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The Mad Hatter's astronomy



 
 
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  #1  
Old September 11th 18, 07:44 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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Default The Mad Hatter's astronomy

After a century and a half of unhealthy 'counter-intuitive' narratives promoted by mathematicians, it is time for humanity to return to normal geometry and exercising their normal judgments when discerning observations in the celestial arena.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party focuses on the mathematical use of 't' (Tea) but the proponents of the mathematical 't' never had a handle between human timekeeping and time itself -

"Alice, angry now at the strange turn of events, leaves the Duchess’s house and wanders into the Mad Hatter’s tea party, which explores the work of the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton. Hamilton died in 1865, just after Alice was published, but by this time his discovery of quaternions in 1843 was being hailed as an important milestone in abstract algebra, since they allowed rotations to be calculated algebraically.

Just as complex numbers work with two terms, quaternions belong to a number system based on four terms (see “Imaginary mathematics”). Hamilton spent years working with three terms – one for each dimension of space – but could only make them rotate in a plane. When he added the fourth, he got the three-dimensional rotation he was looking for, but he had trouble conceptualising what this extra term meant. Like most Victorians, he assumed this term had to mean something, so in the preface to his Lectures on Quaternions of 1853 he added a footnote: “It seemed (and still seems) to me natural to connect this extra-spatial unit with the conception of time.”

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


Today they call the 't' party the 'theory of relativity' but that narrative itself is a child of Newton's attempt to define time,space and motion for mathematicians thereby creating a notion that everyone else is vulgar -

SCHOLIUM.
"Hitherto I have laid down the definitions of such words as are less
known, and explained the sense in which I would have them to be
understood in the following discourse. I do not define time, space,
place and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe,
that the vulgar conceive those quantities under no other notions but
from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise
certain prejudices, for the removing of which, it will be convenient
to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent,
mathematical and common." Newton

http://gravitee.tripod.com/definitions.htm


The contemporary saying of 'adults in the room' isn't really fitting here, people given enough time including some mathematicians should come to understand that the 't' party has gone on for far too long and it is now time to find ways to model cause and effect in a more creative and productive way..


  #2  
Old September 11th 18, 08:49 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Quadibloc
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Default The Mad Hatter's astronomy

On Tuesday, September 11, 2018 at 12:44:43 AM UTC-6, Gerald Kelleher wrote:
Like most Victorians, he assumed this term had to mean something, so in the
preface to his Lectures on Quaternions of 1853 he added a footnote: “It seemed
(and still seems) to me natural to connect this extra-spatial unit with the
conception of time.”


While that was just a wild guess at the time, Einstein's Special Theory of
Relativity has indeed made it meaningful to do this, using the speed of light as
the scale factor relating space and time.

John Savard
  #3  
Old September 11th 18, 11:43 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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Default The Mad Hatter's astronomy

It is always helpful to put genuine concerns of mathematicians like Lewis Carroll in context of this era where an entire society followed mathematicians down a hole into a 't' party where the more things make less sense the more intelligent people are supposed to appear. The sci.relativity forum is a Mad Hatter's party but this newsgroup is not, it is for those who have a acquired adult appreciation of geometry and judgment of motions on scales that are longer and larger than normal human experience.

The pan-European fu)k-up doesn't belong to any particular nation although milestones do exist so I am less likely to point solely at the Royal Society agenda as I have done previously but rather have taken a position that looking at what is in front of observers carries more weight than historical context.

The 'adults-in-the-room' would not be 20th century 't' party relativists, they would be concerned people who do not want to waste the rest of their lives chasing rainbows designed by people of the last century or people who wish to save physics by dumping astrophysics as it has been practiced since empiricism took over.

I have seen these adults just yet as contributors here are either bullied or hapless.
  #4  
Old September 12th 18, 09:27 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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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.







  #5  
Old September 12th 18, 01:09 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Quadibloc
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Default The Mad Hatter's astronomy

On Wednesday, September 12, 2018 at 2:27:31 AM UTC-6, Gerald Kelleher wrote:

Newton's use of the Equation of Time was a muddying influence ,


If I am going to study, say, how long it takes a teaspoon of salt to dissolve in
a glass of water, what sort of time should I use:

that provided by a pendulum clock,

or that provided by a sundial?

Of course, you can take the _average_ of the time provided by the sundial -
that's what the pendulum clock gives you. But before it's averaged, the rate of
time from a sundial isn't constant, because of the Equation of Time.

That seems to be a clear factual distinction, not muddying or confusing matters
at all.

John Savard
  #6  
Old September 12th 18, 09:55 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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Default The Mad Hatter's astronomy

How to distinguish common sense from empirical insanity can be challenging when the nuts and bolts of the real issues are complex, at least as they appear to readers genuinely interested in distinguishing astronomy from timekeeping.

Newton's template of absolute/relative time was Huygen's attempt to fit the Equation of Time into an orbital circuit hence the geocentric/heliocentric equivalency -

"Here take notice, that the Sun or the Earth passeth the 12. Signes,
or makes an entire revolution in the Ecliptick in 365 days, 5 hours 49
min. or there about, and that those days, reckon'd from noon to noon,
are of different lenghts; as is known to all that are vers'd in
Astronomy. Now between the longest and the shortest of those days, a
day may be taken of such a length, as 365 such days, 5. hours &c. (the
same numbers as before) make up, or are equall to that revolution: And
this is call'd the Equal or Mean day, according to which the Watches
are to be set; and therefore the Hour or Minute shew'd by the Watches,
though they be perfectly Iust and equal, must needs differ almost
continually from those that are shew'd by the Sun, or are reckon'd
according to its Motion. But this Difference is regular, and is
otherwise call'd the Aequation.." Huygens

The 't' party people have followed this particular rabbit down a hole where the Sun about the Earth is the same as the Earth about the Sun -

"That the fixed stars being at rest, the periodic times of the five primary planets, and (whether of the sun about the earth, or) of the earth about the sun, are in the sesquiplicate proportion of their mean distances from the sun...This proportion, first observed by Kepler, is now received by all astronomers; for the periodic times are the same, and the dimensions of the orbits are the same, whether the sun revolves about the earth, or the earth about the sun." Newton

Lewis Carroll, at least that is what he called himself when he wrote Alice, recognised the price of following mathematicians down a hole where the less things make sense the more of a party they have and it is no different today. Even before 3D + 1t, they found it impossible to make sense of Newton's construct yet this is exactly where my research comes in as to untangle a really,really unhealthy mindset from astronomy is no mean feat, even with guidance.

If mathematicians really care about physics then they have the opportunity to do something creative and productive by withdrawing from the pseudo-discipline of astrophysics and approaching the celestial arena in a more enjoyable way where they no longer need to 'shock' the people of the world by bluffing, voodoo, stock phrases and slogans.




  #7  
Old September 14th 18, 12:39 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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Default The Mad Hatter's astronomy

The mindset that created Brexit was not the first time a subculture in Britain ran with wishful thinking and wrecked havoc in the process. To be fair to the theorists in the early 20th century, previous generations of mathematicians had conjured up the idea of 3D=1t so the original intent of Newton's absolute/relative time or indeed his space/motion had long been lost -

"This absolute time can be measured by comparison with no motion; it
has therefore neither a practical nor a scientific value; and no one
is justified in saying that he knows aught about it. It is an idle
metaphysical conception." Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen, 6th ed


In short, the damage had been done long before Mach made that remark so the early 20th century folk were,in themselves, inheriting a mess with its origins in the late 17th century.

The theorists today are the weakest of the lot as they have conditioned themselves to ignore technical and historical details which would row back the damage. I actually wish physics to succeed but they insist in cutting their own throats by sticking with a notion on attraction bundled up to look like planetary motions.

Edgar Allan Poe took a peek in at the mathematical 't' party and asked a rhetorical question -

"To explain: The Newtonian Gravity -- a law of Nature -- a law whose existence as such no one out of Bedlam questions -- a law whose admission as such enables us to account for nine-tenths of the Universal phaenomena -- a law which, merely because it does so enable us to account for these phaenomena, we are perfectly willing, without reference to any other considerations, to admit, and cannot help admitting, as a law -- a law, nevertheless, of which neither the principle nor the modus operandi of the principle, has ever yet been traced by the human analysis -- a law, in short, which, neither in its detail nor in its generality, has been found susceptible of explanation at all -- is at length seen to be at every point thoroughly explicable, provided we only yield our assent to -- what?" Edgar Allan Poe

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/eureka.html

I have traced Newton's reasoning as a side product of productive and creative astronomy along with the works and methods of the original Sun centered astronomers and further back in history. The dismay is that nobody is around to accept the analysis nor willing to make the effort to put these important affairs in context.
  #8  
Old September 18th 18, 08:15 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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Default The Mad Hatter's astronomy

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there," Lewis Carroll using the Mad Hatter character at the 't' party.

Whether it is bringing up astronomical history or technical points for discussion, the subculture of empiricism relies on making up whatever is necessary to counter what are actually clear paths to understanding and enjoyment.

People can step outside that hole a small group of people dug for society and pushed through the education system. They can look at imaging with new eyes and perhaps take steps themselves to create original views or improve the older ones.




 




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