Children should wear bicycle helmets.

Simon Brooke wrote:
Mathematics isn't a man-made construct, though; it exists in the
absence of man.

That Sir, is a statement of faith

I offer as counterevidence the leaves of certain wild plants whose
anchor points (I'm not a botanist, OK? :-) spiral around the stem in
the Fibonacci sequence.

And? That merely proves that recursion is primitive. It does not prove
that numbers are primitive, nor that operations on number are
primitive.

Not in itself, no. But numbers (at least the concept of "1", "2", or
"single", "double", etc, which are the root of numbers) are recognised
by some animals, for example.

Furthermore we recognise the world in terms of concepts we understand;
whatever understanding of the world we had, we would recognise features
of that understanding in the phenomena we observe.

Of course, but that doesn't imply that the features we observe are
products of our world-view filtering...

Furthermore, in an
infinite universe, an infinite number of meaningless coincidences are
inevitable.

....or that they are coincidences. Besides, the universe isn't
infinite, it's just Very Very Big.

R.

Peter Clinch opined the following...
"We're very cross. *So* cross, we're going to come and kill all you
infidel scum (but not before we've sacked our allies' towns and raped
the women")"

One of the more interesting snippets of history that I recently
encountered was the sacking of the Great Library of Alexandria.
Apparently, the boats for that particular crusade were being made by the
Venetians, but the crusaders were unable to meet the costs. A deal was
reached, whereby they could have the boats, but they had to attack
Alexandria for the Venetians. A sort of mercenary arrangement.

The rest is (As they say) history.

Jon

in message , Simon
Brooke ') wrote:

in message , Tony Raven
') wrote:

Jon Senior wrote:

Testing requires a procedure similar to the following.

Create model.
Use model to predict result.
Perform real-world experiments.
Compare.

All of which is the non-understood process of sensate cortical
interpretation of a set of electrical signals. Let alone all the
Descartian philosphy, conditions such as synesthesia and anosognosia
question what observing the real world really means.

When you use a computer-based flight simulator, you interact with a
three dimensional interpretation of a two dimensional representation
of a one dimensional array of bits in computer memory. The 'reality'
with which you are interacting bares no relation at all to the
underlying physical reality.

And we have no means of knowing whether the 'real' reality with which
we interact every day bares the same relationship to the underlying
universe (if there is one) as the representation of reality on the
computer screen.

In the end the only consistent philosophical position is solipsism,
and frankly that's boring. So even though it has a more solid
intellectual claim to being correct than any other philosophy, I
choose not to believe it.

s/bares/bears/g, of course, passim. Sorry.

--
(Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; lovely alternative to rice.

RogerDodger wrote in message ...
Mark Thompson Wrote:
(well,
I've never got my head around much of normal physics, let alone
quantum).

Don't sweat it - the physicist Richard Feynman is often quoted
expressing the idea that "understanding" quantum physics isn't really
possible - quantum reality is just too weird to warrant claiming that
it can be understood (his words were to that effect).

"What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics
students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my
task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it.
You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I
don't understand it. Nobody does."

- QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

--
Dave...

Simon Brooke wrote:

in message , James Annan
') wrote:


Tony Raven wrote:



Religion is based on the belief that the Universe is governed by
supreme
being(s). Science is based on the belief it is governed by
mathematics.

A critical distinction being the falsifiability of the latter (and
conversely, its ability to make useful predictions).


********.

Was this bizarre and incomprehensible rant (quoted below) really meant
as a reply to my post, or were you intending to throw John Doe or
half-wit a curve-ball? If the former, ... um ... hatstand.

James


You can create a large number of mostly-internally-consistent
descriptions of the universe. Mathematics is not internally consistent
(see Godel, Turing, Church). Furthermore, mathematics as we use it is
an arbitrary construct chosen from a wide range of possible
alternatives, and formalised as we know it as recently as 1889.

If the Universe is '...governed by mathematics...', did it spring into
being fully formed in 1889, and, if not, by what was it governed prior
to that?


--
If I have seen further than others, it is
by treading on the toes of giants.
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/julesandjames/home/

Simon Brooke wrote:
Furthermore, in an
infinite universe, an infinite number of meaningless coincidences are
inevitable.

Just to return to this, I've just asked the friendly cosmologist chappy
down the hall, and he sez:

"Uhmm... well, nobody knows [if the universe is finite or infinite]. If
it is closed (like a sphere), it is of
course finite in volume but infinite in the sense that there is no
boundary. However, nobody knows if hte universe looks like a sphere.
(If it is a donut, it must be huge, larger than the visible universe.)



It looks like the universe is much bigger than the visible horizon."


R.

Richard wrote:

(If it is a donut, it must be huge, larger than the visible universe.)

Conundrum: if the universe is an infinitely large donut, is there an
infinite amount of strawberry jam, even though the total volume of jam
is clearly less than that of the donut but exists in a fixed proportion?

Oh look, it's Friday afternoon! ;-)

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

Simon Brooke wrote in message ...

If the Universe is '...governed by mathematics...', did it spring into
being fully formed in 1889, and, if not, by what was it governed prior
to that?

When you gentlemen have finished showing off to each other, could
someone please explain to me what mathematics actually is? I've been
puzzling over it for years.

--
Dave...

Dave Kahn wrote:

When you gentlemen have finished showing off to each other, could
someone please explain to me what mathematics actually is? I've been
puzzling over it for years.

It's summat what keeps me employed. If there weren't no mathematics,
I'd be sitting in front of a network of computers with no users.

....now, wait a minute.

Blunkett on

Numbers are used by terrorists.

Therefore, possession of a number is to be made a criminal offence.

/Blunkett off


R, radical member of Al-Gebra splinter group.

A more sensible answer may arrive later.

in message , James Annan
') wrote:



Simon Brooke wrote:

in message , James Annan
') wrote:


Tony Raven wrote:



Religion is based on the belief that the Universe is governed by
supreme
being(s). Science is based on the belief it is governed by
mathematics.

A critical distinction being the falsifiability of the latter (and
conversely, its ability to make useful predictions).

********.

Was this bizarre and incomprehensible rant (quoted below) really meant
as a reply to my post, or were you intending to throw John Doe or
half-wit a curve-ball? If the former, ... um ... hatstand.

Mathematics is falsifiable and has been falsified. No ifs, no buts, no
maybes. The incompleteness theorem, together with the
Entscheidungsproblem, drives a coach and horses through it. Not only is
ordinary Peano axiom mathematics provably inconsistent, but all other
axiom sets of sufficient richness to describe natural numbers are also
provably inconsistent. And furthermore, not only are some theorems not
provable, but it is provable that you cannot reliably determine which
are and which aren't. So if you're saying that religion is based on
something that can't be falsified, and science is based on something
(mathematics) which has already been falsified, I think given the two
any rational person would be forced to pick the former.

So: if you think science is based on mathematics, give up now.
Mathematics is not a safe basis[1]. After all, the incompleteness
theorem is just a sophisticated restatement of the Epimenides Paradox,
which has been known since at least Sophocles' time. It's pretty
trivial stuff.

[1] Nor, of course, is logic, which also falls at just these hurdles
(indeed Godel was able to construct the incompleteness proof my
encoding logical statements into numbers). However, logic still gives
us the best tools we have to examine these problems.

--
(Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

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