Innovative ideas? If they are so innovative, and they are so sure about them, then why don't they patent them?

I'm going to patent my innovative ideas. I'm going to be a trillionaire one day. Or maybe a billionaire. Or maybe, just a millionaire. It doesn't really matter in the end how much money I make. Even if I don't ever make a dime, I just hope that my innovations, make the world a better place.

Kind of like Mr. Tesla. He was kind of funny too.

ps. Are you really from Belgium?

Bravo!

The best part was about having a beautiful and elegant Mathematics. One can ignore "Choice" or "Infinity" for that matter, but the price is really high.

I can ignore the stars and pretend they don't exist, but in doing so I lose the pleasure of looking at the skies.

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There are times when I feel it might be fruitful to explore more fully the ideas or conceptual rigamarole involved behind an engineering application that is not precisely feasible.

Maybe an example is terraforming threads. There is a lot of hard-science interesting physics, chemistry and geology that can be explained by going through a scenario in terraforming. But, I see these threads being locked because the engineering application is unfeasible.

I argue that where the science is understood, we should discuss, even if engineering application of such is not worked out.

micro,

i don't believe the rules are too strict, but i do believe that your administration of the rules are not correct. i didn't say that your administration of the rules was too strict, i am saying that you're not doing it right.

can you talk to Greg or Evo or Zapper or Integral or Pervect or some of the other admins who've been around longer and get some insight from them about this? i mean this in the kindest manner.

Nice rant micro! :D

Can you categorize these "innovative ideas," though?

(1) Some innovative ideas stem from "reality-doubters" who believe that all of reality is a projection of the mind. (2) Some "innovative ideas" stem from not quite grasping a concept, or making a mathematics mistake. (3) Some "innovative ideas" stem from grasping the concepts perfectly well, and seeing past them.

Probably in 90% of the cases, you have one of the first two situations, but occasionally, you'll have situation number 3.

When you cling to what is canonical/mainstream, you run the risk of confirmation bias, narrative fallacy.

In fact, I have the opposite bias towards canonical/mainstream because I'm well aware of these problems. Whenever I hear the bread-and-raisin analogy for the expanding universe, I feel like ripping out my hair.

Yes, I'm well aware of the canonical/mainstream explanation for the expanding universe. But by the rules of this forum, because that IS a canonical/mainstream explanation, I'm not allowed to point out that the analogy makes no sense. (What category does that go in? Obviously category 2... An "innovative idea" that comes from not quite grasping a concept, but we should analyze the idea carefully, and at least entertain the possibility that it genuinely does not make sense. If it does make sense, then the explanation should eventually follow. If it is nonsensical, it can only be defended by closing the thread, implying that the questioner is "too stupid to understand it.")

There are some ideas that are widely accepted, but genuinely do not make sense. These "widely accepted, yet nonsensical" ideas tend to come from religion rather than from science, but I don't think that the canon/mainstream of science is entirely immune to the same problems of canon/mainstream of religion.

(I should also point out that the raisin-bread analogy is derived not FROM Special Relativity, but FROM the canon/mainstream belief that Special Relativity is valid only locally.)

^
All of this would be avoided if people just don't post their "innovative ideas". I suppose there is another place for that. The above post clearly says that the PF philosophy does not include that kind of thing. I think that the least us members could do is respect that. ;)

While what you say does indeed seem fair, I just find that it's too much trouble. Just my two cents. Maybe I'm biased because I don't particularly care about posting or reading speculative ideas - I'd much rather learn what's canonical/mainstream first. :-) :-)

my favorite story about the axiom of choice is the "shoes and socks" story:

if you are asked to pick one shoe from an infinite collection of pairs of shoes, there is a clear way to do it: pick the left shoe!

on the other hand, if you are asked to pick a sock from an infinite collection of pairs of socks, it is not so clear....except to me: i simply pick the left sock!

The problem is a lack of transparency, and a lack of an appeal process. The administrators can delete posts, and end threads, with no more than a comment of "this has gone on long enough" leaving many unanswered questions.

Perhaps the deleted post consisted of crackpottery, perhaps not. I have no way of knowing that, because you delete the post.

When people post on this site, no matter how wrong they may be, they intend their posts for public view, and with rare exception they actually BELIEVE what they are saying. If you delete that post, whether I'm crazy or not, my immediate reaction is that there is some conspiracy to silence the truth, or that you intend to "steal" my ideas, so that you can publish or patent them, and take credit for them yourself. (This is especially true if you delete a comment because "it is not mainstream science.")

I wonder whether there could be a compromise somehow; a couple of suggestions I would have is
(1) When posts are deleted, they should be a matter of public record; the whole post, and the reason for the deletion. And the person who got their post deleted should have at least one opportunity to apologize, retract, or defend their idea.
(2) Instead of permanently closing a thread, it might be appropriate to close it for a week or a month, giving the respective parties a chance to calm down, and reflect on the ideas, so that they can come back to it without anger getting in the way of logic.

The only times when I get upset at the rules are when somebody posts a thread that looks like it's going to be interesting but then it gets locked right away. Usually happens around the Debunking and Philosophy sub-forums but I understand that there are certain criteria that have to be met and whatnot and that this forum isn't for everything.

stokes theorem is really a theorem on differential manifolds, so the book by spivak, calculus on manifolds, may be better, since spivak is a geometer, as compared to rudin who is an analyst. as for algebraic geometry, what do you think of the introductory book by miles reid, undergraduate algebraic geometry, or the more advanced book by shafarevich, basic algebraic geometry, or the books by mumford, complex projective varieties, and the red book of schemes vols. I and II?

Abel said, famously, « study the masters, not their pupils » and, honestly, Lefschetz's book on algebraic geometry is not to be despised....

too true, too true...and to think that those two people got to make decisions far and wide on people's careers...

So are you saying that the Banach-Tarski Paradox lets us draw a 1-1 relation between the entire dictionary and the words starting with "a-"?

If that is truly what you meant, and I'm not mixing anything up, does this not also happen in the reals? Where any open interval ]a,b[ with [itex]a,b\in\mathbb R[/itex] can be show to have a 1-1 relation with all of [itex]\mathbb R[/itex]?

Am I misinterpreting something here?

Very true. I agree that Rudin is horrid.

Indeed! Why this special prejudice? Or is this a case of anything outside of logicism is for the poet and artist only? What about Peano's 5th axiom? Do you accept that any ordered proposition is true (ergo TRUE) given the veracity of some first proposition and another relating a subsequent proposition? Without that, it will get might hard to demonstrate much of anything... On the other hand, that too is strictly speaking an article of faith...

Inquiring minds want to know!

(and thanks for this series, very nice to read this stuff again after a long absence)