[Vampyr]

 32519, on 2014-March-22, 10:01, said:

Seems like our fancy theorists have lined up work for themselves for the next 1,000 years. They have compiled this list to keep themselves in a job, List of unsolved problems in physics.

Thanks for the link; I didn't know about some of these.

Exciting stuff!

[mike777]

 32519, on 2014-March-22, 10:01, said:

Seems like our fancy theorists have lined up work for themselves for the next 1,000 years. They have compiled this list to keep themselves in a job, List of unsolved problems in physics.

thanks for the link

Not sure about 1000 years but maybe at least until 2050 and the "Singularity".

"The Singularity. The event when the rate of technological change becomes human-surpassing, just as the advent of human civilization a few millenia ago surpassed the comprehension of non-human creatures. So when will this event happen?

There is a great deal of speculation on the 'what' of the Singularity, whether it will create a utopia for humans, cause the extinction of humans, or some outcome in between. Versions of optimism (Star Trek) and pessimism (The Matrix, Terminator) all become fashionable at some point. No one can predict this reliably, because the very definition of the singularity itself precludes such prediction. Given the accelerating nature of technological change, it is just as hard to predict the world of 2050 from 2009, as it would have been to predict 2009 from, say, 1200 AD. So our topic today is not going to be about the 'what', but rather the 'when' of the Singularity. "

http://www.singulari...he_singularity/

[32519]

Gwnn, PassedOut, mikeh and Vampyr

Kindly explain to us in layman’s terms why you guys needed to create all these Axioms in the first place. Then you went further by creating Logical Axioms and Non-logical Axioms. Why was it necessary to create these two distinct groups?

How about telling us which of all your theories contain the Logical Axioms, and which contain the Non-Logical Axioms. What would really fascinate all of us is: Which of all these theories contain both.

[Vampyr]

 32519, on 2014-March-22, 21:51, said:

Gwnn, PassedOut, mikeh and Vampyr

Kindly explain to us in layman’s terms why you guys needed to create all these Axioms in the first place. Then you went further by creating Logical Axioms and Non-logical Axioms. Why was it necessary to create these two distinct groups?

How about telling us which of all your theories contain the Logical Axioms, and which contain the Non-Logical Axioms. What would really fascinate all of us is: Which of all these theories contain both.

Why do you assume that other people want to do your research? If you are interested in these questions, do your own reading.

[32519]

Here is a List of Theoretical Physicists who are recognised in Theoretical Physics.

Here is an Academic Genealogy of Theoretical Physicists. You need to read this. These are the guys who had a Doctoral Advisor helping them develop these theories (sorry, thesis).

[gwnn]

 32519, on 2014-March-23, 01:39, said:

Here is a List of Theoretical Physicists who are recognised in Theoretical Physics.

Actually, that is a Wikipedia article. There is no single official list of recognition of theoretical physicists evil conspiratory heretics. There is a Nobel prize for evil, deluded heresy but that is just a decision made by a committee. What is worse, they also often award it to experimental black magic, not only for theory. Dan Schechtman, zionist alchemist of the year 2011, said that experimentalists are always the real conspirators, not theorists.

In unrelated news, do you actually read the Wikipedia articles you link here? I know that you very rarely read the posts on these forums, especially the ones addressed to you.

[32519]

This pursuit of madness started with the Tevatron which was completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million and significant upgrade investments were made in 1983–2011. The Tevatron ceased operations on 30 September 2011, due to budget cuts and because of the completion of the LHC, which began operations in early 2010 and was far more powerful.

And still they only think they found the Higgs-Boson!

[32519]

People, this madness had many predecessors before the LHC. Here are some that I managed to dig up –

Bevatron, which began operating in 1954, has reached the end of its life. The demolition of the Bevatron began in 2009 and was scheduled for completion in 2011.
Tevatron (see my previous post).
Superconducting Super Collider was under construction when the project was officially cancelled on 21 October 1993 due to budget problems after $2 billion had been spent.
DESY is a national research centre in Germany which still operates. The research centre has an annual budget around € 192 million.
UNK Proton Accelerator was Russia’s foray into this madness as well. Seems like this came to an end in 1996 after the breaking up of the Soviet Union.

Now we have the LHC and still no progress has been made while the cost keeps on mounting.

[kenberg]

 32519, on 2014-March-22, 21:51, said:

Gwnn, PassedOut, mikeh and Vampyr

Kindly explain to us in layman's terms why you guys needed to create all these Axioms in the first place. Then you went further by creating Logical Axioms and Non-logical Axioms. Why was it necessary to create these two distinct groups?

How about telling us which of all your theories contain the Logical Axioms, and which contain the Non-Logical Axioms. What would really fascinate all of us is: Which of all these theories contain both.

My experience has been that when people begin with "Kindly explain" they really are not remotely interested in an explanation. But for anyone who is, it goes something like this:

The axiomatic approach has proved to be a very effective way of advancing knowledge. Partly it is a good way of dividing up work. We start by saying "Let's assume so and so and see what the logical consequences are". Sometimes the logical consequences are in contradiction to observations and we scratch the axioms and search for others. In other cases, we find that the axioms imply some previously unobserved phenomenon. We search to see if we can find this phenonemon, and if we do we regard it as supporting evidence for the axiomatic system. If we don't find it then we have to judge whether we have not looked hard enough, or cleverly enough, or whether the axiomatic basis is wrong. All in all, this leads to the advancement of knowledge.

As to logical and non-logical axioms, this is no big deal. Personally, I had never heard of the distinction but I can see why a philosopher would divide these up as indicated in the article. My guess is that most mathematicians, physicists, biologists, etc happily pursue their scientific aims without giving this much thought.

People think in this axiomatic way all the time. Someone tells us a story of what happened. We say, or think, "If I believe that then I also have to believe this other thing which appears to follow logically from what he said". Then we decide, logically analyzing the consequences of what we are asked to believe, whether we should believe it. Science is the same, on a much grander scale.

I have focused on real world interactions with axioms here. In mathematics it's a bit (but not all that much) different. For example, there are axioms for finite geometries (plural intended). This is not because mathematicians are thinking that the universe might consist of only 37 points. Rather it happens that sometimes there are 37 objects in a problem and these objects are inter-related in a somewhat geometric fashion. So we haul out a study of finte geometry to see what it has to say. In cases like this, it's just a matter of not being too literal minded in the use of words like "geometry". We are not attempting to metry the geo.

[gwnn]

If you want to cancel out all of the progress made by LHC by vacuous, ignorant posts, you're gonna need a bit more effort than that, 32519. While you are here reposting "no progress" over and over, the LHC is actually producing valuable scientific knowledge. On this site: https://lpcc.web.cer...ge=lhc-articles I count 210 publications in the last 12 months. Maybe you could write a short explanation (let's say, about 100 words, like a scientific abstract) on each of the 210 explaining why none of them constitutes progress?

[Trinidad]

 kenberg, on 2014-March-23, 07:58, said:

My experience has been that when people begin with "Kindly explain" they really are not remotely interested in an explanation. But for anyone who is, it goes something like this:

etc. etc.

Matthew 7:6

Rik

[Vampyr]

 Trinidad, on 2014-March-23, 14:32, said:

Matthew 7:6

But others can learn something when a post is so clear and well-written.

[mike777]

 32519, on 2014-March-22, 21:51, said:

Gwnn, PassedOut, mikeh and Vampyr

Kindly explain to us in layman’s terms why you guys needed to create all these Axioms in the first place. Then you went further by creating Logical Axioms and Non-logical Axioms. Why was it necessary to create these two distinct groups?

How about telling us which of all your theories contain the Logical Axioms, and which contain the Non-Logical Axioms. What would really fascinate all of us is: Which of all these theories contain both.

Is Math created or simply discovered?. In other words is it the same as geography; it was always there just waiting for some brave soul to come along and see it?

Are Mathematicians better called explorers, our Indiana Jones?

Ken(Indi)Berg

[kenberg]

 mike777, on 2014-March-23, 17:07, said:

Is Math created or simply discovered?. In other words is it the same as geography; it was always there just waiting for some brave soul to come along and see it?

Are Mathematicians better called explorers, our Indiana Jones?

Ken(Indi)Berg

I think explorer's get babes. So yeah, explorers.

Slightly more seriously: Our language suggests exploration. We speak of discovering theorems and discovering proofs. To the best of my knowledge, this is not some gimmick suggest4ed by some PR type, it is how the language naturally evolved. We think of it as existing, waiting to be discovered. But I would not insist that this is in any deep sense the correct philosophical rule.

I recall an author (Marvin Greenberg), slipping into philosophical reflection, saying something like that the philosophical foundations of mathematics are in a shambles. He might have added that to a large extent, no one is much worried about this. Hockey players are probably not losing any sleep over the philosophical foundations of hockey.

[32519]

The Particle Everyone Said Was the Higgs Boson is likely to be the Higgs Boson Seems like you guys aren’t sure yourselves if the Higgs was found.
Here’s an extract:
I asked physicist Sean Carroll how they determine if it is or is not a Higgs, and he said the ways the particle decays – and the rates of those decays – could have indicated that it was something different. “This is one of those situations where it would be easy to know that it's *not* the Higgs, but very hard (impossible, in some sense) to know for sure that it *is* the Higgs,” he wrote in an email.

The Higgs boson is often called "the God particle" because it's said to be what caused the "Big Bang" that created our universe many years ago. The nickname caught on so quickly (even though scientists and clergy alike do not care for it) partly because it's a great explanation of what it's supposed to do -- the Higgs boson is what joins everything and gives it matter.
Seems like not one of you guys know who said the Higgs Boson caused the Big Bang. Can you answer this question from the article –
I’d like to know who said the Higgs Boson caused the big bang. Obviously not a physicist.

How about this one: Higgs Boson, the so-called ‘God Particle’ – What’s really as stake?
If the Higgs doesn't exist, it will also be, for some, a relief. A resounding 'No' from the data would be easier to swallow, after all, than another couple of decades of expensive and time-consuming research on something that would turn out to be wrong anyway. If the Higgs doesn't exist, it will be back to the drawing board on science that's dominated for decades, so you can expect to see a range of "Higgsless" models that may contain even more novel mechanisms.

CERN is under pressure to produce something tangible. So there is a lot of hype around the POSSIBLE existence of the Higgs Boson, CERN’s Expensive Science.
Proof of the Higgs boson would be perceived as one of the most important scientific discoveries for decades. Disproving its existence would be even more substantial, as this would lead to a tearing up of current scientific textbooks and a major rethink about the way the universe works.
This week’s announcement is an indication that the boson almost certainly does exist. But scientists, being scientists, are wary of giving iron clad guarantees without irrefutable evidence. That will have to wait for months or years, while CERN’s computers crunch through the data.

How about this? Cash Challenged CERN

[mike777]

"I recall an author (Marvin Greenberg), slipping into philosophical reflection, saying something like that the philosophical foundations of mathematics are in a shambles. He might have added that to a large extent, no one is much worried about this. Hockey players are probably not losing any sleep over the philosophical foundations of hockey."


I note he indeed did NOT add that.

I would be rather surprised if Math majors/profs do not think about this.

I would be rather surprised if math majors/profs do not think about the philosophical foundations of math.

If not you then who?


As a finance guy, trust me, the philosophical foundations of finance are under constant question/attack.

[mike777]

"The Particle Everyone Said Was the Higgs Boson is likely to be the Higgs Boson Seems like you guys aren’t sure yourselves if the Higgs was found...."

Ya you guys in Physics always seem to question, at times you even question/challenge "settled science"?

[gwnn]

 32519, on 2014-March-23, 22:54, said:

Seems like not one of you guys know who said the Higgs Boson caused the Big Bang. Can you answer this question from the article –
I’d like to know who said the Higgs Boson caused the big bang. Obviously not a physicist.

No one in this thread. You may or may not have, I am not sure. You do post a lot of stuff, many of it clearly in a different language than ours.

[gwnn]

Yep, it is indeed impossible to prove that it is the Higgs boson. It is also impossible to prove that all objects with mass are attracted to Earth. It is only possible to increasingly make the alternative hypothesis (there are some objects with mass that are not attracted to Earth) more and more unlikely. I know you like Wikipedia, maybe you have a moment to click on this link? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value Science works by accepting as tentatively true whatever is sufficiently unlikely to be false. Religion works by accepting certain facts as absolute, unambiguous truths revealed to us by the creator of the universe, and then changing them/interpreting them differently according to circumstances (for example, the god of the Mormons changed his all-knowing, unchanging, absolutely good mind on polygamy just in time for Utah to join the United States). Well, anyway, listening to Hitchens is probably more pleasant than listening to me: https://www.youtube....h?v=a_cNReWlXhw

[32519]

Can you guys still not see the flaw in the BBT? Here, let me help you.

The Higgs boson is often called "the God particle" because it's said to be what caused the "Big Bang" that created our universe many years ago. The nickname caught on so quickly (even though scientists and clergy alike do not care for it) partly because it's a great explanation of what it's supposed to do -- the Higgs boson is what joins everything and gives it matter.

If you still can’t see the flaw, try this. You guys needed to build (now already your fourth attempt) a massively expensive machine to collide two particles together at the speed of light or better. But you haven’t told us where the original two particles originated from. Nor have you told us the source of energy behind them enabling them to travel at these speeds. Nor have you told us the mathematical probability of these two particles colliding in the vastness of emptiness (or nothing). Nor have you told us how, from these two tiny particles, the universe and everything in it managed to evolve. We have growing food crises all across the world. Why not spend your time developing a new kind of yeast which we could mix into a batch of dough causing it to rise to the extent that these two particles of yours have done. One loaf can feed the entire human race into eternity.

All of you guys reject the existence of God, yet you needed him to create the Big Bang for you to get your theories in motion. Directly after the bang, you conveniently move God off-stage while you embark on a 50 year and more crusade to find the Higgs boson to substantiate endless meaningless calculations as to the age of the universe, the planets, etc.

Let me make a prediction:
As soon as you guys can say with absolute certainty that the Higgs boson has been found, you will embark on your next crusade, and that is to eliminate God entirely out of your vocabulary. Oh sorry, you are already going down that road with your Theory of Everything.