Recent content by quartodeciman

The problem is that you aren't forgetting them, or him. Here's a tale you may take a moral out of: Two monks, hindu and buddhist, were walking together in the countryside. They arrived at a river where a young (and not uncomely) woman was waiting. She pleaded with the two men that she be...

? Something like two polynomial functions over the real field coordinated so as to guarantee real field solutions for each of their corresponding equations? I don't recall seeing this being exploited to demonstrate the fundamental theorem of algebra.

The property that any polynomial function of degree > 0 over the complex field possesses at least one value from the same field that assigns that function a value of 0 does not easily translate to a corresponding property of the real field.

Or else it requires an uncountable axiomatic basis. I don't know that it avoids undecidability/incompleteness. There just isn't a clean demonstration of them in the calculus real number system AFAIK. Maybe we never do get rid of obstacles to a perfect computational/noncomputational scheme...

Pete, You may have surmised by now that I'm right on the verge between (what I call) mass-first and energy-first points of view. That is why I posed my earlier question about validating SR momentum fundamentally. Then (I hope) one has (perhaps) a choice of directions for expanding SR...

FYI National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorder NIDCD: Noise-Induced Hearing Loss ---> http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/noise.asp Oddly, no mention of loud music in that article. But here is something including loud music. NIDCD>WISEEARS!: How loud is...

Pete, That was a good tip: put 'DW' in my ignore list. The topic looks much better now. Quart

I was thinking that removing spherical symmetry alters the metric and requires different solutions. That wasn't my impression. I started investigating the ideas of SR back when Einstein still lived and worked. I don't recall any complaints about relativistic mass then. People who accepted SR...

Granted the SR ordinary momentum defined by mvγ, I can readily derive the energy-momentum-restmass relationship. If I opt for a relativistic mass M defined by mγ, then the momentum is a cinch: it is just Mv, just as Newton said "quantity of motion" should be quantified. But the energy-first...

The real number 1 and the unsigned integer 1 are constructed differently. But there is an embedding isomorphism to carry a minimal ring of real numbers generated by 0 and 1 onto the signed integers. This entails the equivalent of a least upper bound postulate, which everyone who enfranchises...

Hasn't two solid decades of adulation been enough? :)

Ethics alone can't resolve the issues of the robotics 3. Epistemology is necessary, and neither Asimov nor others have pursued these foundations extensively (except maybe in the story "Reason" of the book "I, Robot"). In short: "what does a robot think is true, what can a robot know, how good...

from Baez link: Philip Gibbs 1996 - If you go too fast do you become a black hole? "M is contained within a sphere of radius 2GM/c2 (the Schwarzschild radius)" Spherical symmetry is pretty much lost when the star is transformed by a very large boost. "One way to avoid this is to not speak...

Lewis Epstein in the book "Relativity Visualized" does a trick I have not seen exploited anywhere else. Instead of explaining the Minkowski 4-space idea with its new ct dimension, he postulates that all motion is in 4 spatial dimensions (x, y, z, s). 's' is, of course, the same as the...

Even then, one can doubt whether the writing on the stone tablets is authentic. Back over half a century ago, Henry Margenau defined a physical law as a routine relationship resulting from a mass of observations or from deductions. A physical theory is a deductive system with formulated...