Daymare17

"One of the origins of scientific method was with trying to find a philosophical validation for god. That doesn't mean that science is religion. Mathematics, and logic, are entirely abstract entities. ENTIRELY. Whatever issues you may have with their application, they are not based in measurement, but on axiom." The article makes the point that axioms in turn are based on measurement, on reality. They don't drop from the sky like certain persons seem to think.

I don't know any real mathematicians, I'm a total amateur. But I think that even an amateur can see many of the obvious contradictions that abound in mathematics. The article is an answer to the general idea that mathematics has nothing to do with reality. Here is a pure specimen of this mystifying thinking: "One of the origins of scientific method was with trying to find a philosophical validation for god. That doesn't mean that science is religion. Mathematics, and logic, are entirely abstract entities. ENTIRELY. Whatever issues you may have with their application, they are not based in measurement, but on axiom. Mathematics is correct for its set of axioms. If you disagree with one of the axioms, then you're just making a different mathematics (JaKiri)." JaKiri, like most of the mathematicians here, is essentially a Pythagorean number-worshipper. So as you see, the article is quite relevant.

Yes, please.

I have here a piece that I hope many of the mathematicians will read, if nothing else than to get their discipline described from different viewpoints. Does Mathematics Reflect Reality? Extract: "The content of "pure" mathematics is ultimately derived from the material world. The idea that the truths of mathematics are a special kind of knowledge that is inborn or of divine inspiration does not bear serious examination. Mathematics deals with the quantitative relations of the real world. Its so-called axioms only appear to be self-evident to us because they are the product of a long period of observation and experience of reality. Unfortunately, this fact seems to be lost on many present-day theoretical mathematicians who delude themselves into thinking that their "pure" subject has nothing to do with the crude world of material things. This is a clear example of the negative consequences of carrying the division of labour to the extreme. From Pythagoras onwards, the most extravagant claims have been made on behalf of mathematics, which has been portrayed as the queen of the sciences, the magic key opening all doors of the universe. Breaking free from all contact with the physical world, mathematics appeared to soar into the heavens, where it acquired a god-like existence, obeying no rule but its own. Thus, the great mathematician Henri Poincaré, in the early years of this century, could claim that the laws of science did not relate to the real world at all, but represented arbitrary conventions destined to promote a more convenient and "useful" description of the corresponding phenomena. Certain theoretical physicists now openly state that the validity of their mathematical models does not depend upon empirical verification, but on the aesthetic qualities of their equations. The theories of mathematics have been, on the one side, the source of tremendous scientific advance, and, on the other, the origin of numerous errors and misconceptions which have had, and are still having profoundly negative consequences. The central error is to attempt to reduce the complex, dynamic and contradictory workings of nature to static, orderly quantitative formulae. Nature is presented in a formalistic manner, as a single-dimensional point, which becomes a line, which becomes a plane, a cube, a sphere, and so on. However, the idea that pure mathematics is absolute thought, unsullied by contact with material things is far from the truth. We use the decimal system, not because of logical deduction or "free will," but because we have ten fingers. The word "digital" comes from the Latin word for fingers. And to this day, a schoolboy will secretly count his material fingers beneath a material desk, before arriving at the answer to an abstract mathematical problem. In so doing, the child is unconsciously retracing the way in which early humans learned to count."

Can anyone explain in layman's terms what the Planck's constant is? I'm not an utter novice on quantum physics but the wikipedia article on Planck's is way too professional for me.

"I mean if there was it would be a great boost to the punctuated model of evolution." Why would this be so?

Yes or no: The origins of mathematics is the real world.

How odd - the Mayans invented the 0 but never invented the wheel

Some examples of warmongering women are: Condoleeza Rice Madeleine Albright War is not caused by men, but by opposing interests between the capitalist classes of each nation. If you abolish borders (which belong in a museum) then you abolish war too. This is just a silly sexist prejudice.

I'm not a mathematician so can you explain in less professional terms exactly what you mean? I don't have to consider any mathematical object, since all mathematical objects are abstractions of real objects and need to be accountable to them in some way. You can "prove" anything on its own terms. You're simply evading the question. Mathematics has serious problems with describing reality and you seem to think that this is well and good and should remain that way. You think that maths does not have to describe reality but stands fine on its own legs. In this you are joined by many of today's theoretical physicists, by the way. They start with some vast equations, and then select those facts that they think look good with the equations, or in the worst cases no facts at all. Then they pass this jumble off as a hypothesis. It's very poor science. Maths actually arose precisely from describing reality. Are you religious? No? Well, then how can you say that mathematics has existed since the beginning of the universe? Since that is what you imply when you say that it is independent of the real, material, human world. Your view is an unfortunate consequence of the extreme division of labor. But formalism is idealism, in the broad sense. Idealism means the idea that matter comes from ideas. That's what you say when you say that the apple is equal to itself. Formal logic states that x = x. But x is always changing. So it's never x. Thus, you're arbitrarily foisting an idea (which is more or less true, but not completely true) upon the real world. You're committing violence to reality. I never said that. I explicitly said that I have no gripe with abstract maths as such. The greater the abstractness of the mathematics, the greater its ability to describe real interrelationships between things - but also the greater is the danger of one forgetting its material roots. "I didn't just say that one apple is different from another apple. I think you guys misunderstand me. What I said is that any apple is never equal to itself." I said that x not= x. That means that the apple is not equal to itself, since it's always changing. It's never equal to itself. Never! It's a wrong conception of your mind.

Well, you're right in the sense that democracy is incompatible with private ownership of the means of production, period. We are supposed to live in one, but what it boils down to is that everyone can say largely what they please, so long as the banks and the boards of the multinationals decide what happens. Primarily, this law gives the lie to the occupiers (as if they weren't exposed enough already). It's proof that what they really care about is the profits of the US corporations, not democracy. One might also consider how simple it is to build a democracy when 100,000 foreign troops are stationed in your country with pretty much a carte blanche to detain or even shoot anyone at will.

You seem to think that there's not widespread censorship and that the big-business media is somehow interested in telling the truth, explaining cases like this with 'sloppy journalism'. That's a conventional social lie. Just like explaining the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, or any abuse by US soldiers really, with a few 'bad apples'. The BBC is one of the more respectable capitalist outlets. Like the Guardian, for instance, it tells the truth on all insignificant issues just so it can lie more convincingly when it really matters.

What policies are they enforcing? Nothing fundamentally different from the opposition's policies.

War crimes are committed on a daily basis in the name of freedom and democracy, and it is nonsense to portray the attacks as a product of terrorists alone. The resistance are not only small groups of Islamic fanatics or supporters of Saddam Hussein. What we see in Iraq is a resistance movement with a real mass basis. True, tragically enough the leadership of the movement tends to be in the hands of the Islamists, but that is only because no genuine alternative is available at the moment. The Communist Party and parts of the trade union movement are openly collaborating with the occupier. Thus, it is no wonder ordinary Iraqi people orient themselves towards the clergy, which they see as the only voice speaking against imperialism. It is easy to see why the resistance is growing. When you see your relatives and friends being killed on a regular basis, you are likely to seek revenge. And as the deadly bombs are dropped from American planes, the anger of the Iraqi people will inevitably be directed against the occupying troops. The fact that some terrorist groupings are able to hijack this enormous amount of rage and frustration and use it for their own reactionary purposes is no excuse for the crushing of Fallujah and other rebel cities. It will only exacerbate the tensions and make the spiral of violence worse. Fadhil Badrani, a journalist in Fallujah reporting for the BBC World Service reported: “For people in the city, life has become even more extreme. Food is in short supply and the shops are all closed ... Electricity is cut off because of damage to the main power station from the bombardment. The water supply has been cut off too. The roads are now heavily cratered. People, particularly children and women, tend to stay at home, fearing being mistaken for a military target. “Doctors say medical supplies at the main hospital, which has been in American hands since Sunday, are low. Most of the city’s population has left, some for other parts of Iraq, others, I hear have left the country altogether for neighbouring Arab counties.” Interestingly, the Washington Post, one of the most right-wing US papers and one that openly backed the illegal aggression of one and a half years ago, stated that in Fallujah some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. The Post quoted Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital: “The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted.” The Post went on: “The Jolan and Askali neighborhoods seemed particularly hard hit, with more than half of the houses destroyed. Dead bodies were scattered on the streets and narrow alleys of Jolan, one of Fallujah’s oldest neighborhoods. Blood and flesh were splattered on the walls of some of the houses, witnesses said, and the streets were full of holes.” If this entered the multi-billion dollar corporate press, one can only imagine what kind of butchery really went on and goes on in Fallujah. river of the Baghdad Burning blog, shrewdly defined al-Zarqawi as "WMDs with legs". He was the main pretext the US used to assault Fallujah, although there was not a single shred of evidence for him being in the city. Predictably, after they raped the city ("in order to save it") they suddenly found out that he has fled. He can be expected to show up wherever the US army needs him to. The state of the much-vaunted "Iraqi Army" should leave no doubt about what the Iraqis think of the occupiers. If they were popular then the population would not hesitate to join the army to "fight the terrorists". Fallujah was supposed to be the testing ground of the new Iraqi Army. Let Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, speak for himself: “The reality is there is no Iraqi Army. Of the tens of thousands recruited into its ranks, there is today only one effective unit, the 36th Battalion. “This unit has fought side by side with the Americans in Falluja, Najaf, and Samara. By all accounts, it has performed well. But this unit can only prevail when it operates alongside overwhelming American military support. Left to fend for itself, it would be slaughtered by the resistance fighters. Worse, this unit which stands as a symbol of the ideal for the new Iraqi Army is actually the antithesis of what the new Iraqi Army should be. “While the Bush administration has suppressed the formation of militia units organized along ethnic and religious lines, the 36th Battalion should be recognized for what it really is – a Kurdish militia, retained by the US military because the rest of the Iraqi Army is unwilling or unable to carry the fight to the Iraqi resistance fighters.” (Aljazeera.net, November 11, 2004) Members of the Iraqi police and army are rightfully seen as collaborators with the occupiers. They are seen as traitors by the majority of the population. That explains why in Fallujah no Iraqi army or national guard unit fought. Stratfor reported that Iraqi National Guard units have refused to attack guerrilla positions; their commanders had been unable to make soldiers move forward and some officers were siding with the troops. “Only the Iraqi army’s special forces unit, which is mostly Kurdish, helped search for hidden guerrillas behind U.S. Marine lines outside the city. Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers have deserted bases around Al Fallujah, the sources added.” Iraqi interim President Ghazi al-Yawar criticised the plan to attack Fallujah. “I completely disagree with those who see a need to decide the [Fallujah] matter through military action,” Yawar told Reuters. “The coalition’s handling of this crisis is wrong. It’s like someone who fired bullets at his horse’s head just because a fly landed on it; the horse died and the fly went away.” Remember that this president is a pure Quisling, hand-picked by the illegal occupation, like Allawi himself who is a CIA agent and a terrorist. It is as if a ventriloquist's dummy suddenly developed a mind of its own and started arguing with its master. This striking example should underline the unexampled barbarity of the US imperialists, who are even alienating their own stooges. The Lancet, a medical journal not particularly known for its radicalism, puts the number of civilian dead since the start of the war at no less than 100,000. That in itself is a shocking condemnation of this filthy war. Even if this number is exaggerated (but then it could also be more, as The Lancet considers its findings conservative), that does not change by one iota the nature of this war. How much “collateral damage” do they want? Twenty thousand people? Fifty thousand people or 200,000? Whatever the number of innocent people dying in Iraq, it is already clear enough how monstrous “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is. BTW, have you heard about the Nüremberg trials? What do you know of them?

I find it fascinating that almost everyone here clutches onto the conventional lies like straws. The human mind is conservative indeed. Let's remember that the only crime the inhabitants of Fallujah committed, was to disobey the American occupation authority. One of the pretexts for the assault was to get it 'secured' in time for the election in January. Imagine if only 'secure' areas like Texas or Oklahoma were allowed to vote... The fact is that the US army is the boss in Iraq and kills anyone who doesn't bend over to their demands. Its aim is not democracy, but military dictatorship. By a foreign conqueror, at that. A year ago Bremer passed a law that allowed for 100% foreign ownership, except in the oil industry, as well as for 100% repatriation of profits. I wonder why this provokes resistance? Anyone going on about how the US is trying to build democracy is a dupe. It's nothing but a lie. The other fact is that the so-called 'free media' is a farce. In those cases where the media is not under the direct dictatorship of capitalist individuals, as with the BBC, it is under the constant pressure of the government and of 'public opinion', which mostly consists of lies spouted by the private media. Censorship goes on all the time, as in this case.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels advocated widespread reforms to take the power out of the hands of the banks, corporations, generals, police chiefs, etc., and to make the elected representatives accountable to the people and not to big money. Their idea of the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' (in reality meaning workers' democracy) comes close to your idea. The basic four points were: 1) All officials subject to election and immediate recall at any time 2) No official to receive more than a workers' wage 3) No standing army but the armed people (i.e. election of officers) 4) All state functions to be carried out by the whole able population round-robin. Of course, these democratic reforms would be little worth without at the same time carrying out a program of widespread nationalisation, eliminating the market system, and putting the whole economy under the conscious democratic control of the population. Otherwise, the economy is still under the despotic control of a handful of unelected bankers and board members.

Like China, Vietnam is proof that the totalitarian 'socialism in one country' doesn't work. Sooner or later, it sells out to the advanced capitalist countries. And then capitalism comes, which is even worse than the bureaucratic 'command economy'. The Western companies exploit the Vietnamese workers like mad. They are forced to work long hours and paid very little. Many work until they drop, as in China. The generally recognised Vietnamese death toll for the war is put at 1 million combatants and 4 million civilians. That's roughly 10 per cent of the population, as large a part as Hitler killed in Poland. Poland only had 20 million though, so the US killed 2.5 times as many in total. The US dropped literally megatons of bombs and they are still going off. Unexploded ordnance detonating in childrens hands is a common feature of most victims of U.S. imperial aggression, from Somalia to Iraq. The history of post-1975 Indochina is a very convoluted one. For instance, Kissinger sent an order to the Pentagon demanding a carpet-bombing of Cambodia: "Everything that flies on everything that moves." You might know that they are trying Milosevic in the Hague. Their problem is that they can't find any evidence tying him to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Imagine if they had found, say, a memo, "I want Kosovo cleaned out. Everything that flies on everything that moves". In fact, there's no such obvious evidence tying Hitler to the Holocaust! And this by one of the most prominent representatives of the US establishment.

There's no difference between the two candidates, except the fact that one is backed by US and EU imperialism and the other's backed by Russian imperialism. Compare the coverage of the Western media on this election with their coverage of the US elections. As always, it's a question of the interests of the US/European/Russian banks and multinationals. 'Democracy' just doesn't enter into it. No matter who gets in power eventually, it will still be the mafia who rules Ukraine just like they rule the rest of Eastern Europe. The difference is whether Ukraine will remain in the Russian sphere of influence or whether it will enter the Western sphere of influence (yes, the West does have one too) like Georgia did earlier.

What's the definition of nanotechnology anyway? Do you have a certain size, and if you go past this size, then it's a nanomachine?

It was a juvenile mistake of his, which he honestly admitted in his later years. He was influenced by the empirio-critical philosophy of Ernst Mach. It's very sad that so much of 20th century physics is based on this error of Einstein, which he himself repudiated.

But even if you take alcohol or LSD, you will fall down the stairs if you trip. Even though a primitive tribesman may not know of Newton's theory of gravitation, that doesn't mean he can jump off a cliff and get unscathed away with it. See what I mean? The world is objective, it exists independent of our perception of it.

Looking over this topic, I found something amusing. Judging from what I see, if mathematics is what you pass off as "mathematics", then Platonism is not just popular in mathematics - it IS mathematics! Plato was a pure idealist. If you had a circular plate, for instance, according to him it was not a plate, it was just an unperfect expression of the Ideal Circle. This stands reality completely on its head. The abstract circle comes from the concrete round thing, not vice versa. And this error is exactly what you are making. You take mathematics, which ultimately derives from observation of objects in the real world and their relations with each other, and then you counterpose it to the real world! You say that maths has nothing to do with the real world. You separate the ideological leaves from the material trunk. One can say that you are sawing off the branch you are sitting on.

How did you manage to derive this nonsense from what I said? What I mean is: If the facts clash with Newton's theories, then that proves that Newton's theories are wrong. I never said anything about primitive cultures or whatever gibberish you are making up. A while ago they found out that the observed facts clashed with Newton's theories. Then they tried to mend up the theory, and it looked worse and worse after a while. Laplace (i think) took Newton to the absurd extremes. Science entered a process of searching for a new theory to fit with the facts. The process was ended with a scientific revolution, and Einstein replaced Newton. The succession of astronomical views is a good example of how theories change to fit the observed facts. Aristotle - Ptolemaios - Copernicus - etc., etc.. The theory of astronomy changed, not on a whim, but to fit the facts of the real world. The same thing should apply to mathematics. If you math people think you are some kind of special caste who are exempt from having to show proof for your theories, preferring conservative vegetation in warm corners, living off the accumulated errors of the past, then fine. Think whatever you want, but don't expect to take the science of mathematics much further. Mathematics is just a way of describing the real world. Whoever mentioned anything to the effect that math is not dependent on reality - psh. Pythagorean number worshippers. All I'm asking is that math train itself for its real mission, i.e., explaining, or helping to explain, the nature of the universe. I'm not saying that abstract maths should be banned. I'm saying that every mathematician should realise the fundamentally unprecise nature of the present mathematics. X not= X, because X, whatever it is, is always changing. And I quote myself: "Is it an infinitesimal interval of time? But then the apple will be subject to minute changes."

I'm pretty much an amateur but I find science fascinating. Would this location be the magnetic north and south poles? Thanks.