Your favorite definition of physics

[DoggerDan]

The first step of applied mathematics. Engineering is the second step. By comparison, most of the other sciences use relatively little math.

 

[juanrga]

Prigogine I know his work rather well, and I do not think we are talking about the same issues, at all.

Are you talking about Byung Chan Eu ? Can you please point out to a technical reference describing the equation you are referring to and how the equation was suggested ? I believe this work amounts to using a large computer simulation and fit it with a simple function. I hope I have the wrong reference.

You say yourself that reductionism is dead because of findings in the late XXth century. But Poincare stumbled onto chaos long before that, in fact at the end of the XIXth century, and it just took a long time for non-mathematician to realize what chaos and non-linear dynamics mean. A good reference would be "Structural Stability and Morphogenesis" for instance, much earlier than what you quote. Of course you will not get non-linear behavior out of a simple Shrodinger equation. Anyway, I will wait until a proper reference has been provided.

Prigogine knows that the laws of chemical reactions are not derivable from quantum electrodynamics in despite of your beliefs. What is more, Prigogine starts one of his last papers Chemical kinetics and dynamics with a critique of the well-known Dirac quote about the reduction of chemistry to quantum mechanics.

About Eu, a good reference is his monograph Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics: Ensemble Method. He suggested his equation after checking that the related Schrödinger-based theories could not explain all the transport phenomena of his interest. As a consequence he postulated his equation. As he correctly notes, the Schrödinger equation can be obtained as a special case from his equation, but the inverse is not true.

Nowhere I said that reductionism was dead because of work on chaos. At contrary I wrote about other three different topics.

I think that I already said that this thread is about definitions of physics, and I think that I do not need to write more about reductionism.

 

[juanrga]

The first step of applied mathematics. Engineering is the second step. By comparison, most of the other sciences use relatively little math.

What is for you the difference between physics and mathematical physics?

 

[Evo]

Enough.