joigus

I'd heard about ESPN, though. I'm not a complete ignorant. 🤣

I infer Sky Sports is a Sports channel of some kind...

Take comfort in this: If Euclid himself were to come back to life and tried to give some of his views on modern theories on these forums, without thinking with any care what science has been up to for the last \( 2.2 \times 10^3\) years, his ideas would be probably dismissed just as quickly as yours have. And rightly so.

Dear @PrimalMinister, I'll tell you of the cautionary tale of Enrico Fermi. In the mid 1930s he submitted a paper to Nature. It was flatly rejected. Today we know it contains the essence of beta decay at first order. Of course, it miserably fails at every other order you may wish to push the theory through. Today we know why: Essentially because he missed the need for massive Z's and W's in weak interactions. He didn't get discouraged though. He pushed forward because he thought he had had a good idea. And he managed to get it published somewhere else.* Mind you, 1) He didn't try to explain everything 2) He wasn't discouraged 3) He didn't spend a moment of his valuable time in criticising Nature's editors and referees --to the best of my knowledge Why aren't you a bit more like Fermi? * E Fermi, Attempt at a Theory of \( \beta \)-rays, Il Nuovo Cimento, Vol.11, p.1, 1934; Zeitschrift fur Physik, Vol.88, p.161, 1934. (My red emphasis.)

It's two up and one down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton Plus gluons dancing around telling the quarks and each other to change colour, plus a number of virtual quark-antiquark and gluon states. That soup is what Lisa Randall refers to as "the sea".

Those are scientific communications that serve many different purposes. You have pre-prints (highly technical papers that are sent for consideration before they've gone through the peer-review system), lectures notes (of different degree of pedagogical approach), letters, books... There are filters (not everybody can "publish" there). And whether you can read it like most people read the newspaper highly depends on your level of knowledge as well as on what particular paper you read).

I think you've managed to clump together there a record number of logical fallacies. One is to substitute my statements by something far more stupid than what I said, and completely disconnected to what I said; the other is to conclude something that doesn't follow from what @swansont said, and put it at variance with what I said. Rarely ever do I disagree with Swansont, I think; or he with me (just once AFAIR, on grounds on how to explain something). That's not because we're besties, or we've been grown as seeds from the same pod. It's because we both look at science as an edifice of objective knowledge. Or, maybe I'm wrong, and the pod we've both been grown in is something we all share --or should--, which is called science. Now, if you don't mind, I would like to discuss some of the finer points @Duda Jarek is making. We may disagree about some ways in which to tackle this question, but I want to learn more about his approach. Thank you.

Well spotted. Precision in terminology is essential in science.

Pieter Zeeman was 14 years old when Maxwell died. Maxwell could hardly have "invented" any Zeeman splitting. Minimal coupling has to do with gauge transformations, which is a concept introduced by Hermann Weyl, who was born 6 years after Maxwell died. So I'm guessing no. I don't understand why fluxions are purple. Yes, I understand. But has there been any attempt at building the multiplets that I'm talking about with topological equations? Is there a model of non-linear equation that can implement, if not predict, decay modes, for example? Something like that. I know how easy it is to criticise, so please bear with me. I'm worried about this business of building analogues not being just a matter of building something that "resembles" something.

I meant those in the theory of electromagnetism. You seem to think something is not needed in Maxwell's theory. You said: (My emphasis.)

Too many conceptualisations? Which ones do you have in mind?

I'm going to insist on this point just for a little while. I'm not completely sure that I'm faithfully echoing @studiot's concerns here, but I think my concerns and his at least partially overlap. It is not enough to build analogical models of individual particles with every particle popping up in the model as an independent character in a play that could or could not be there. Kaons, for example, have known lifetimes, decay modes, etc., that must be accounted for. We know that kaons, and hyperons, and nucleons, are made of quarks. Where are these quarks, and the hadrons they give rise to in their decay modes? These topological charges should have a multiplet structure to be fit into the known multiplets of the standard model, for example, \[\left(\begin{array}{c} e\\ \nu_{e}\\ u\\ d \end{array}\right)\] \[\left(\begin{array}{c} \mu\\ \nu_{\mu}\\ c\\ s \end{array}\right)\] \[ \left(\begin{array}{c} \tau\\ \nu_{\tau}\\ t\\ b \end{array}\right) \] There are also tight constraints on chiralities for these leptons, so that right-handed leptons do not couple to the weak force. IOW: The weak force violates parity maximally. Then there's the question of the mixing angles: eigenstates of mass are not eigenstates of the gauge charge operators. Where are all these constrictions? Don't get me wrong; I deeply sympathise with these topological efforts. The part that I'm missing is the one that makes them try to replicate more closely the known features of the SM and QM. It's all a little bit as if an archaeologist unearthed a couple of broken columns under the ground of old Israel and proclaimed, "well I think I've found Samson!" We're never short of people who make such claims.

Mmmm... To make do. To do. To make. To make love. To love. To love making. To do better. To make better. To make love better. To love making better. All of that in order to make do better.

The terminology has changed quite a bit over the years. Look at this for an appetiser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton_(disambiguation) (I think there are more.) The bone of contention to me is: What about quantum mechanics? Bell-Clauser-Horne-Shimony, Bell-Kochen-Specker and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-Mermin theorems --and their experimental confirmations-- tell us that it is not consistent to assume on the basis of classical logic alone a particular orientation of the particle.

No, there isn't because those are just three numbers. The product of two primes is always a semiprime, because that's the definition of semiprime. Is that what you're on to? "Some denominator"? Oh, that' clear!!! Will you just state clearly what you're trying to get at? I don't get it. And I don't seem to be alone in this. "The graph is what's important" just doesn't cut it. Make a statement. If you don't make a statement there can't be "any thoughts". Except: "what's this all about?" Something like "the distance (or the quotient, etc.) between consecutive semiprimes goes like such and such". It can be a conjecture, (a guess, an intuition). It all sounds to me like mathematical innuendo. And it's very annoying.

Absolutely spot-on, @Sensei. On a similar vein, here's a couple of very interesting TEDtalks by Karen Lloyd, Hyper-slow metabolism microbes that live under the Earth's crust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2DzsgJSwcc Hyper-slow metabolism microbes that live under the sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbgB2TaYhio 15 minute talks for the general public. Some catchphrases by Lloyd are priceless. Makes you think that the amount of microorganisms may have been, if anything, grossly underestimated.

Not so meandering after all.

Well, yes but: (my emphasis) Also: (my emphasis) Also: This recurring point is what I mean by off-shell. Can you address any of these questions? You can get all kinds of weird things by adding 4-vectors, one pointing to the past light-cone, and another pointing to the future light-cone. You can obviously get the 4-vector, \[\left(u^{0},\boldsymbol{u}\right)+\left(-u^{0},\boldsymbol{u}\right)=\left(0,2\boldsymbol{u}\right)\] But that's unphysical. That's what we're trying to tell you.

Exactly. And even for macroscopic objects, what they look like strongly depends on the kind of radiation we use to look at them: https://www.wired.com/2014/04/the-world-looks-different-when-you-see-in-infrared/ When you look at this person covered by a plastic bag, couldn't we say that "normal" reflected light is deceiving you, by offering a picture of the object that is actually less faithful than emitted infrared light? In order to get an infrared picture of the object, we also need to map these colours somewhere in our visual cortex. So there is a neurological aspect about the whole question too. Most of the light we see is reflected light, and the way our brains process this information gives rise to the usual "palette" of visual concepts, such as shiny, matte, red or blue, fuzzy, etc.

(my emphasis) I take it that humans are neither moving nor non-moving. Who invented the third? We, the weird ones? Before "we" existed? I disagree with @MigL: This is way past silly. It is a meandering nonsense.

I don't want to be insulting but this doesn't look promising as the start of a theory about the Earth.

If you can afford a long-night vigil, you can see it in the Summer too. Slimmer chance of an overcast sky, perhaps. At least in Spain, where I live. 7 years ago, I was stopped on the outskirts of the village where I lived by the rural police --Guardia Civil--, who asked me for ID, and had lots of questions for me, none related to Orion. They couldn't believe I was crazy enough to relish in contemplation of "lovely Orion" at past 5AM almost in the middle of nowhere, trying to catch glimpses of Betelgeuse. A kindred spirit.

Politics aside, the Sokal affair still gives me food for thought, even all these years down the road. I knew it would interest you. Thanks for appreciating it. If you overlook the political implications, there's still a lot to be learnt concerning this topic on purely scientific/philosophical grounds.

No way to get lost that way, unless you're a flat-Earth advocate... So what if so? Don't tell me you're a covert ageist. Marilyn Monroe never gets old.