Yeah, except everyone else is about 20 steps of ahead you.

Obviously, it's trivial to reduce everything to being a branch of philosophy. For the purposes of this discussion, however, it's completely pointless. The OP obviously means professional/named top philosophers vs professional physicists.

I agree, it's not going to lead anywhere talking about it further.
For the sake of argument, we can make a distinction between the activities.

This is may be where it gets confusing to some, Hawking has philosophized about black holes. His concept of baby universes emerging from singularities (or whatever he said) is philosophy along the lines of people just stating that energy and matter are the same. But his theorems on singularity formation or calculation of Hawking radiation are not in the same category. Those things are part of physics and why he is considered a great physicist. If they look the same to you that's fine, but they are totally different to people with graduate training in physics, and that's the standard that matters.

Street poker players have an edge either way . . .

"And this is what street poker is all about. I understand that i've just jumped from my metaphor of Batman to talkin about the streets, but Batman wears Black and black people ARE black, so it's really not that different." -MagicNinja

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...-poker-394442/

Haha, dang. I thought dominoes was street poker. At least, it is on some of my people's streets.

A bit busy for a full reply or to keep track of developments in this thread, but people's preferences and interests don't match your model of how people work. A physicist couldn't even begin to work on the problems of how serotonin analogs interact with receptors. They'd struggle mightily and with no results for millions of man-hours* if they were interested in developing a decent ceramic for a fuel cell. Those interested in such things would be silly if they pursued studying physics.

I am not an expert in linguistics, so I cannot parse your last sentence. Was your account hacked?

*assuming infinite intelligence.

In an effort to clarify, "philosophizing" isn't equal to "thinking about stuff."

George Lakoff in 2001 said:

"Mathematics may or may not be out there in the world, but there's no way that we scientifically could possibly tell".

What mathematicians and philosophers have to say about this statement? Is it true or false...or maybe neither?

It's ****ing stupid. It's as "out there in the world" as any abstract concept could be...

What if math itself is a giant quantum wave function that only exists like it does because of what we choose to "measure"?

I (and I think most mathematicians) would largely agree. We imagine we're discovering stuff that exists somewhere in a way that's different from say writing a novel. But that view is obv indefensible.

Discovering the logical consequences of a particular set of axioms, for the most part. Whether the axioms, and the logic itself, are discoveries is another matter.

The principle of least action in physics is no coincidence. It exists independently of our mathematical formulations (i mean we can arrive at it differently but it - the higher connection- is still there in that other formalism and essentially unites the formalisms).

Math exists independently of our brains because it exists in nature itself within its laws and explains how our own brains function anyway.

However notice that math cannot exist independently of nature!!! There is no platonic math world!

In order for math to exist you must have something that you can use to represent math with, something that starts the game of connections.

Yes you can imagine a world (toy model world) that is very limited and still described by math but this math is definitely now developed within a much richer structure world that made the analysis of the other one possible. Otherwise the simpler world is a nonstarter in terms of its math.

This i why i believe that math and physics are entangled. It is impossible to have math without physics. Yes abstract math may appear to not relate to nature often but it does have beginnings from nature and is now the game that nature (brains are parts of nature) play! So its back to physics even in its most abstract sense.


A theory of everything is possible and it will have to unite math and physics actually making both inevitable.

It can only exist like that or not at all! (even if "that" is a megaverse type supertheory and this is just one of its "places")

True, but the vast majority of consequences of a set of axioms are trivial or uninteresting. And the metric mathematicians use to figure out what's interesting seems very similar to exploration. While novel writing, if you ask writers, is creation. But obv that's not really a tenable position, buts its what people actually believe and its fine since it doesn't actually matter.

Never heard of it, and I don't understand a word of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_action

Is there a version for physics dummies?

Yes, good point.

The bolded I found to be somewhat mysterious but I think also profoundly interesting and profoundly important - Masque at his best.

I think I have read similar things and/or analogies from Feynman and Daric, though not expressed in the same manner. Daric expressed it in terms of aesthetics in building the connections with equations. Feynman explained it more in terms of the least action principal. Explain may be the wrong word - comment on is perhaps better. I may have some of this a bit befuddled but our math/physics guys can certainly square up misunderstandings or clarify.

A baseball leaves your hand - The path (trace of the curve) is set at each interval of time; the ball can only follow the least path of resistance. No other path is possible. This leaves two ways to predict the ball's path. Eliminate all possible "other" resistance paths leaving only the one path (trajectory); or have perfect knowledge of all initial conditions to predict the least path of resistance*. Again, I will be taken to task if all the above is just muddled misunderstanding.

But it is a principal the applies across nature (math is just a tool kit to explain/predict natural phenomena**) as alluded to by the quotes from the people that first thought about this, as explain in the linked article.

* Philosophically this seems to mesh with hard determinism.

** If I read Masque correctly nature and math are actually the same phenomena. That is yet to be proved. Perhaps Masque will do it.

Thanks, but what does that mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_of_least_resistance

Wiki has a certain portion of errors and misleading and dubious information to outright gibberish embedded into it. You need to filter. It is a difficult job. Like being a moderator of a SMP forum.

I started a physics degree and chose philosophy as a subsidiary option, for no reason other than it seemed cool. One lecture per week clashed, however, and so the physics department informed me that I was not allowed to do philosophy. This annoyed me because of the obvious but unspoken reality that no undergraduate worth their salt attends every single lecture, so for that reason alone I abandoned physics and switched to doing a philosophy degree. Smart, huh?

The vast majority of consequences of <insert anything here> are trivial or uninteresting.

Figuring out something new is interesting. Especially if it is independently done. This is common and can make life pretty fun.

Figuring out something that is new to everyone else is also fun and gets your name remembered. Some people seem to want their name remembered, I guess.

It is the same as the above. Part of the fun of linguistics (and many other human endeavors) is that you can, with a bit of effort, create a sentence/thought that is original. Some may even be repeated and remembered by others, if you are interested in such things.

But, sometimes wiki shows a sense of humor: http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/...rtebrates.html

Basically proving your point.

"When I was in high school, my physics teacher—whose name was Mr. Bader—called me down one day after physics class and said, ‘You look bored; I want to tell you something interesting.’ Then he told me something which I found absolutely fascinating, and have, since then, always found fascinating. Every time the subject comes up, I work on it. In fact, when I began to prepare this lecture I found myself making more analyses on the thing. Instead of worrying about the lecture, I got involved in a new problem. The subject is this—the principle of least action.

Mr. Bader told me the following: Suppose you have a particle (in a gravitational field, for instance) which starts somewhere and moves to some other point by free motion—you throw it, and it goes up and comes down (Fig. 19–1). It goes from the original place to the final place in a certain amount of time.





Now, you try a different motion. Suppose that to get from here to there, it went as shown in Fig. 19–2 but got there in just the same amount of time. Then he said this: If you calculate the kinetic energy at every moment on the path, take away the potential energy, and integrate it over the time during the whole path, you’ll find that the number you’ll get is bigger than that for the actual motion.




In other words, the laws of Newton could be stated not in the form F=ma but in the form: the average kinetic energy less the average potential energy is as little as possible for the path of an object going from one point to another. "

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html


See also these;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%...range_equation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_principle

More importantly see also this;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation

and the section on Quantum action principle.

The conclusion by Feynman regarding how probability amplitudes are calculated (the system now is allowed unlike classical physics to go over all possible paths - and it is this totality that defines the true probability) is one of amazing future consequence for quantum mechanics in my opinion. It will survive and possibly connect well with the reframing of physics. It holds the keys to how geometry comes alive out of deeper unknown theory.

"Dirac's work did not provide a precise prescription to calculate the sum over paths, and he did not show that one could recover the Schrödinger equation or the canonical commutation relations from this rule. This was done by Feynman.[4] That is, the classical path arises naturally in the classical limit.

Feynman showed that Dirac's quantum action was, for most cases of interest, simply equal to the classical action, appropriately discretized. This means that the classical action is the phase acquired by quantum evolution between two fixed endpoints. He proposed to recover all of quantum mechanics from the following postulates:

The probability for an event is given by the modulus length squared of a complex number called the "probability amplitude".
The probability amplitude is given by adding together the contributions of all paths in configuration space.
The contribution of a path is proportional to e^(iS/ħ), where S is the action given by the time integral of the Lagrangian along the path.

In order to find the overall probability amplitude for a given process, then, one adds up, or integrates, the amplitude of the 3rd postulate over the space of all possible paths of the system in between the initial and final states, including those that are absurd by classical standards. In calculating the probability amplitude for a single particle to go from one space-time coordinate to another, it is correct to include paths in which the particle describes elaborate curlicues, curves in which the particle shoots off into outer space and flies back again, and so forth. The path integral assigns to all these amplitudes equal weight but varying phase, or argument of the complex number. Contributions from paths wildly different from the classical trajectory may be suppressed by interference (see below).

Feynman showed that this formulation of quantum mechanics is equivalent to the canonical approach to quantum mechanics when the Hamiltonian is at most quadratic in the momentum. An amplitude computed according to Feynman's principles will also obey the Schrödinger equation for the Hamiltonian corresponding to the given action.

The path integral formulation of quantum field theory represents the transition amplitude (corresponding to the classical correlation function) as a weighted sum of all possible histories of the system from the initial to the final state. A Feynman diagram is a graphical representation of a perturbative contribution to the transition amplitude."

Thus, in contrast to classical mechanics, not only does the stationary path contribute, but actually all virtual paths between the initial and the final point also contribute.

The opinions of Penrose on relations of Math and Physics and what kind of "worlds" exist.






Stop fighting who is smarter and realize that those that care for both are lol.