- #36
humanino
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It was Riemann and Hilbert. Indeed, you need to buy a math book.Buckeye said:Was it really Albert or his 1st wife who developed most of the theory of Albert's first 3 papers?
It was Riemann and Hilbert. Indeed, you need to buy a math book.Buckeye said:Was it really Albert or his 1st wife who developed most of the theory of Albert's first 3 papers?
Physics advances as we loose our time "discussing" here.Buckeye said:Has advanced physics really advance that much over the past 20 yrs?
humanino said:Physics advances as we loose our time "discussing" here.
Pray tell me, where did I claim to know much?malawi_glenn said:Normouse: The thing is that he claims that he knows much, but he doesn't. He is already convinced that the physical paradigm of today is wrong. He is not even a physicist. It would be different if it were a person who just started college and had a bunch of questions. But this guy is working on his own (crackpot) theories, without even knowing what the heck is is refusing.
Buckeye:
What if the physics of a process CAN'T be explained to a beginner?
As we have written here quite a lot now, it doesen't matter if Feynman would have published his text 3years ago (if he was alive). Physics don't follow prophets.. Einstein never believed in quantum physics, Fred Hoyle never believed in the Big Bang. And so on..
A possible explination can be that Feynman never read articles after the 1970's, or just wasn't smart enough to understand what he read. I have one professor in particle physics who thinks Supersymmetry is junk. And another professor who believe very strongly in it. That is why consensus is important. You can't use your authority all the time.
peter0302 said:I knew you were being sarcastic, and I think your argument is rather ignorant. You don't have to know _everything_ about something in order to gain value from it. Renormalization is taught because it provides very accurate, very useful results and predictions. We know some other theory will supercede it, just as all theories are eventually superceded. You can't be so childishly dismissive of something that's been so successful if you don't have a better alternative. And your analogy to teaching that the Earth is flat is completely wrong: in fact, a "flat" Earth is immensly useful for certain types of cartography. Should we eliminate the use of mercator projections and the like because they're not perfect?
FEYNMAN has standing to call renormalization "dippy". No one on this forum does, however.
Hmmm,Haelfix said:Renormalization was weird when it first came out back in the day, but the mystery was largely resolved in the 70s with the advent of the renormalization group and lattice gauge theory. It seems perfectly natural now and it would be weird if you *didn't* have to perform such a process.
Buckeye said:Hmmm,
That's strange. Does that mean that Feymann, in his 1985 book on QED, did not know that renormalization and lattice gauge theory in the 70s contradicted his writing in 1985, or was he still at odds with renormalization?
Buckeye said:Yes, teaching renormalization is useful as long as the proper warnings and limitations are also taught so someone in the future will have the good sense to question infinity / infinity = 1. I'm not sure, but it seems as though my question may have led you to call me "childishly dismissive"? Is that about right?
Normouse said:But I am mildly alarmed that Physics has turned into a new form of mathematics(extremely wide ranging and complex) with a lab.
That lab is reality. Mentioned in the thread was science was to be able to calculate and predict tangibly the results of experiments. Who said that? Did God whisper in someone ear when I wasn't looking. Why is science only that? What about non-mathematical insights?
What about intuition,(non-mathematical)? Unless you know the math completely, not much of those things are around even mathematically. Are we going toward a mathematical wall where only the inventors of the new mathematics can conceptualize Physics?
Unless you professional boxers are willing to share a little and value visualization of reality a little more we amateurs will be totally left out. We then have no choice but to come up with our own theories, which some of you ungraciously call "crackpot" just to participate. Cut a brother a break.
Feynman suspected that Quantum Electrodynamics did not make sense in a purely mathematical way. It is fantastic as a physical theory. Also, lattice gauge theory wasn't really around in the 1980s.Buckeye said:Hmmm,
That's strange. Does that mean that Feymann, in his 1985 book on QED, did not know that renormalization and lattice gauge theory in the 70s contradicted his writing in 1985, or was he still at odds with renormalization?
vanesch said:That's the *definition* of physics: how mathematics applies to observations of nature! If it has no mathematical underpinning, it is not physics. It is not possible to do physics without some form of mathematics. Now, that mathematics can be approximative, and one can use intuition instead of calculations, but it is still "mathematics". For instance, saying that "pressure rises with the amount of gas in a container" is still a mathematical statement (even though it is not an equation, it specifies something about the functional relationship between two quantities (real numbers).
Well, unfortunately, that IS science. Science is the confrontation of a theory (a set of hypotheses, with their logical, hence mathematical, deductions) with observations (hence some form of quantitative assessment).
You cannot confront these if there's not some form of mathematical relationship between quantities (even inprecise, as stated above). And if you cannot confront them, then the theory is "non-falsifiable" and hence "non-scientific".
It's the very definition of science.
No, you can use old mathematics too, with new hypotheses.
But that's about as interesting as saying that "you professional scribes should be willing to let us, who have never learned the alphabet or any grammar or vocabulary, also write our works of literary art...", in other words, you should also consider our meaningless scribbles on paper.