[Bikers4Bush]

All you need is a white towel.

[PatrickHenry]

PING. [This ping list is for the evolution side of evolution threads, and sometimes for other science topics. FReepmail me to be added or dropped.]

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP - PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE - COSMOLOGY - COSMOGONY

[RightWingAtheist]

We aren't seeing the end of physics, (contra James Horgan), but rather, simply the end of logical positivism.

[LibWhacker]

Any given mathematical statement (eg, 11 is a prime number) must either be true or false, right? Wrong! Godel showed that however elaborate mathematics becomes, there will always exist some statements (not the above ones though) that can never be proved true or false.

Then why did he use it? What is it with the crappy math articles lately? Now we're going to have ignoramuses running around saying mathematicians can't prove 11 is prime and smirking at everything else they say as well.

[Honcho]

My head hurts.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

But dig deeper, and the richness and variety of nature are found to stem from just a handful of underlying mathematical principles.

Whatever they are.

[stainlessbanner]

we will never be able to grasp in totality how the universe is put together.

bump

[tcuoohjohn]

I confess...I am a mathematical dunderhead. Can anyone tell me in layman's terms what a "manifold" is?.. Given my limitations I understand what an automotive manifold is but haven't a clue what a mathematical manifold is. I have tried websites but the discussions of manifolds are very much " inside baseball" stuff.

[RightWhale]

There is a lot of math that describes nothing in nature. Who says math describes the universe?

[Unknowing]

It seems that no system can be fully understood from within the system. Russell's solution to the set pardox concluded that the set of all sets can't be a set; Emerson said "the field cannot be seen from within the field." Godel, Escher, Bach challenge our notions of completeness.

The fact that there always seems to exist extra-systemic data makes us aware that that we are "inside" the cosmos, and can't get out even in thought. Objectifying it to the point where we can imagine standing outside the universe observing it is a senseless but common mistake. Physics cannot issue a formula describing all phenomena at once because of these limitations.

Theoretical physics has been trending toward a kind of philosophical speculation, and BS is BS whether it's jibberish, gobbledegook, calculus or English.

[Consort]

A point is the beginning of everything; the departure of the unmanifested and the beginning of manifestation. Matter is formed point by point, by line, by angle, by surface, and by completing curve. When massed together, they appear as physical objects and are perceived as surfaces. And then, maybe not.

[Rocky]

"The Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus suggested that however complicated the world might seem to human eyes, it was fundamentally simple. If only we could look on a small enough scale of size, we would see that everything is made up of just a handful of basic building blocks, which the Greeks called atoms. It was then a matter of identifying these elementary particles, and classifying them, for all to be explained.


"Today we know atoms are not the elementary particles the Greek philosophers supposed, but composite bodies with bits inside. "

I would rephrase it: Today we know that what "modern" science chose to call atoms are in fact not the fundamental building blocks that the Greeks envisioned. The real "atoms" are much smaller.

I would not suggest that the Greeks could have had any concept of nuclear physics, but let's not blame them for coopting their word to name something which turned out not to fit the original meaning.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It turns out that mathematical systems rich enough to contain arithmetic are shot through with logical contradictions.

Not true. What is true is that such systems cannot within themselves be proven to be contratiction-free. Perhaps Paul Davies doesn't fully understand current mathematics. Of course, not all of mathematics is subject to these limitations. Pressberger arithmetnc (no multiplication, just addition, but you can multiply by any given number through iterated addition; you just can talk about multipllication as such) has no such problems. Euclidean geometry (and thus the non-Euclidean geometries too) are provably consistent.

[DoctorMichael]

Bump.

[templar]

The world about us looks so bewilderingly complex, it seems impossible that humans could ever understand it completely. But dig deeper, and the richness and variety of nature are found to stem from just a handful of underlying mathematical principles.

We can 'understand' nothing about our 'world'. We can discover the cognitive and perceptual processes and limitations of ourselves. This is what our 'world' is. If it isn't prewired (into the brain and nervous system)we can't do it.

[Political Junkie Too]

I recently reread Hawking's book A Brief History Of Time.

It seems to me that, if at the quantum level particles and waves are interchangeable (the duality as Hawking puts it), and then if particle physics is really string theory, then tell me what a wave would look like as a string counterpart, if a point on a wave is a particle counterpart.

-PJ

[jpsb]

Is the author French?