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Many of you probably heard this by now. Time to celebrate!!
Higgs Boson Found!!
Higgs Boson found? I didn't know it had ever been lost... If they'd asked, they could have borrowed some of mine - I've got two big buckets of them just taking up space in the toolshed, left over from when I last causality-proofed the barn roof.
On a related note - I think the missing mass problem might be explained by the sweater my Granny gave me last Christmas. She spun the yarn from a pile of quantum-collapsed proton/anti-proton couplets she had sitting about in her workroom for ages... I don't really want to give it up though - nice and heavy and warm for working outdoors in the winter. And it's got Santa and his reindeer on it.
On a related note - I think the missing mass problem might be explained by the sweater my Granny gave me last Christmas. She spun the yarn from a pile of quantum-collapsed proton/anti-proton couplets she had sitting about in her workroom for ages... I don't really want to give it up though - nice and heavy and warm for working outdoors in the winter. And it's got Santa and his reindeer on it.
Very well put, TGR.
I have, after many long years of bashing my admittedly thick skull against the science, concluded that it's all bunkum. The Higgs boson, like the anti-neutrino, the proton, the electro-weak force, loop quantum gravity, and the filling in a Twinkie, are all just artifacts of the mathematics.
Furthermore, I attest that the maths will NEVER provide us with an accurate model of the underlying physics of the cosmos until we learn to stop using mathematical entities that have no basis in reality. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the villain of the piece: zero (and its attendant sidekicks, infinity, negative numbers, and complex numbers.) The universe doesn't believe in zero, so why should we?
I offer this, as proof:
Two bodies with mass attract one another gravitationally. As the distance between the bodies increases, the attractive force between them decreases. On the scales at which we have been able to measure this, the force/distance ratio appears to follow an inverse square law. So - how far away must the two bodies be from one another, for the attractive force to be zero?
There is no distance, no matter how great, how perplexingly mind-bogglingly vast, at which the force can be said to be zero. No matter how inconceivably tiny that force becomes, it can always be made smaller by dividing by any number larger than one.
Now - I do not claim that fixing this will be easy. From a basic psychological standpoint, human mathematics is based on counting. We need number systems to help us count, and number systems don't work very well without zero. Number Theorists, Accountants, and the subroutine that keeps track of my bank balance all rely heavily on zero, and shouldn't be required to give it up. But true science is not about counting - it's about comparing, and drawing relationships between the behaviours we witness around us in the universe. A scientist doesn't care how many croutons are in the soup, he wants to know what the soup *IS*, how it relates to other soups, and how to prevent it from irrevocably staining his tie... A concept invented millenia ago by a Persian shepherd to help him prove that Abdul has been stealing his sheep cannot aid us in this quest. Indeed, it hinders us, as we find ever more convoluted ways to make reality fit our entirely fictional zero-origin numberline, instead of discarding the thing and starting again.
Sadly, while I am smart enough to see the problem with it all, I'm not smart enough to fix it.
SJ
I have, after many long years of bashing my admittedly thick skull against the science, concluded that it's all bunkum. The Higgs boson, like the anti-neutrino, the proton, the electro-weak force, loop quantum gravity, and the filling in a Twinkie, are all just artifacts of the mathematics.
Furthermore, I attest that the maths will NEVER provide us with an accurate model of the underlying physics of the cosmos until we learn to stop using mathematical entities that have no basis in reality. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the villain of the piece: zero (and its attendant sidekicks, infinity, negative numbers, and complex numbers.) The universe doesn't believe in zero, so why should we?
I offer this, as proof:
Two bodies with mass attract one another gravitationally. As the distance between the bodies increases, the attractive force between them decreases. On the scales at which we have been able to measure this, the force/distance ratio appears to follow an inverse square law. So - how far away must the two bodies be from one another, for the attractive force to be zero?
There is no distance, no matter how great, how perplexingly mind-bogglingly vast, at which the force can be said to be zero. No matter how inconceivably tiny that force becomes, it can always be made smaller by dividing by any number larger than one.
Now - I do not claim that fixing this will be easy. From a basic psychological standpoint, human mathematics is based on counting. We need number systems to help us count, and number systems don't work very well without zero. Number Theorists, Accountants, and the subroutine that keeps track of my bank balance all rely heavily on zero, and shouldn't be required to give it up. But true science is not about counting - it's about comparing, and drawing relationships between the behaviours we witness around us in the universe. A scientist doesn't care how many croutons are in the soup, he wants to know what the soup *IS*, how it relates to other soups, and how to prevent it from irrevocably staining his tie... A concept invented millenia ago by a Persian shepherd to help him prove that Abdul has been stealing his sheep cannot aid us in this quest. Indeed, it hinders us, as we find ever more convoluted ways to make reality fit our entirely fictional zero-origin numberline, instead of discarding the thing and starting again.
Sadly, while I am smart enough to see the problem with it all, I'm not smart enough to fix it.
SJ
What gave me away, Xocrates? Was it the "twinkie filling only a mathematical artifact" bit? I did worry that would prove to be a controversial statement...
As someone with a small philosophical foreground, I can attest with 100% certainty that whenever I post a quasi-humorous entry on a forum, someone with soup stains on his tie and an over-inflated sense of the importance of crouton quantisation will call me out on it...
Or in simpler terms: I jest. Breathe, big guy. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. And relax...
SJ
As someone with a small philosophical foreground, I can attest with 100% certainty that whenever I post a quasi-humorous entry on a forum, someone with soup stains on his tie and an over-inflated sense of the importance of crouton quantisation will call me out on it...
Or in simpler terms: I jest. Breathe, big guy. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. And relax...
SJ
SpitJock wrote:Very well put, TGR.
I have, after many long years of bashing my admittedly thick skull against the science, concluded that it's all bunkum. The Higgs boson, like the anti-neutrino, the proton, the electro-weak force, loop quantum gravity, and the filling in a Twinkie, are all just artifacts of the mathematics.
Furthermore, I attest that the maths will NEVER provide us with an accurate model of the underlying physics of the cosmos until we learn to stop using mathematical entities that have no basis in reality. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the villain of the piece: zero (and its attendant sidekicks, infinity, negative numbers, and complex numbers.) The universe doesn't believe in zero, so why should we?
I offer this, as proof:
Two bodies with mass attract one another gravitationally. As the distance between the bodies increases, the attractive force between them decreases. On the scales at which we have been able to measure this, the force/distance ratio appears to follow an inverse square law. So - how far away must the two bodies be from one another, for the attractive force to be zero?
There is no distance, no matter how great, how perplexingly mind-bogglingly vast, at which the force can be said to be zero. No matter how inconceivably tiny that force becomes, it can always be made smaller by dividing by any number larger than one.
Now - I do not claim that fixing this will be easy. From a basic psychological standpoint, human mathematics is based on counting. We need number systems to help us count, and number systems don't work very well without zero. Number Theorists, Accountants, and the subroutine that keeps track of my bank balance all rely heavily on zero, and shouldn't be required to give it up. But true science is not about counting - it's about comparing, and drawing relationships between the behaviours we witness around us in the universe. A scientist doesn't care how many croutons are in the soup, he wants to know what the soup *IS*, how it relates to other soups, and how to prevent it from irrevocably staining his tie... A concept invented millenia ago by a Persian shepherd to help him prove that Abdul has been stealing his sheep cannot aid us in this quest. Indeed, it hinders us, as we find ever more convoluted ways to make reality fit our entirely fictional zero-origin numberline, instead of discarding the thing and starting again.
Sadly, while I am smart enough to see the problem with it all, I'm not smart enough to fix it.
SJ
There is no ghost in the machine, it is the machine that is in the ghost. The classical notion of "Physicality" is largely nothing more than meaningless empty rhetorical relabeling of subjectively mental neural-correlates-of-consciousness constructs and analytical overlays derived from the "categorical perceptive" empirical (and increasingly anecdotal...) observations of a so-called external objective truth and reality. The search for a final quantum receptor leads to an infinite regress unless the entire paradigm is shifted on its head and qualia is taken to be as fundamental (if not more so) than the rest of the so-called physical omnium multiverse(s) and the totalities of all grand absolute existence itself. QM is mathematically complete and encodes everything - namely, QM wave function or state vector of a system encodes all the information that can ever be known about that system - and yet qualia is not encoded... The raw canonical quale of the "redness of red" cannot be encoded, captured nor defined by mathematics, quantum mechanics, nor any other formulate model or definition of a "theory of everything". Penrose's triune world dilemma will only be resolved and reconciled and unified when it is realized that reality at its core is fundamentally nondual and that ultimately, all aspects of existence and reality, however disparate and divergent they may seem, are inevitably syndiffeonic in nature in the most fundamental way possible.
Last edited by BGP on Mon Jul 09, 2012 7:15 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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SpitJock wrote: From a basic psychological standpoint, human mathematics is based on counting.
All of mathematics as we know it boils down to "categorical perception" and the ability to identify and enumerate the "boundaries of a boundary". Everything else is merely axiomatic.
keyID = 436060 apollo13@lavabit.com
SpitJock wrote:
Two bodies with mass attract one another gravitationally. As the distance between the bodies increases, the attractive force between them decreases. On the scales at which we have been able to measure this, the force/distance ratio appears to follow an inverse square law. So - how far away must the two bodies be from one another, for the attractive force to be zero?
Essentially this is Zeno's paradox rephrased. A similar variation on a theme. This is the question you are really posing: "Is the nature of reality fundamentally discrete or continuous?" Btw, it was Einstein's Relativity Theory that fully resolved Zeno's original paradox... Pre-Relativity, Zeno's paradox was actually "valid". How and why? The BGP leaves that as an exercise for the reader.
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