View Single Post
  #4  
Old September 12th 18, 09:27 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,551
Default The Mad Hatter's astronomy

It is not possible to join the 't' party which constitutes Lewis Carroll's opinion on what turns out to be a dead end route that his fellow mathematicians took however it is possible to go so far as to point out how they and the people of the world found itself at that particular 't' party table.

Withdrawing to the reasonable world where everything makes sense, the framework for timekeeping involves the daily and annual cycles constituting the day and year where the 24 hour day represents one rotation but a year only represents a close approximation to an orbital circuit. The year, starting March 1st to March 1st can have 365 days/rotations in it or 366 days/rotations denoting the original format where astronomical observations for timekeeping are constructed on 1461 rotations for 4 orbital circuits as a proportion.

The intelligent mocking of his fellow mathematicians is actually dead serious by virtue that the absurdities did find a popular subculture in the early part of the 20th century. It still continues over in sci.physics.relativity but effectively is rehashing the same old themes that Carroll put into fictional form -

"The parallels between Hamilton’s maths and the Hatter’s tea party – or perhaps it should read “t-party” – are uncanny. Alice is now at a table with three strange characters: the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse. The character Time, who has fallen out with the Hatter, is absent, and out of pique he won’t let the Hatter move the clocks past six.

Reading this scene with Hamilton’s maths in mind, the members of the Hatter’s tea party represent three terms of a quaternion, in which the all-important fourth term, time, is missing. Without Time, we are told, the characters are stuck at the tea table, constantly moving round to find clean cups and saucers.

Their movement around the table is reminiscent of Hamilton’s early attempts to calculate motion, which was limited to rotatations in a plane before he added time to the mix. Even when Alice joins the party, she can’t stop the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse shuffling round the table, because she’s not an extra-spatial unit like Time.

The Hatter’s nonsensical riddle in this scene – “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” – may more specifically target the theory of pure time. In the realm of pure time, Hamilton claimed, cause and effect are no longer linked, and the madness of the Hatter’s unanswerable question may reflect this."

https://www.newscientist.com/article...ved/?full=true


Newton's use of the Equation of Time was a muddying influence , a mathematicians borrowing a timekeeping facility and applying his own interpretation to further his agenda but the early 20th century 't' party people managed to turn absolute/relative time into a narrative that supports Hamilton's use of 't'.

The mathematicians who show up in this newsgroup know only the 't' party but never the principles of timekeeping which operate in the the wide-awake world of humanity. It is really,really unhealthy for people to indulge the lingo of 't' party people and their heroes.