Physicists cannot do maths.

And that is life. Unless you're a doctor. In which case, you're dedicated to saving the lives of the mediocre. Or you're a physicist and furthering the understanding and/or saving the lives of the mediocre.

Or worse, you're making mediocre people even more mediocre with modern inventions that make their already easy lives even easier.

Or you're helping research knowledge with the inevitable goal of becoming a space faring people, to spread our ideas of mediocrity to the galaxy -- and beyond!

Are the humans dead yet?

Oh, I wouldn't worry. Nobody understands string theories; not even the physicists who came up with them (especially not them).

Any of you physicists have any theories on why the results are what they are?

Not knowing how to properly coil a cable != contributing to the moral dissolution of future generations.

Also, I'm getting tired of this entire ridiculous fascination society in general seems to have with people "getting their hands dirty." I grew up surrounded by intellectuals, and though they might've been able to handle simple problems around the house, there were other things they spent their time learning how to do.

These were mathematicians, programmers, psychologists and physicists, and for all the usefulness of plumbers, mechanics and others of their ilk, these intellectuals provided other services to society which were quite honestly no less vital to its success. What they taught me was how to use my brain rather than my hands, and frankly, the world as I see it is filled to the brim with people are perfectly willing to get their hands dirty but who are astoundingly unwilling to ever use their heads.

I spent about a week this summer building a fence, and for all the shallow gratification of "honest labour," I would honestly really prefer it if I could just pay someone else to do it while I stayed inside, learning about the world and everything that goes on in it, instead of working outside like some sort of beast of burden.

If you happen to be one of those people who for some reason feel that digging holes and putting large sticks in them is a meaningful pastime, I will neither stop you from doing it nor judge you for your choice. So please, would you kindly shut the fuck up about how wonderful it is to "get your hands dirty" and just leave me to my Goddamn books?

Just in general terms, I'm one of those non-nuclear-physicists who was under the (mistaken) belief that fusion and fission reactions were different from each other. One being explosive, the other being incredibly hot. I had thought reactors were fissile, and Chernobyl was a massive steam explosion, and incapable of blowing up like a nu-cu-lur bomb. Instead, melting down and causing the "China Syndrome"

Finding out both fission AND fusion can "go Hiroshima" gives me pause when considering nuclear-electric power..

^ You can make all of that make sense by simply shifting your epistemological position to the only ones which truly make sense i.e. phenomenology &/or perspectivism.

To rephrase that in less impenetrable terms:
"Materialism" (or in your case I assume "Scientific Materialism") that is to say 'matter is primary', from a philosophers POV is a deeply flawed assumption. Flawed because there appears to be not one experience in human history that did not occur entirely within the mind.
When one see's say a Dog, one only ever experiences the images and sensations occurring within ones mind. You don't see the photons hitting your retina, only the way your mind as interpreted the data.

However the opposite position "Idealism" (mind is primary) is also fundamentally flawed in the exact opposite way. If our minds are the only "real" things then where exactly are they? And how do we even derive logic and reason if there is not something outside of ourselves which it describes? etc. etc.

Philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre' got around this by defining a new category, "phenomena". We know for certain that "phenomena" exist in some sense because we experience them, the categories of mind and matter then become secondary properties, both only existing as definitions we apply retrospectively to experiences. i.e. stuff happens and then our brains kick in and say "that happened because of X because in the past X has preceded similar experiences" or "that thing looks like other examples of Y so is probably Y".

The problem then is that this appears to come no closer to telling us what is objectively happening in the universe, it's more like linguistic/logical housekeeping. The phenomenologists and existentialists did a superb job of clearing away all of the old invalid baggage about how we try to describe things, but they did little or nothing to solve the problem of Kants "nouminal world" (i.e. the "real" stuff that we are experiencing by simulation in our minds).

Its stumped philosophers for centuries as we don't appear to have any way to ever get at this "nouminal" or "real" world we naturally assume must exist in some way. But....

I reckon ultimately one of the first western philosophers in history nailed the way out 3000 or so years ago. Pythagoras said "all is number" and due to the work of Euler, Riemann and Fourier in particular I think we can now make it stick. (yeh its turning into an essay sorry )

Without wishing to go deep into a subject you could spend half your life on; Fourier transforms are involved in signal processing. It is a mathematical means by which spatio-temporal signals (e.g. the vibration of a string or the movement of a record needle) can be converted with no meaningful loss of information into frequency (analog) or binary (digital) forms and back again.

Mathematically speaking there is no reason to regard the "signal" as any less "real" whether it is in frequency form or spatio-temporal form. It is the same "signal", it can be converted 100% either direction.

So then here's the biggie: Is there any reason why we could not regard instrumental mathematical numbers and operations (i.e. the stuff we write down and practice as "mathematics") and the phenomena in the universe they appear to describe. I.e. when we use man made mathematical equations to describe and model the behavior of "phenomena" we experience like say Physicists do, could we suggest that we are using a form of Fourier transform? And moreover that this indicates an Ontological (existing objectively outside of yourself) aspect to the mathematical "signals".

Or to put it another way, is mathematics itself really real?

The Reimann sphere and Eulers formula provide a mathematical basis to describe the entirety of known existence in purely mathematical terms, but they indicate that pure ontological mathematics itself is more primary than anything we ever experience. It suggests infact that we ourselves are ultimately reducible to Ontological mathematical phenomena (what Leibniz called "Monads").

What we think of as "reality" could then perhaps be regarded as non dimensional (enfolded) mathematics interacting in such a way as to create the experience of a dimensional (unfolded) universe of extension (such as ours).

(R = distance between two points)
Enfolded universe: R=0
Unfolded universe: R>0

Neither is more "real", they are simply different perspectives from which Ontological mathematics can observe itself.

"Reality": R>=0

I've explained parts of that poorly sorry. Its an immense subject and can be tackedled from many different (often completely incompatible) paradigms. I hope at the very lest I have perhaps demonstrated that the Holographic universe theory could have legs if we combine the advances of scientific exploration (i.e. study of matter) with those of Philosophy and neuroscience (i.e. study of mind & reason itself). The latest big theory doing the rounds with neuroscience is that the mind/consciousness is a fractal phenomenon, which plays into what I've been discussing here more than you might think.

Then again maybe you just wrote me off as a crackpot within the first few lines "lawl" etc..

I'm no physicist or theorist, but I've always had trouble accepting #3 (and it's many uses in sci-fi), where they say each decision is played out in another universe. But every decision we make is based on circumstance and our own behaviour. Nothing is truly random.

What would make you choose differently? The circumstance would have to be different to begin with, but that would mean you're already in an alternate universe. Where did this one come from?

I dunno, I just don't understand this theory, maybe I'm getting the principle wrong

I think teaching students basic scientific method when they are young can prevent willful rejection of science, due to ignorance, later in life. Non-scientists can't possibly know everything, yet, if they are sufficiently enlightened in scientific method, they can comfortably accept truths that are revealed using scientific method. Additionally, scientists needn't require proof for knowledge widely accepted by the scientific communities outside their particular areas of expertise.

Specialization also eliminates the need to know everything. Scientists know they stand on the shoulders of giants, that there was much to discover and learn long before they arrived in the world. But they don't have to know everything. It's like Sean Carroll discusses (kind of) in this video. You can be a physicist and know little of geology.


Edited: clumsy, nonsensical sentences

That's not just some smart British guy. That's particle physicist, TV personality, rock star, hair model, podcaster and professor Brian Cox

I'm not about to go chasing religion's tail again, but the claim being made in this video is pretty freaking strong. It sounds remarkably similar to claims made by classical physicists...they didn't have any measurements that didn't fit within their framework, so obviously it was complete. Now, you have physical evidence of the accuracy of quantum mechanics in the computer you're currently using. Transistors could not work under classical physics.

In the next century or two, I'm pretty sure we'll have developed technology that requires fundamental changes in our knowledge of physics, and those technologies will provide physical evidence of the superiority of that new knowledge. Physics students of that time will laugh at claims like this, just as we do at those who made them centuries ago.

This is all given within the context of a materialistic worldview. If you believe matter is all there is, then yes, a spiritual reality is improbable. However, according to most physicists time space matter and energy began at the big bang. So, whatever created the Universe is transcendent of all of those things and not restricted by our limitations. A temporal being can never conceive of an eternal being. A material being cannot conceive of an immaterial being. Our senses are not the key to the door, they are the blinds that keep the sun out.

If you want to get philosophical, if you say that empiricism is the only source of truth, how do you test that idea empirically? To even begin testing something, you have already made certain assumptions (axioms) which cannot be proven empirically to begin with. That is the fundamental limitation of empiricism.

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