Post: # 6,493,128 • Susmariosep | Mon 28 Aug, 2017 03:20 pm

@brianjakub,
Dear Brian, you ask me:
"Are you Roman Catholic, you sound like the church during Galileo's time."

If I may, I see that you are into the wrong mentality that anything of the past is already to be abandoned.

I am now a diy Christian, that means that I observe my faith according to my very own personal discretion, in regard to what to 'believe' in and what not, and also what to observe in personal morality and also in social morality.

Dear Brian, you are really a civil poster here, which is a very rare bird here.

I will tell you as I said already in public forums that I am not a mathematician nor a scientist, but I know how to think critically, and I keep to truths, facts, logic, and the best thoughts of mankind from since the dawn of man's conscious intelligence.

I kind of see myself as that I could best handle atheists' thinking pretty well, because atheists don't think at all, that is why they are always conducting themselves in evasiveness: they don't think at all, they emote, often with profanities.

Here is an experiment, read carefully:

@Fresco [if you be an atheist] and all atheists, as you think you are so smart and you go about with such chutzpah, please come and exchange thoughts with me on the issue:
"God exists or not, in concept first and foremost as the creator cause of everything with a beginning."

They will call me a dickhead instead of getting busy with their best explanations on how they come to not accept the existence of God, in concept as first and foremost the creator cause of everything with a beginning.

There, dear Brian, you have now my disclosures, so you know in advance how I am going to react to your thinking.

This here a2k is the best forum I have ever been to in my history of sojourning in web forums, because it does not ban me, so far; I have been banned almost everywhere I have been to, in most particular in atheists owned and operated forums.

And all I did was to do what I do here.

Even in Christian forums, basically the way I see it, Christian forums want to coddle atheists and all kinds of blasphemous characters, in order to save them from losing their 'soul'.

Hehehehehehe, and I make them atheists and all kinds of blasphemous creatures, even more damnable, hehehehehehe.

1 Reply

I have to take breakfast now, then do some home chores, but I will be back for my daily session here in a2k, until the working day starts in my location on planet earth.

You see, dear readers here, this country has so many holidays, yesterday Monday it was Heroes Day, no work and no school.

Then in the previous Monday, it was the day of the latest National Hero, by the name of Ninoy Aquino.

Then in the Monday before Ninoy Aquino's Day, there was fear of a big storm, so no work and no school also.

For myself, I think the government declares too easily no work and no school days.

And the people, Oh they love holidays, no work and no school, everyone happy, but where is the country going?

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@Susmariosep,

You seem like an intelligent person. But maybe English isn't your first language because I have a hard time following your train of thought sometimes. My Roman Catholic statement was meant to be Sarcastic humor.

0 Replies

@brianjakub,

Dear Brian, and everyone, I am back.

I guess Brian is now off-line.

Dear readers, when he comes back I hope he will react to my last post here, see Annex below.

And then also I like to bring up a particular point with Brian, on our respective concepts of reality, namely from his part, that as long as all in his mind he can produce a logical explanation for an idea which he fabricates also all in his mind, the idea owing to his logical explanation, it is real.

From my part, what is real is what we humans can connect to our experience in the world outside and independent of our mind.

Now, we or I can also when I have an idea and its explanation in my mind, I can go forth to search for an example representing that idea, in the universe, and when I could find one at least, in which case there is that one instance of a real being.

Or I can go forth into the world outside and independent of my mind to invent a thing that corresponds to that idea in my mind; and that invention then is real.

Okay, here is now, dear Brian, my inquiry with you as a scientist, what do you say about the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), is it real in my sense of real, or real in your sense of real?

Quote:

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is electromagnetic radiation left over from an early stage of the universe in Big Bang cosmology. In older literature, the CMB is also variously known as cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) or "relic radiation".

Courtesy of google.

Annex

Quote:

• Post: # 6,493,128 • Susmariosep | Mon 28 Aug, 2017 03:20 pm

@brianjakub,
Dear Brian, you ask me:
"Are you Roman Catholic, you sound like the church during Galileo's time."

If I may, I see that you are into the wrong mentality that anything of the past is already to be abandoned.

I am now a diy Christian, that means that I observe my faith according to my very own personal discretion, in regard to what to 'believe' in and what not, and also what to observe in personal morality and also in social morality.

Dear Brian, you are really a civil poster here, which is a very rare bird here.

I will tell you as I said already in public forums that I am not a mathematician nor a scientist, but I know how to think critically, and I keep to truths, facts, logic, and the best thoughts of mankind from since the dawn of man's conscious intelligence.

I kind of see myself as that I could best handle atheists' thinking pretty well, because atheists don't think at all, that is why they are always conducting themselves in evasiveness: they don't think at all, they emote, often with profanities.

Here is an experiment, read carefully:

@Fresco [if you be an atheist] and all atheists, as you think you are so smart and you go about with such chutzpah, please come and exchange thoughts with me on the issue:
"God exists or not, in concept first and foremost as the creator cause of everything with a beginning."

They will call me a dickhead instead of getting busy with their best explanations on how they come to not accept the existence of God, in concept as first and foremost the creator cause of everything with a beginning.

There, dear Brian, you have now my disclosures, so you know in advance how I am going to react to your thinking.

This here a2k is the best forum I have ever been to in my history of sojourning in web forums, because it does not ban me, so far; I have been banned almost everywhere I have been to, in most particular in atheists owned and operated forums.

And all I did was to do what I do here.

Even in Christian forums, basically the way I see it, Christian forums want to coddle atheists and all kinds of blasphemous characters, in order to save them from losing their 'soul'.

Hehehehehehe, and I make them atheists and all kinds of blasphemous creatures, even more damnable, hehehehehehe.

1 Reply

@Susmariosep,

I think ideas are real. They aren't physical. All physical things are real. I think matter is just ideas stored in rotation. I think a lot of people would disagree with that. I think some ideas are true and agree with reality, and some are false and don't agree with reality. I am done with this discussion with you for now.

2 Replies

@Olivier5,

I suggest you investigate the difference between the two German words vorstellung and dastellung which both translate as 'representation'.Only one of them refers to 'the existence of a referrent' and that is the one which is the target of 'antirepresentationalism'. The second refers to re-presenting/ re-creating a mental phenomenon and it inolves total communicative context, not just a single word.
Note that dictionary definitions involve defining contexts, and that words (i.e. tokens of communicative exchange) can change their meaning (value) like monetary currency.

1 Reply

Who is your favorite Physicist?

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