Subject: Re: MOST IMPORTANT FOSSIL (A human skull as old as coal!)
From: CyberGuy
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 00:19:24 -0800
Peter Stephen Thomas III wrote:
>
> OX-11 (jacob@omicron.csustan.edu) wrote:
> : therre is an even more interesting fossil -- in the upper rio grands
> : valley of new mexico, there is the imprint of a bare human female footprint
> : in a sandstone outcropping that is around 10 -60 million years old. The
> : girl was walking and tripped. seh overcorrected by extending her foot and
> : made the imprint in the once soft mud of the riverbank. It left a deep
> : impression clearly visible. You can even see the potho;e she stepped
> : into, and the splash marks extending out from it.....
> :
> :
>
> Please explain in detail how it is possible to determine the sex of a
> being from a single foot print.
>
> Also please explain how you came to the conclusion about her acrobatics at
> the time this foot print was made. You speak as if you have video or film
> of her preforming this act.
>
> Peter THomas
> --
> Bearhugs & Footrubs
> "I'll lose my beard when they shave it from my cold, dead face!"
> Quote from the Razor's Anonymous Handbook
> Peter Thomas is pst@csd.uwm.edu B3/4 f+ t w- s r k+ (aka Freyr on IRC)
> **************************************************************************
> ** FIGHT THE CDA!! DON'T LET THEM TAKE AWAY YOUR FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION **
> **************************************************************************
Isn't Science supposed to take into account actual OBSERVATION? and not
call into existence unobserved things complicating things? By actual
observation, one of the greatest causes of mass extinctions is MAN. We
have gone from being animals in caves to being able to exterminate the
entire planet in a few thousand years. You have green glass under a
bunch of mud hut 'civilizations' in the middle east, green glass in the
Gobi, in Lybia, Arabia, you have 'forbidden zones' a la planet of the
apes in Australia where the natives think it is death to go out there
and you dig under the sand and find green glass. In 4 billion years lord
knows how many times 10,000 years of 'progress' can come and go, and how
many mass extinctions were caused by some 'civilization' developing and
getting wiped out. You could have had space going civilizations any
number of times. So a foot print in a couple hundred million year old
coal seam is no supprise, or machined screws in quartz, or machined
metal objects found in coal. Your bible thumping fruitcakes who think
the world is only a few thousand years old are off by thousands of
TRILLIONS of years (for the universe at least). What is missed is that
this planet has been DEGENERATING not evolving. Heck, even a couple
hundred years ago people KNEW they were immortal spiritual beings who
lived again and again. Even fruitcake Christianity taught/knew this up
till about 453AD when the psychotic wife of a Byzantine emperor had tens
of thousands of people put to death to wipe out this 'herasy' - since if
you knew you were gona come back, being put to the sword didnt make you
back off your political convictions - it was only the most degraded
motives of political control that prompted this you see, this assault on
the truth about Man. Virtually every culture in the world except recent
west for thousands of years have had this view of man - until your
German 'Man is an animal from mud' Psychiatric/NAZI criminals. So, it
seems to be much too much to ask people to just confront what is in
front of their face in plain view. If they found a bunch of buildings
in lava it would be explained away. Roads that go off the coast of
Yucatan and come up on islands out at sea. Cave paintings under 400
feet of water off Yucatan with carved heads. Hell, cave paintings in
the Caucasus of a flying saucer fight and arial attack on a city or base
of some sort. Funny thing that the language in the Pyranees has NO
INDOEUROPEAN ROOTS OF ANY KIND WHATSOEVER - but is somehow related to
the language near these cave paintings. Indo Markabian? (joke). Or hey,
Banannas - which cant reproduce without MAN? Who genetically engineered
THAT one?
Or a bag of Phoenecian coins in central america. Heck, go to Palenque
in Yucatan, under 9 coats of plaster they found Aramaic
inscriptions!!!!! In case you dont know - that was the language of the
near east at the time of Christ. Or the dates in Mayan calanders of
over a MILLION years ago? Or the account of an atomic war in ancient
Indian texts. And now think about this - RIGHT NOW ON THIS PLANET THERE
ARE STILL STONE AGE CIVILIZATIONS COEXISTENT WITH ATOMIC POWER.
And if you REALLY want to blow your mind, start regressing people and
you find out just how LONG people have been around and WHERE. And why
they are now amnesiac about their own spiritual nature.
So lets hear more about some of these 'impossible' things dug up. Get
it out into the open. Anyone talk to oil field workers - there is a
place for stories. Any 'theory' that is ACTUALLY 'Scientific' is going
to have to account for ALL the facts and 'anomalies' and the crap they
fed us in school just does NOT cut it.
cyberguy
Subject: FMOODS'97 - CALL FOR PAPERS
From: hccdr@ukc.ac.uk (H.C.C.Rodrigues)
Date: 11 Nov 1996 16:25:57 +0000
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-
Preliminary Announcement and Call for Papers
FMOODS'97
Canterbury 21st-23rd July, 1997
United Kingdom
Second IFIP International workshop on
Formal Methods
for Open Object-based Distributed Systems
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=
The first FMOODS workshop was successfully held in Paris in March
1996 and the proceedings have been published by Chapman and Hall.
OBJECTIVES
Object-based Distributed Computing is being established as the most
pertinent basis for the support of large, heterogeneous computing and
telecommunications systems. Indeed, several important international
organisations, such as ITU, ISO, OMG, TINA-C, etc. are defining similar
distributed object-based frameworks as a foundation for open
distributed computing.
The advent of Open Object-based Distributed Systems - OODS - brings new
challenges and opportunities for the use and development of formal
methods. New architectures and system models are emerging (e.g., the
enterprise, information, computational and engineering viewpoints of
the ITU-T/ISO/IEC ODP Reference Model) which require formal
notational support. Usual design issues such as specification,
verification, refinement, and testing need to take into account new
dimensions introduced by distribution and openness, such as quality of
service and dependability constraints, dynamic binding and
reconfiguration, consistency between multiple models and viewpoints,
etc. OODS is a challenging research context and a source of motivation
for semantical models of object-based systems and notations (e.g.
concurrent and distributed OO languages), for the evolution of
standardised formal description techniques (e.g. SDL, LOTOS, Estelle,
Z, ...), for the application and assessment of logic based approaches
(e.g. temporal logic, TLA, ...), for better understanding and information
modeling of business requirements, and for the further development and
use of Object Oriented methodologies and tools (OMT, HOOD, Fusion,
...).
The objective of FMOODS is to provide an integrated forum for the
presentation of research in several related fields, and the exchange of
ideas and experiences in the topics concerned with the formal methods
support for Open Object-based Distributed Systems.
TOPICS
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- formal models for object-based distributed computing
- semantics of object-based distributed systems and programming languages
- formal techniques in object-based and object-oriented specification,
analysis and design
- refinement and transformation of specifications
- multiple viewpoint modelling and consistency between different
models
- formal techniques in distributed systems verification and testing
- types, service types and subtyping
- specification, verification and testing of quality of service
constraints
- formal methods and object life cycle
- rigorous specifications of business semantics and their
refinement into system specifications
- beyond IDL: semantics specification patterns
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Gul Agha - U. of Illinois, Urbana, USA
Patrick Bellot - ENST, Paris, France
Gregor Bochmann - U. Montreal, Canada
Howard Bowman, UKC, Kent, UK
Ed Brinksma, U. Twente, Netherlands
John Derrick, UKC, Kent, UK
Michel Diaz - LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Kokichi Futasugui - Jaist, Ishikawa, Japan
Reinhard Gotzhein - U. Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Haim Kilov - IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, New York, USA
Guy Leduc - U. of Liege, Liege, Belgium
Luigi Logrippo - U. of Ottawa, Canada
Jan de Meer - GMD Fokus, Berlin, Germany
Elie Najm - ENST, Paris, France
Oscar Nierstrasz - U. of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Claudia Linnhoff-Popien, RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany
Kerry Raymond - DSTC, Brisbane, Australia
Omar Rafiq - U. of Pau, Pau, France
Gerd Schuermann - GMD Fokus, Berlin, Germany
Jacob Slonim - IBM, Toronto, Canada
Jean-Bernard Stefani - FT/CNET, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France
Sebastiano Trigila - F. Ugo Bordoni, Roma, Italy
Juan Quemada - ETSI Telecomunicacion, Madrid, Spain
PROGRAM CHAIRS
Howard Bowman John Derrick
H.Bowman@ukc.ac.uk J.Derrick@ukc.ac.uk
Tel: + 44 1227 827913 Tel: + 44 1227 827570
Fax: + 44 1227 762811
Computing Laboratory
University of Kent at Canterbury
Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, United Kingdom
EVALUATION AND PUBLICATION OF SUBMITTED PAPERS
Submitted manuscripts will be evaluated and selected for presentation
in the workshop. The proceedings of FMOODS'96 have been published by
Chapman and Hall, the publisher of IFIP events; FMOODS'97 will be
similarly published.
The proceedings will be made available at the
workshop. It is also anticipated that a selection of the highest quality
papers will be published in a journal special issue on the conference.
INSTRUCTIONS TO THE AUTHORS
Authors are invited to submit full original research papers, up to 16
pages (including bibliography), 12 point, single spaced, including an
informative abstract, names and affiliations of all authors, and a list
of keywords facilitating the assignment of papers to referees.
IMPORTANT DATES
14th January 1997 Submission deadline
18th March 1997 Notification of acceptance
18th April 1997 Camera ready copy for proceedings due
FTP SUBMISSION
Manuscripts in plain (ASCII) text or PostScript format are
welcome (possibly compressed with 'compress' or 'gzip'). Use anonymous FTP to
mango.ukc.ac.uk directory "/pub/hidden/fmoods97"
using the last name of the contact person as a filename.
Note that files deposited in the submission directory can only be written
once and cannot be read or deleted afterwards. After having downloaded
your manuscript file into the submission directory, you should notify your
submission by e-mail to:
>>> fmoods97-submit@ukc.ac.uk <<<
Your notification e-mail should be in plain text (ASCII)
and should include:
- the title of your paper
- the name of the authors and their institutions
- a list of keywords
- an abstract of your paper
- the name and postal, fax and e-mail addresses of the contact person
- the name and format of your submission file
Your submission and notification will be acknowledged.
E-MAIL SUBMISSION
Should ftp submission be impossible, you may choose to submit your paper
with electronic mail. Submissions should be made in two separate e-mails:
a Manuscript e-mail and a Notification e-mail. Send your Manuscript in
postscript format (possibly uuencoded and compressed with 'compress' or
'gzip') to the following address:
>>> fmoods97-submit@ukc.ac.uk <<<
Send your Notification e-mail to:
>>> fmoods97-submit@ukc.ac.uk <<<
Your notification e-mail should be in plain text (ASCII) and
should include:
- the title of your paper
- the name of the authors and their institutions
- a list of keywords
- an abstract of your paper
- the name and postal, fax and e-mail addresses of the contact person
Your submission and notification will be acknowledged.
POSTAL SUBMISSION
Should electronic submission be impossible, please send 5 copies of your
manuscript to:
Howard Bowman
Computing Laboratory
University of Kent at Canterbury
Canterbury
Kent CT2 7NF
United Kingdom
INQUIRIES
Should you need any organisational information,
please send a message to: fmoods97-request@ukc.ac.uk
Should you have any scientific enquiries, please send a message to
one of the chairpersons: H.Bowman@ukc.ac.uk or J.Derrick@ukc.ac.uk.
ORGANISATION COMMITTEE
Eerke Boiten - University of Kent
Charles Briscoe-Smith - University of Kent
Geraldina Fernandes - University of Kent
Olga Fernandes - University of Kent
Donna Lindsey - University of Kent
Erik Poll - University of Kent
Helena Rodrigues - University of Kent
Maarten Steen - University of Kent
WWW
Further details of FMOODS 97 and an HTML version of the present call
for papers can be accessed at the following web page.
http://alethea.ukc.ac.uk/Dept/Computing/Research/NDS/FMOODS/
RELATED EVENTS
ECOOP'97 11th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Jyvaskyla,
Finland, June 9-13, 1997. Information is available at the following WEB
sites: http://www.ecoop97.jyu.fi and http://wwwtrese.cs.utwente.nl/ecoop97
Subject: Re: Occam's razor & WDB2T [was Decidability question]
From: n_nelson@ix.netcom.com(Neil Nelson)
Date: 12 Nov 1996 02:32:31 GMT
webb@deakin.edu.au (Geoff Webb) wrote:
> The article is a response to research I have done into the
> application of Occam's razor in machine learning. I believe
> that I have provided strong evidence against the utility of
> Occam's razor as it is commonly applied in machine learning.
> Those interested in this research can obtain a copy of the
> Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research paper from
> http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/jair/table-of-
> contents-vol4.html
The following quoted from the previous web reference.
> [Heading] Other Theoretical Objections to the Occam Thesis
> [snip]
> On the philosophical front, to summarize Bunge [1963], the
> complexity of a theory (classifier) depends entirely upon the
> language in which it is encoded. To claim that the
> acceptability of a theory depends upon the language in which
> it happens to be expressed appears indefensible.
This is essentially incorrect. See Li and Vitanyi's *An
Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and It's Applications* p.
90 The Invariance Theorem. Complexity depends in part on its
language up to a fixed constant which becomes negligible beyond
a certain degree of overall language and description
complexity.
> Further,
> there is no obvious theoretical relationship between
> syntactic complexity and the quality of a theory, other than
> the possibility that the world is intrinsically simple and
> that the use of Occam's razor enables the discovery of that
> intrinsic simplicity. However, even if the world is
> intrinsically simple, there is no reason why that simplicity
> should correspond to syntactic simplicity in an arbitrary
> language.
>
> To merely state that a less complex explanation is preferable
> does not specify by what criterion it is preferable. The
> implicit assumption underlying much machine learning research
> appears to be that, all other things being equal, less
> complex classifiers will be, in general, more accurate
> [Blumer, Ehrenfeucht, Haussler, and Warmuth, 1987, Quinlan,
> 1986]. It is this Occam thesis that this paper seeks to
> discredit.
> [snip]
It is obvious that any description needs to have a sufficient
complexity in order to be accurate and that less complexity in
those cases will reduce accuracy. Our difficulty is in
determining how much complexity we need to achieve sufficient
accuracy. It is always possible to increase complexity and
provide a closer fit to the sample data; however, as Geoff Webb
has indicated in a related html page, an increase in fit at
some point does not increase predictability of future
(additional sample) data and may actually decrease
predictability.
The optimization of complexity and accuracy depends upon the
amount inherent randomness present in the data and the
additional implementation difficulty the additional complexity
requires.
Data always contains a certain amount of error that cannot be
removed and an attempted fit within that error provides no
predictive utility. An evaluation of inherent data error is
always in part subjective but its limit becomes apparent by the
decreasing increment in predictability obtained from the
increasing increment in complexity upon mining additional data.
Although some descriptions may benefit in absolute
predictability from additional complexity, at some point the
effort required to utilize the additional complexity falls
below any reward that may be effectively obtained.
Given two descriptions of the same data A) having less
complexity and less predictability and B) having more
complexity and more predictability; we will usually notice that
description A is, in most part, included in description B.
Some components having general utility are contained in both A
and B, and some components with more specific utility are
contained primarily in B. And in general, it will also be the
case that the additional components of B will depend on the
common components of A and B such that an utilization of B
implies a primary utilization of A with a secondary utilization
of the additional components of B. Under this scenario in
Geoff Webb's tree model of complexity, the additional
components of B are leaves that would be added to the common
leaves of A and B.
My interpretation of Occam's razor here is a description
optimization process whose increase in description accuracy
corresponds to an increase in description complexity with
diminishing returns; and is limited by the following three
criteria: 1) the inherent amount of error contained in the data
limits useful complexity, 2) the computing resource (time and
space) available to utilize additional complexity against its
increment of benefit limits useful complexity, 3) a recognition
that there is a cluster of descriptions for a given body of
data whose most common components have greater overall
immediate utility.
Neil Nelson
Subject: Re: limit ordinals and ordinal arith question
From: angilong@u.washington.edu ('mathochist' Angela Long)
Date: 12 Nov 1996 04:22:51 GMT
Daniele Degiorgi wrote:
>In article <327A8400.6DCF@cs.umbc.edu>, peterson@cs.umbc.edu writes:
>>I'm trying to learn about limit ordinals. Does anyone
>>have any recommendations on particularly readable texts
>>on the subject?
I recommend Keith Devlin's "The Joy Of Sets." It's a good general
introduction to set theory and includes ordinal and cardinal math.
>>A specific problem I'm having is that, form the text
>>I'm working from, I'm having trouble understanding
>>the difference between
>> w + 1 {were w is ord assoc with set of nat numbers}
>>and
>> 1 + w
>I think this is an improper usage of +.
No, it's the perfectly standard ordinal +. A + B means the
ordinal that is isomorphic to the ordered set that is formed
by "lining up" the elements of A followed by the elements of
B. So 1 + w is the ordinal isomorphic to {A,0,1,2,...},
which is w. But w + 1 is the ordinal isomorphic to
{0,1,2,...,A}, which is clearly not w, since it has a last
element. In fact, since w is an initial segment of w + 1,
w + 1 > w. Further, w + 2 is the ordinal isomorphic to
{0,1,2,...,A,B}, which clearly has w + 1 as an initial
segment, and also clearly is not isomorphic to w + 1, since
w + 2 has both a last and a next-to-last element. So
w + 1 < w + 2.
--
-- Angi
Subject: Re: Vietmath War: Wiles FLT lecture at Cambridge
From: Le Compte de Beaudrap
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 23:05:34 -0700
On 7 Nov 1996, Archimedes Plutonium wrote:
> In article <327FD551.4A31@postoffice.worldnet.att.net>
> kenneth paul collins writes:
>
> > Please, what are "p-adics"?
>
> Each of them are Infinite Integers. Around 1901 Kurt Hensel in Germany
> extended the integers through a series operation.
>
> The Finite Integer such as 1 is supposedly finite, nothing to the
> right or left of it.
>
> Infinite Integers all of them have an endless string of digits to the
> leftward, thus 1 is .....000000001 or 231 is .....00000231 but not
> every Infinite Integer repeats in zeros, for instance the Infinite
> Integer
> ....9999999999998 is equivalent to -2
>
> and who knows if these two Infinite Integers have any remarkable
> qualities
> ....951413.
>
> ....172.
>
> But you can quickly see that if you accept the Infinite Integers as
> the real live and true integers and look at the finite integers as a
> sham, a cutsy but crude setup that is all foggy and imprecise, a
> Newtonian first approximation of what numbers are, then all of
> mathematics is changed. No longer do you have Cantor diagonal baloney.
> No longer do you have Number Theory stockpiled with ancient unsolved
> and easy to state problems. No longer do you have hundreds and
> thousands of pages of proofs for easy problems such as FLT or Goldbach
> using every piece of incoherent field of mathematics to tackle it with.
>
> But all of the above is useless to tell any mathematician. It is far
> easier to convince the Pope that Jesus was just an ordinary human being
> than it is to convince a 1993 professor of mathematics that his
> understanding of "finite integer" is all wet.
>
> I wait for the physicist to show that Infinite Integers-- the p-adics
> are essential in physics. I think it is the Quantized Hall Effect. Once
> the physicists report this, then the house-of-cards of mathematics all
> comes a fallin down.
>
> A mathematical proof is nothing more than a physics experiment that
> uses just a pen and a piece of paper. And just like in physics, where
> it takes but one experiment to ruin a theory, the same for mathematics,
> that when a physics report comes in that finite integers are not
> adequate in describing the Quantized Hall Effect but that the p-adics
> are necessary and sufficient thereof. That will be the day that physics
> will have destroyed mathematics and will build her back anew and
> better.
>
> Mathematics from Cantor until 1993 has become more philosophical than
> it has become scientific and it will pay the price for its vagrancy,
> its truancy, and its vandalism meanderings
>
> Noone but me can see that mathematics is nothing but physics and is a
> subdepartment of physics, but how could anyone see that unless they had
> a Atom Totality theory where mathematics is but a mirror reflection of
> how many atoms and atom characteristics.
>
>
I'm not disputing p-adics, so please don't bite. I actually
consider the prospect very interesting (I like it when I find that there
is an idea in math, physics that I haven't contemplated!).
I would merely like to point out that, while math was constructed
to model things in the real world, it was actually far more likely to be
modelling a transaction (my 7 sharp rocks for your arrowhead, say), and
not, for instance, the speed of a running gazelle. The way physics was
built from Gallileo to Descartes to Newton, physics is rather a branch of
mathematics, the mathematics of physical behaviour. And, if finite
integers are seen to be insufficient in physics, it implies either that
our understanding of the physical world is lacking, and/or mathematics as
it stands is not complete or properly defined. The argument would then
come down to why the former is not a sufficient reason for physics'
insufficiency.
Niel de Beaudrap
----------------------
jd@cpsc.ucalgary.ca
Subject: Re: insights into the quantum Hall effect; SCIENCE 25OCT96; p-adics
From: Le Compte de Beaudrap
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 00:26:33 -0700
On 8 Nov 1996, Archimedes Plutonium wrote:
> --- quoting SCIENCE, 25OCT96 ---
>
> UPON REFLECTION
>
> In theoretical physics, it is sometimes the case that the solution
> to one problem can be used to solve another by the proper
> transformation of the system, such as switching the role of electrical
> fields and charges with their magnetic analogs in electromagnetism (see
> the Perspective by Girvin, p. 524). Shahar et al. (p. 589) measured the
> current-voltage characteristics of a fractional quantum Hall effect
> fluid and its nearby insulating state and found that the results are
> essentially identical for the two states when current and voltage are
> interchanged. The existence of this duality symmetry for charge and
> magnetic flux may lead to new theoretical insights into the quantum
> Hall effect.
>
> --- end quoting SCIENCE, 25OCT96 ---
>
> Since my discovery that the finite integers, the counting numbers, or
> called Naturals in mathematics are a fake and that the p-adics or
> Infinite Integers are the real true integers, I have looked to physics
> to straighten-out the mess. I have looked to the Quantum Hall Effect
> with its strange numbers to clear the mess that is mathematics.
> Once the world sees a part of physics where the p-adics are essential
> and where the finite integers just do not work, that day my friends is
> a spectacular day here on Earth, for on that day physics subsumes
> mathematics, just as physics subsumed chemistry in the Schroedinger
> equation.
As soon as chemistry stopped being alchemy, it was a branch of
physics. It happened in the late 19th, not the early 20th, century. To
quote Rutherford: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."
That was from long before the full glory of Quantum Physics.
As well, how can physics ever subsume math!? That's impossible!
While findings in physics may force math to change, it is the laws of
physics that are expressed in math, NOT the laws of math expressed in
physics. I defy you to, using Maxwell's equations, prove that 1+1=2,
without depending on the proof asked for to accomplish it.
If physics predicts a mathematical property, THEN has physics
subsumed math. You state that physics CONTRADICTS math, or shows that
math is insufficient; that means that the laws of mathematics do not form
a proper base as defined.
>
> Mathematicians have for centuries acted like high priests, acted
> superior to the sciences. Almost laughable here at the close of the
> 20th century that mathematicians pander off as true a monsterous 100
> page proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, when just around the corner the
> physicists will show the birdbrain mathematicians that the Quantized
> Hall Effect is written in p-adics. Essentially required p-adics and the
> finite integers just do not work.
Excuse me, but are you not also being a mathematician in
contributing to mathematics? (Are you not also acting like a High Priest
impersonator by writing this article? "The end of the finite integers is
a'comin, and all of the unbeleivin' mathematicians of the world will be
thrown into the fires of hell!")
As well, where does the impression of mathematicians feeling
superior to scientists arise? I never heard of this, and many
mathematicians were also physicists. Were you scared by a
mathematician in your childhood?
As an aside, I take opposition to your calling me a birdbrain,
despite the fact that I haven't breathed a word against p-adics
themselves yet. And until I have sufficient reason, I won't.
>
> What does all of this mean? It means simply that mathematics since
> Cantor in the late 1800s has been mostly gibberish, goon squad
> gibberish.
Maybe. As Quantum Physics has "classical" and "renormalised"
versions of theories, so may mathematics under p-adics. (What does
"p-adic" stand for, anyway? Just curious.)
>
> There are many people in this world who still believe that a
> mathematics proof such as say the 4 Color Mapping Proof or Wiles FLT
> has more bases in reality than any physics experiment, whether you take
> a shoddy one or a highly refined physics experiment. But it is this
> general feeling , this general notion that mathematics proofs are
> higher in trustworthiness of truth than physics experiments which has
> come to a shattering end and a shattering close by 1993. All it takes
> for mathematics to come rolling down from the top of the mountain is
> for physics to show one area of physics where p-adics are essential.
> When that happens then physics will forever more be King of the
> Mountain and mathematics will grub, grub along the base of the
> mountain, and whipped into shape by the physicists.
>
Firstly, I agree that physics EXPERIMENTS have more basis in
reality than math: math is a formal system which seems to work, and
physics experiments are measurements of reality itself. However,
THEORETICAL physics depends on math intimately. Physics theory without
math boils down to: "light is very very very very fast."
Secondly, how did you "derive" (for lack of a better word)
p-adics? Are p-adics a consequence of observation, as the existance of
the neucleus of an atom is? Or are p-adics the only way math and physics
able to coexist? If the latter, I submit that you have found a math that
is better for a basis of physics. P-adics are a part of physics (as
opposed to math) IF AND ONLY IF p-adics exist by the observations of
physics. Have you observed a 2 today? Not two objects, not ink in the
symbolic representation of "2", but an actual 2? No such thing exists,
one cannot "observe" a number, nor can one observe a class of numbers.
Thusly, p-adics are a part of MATH, NOT PHYSICS.
> I will look at all reports of the Quantized Hall Effect, for it is in
> these strange quantum numbers, these strange fractional quantum numbers
> that I believe they are strange looking only because they are not based
> on the Naturals = Finite Integers but instead,
>
> the Quantized Hall Effect is based on Naturals = P-adics and that the
> strange looking numbers are really p-adics or n-adics and their
> strangeness evaporates instantly when these numbers are put into p-adics
>
Ah, so then you did not observe a p-adic, you merely concluded
that to use a p-adic instead of a finite integer solved your problems.
Your problems of reconciliation of THEORETICAL PHYSICS with EXPERIMENTAL
PHYSICS, not PHYSICS with MATH. By improving math, you makephysics
consistent. If p-adics are indeed an improvement, I applaud your efforts.
However, in trying to convince (convert?) others to see things your way,
you have begun to sound more like a fanatical Nazi than a rational
philosopher of any type.
P-adics are math. New math, math brought about due to problems in
physics, but math nonetheless. By insulting math, you insult yourself.
Whether you are aware of it or not, you are a mathematician, and are
trying to bring about a mathematical, and not a physical, revolution.
Physics will not envelop math, as you envision: math will not be whipped,
kiss physics' feet, or be put into concentration camps. Theoretical
physics will still be the middle man between experimental physics and
math, trying to predict the former by use of the latter. It will merely
be the first time that an inadequacy in physics will necessitate a change
in math, is all, just as inadequacies have necessitated better
experimental procedures all these centuries.
I put it to you that you are either a physicist who has been
either abused, teased, or put down by mathematical peers, and that you
are trying to insult them by saying that physics is infinitely superior
to math. In that, you are gravely mistaken. All quests for truth are
equally valid, and while some may be based on others (ie, just as PHYSICS
is based on MATH and observation), all searches for truth are noble, and
light up our world with their insights.
This has been my humble opinion, amplified by way of reaction to
extreme comments about math. (Newton's 3rd law: For every action, there
is an equal but opposite reaction...a qualitative law of physics, which
needs math to be of any concrete use.) I neither oppose nor promote
p-adics, but I do oppose the way that the promoter(s) of p-adics seem to
go to great lengths put math down, especially with shock tactics like
"Physics Envelops Math" and "Math forced to grub, grub, grub". Let
us discuss things, and think things out, like reasoning beings: That's Why
God Gave Us Brains.
Math a branch of Physics? IMHO, impossible. P-adics valid? No
comment. After all, I haven't enough of a basis to have an opinion. If
only all people were like that, all the time...
Niel de Beaudrap
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jd@cpsc.ucalgary.ca