Kiwi solves Zeno's paradox and argues against Hawking

[BustaMike]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Sure it does. The label is hyped by people (popular media) who don't have a clue about compound and imaginary numbers. The "imaginary" component results from the reduction of a negative square to it's square root (i.e. -b² to ib)

Nitpicking cause I have nothing important to add.

(-b)² = b², -b² = -(b²)

you mean SQRT [-b²] = ib



...god I'm bored

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by BustaMike


Nitpicking cause I have nothing important to add.

(-b)² = b², -b² = -(b²)

you mean SQRT [-b²] = ib



...god I'm bored

Prove Furgi's Last Theorum. That ought to keep you busy...

[BustaMike]

Nah, I think I'll get something to eat

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
For reasons that are beyond the scope of this thread and beyond my ability to discuss based on my acedemic studies, the East didn't flourish in science as readily as the West, despite their early similarities in thought.

There IS a bias in modern Western scientific thought against Eastern philosophies.

Um, I think its perfectly fair to judge a particular society's scientific methods based on results. You yourself admit Eastern philosophy produced little scientific progress.

Western scientific method produced the greatest flourishing of technological advancement and knowledge about the world and our universe ever, and it continues to accelerate to this day. It's rather difficult to argue with those results!

[BustaMike]

[troll] Boris, one could also argue that the Chinese had gunpowder for hundreds of years, and it took Western thought to start killing people with it. [/troll]

[JohnT]

Precisely!

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by BustaMike
[troll] Boris, one could also argue that the Chinese had gunpowder for hundreds of years, and it took Western thought to start killing people with it. [/troll]

Both the Chinese and Westerners had been killing each other in droves for millenia without gunpowder, so it was moot by that point.

[alva]

Is there a pop-up book that explains some of this stuff?

/me feels like Homer with these threads..

[DRoseDARs]

Hey Busta, there's a way to kill some time: Make a Physics/Quantum Physics Pop-Up book!

I'd buy a copy...



Ack, Stargate in 30 minutes and I've things to do before that. I'll come back later.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Modern Western Science is based on Western philosophy, specific that originating out of Ancient Greece. I'm saying that at the same time Zeno and his fellow ponderers were pondering away, Eastern Philosophers were doing THE EXACT SAME THING at the same time. Their words and methods were different, but their conclusions followed the same lines of thought as their Western counterparts.

I don't think this is true at all. Although some of the Tao Te Ching reads like Heraclitus I can't discern a causal metaphysical analysis in anything I've read about Eastern philosophy. Where philosophy really starts for the Greeks is in the attempt to give a fundamental arche of everything and to relate everything else to this in causal terms.

It should be pointed out that what Zeno is aiming to do is provide arguments in support of the Eleatic thesis that there exists only one completely undifferentiated being. Of course this puts Parmenides at odds with the rest of his peers since it removes the possibility of causal analysis - but it can fairly be said that he writes in opposition to this tradition.

[Urban Ranger]

I loved the way John Wheeler commented:

Another impressed with the work is Princeton physics great, and collaborator of both Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman, John Wheeler, who said he admired Lynds' "boldness", while noting that it had often been individuals Lynds' age that "had pushed the frontiers of physics forward in the past."

Notice he said absolutely nothing about the actual hypothesis itself.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Odin
If aristotle would of tested his BS he would of been right a lot more often.

Look this really pisses me off. How much Aristotle have you actually read? And how much of it in the original language. None, I'll bet.

Most of the things that Aristotle is accused of he never said. I don't believe I've ever come across him making the claim about falling objects that is often attributed to him.

In fact if you read Aristotle you would see that he is quite meticulous about observation, he invented the science of biology and has accounts of all the various sorts of animals and attempts to provide classifications for them.

I'll say this again: you cannot accuse Aristotle and other ancient thinkers of being stupid simply because they differed with contemporary science. None of these guys had access to the technology that has been available since the renaissance. Do you think that Aristotle wouldn't have loved to have had a microscope? These guys didn't have the ability to make such observations, so they were forced to rely on reason

Frankly the scientific revolution of Galileo's time represented a kind of dumbing down of natural philosophy (science) and eventually led to the sceptical problems that beset empiricist theories - it's precisely by ignoring these problems and focusing on practical gains at the expense of theoretical unity that western science made its great advances. For someone like Aristotle, who was trying to fit absolutely everything into one grand unified theory, such slipshod practice would have been unthinkable. But then again, that was the method that his dearth of instruments forced on him - and frankly it made it harder for him.

Aristotle took a more common sense approach, he was a scientific realist - he thought that the mind could apprehend what was really in nature, rather than make speculative guesses on the basis of meagre evidence. That's the under appreciated difference between Greek science and the modern version.

Slagging him off as stupid while being in complete or near complete ignorance of his work is just unfair and totally out of order. There has probably never existed another individual who was as smart as Aristotle - he often manages to say more in a page than most thinkers do in a book. He was the first person to think systematically about science and its methods, logic, aesthetic theory and countless other things. Don't be uncharitable.

[The Vagabond]

From the original quote:

Lynds' solution to the Achilles and the tortoise paradox, submitted to Philosophy of Science, helped explain the work.

Lynds' solution to all of the paradoxes lay in the realisation of the absence of an instant in time underlying a bodies motion and that its position was constantly changing over time and never determined.

After reading something like that, my BSdar brays a shrill buzz.
Solution to the paradoxes?? Did these paradoxes really need a solution? Aren't they solvable within a classical approach (a convergent infinite series, as St Leo pointed out)? In this context, you really start to wonder whether the referee that made the following judgement was right:

"I have only read the first two sections as it is clear that the author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus. I'm afraid I am unwilling to waste any time reading further, and recommend terminal rejection."

Perhaps it would be more correct to speak about Linds' take on the paradoxes within the framework of his concept of time (but not a solution to the paradoxes!). But then, if time is not continuous, it seems that the very formulation of the paradoxes loses its original meaning. Then it's not quite clear what we are talking about.


Anyhow the ideas like Linds' certainly have the right to exist. However, to realize them in a mathematical form, a hell of mathematical apparatus is needed. Did Linds provide at least some preliminary mathematical formulation in his paper? If not, any comparison with Einstein's 1905 paper is not appropriate.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
I loved the way John Wheeler commented:
Notice he said absolutely nothing about the actual hypothesis itself.

Isn't Wheeler really old now? he coined the term "black hole" in the 60's. He must be in his late 90s!

[Ramo]

This seems a lot more like irrelevent philisophical jacking off than real physics to me...