"My Ignorance is as Good as Your Knowledge" --Asimov

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by danshawen, Apr 19, 2017.

  1. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    Dan I hope you liked what I said enough to stay.

    I always read everything you posted in the science sections and although I absorb only about 10% of what you posted and generally of the discussions for me it was a great help.

    Things will work out.
     
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  3. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    No. James R would just "point" me into getting banned whenever I posted to science portions of this forum, or else relegate any thread I took in other directions into the fringe or pseudoscience areas. This is almost, but not quite as bad a form of censorship as I suffered for a while on the stack exchange forums, where my former Usenet pals like Uncle Al ultimately were kicked into the same kind of banishment and posting oblivion by their troll "moderators". I found out much later, the one who was responsible was 14 years old, and was engaging in some sort of sick disinformational game to garner himself academic credit. Not even something or someone worth arguing with, or about.

    It's been real, xelasnave, but no thanks.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2017
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  5. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    Why don't you sleep on it.
    If you can't stay may I wish you all the best.
    Best wishes
    Alex
     
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  7. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    I may have forgotten to mention, the 14 year old moderator had no compunction about altering posts until they resembled nothing like what posters to stack exchange had actually written, then tore the posts to sheds for being inaccurate. How's that for an academic scam? It left few traces of what actually transpired, obviously.

    Don't think it couldn't happen here as well. There was a whole gang of these delinquent moderators awarding each other higher membership status on the stack exchange forums. I know this only because I found their secret chat room area and reported them. Most of them have since been removed. But what if I hadn't? What would prevent it from happening again? Nothing, that's what.

    Sleeping on it will make no difference. Freedom of association is a constitutionally protected freedom, and I choose not to interact on a forum where James R is a moderator. I value that freedom. If the same happens to you, I recommend you exercise your franchise. It's still a mostly free internet.

    Done here. Take care.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2017
  8. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    If you look at universities, censorship is now the nor, slanted toward the liberal POV.
    In the early days of science forums, the earliest moderators were much more open minded and of much higher talent level. The discussion forums were new and the attraction of new people was the goal. Trolling back in the day, meant something different. It was performed by the moderators, like a net to fish for new members. Sometimes the controversial and novel was the best way to get new people's attention, so the site could grow and evolve.

    Anyone who ever worked in a research and development environment knows all new science begins as educated speculation. From these seed ideas, which have yet to be proven, you narrow down the truth via research, experiments and analysis. The original moderators were more comfortable with this, since many were in the science fields and had applied science skills. They were also trolling for new members using more out of the ordinary as bait, which they were not afraid of.

    The problem this created for the early moderators, was this approach, although more interesting and exciting, was much harder and created a lot more work. The moderators would need to study and learn new and old things, to provide useful and relevant feedback. The result was many of the early moderators got worn out. I generated a lot of ideas, and I played a role in providing early troll fishing bait, but also moderator fatigue.

    The new generation of moderators are much more lazy, with their roles more like a union job. The sites were no longer in their development stage, but had become more of less defined. The new moderators don't even try to understand the new, since this means more work, beyond just the bare bones. They evolved a by the book dogma approach.

    The moderators became more liberal orientated since by the book is their approach. They were good at memorizing party line indoctrination, and would will look the others way to members who will persecute the creative messengers. They will also use censor if needed, so little effort is required of them.

    If you look at liberalism which runs education, you can see the source of the narrow minds of the moderators. They are taught to have a singular way of looking at things and anything different is censored and feared. They are emotional wrecks; chip on shoulder, with a tendency toward violence and disrespect. They can't compete so they cheat. Different members of old are getting burnt out, being bogged down by lazy obstructionism.


    Danshawen, if you are still there, a good place to express your talents is Naked Science, which is connected to Cambridge University in London. The moderators and members are all respectful of each other, sort of like a throw back.

    It is refreshing not to get bogged down in insults and nonsense all the time. This site shows a higher level of skill up the food chain. They are not afraid of new ideas, and they also attract the young novice members, interested in science, who asks basic questions where anyone is allowed to help.

    My science ideas, which are censored here, are not there. Outside the box is not as scary there, since Cambridge is full of smart people who enjoy new ideas. They are not insecure in their knowledge since many write the book, instead of memorize it.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2017
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  9. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    That would be most upsetting do you think things could be better for you here if that experience was not somewhat front of mind.
    Alex
     
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  10. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Too late for that.

    Nice post, Wellwisher. Thanks.
     
  11. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    So far, this thread has discussed Asimov's Manifesto: "My Ignorance is as Good as Your Knowledge" as it relates to the fields of politics and religion.

    I have saved science for last because of all the fields of human knowledge, science, other than purely observational parts of scientific fields like astromony, chemistry, geology, archeology and paloentology, are the most heavily scaffolded body of knowledge the human race possesses. And it is also because a discussion of this has generated more static from my own posts to science portions of these forums than anywhere else.

    Proportional mathematics has gotten science a long way indeed, but it has one major flaw, the operation of division, which places certain kinds of scaffolding out of reach of the logical structure of math and associated science. Science usually finds ways around this deficiency for example by converting things we wish to calculate into probabilities and proceeding as if the resultant infinities never existed.

    But there are places this procedure doesn't work. One example is the issue of time as it relates to processes which may exceed the speed of light. Don't pretend this isn't a real problem. Between the peak amplitude of a single photon's wavefront and the next, and at any frequency from zero to the high end of the electromagnetic spectrum, EVERY EVENT THAT HAS EVER OCCURRED IN THE UNIVERSE SINCE THE BIG BANG could literally be made to transpire by means of a suitable choice of velocity relative to the peaks of that photon's waveform. So, really, what sense did it really make for Minkowski (Einstein's calculus teacher) to posit that TIME ITSELF was proportional to a Euclidean-complex-Pythagorean mismosh which was in turn proportional to the speed of light? Time dilates depending on relative motion, and so from this you can easily convince yourself that 1) time is something different from a proportion based on the velocity of light, and 2) Science doesn't have a clue what geometry exists beyond the limits of relativity theory imposed by Minkowski's math, including known phenomena like entanglement. Very likely, it's not anything like Euclid's most fevered nightmare. Entanglement also violates Minkowski's misbegotten edict that no two events in this universe of events seoparated by light travel time are really "simultaneous". Simultanaeity does not exist, according to Minkowski. Fine, except that it manifestly does. Every quantum spin flip of every entangled electron pair in matter or positron pair in antimatter is a counterexample. This science (physics) has a huge gap in our understanding of the universe and processes and events going in inside of it.

    This incomplete science is rather a big deal, or it should be considered as such. For as long as science is based on proportional mathematics, there will always be parts of science that are either incomplete or inconsistent. Gödel's incompleteness theorems assure that this is true, and is also why I suppose the "General Philosophy" forum here is the most appropriate place to bring up the issue. But this is no reason to brand any thread containing such information as "fringe" or "pseudoscience" and censor it by moving the whole thread somewhere it is unlikely to be read, much less understood. And this is the principle reason I allowed this thread to deviate a bit from the issue being discussed for a little while.

    Does knowledge associated with the values of science, like other fields of learning, have survival value for the human race? Of course it does. Will the scaffolding of the structure that derives by cyclic application of the scientific method ever end with a complete body of knowledge containing every scrap of knowledge needed by a being such as ourselves with finite minds, crafted by the same process of natural selection? Definitely, the answer would be "no". There will always be knowledge, which while true, remain outside of any symbolic logical framework devised to capture all of it. Symbols are the tools of a finite mind crafted for the purpose of grasping the infinite. These crudely and aribitrarily contrived symbolic tools will always fail to grasp all of the truth value of anything..

    This is chiefly why it is that "My Ignorance is as Good (and also considerably larger in scope) than your (pitiful finite attempts at categorizing and evaluating an infinite amount of) knowledge with your finite minds", even with all of the power and knowledge of science you may have amassed. Conclusions to the contrary might as well be dividing by zero. And by the same argument, your own valuation of the same knowledge is entirely at your own discretions. However, for each and every one of us, there will always be much more that we don't have knowledge about in this universe than what little we do. In every direction. In every corner of this observable and unobservable universe, and at every magnitude scale.

    Asimov's little manifesto carries much more weight than anyone has previously realized. Where's the anthropic principle in all of this? Exactly nowhere.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2017
  12. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Do not understand

    Have a queasy feeling I should understand some of it

    But I don't

    So I'll file it in the shredder and spend 2 minutes worrying about what I missed

    Sorry bout that

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  13. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Well, it was very hard for me to learn also. I learned most of it here.

    And one last parting thought that I can't seem to get into a science forum here:

    Being an observer (of ANY EVENT) means simply that you have chosen a DIRECTION in which to observe.

    This is chiefly why observing one or the other slit of a double slit experiment ends up being an observation of quantum entanglement. Choice of which slit to observe means choosing a direction, and choosing a direction means that you are observing one entangled state of a photon or the other. This process in an updated experiment early this century performed by Birgit was able to prove that entangled state flips of either photons or the electron pairs which produced them transition instantaneously. This is an elementary application of FTL relativity as it applies to simultaneous flips of entanglement states. Spooky? Not really. A causality violation? Only if you believe that the speed of light is the basis of time itself. It isn't. I have every right to completely ignore Minkowski's formulation of relativity in order to make sense of quantum entanglement. It is outside of the framework of scientific reasoning he established for velocities slower than or equal to the speed of light.

    To understand time and inertia, you are going to to use need a geometry that acknowledges the importance of a rest frame for quantum spin states. That's not going to be Euclidean, and if it is relativistic, the vector math will not resemble anything that can be applied to understanding a geometrical solid larger than a single particle. The Lorentz transformations of length will be of no use at all because they are Euclidean geometry based, and those involving time dilation may require a revision as well. No matter how massive the road bed used for establishing a Euclidean coordinate system, it doesn't behave like a solid. Inertia itself really doesn't work that way.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2017
  14. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    21st century science after the discovery of Higgs should not resemble any math from the late 19th century. That would be over 100 years of ignorance, not something that anyone in science should be remotely proud of. Only the gap between Newton and Ancient Greece was longer.
     
  15. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    Isn't mathematics a language; what exactly do you mean?
     
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  16. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Glad to see you are still around, Bw/S.

    Yes, mathematics is a symbolic language. We have already covered the Gödel incompleteness discussion, which applies to any such system of reasoning. This is the reason why if your intention is to provide a mathematical description of the universe from first principles, using no empiracal observations of particle behavior, it will fail. The mathematics simply can't (yet) capture enough of the truth about the nature of particles all by itself to do so.

    Be that as it may, the Standard Model of particle physics owes a great deal (understatement) to Emmy Noether. Using her mathematics, conservation laws and symmetries (some of which are confirmed by SM experimentation, others not), particle physics has gone from the days of "the particle zoo" to a much more coherent and predictive science model of the statistical behavior of subatomic particles.

    Einstein was one of the earliest to recognize the importance of Noether's work to that purpose. And yet...

    It breaks many of Noether's derived conservation laws if it is by any means possible to construct a neutrino (particle of lowest mass) from photons ("particles" of zero mass).

    E = mc^2 is an important conservation law, and it suggests this should be possible, but I have it on the best authority I can find, it won't work It will never work.

    The behavior of the Higgs field is why. Photons are not "really" particles, you see? They are directed energy. They are produced by pairs of entangled electrons, and they can carry inertia in a single direction, but nothing with any mass actually travels through space when a photon propagates. Photons may also carry quantum spin of sorts, which we refer to as polarization. This behavior suggests the wave of propagation is most likely carried in a given direction by interaction with particles that have spin zero until such a wave passes by. How about the "time dilation" that you would get if something with mass could travel as fast as a photon in a vacuum? Well, that exists for things like neutrinos alright, but not for a photon. Wavelengths of photon energy may stretch into the red or shrink into the blue, but nothing but energy actually travels from point A to point B.

    What about relativistic time dilation as it affects those entangled electrons that produced the photon? Here is where it gets a bit trickier. It's actually going to be difficult to relate time dilation to a first principles calculation within atomic structure, as it applies to radioactive decay or anything else. This is largely because of the way quantum entanglement works. Spin flips between entangled electrons in the outer shells of atoms are likely to occur faster than light propagates between them, but at a different rate than spin flips or color charge exchanges between TRIPLETS of up/down quarks within an atomic nucleus or inside of protons and neutrons. Those quarks and electrons get their inertial masses from interaction with the Higgs field, but these fermions only account for about 2% of the total mass / energy of atomic structure. AND QCD and particle physicists both swear that this amount of mass doesn't come close to accounting for General Relativity's Principle of Equivalence between total inertial mass of atomic structure and its gravitational mass. Why not? Because they don't believe that E=mc^2 means what 20th century physicists were taught that it means. I can see their point (finally) that if you can't build a neutrino out of photons, you probably can't attribute the entire inertial mass of atomic structure to interaction with the Higgs field. But then these same particle physicists turn around and say that neutrinos too get their tiny masses from Higgs. So, what's going on here? A lot of inconsistency and incompleteness. That's what. Higgs bosons most often decay into gluons too. Looks like total conversion of matter to energy to me. Just like we always knew matter and antimatter behaved when you put them together.

    It was in 2002 that QCD verified a detailed calculation of the mass of a proton from Standard Model and QCD principles with a supercomputer. They still couldn't achieve a proton spin calculation anywhere close.

    The Higgs interaction, like neutrinos, penetrates all the way through a planet to its core. The interaction isn't one way because all forces in the universe occur in pairs. Everyone knows this. When you let go of a bowling ball near the surface of the Earth, it falls to the ground in the direction of the center of the Earth because the Higgs interaction on that side caused a loss of energy from the Higgs field in the space penetrating and surrounding the Earth. Time dilation at the exact center of the Earth (or even a rotating black hole) will be the same rate as though the clock were removed to infinity. SHOW ME the detailed calculation, using the gravitational field equations of your own choice which include a radius R=0, that can render this prediction with the certainty I just did with no effort at all. I just did it with nothing more than reasoning with what we learned on July 4, 2012. Any takers?

    The mass of a planet doesn't abruptly end at the surface. The gravitational field in the space surrounding a gravitating body also carries mass. Second prediction with no effort at all. Predicts the origin of Dark Matter. Does your theory of gravity do that? Maybe it does, but you are stuck in the archaeic notion that "curvature of space" is more important than time dilation. The former effect has no physical consequences. The second effect is what bends a passing beam of light around a gravitating body as though it had inertia. Because space can have inertia. It gets inertia from interacting with matter.

    You can't use new science to make new predictions while refusing to use those results. That's what I mean when I say that physics and the math that goes with it seems to be stuck in the late 19th century. If you refuse to use new science and I do, then my ignorance of your 19th century calculations is as good as your knowledge.
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2017
  17. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    At the end of the day, I guess you're trying to say that science needs more funding. Almost like a WWII/H-Bomb relation.
     
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  18. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    To promote his new theory of special relativity, Einstein derived his most famous formula and defended it in front of an audience of Newtonian physicists using the example of a photon emitted from one end of a long spaecraft and completely absorbed at the other, using nothing more elaborate than center of mass calculations. There is power in knowing what inertia is.

    It was chiefly the Michaelson-Moreley aeither wind null experimental result that inspired Einstein to determine this had to be the case. And some of those Newtonian physicists bought into Einstein's argument and some didn't. Michaelson certainly didn't, and spent most of the rest of his career trying to find an alternative solution or devise another aether wind experiment to test the hypothesis that absolute motion through space could somehow be detected experimentally. It never could. ALL motion is relative. Even the speed of light itself is relative to a rest frame of a pair of electrons that created the photons that propagate. Odd thing is, that particular velocity is also s Lorentz invariant. Einstein's theory explained in part how the speed of the light was always the same independent of the motion of the frame that produced it. Hence, NO aether wind. Ever. Until quite recently, we didn't know that acoustic "gravity" waves propagated through space also. They are incredibly feeble, but they are there. Still, no aether wind to be found. Only relative motion can be measured, locally or otherwise. And if a really, really strong train of gravity waves were ever detected, what exactly would that mean? There is power in knowing what inertia is.

    It wasn't until Fermi started noticing what happened in the case of atomic fission of Uranium that the theory began getting special notice, culminating, as you say, in Einstein and Szilard's letter to FDR which kicked off the Manhattan Project. Feynman worked with the weaponry. Whole roomsful of women with pencil and paper and a few comptometers were hired by the project to do the tedious critical mass geometry calculations that eventually allowed the weaponization of nuclear energy. Einstein himself never participated in this part of the project, and declined any work on the idea beyond the letter to FDR which he co-wrote.

    We got a lot more theoretical mileage for doing physics out of E=mc^2 than from any other science since Newton. It is hard to underestimate the value of this. We know for certain the exact age of our sun from neutrino experiments kicked off by Ray Davis Homestake primitive neutrino detector in the 1980s. A knowledge of this science and of atomic energy and of Newton's laws of motion means that we have a decent chance of deflecting smaller asteroids that might otherwise plunge the Earth into nuclear winter and mass extinction before the human race is mature enough to leave the confines of the planet we crawled out of the primordial slime to master.

    We have a very long way to go, and don't seem to be getting anywhere very fast in terms of mastering enough basic science knowledge to get there. It was hard enough for us to wrap our collective minds around an Earth that wasn't flat and to learn to ignore religious leadership that had decided for itself that the sun orbited the Earth and that any other belief, scientific or otherwise, was heresey.

    Not the sharpest knives in the drawer living this center of the universe, and that is putting the point as mildly as possible. We might as well be smart termites. Isaac might have intended his statement as sarcasm, but really it is nothing but the truth about what most people believe, and in a certain sense, they are more right than they know.

    The Higgs boson imparts inertia to electrons, quarks, neutrinos, electroweak bosons, and their antiparticles. There is power in knowing what inertia is. Ignorance has more inertia than knowledge ever will.
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2017
  19. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    When I joined these forums, I was excited at the prospect of the new science that could eventually come out of the discovery of the Higgs boson. I'm still excited about what it will eventually mean to our understanding of just about everything, but my enthusiasm is tempered somewhat by what I eventually learned about the road and the math that led to that discovery. And I'm not foolish enough not to believe, there is still much to be learned, or that anyone yet has all of the answers.
     
  20. Tralay Registered Member

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    if someone said to me that their ignorance was as good as my knowledge I would respond thusly, "you're ignorance is surely as real my knowledge."
     
  21. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    You may or may not be correct

    It surely would be dependent on your real knowledge actually being real knowledge and not some flavour of Woo Woo

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  22. Tralay Registered Member

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    well, then we'd have to delve into the subject of what real knowledge actually is, but i assure you, at the crux of reality, everything is just as real as the next thing lol
     
  23. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Well you will have no problem providing a sample of any of the following

    Time

    Soul

    Thought

    I'll accept photos of any if exist from a museum

    If you wish to post samples to me give me some moments to send you the required postage and packaging

    Also allow me to check with customs who a very strict in Australia

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