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#261
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 09:40:32 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote: I'm not sure what that's supposed to demonstrate, though. Times change. Our understanding of nature, and of how to understand nature, is radically different now. Do you think that nature will never be understood? That there's an infinite depth to the fundamental laws, and we can never reach the end? Pretty much like peeling an onion. When you gain access to ever higher energy collisions and rarer events you may see some new fine detail that was not previously detectable. Likewise with bigger telescopes and multispectral imaging - the first view of the universe at really high resolution in the terahertz band will be significant for example. Seeing more doesn't mean we learn more. Much of what we see now is just confirmation of ideas we already hold. Confirmation isn't the same as discovery. Onions have centers. They're not layers forever. I see the Universe as a simple place, with simple laws. Indeed, that's the general view of modern physics, and all the available evidence supports that view. A view which had not developed 150 years ago. At some point, it appears we'll know everything. And we are arguably much farther along that path now than we were 150 years ago. Our big theories are highly stable. They continue to hold up, and new observations continue to support them. 150 years ago new observations were overturning the (rather weak) theories of the time. Even the simplest canonical game of life with Conway's original rules turns out to have extremely complex behaviour and is Turing complete. Irrelevant to my point, which is that we understand the rules, not that we can necessarily predict the behavior. |
#262
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 09 Oct 2018 06:58:19 -0600, Chris L Peterson
wrote: On Tue, 09 Oct 2018 14:28:51 +0200, Paul Schlyter wrote: On Sun, 07 Oct 2018 14:45:11 -0600, Chris L Peterson wrote: On Sun, 7 Oct 2018 13:21:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc wrote: On Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 7:58:08 AM UTC-6, Chris L Peterson wrote: GR is easy to understand. For a certain value of "understand". Tensor calculus isn't easy. Sure. The techniques for manipulating the numbers can be tricky (although trivially handled by software tools these days). But the underlying concepts are accessible to anyone with a reasonably normal level of intelligence. You need much more than just the fundamental concepts to successfully build a theory. The fundamental concept of Newtonian gravity, for instance, is trivially simple. Yet, even the three-body problem turned out to be hairy and difficult, not to mention the N-body problem. Numerical integration handles them all of course, but numerical integration does not answer the question about the extreme long-term stability of the system. I'm not sure of your point here. It certainly doesn't argue against anything I've said. In your opinion, what are the simple fundamental concepts of that GUT which has QM as one of its limits and GR as another one of its limits? Either you swiftly tell me that (and of course a majority of today's physicists should agree with you here), or else you admit that it is not simple to find that answer. |
#263
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Sun, 07 Oct 2018 07:58:05 -0600, Chris L Peterson
wrote: On Sun, 07 Oct 2018 06:58:35 +0200, Paul Schlyter wrote: I see it as shallow. Very shallow. The Universe is simple and easy to understand. If so, please present your Grand Unified Theory of the universe. If the universe is so easy to understand, you should be able to do so quite quickly. Why? That's a fallacy. GR is easy to understand. QM is easy to understand. That doesn't make either of them obvious. We can puzzle for a long time over a tricky problem that ends up having an extremely simple and easy to understand solution. Simple != obvious. Here you contradict yourself by saying: 1. QM and GR are both simple.. 2. Simple is obvious. 3. However, QM and GR are not necessarily obvious. So what about GUT? Is it simple? Is it obvious? Is it neither? Is it both? |
#264
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
These mongrels are a product of the adventures of mathematicians around 100 years ago rather than dealing with substantive issues which distinguish normal physics from the pseudo-science of astrophysics.
The concession genuine researchers have to make is back centuries ago but considering what is on offer in the 21st century, they are the ones who should be desperate to escape the mentality dumped on them by Newton much less the guys last century. |
#265
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On 09/10/2018 13:21, Paul Schlyter wrote:
On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 09:40:32 +0100, Martin Brown wrote: Likewise with bigger telescopes and multispectral imaging - the first view of the universe at really high resolution in the terahertz band will be significant for example. We've already done that. Visible light has a frequency of about 500 THz. I meant the tricky part of the terahertz band where some neutral matter is almost transparent. I have seen an image of Cass A done but I think it must be classified as it has to my knowledge never been published. It is the awkward gap where photon energy is too low for optical devices and frequency too high for microwave techniques to work adequately. theories of the day predict. We are about due a paradigm shift in physics this century. Average is about one every couple of centuries. Only during the last half millennium or so. Before that, physical theories prevailed for millennia. Back then people were content with the approved "just so" stories and the established religion that their rulers subscribed to. Scientific curiosity has let the cat out of the bag. -- Regards, Martin Brown |
#266
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 09 Oct 2018 15:16:49 +0200, Paul Schlyter
wrote: I'm not sure of your point here. It certainly doesn't argue against anything I've said. In your opinion, what are the simple fundamental concepts of that GUT which has QM as one of its limits and GR as another one of its limits? Either you swiftly tell me that (and of course a majority of today's physicists should agree with you here), or else you admit that it is not simple to find that answer. I have no idea. Again, lacking knowledge about something does not mean that something is not simple. All of the major theories we have that describe nature are simple. Why would I not expect the same for those we have not yet discovered? I have not argued anywhere that it is simple to find any answers. |
#267
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 09 Oct 2018 15:21:57 +0200, Paul Schlyter
wrote: Why? That's a fallacy. GR is easy to understand. QM is easy to understand. That doesn't make either of them obvious. We can puzzle for a long time over a tricky problem that ends up having an extremely simple and easy to understand solution. Simple != obvious. Here you contradict yourself by saying: 1. QM and GR are both simple.. 2. Simple is obvious. 3. However, QM and GR are not necessarily obvious. Where did I say that simple is obvious? I said that simple does not imply obvious. |
#268
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
Certainly this thread should be named the MadHatter's Tea (t) party, after all, Lewis Carroll dressed his fantasy in reference to mathematicians and their wayward agenda. He wasn't capable enough to distinguish time from timekeeping and this is where it all falls apart as the founding errors of Newton's system arises in astronomy and specifically the creation of RA/Dec which is just a convenience for adding the 24 hour system to the older system which predicts celestial events within the calendar framework.
The intellectual mongrels today don't know what Newton was doing and have less interest in astronomy, at least the astronomy of a moving Earth and Sun centred system that emerged before telescopes arrived on the scene. It is like a parade of pseudo-intellectual peacocks in this thread but the feathers are a lot duller these days. |
#269
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 14:36:12 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote: It is the awkward gap where photon energy is too low for optical devices and frequency too high for microwave techniques to work adequately. Which frequency range is that? And is thar radio waves or infrared? |
#270
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 09 Oct 2018 07:44:26 -0600, Chris L Peterson
wrote: On Tue, 09 Oct 2018 15:16:49 +0200, Paul Schlyter wrote: I'm not sure of your point here. It certainly doesn't argue against anything I've said. In your opinion, what are the simple fundamental concepts of that GUT which has QM as one of its limits and GR as another one of its limits? Either you swiftly tell me that (and of course a majority of today's physicists should agree with you here), or else you admit that it is not simple to find that answer. I have no idea. Again, lacking knowledge about something does not mean that something is not simple. All of the major theories we have that describe nature are simple. Why would I not expect the same for those we have not yet discovered? I have not argued anywhere that it is simple to find any answers. You have a quite unusual definition of simple if you think e.g. tensor calculus is simple. Yes, the GR theory uses tensor calculus as an essential part. In normal language use, simple implies easy to learn. |
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