The Last Word

[L. Marcus]

Also, a source of income and profit.

[Cancer]

Sadly, true.

[L. Marcus]

You never wanted a slice of that pie?

[Cancer]

The author's slice is distressingly small. It's not something you do just for money.

[L. Marcus]

Might it be a matter of principle?

[Cancer]

Certainly, and I expect, actually, that's how most college textbooks start, with some professor blowing his stack at the crap textbooks available for his class, and burning a year or two of his life writing one.

[L. Marcus]

Trying to teach Evolution to Texans ...

[Bazza]

Texans are already evolved, well some are.

[L. Marcus]

Then they are not Texans.

[Bazza]

They wear cowboy hats, that's enough.

[L. Marcus]

So does some New Mexicans.

[Bazza]

What's so evolved about evolution?

[L. Marcus]

It's been tweaked to better fit the facts for a century and a half now.

[Cancer]

... pillars rather than crutches ...

 

link

[Bazza]

What if the pillars are set on quicksand?

[Bazza]

Also, why is the absolute NEED for these laws to be expressed in mathematics? What if some laws (or principles) can only be expressed in non-mathematical terms?

[Bazza]

"Life wasn’t meant to be logical." -- me at 11:47 AM today

[Cancer]

Also, why is the absolute NEED for these laws to be expressed in mathematics? What if some laws (or principles) can only be expressed in non-mathematical terms?

It doesn't need to be expressed mathematically, but mathematics is an unusually handy way of describing symmetric or repetitive patterns, and it has been unreasonably successful in providing a framework for describing and discussing things like waves, curves, and so on, as Pythagoras and Euclid noted. Archimedes almost completed formulation of a framework for handling infinitesimal quantities, which was the problem on which the rest of the Classical thinkers broke themselves.

 

Tycho's matchlessly precise program of observations, analyzed by Kepler with a fanatical if not obsessive respect for accuracy, allowed description of the starkly simple motions of the planets using the Euclidean language of geometry. Kepler speculated further in terms mystical causes, but then Newton made the leap needed to handle continuously varying motions brought about by a simple inverse square law force. Centuries later, Faraday had the breathtaking idea of describing the workings of electricity and magnetism in terms of fields of force filling space, and Maxwell made the concept work mathematically, with Heaviside and Gibbs refining the formalism into four beautiful if highly abstract equations.

 

I haven't seen a purely mathematical formulation of biological evolution, though it isn't hard to set up mathematical models of specific situations. Lord Rutherford made a dismissive, gratuitous sneer at descriptive science ("stamp collecting") but it takes a while to build up enough controlled observations and experiments to realize what is important, find the patterns, and from the patterns deduce the mechanisms at work.

[L. Marcus]

And then there's the fun little debate on whether mathematics is invented or discovered.

[Bazza]

 

It doesn't need to be expressed mathematically, but mathematics is an unusually handy way of describing symmetric or repetitive patterns, and it has been unreasonably successful in providing a framework for describing and discussing things like waves, curves, and so on, as Pythagoras and Euclid noted. Archimedes almost completed formulation of a framework for handling infinitesimal quantities, which was the problem on which the rest of the Classical thinkers broke themselves.

 

Tycho's matchlessly precise program of observations, analyzed by Kepler with a fanatical if not obsessive respect for accuracy, allowed description of the starkly simple motions of the planets using the Euclidean language of geometry. Kepler speculated further in terms mystical causes, but then Newton made the leap needed to handle continuously varying motions brought about by a simple inverse square law force. Centuries later, Faraday had the breathtaking idea of describing the workings of electricity and magnetism in terms of fields of force filling space, and Maxwell made the concept work mathematically, with Heaviside and Gibbs refining the formalism into four beautiful if highly abstract equations.

 

I haven't seen a purely mathematical formulation of biological evolution, though it isn't hard to set up mathematical models of specific situations. Lord Rutherford made a dismissive, gratuitous sneer at descriptive science ("stamp collecting") but it takes a while to build up enough controlled observations and experiments to realize what is important, find the patterns, and from the patterns deduce the mechanisms at work.

 

 

I get that, really I do, the scientific method + mathematics is a wonderful tool, but for me it is just one of many. More tools would thus give a better description on objective reality. 

 

I still go back to one of the passages in the Didaskalikos which gives a three level method 1) hypothesis, 2) I forget exactly (darn), 3) both levels below lead to formulating first principles of the field. Physics has this method to a certain degree, e.g. conservation of energy, Newton's laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics could be considered "first principles". And of course first principles relates to the discipline of ontology. 

[Bazza]

And then there's the fun little debate on whether mathematics is invented or discovered.

 

Bit of both. But ultimately comes down to if you are a realist, conceptualist or nominalist. 

[Cancer]

I'd have to spend a while considering how each of those is defined.

[Pariah]

I'm a pragmatist. Mathematics is a tool for solving problems. Yes, I know that there's an inherent beauty to mathematics, but I don't use it for that.

[Bazza]

I'm a pragmatist. Mathematics is a tool for solving problems. Yes, I know that there's an inherent beauty to mathematics, but I don't use it for that.

 

Mathematics is for solving quantitive problems, right? 

[Bazza]

"Custodian of Entropy" So...a CHAOTIC priest (in gaming terms).