nyc111

I don’t understand how what I wrote is related to meme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme

Great article. It shows how fluid the topics defined as the subject of philosophy are. Space, time, motion and the influence of god on the workings of nature were considered philosophical topics. Natural philosophers viewed nature more wholistically than physicists who inherited these topics and study them with the defined units of physics.

The article is from this book by Andrew Janiak https://www.amazon.com/Newton-as-Philosopher-Andrew-Janiak/d...

The author http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Philosophy/faculty/janiak

Coincidentally, I was thinking about this example today. The paper in fact is not the song. It becomes a song when it is sang. When it is given voice. In fact it is hard to say what the song is. You can play it with different instruments. You can play it in its recorded form on various media. All these will sound different. I was thinking "reality" is like this too. So I don't think the sign can make the airport.

I think it is Javascript. Is he using some kind of library relating to music (claps. cymbals etc.)

What is the language used for coding?

What kind of meditation did you try?

It seems that money was invented as a unit to measure the worth of incommensurable things, a universal conversion factor.

I think what you did is standard. But what I question is, if we can solve our problem without assuming spacetime, why do we need the abstraction called spacetime? Spacetime looks like a historical quirk that physicists feel obligated to carry.

For instance, bending of the light experiment is not done in spacetime but in space and time.

"Spacetime is not a physical thing."

But physicists shamlessly reify spacetime. How can something that is said to have a "fabric" not physical? How can something that expands not be physical.

At this point physicists enter into semantics and ask, "it all depends on how you define 'physical'". And indeed, physicists heavily use casuistry, and they have a definition for every case.

To me, if spacetime is not physical, then, it does not exist. Similarly, I don't think such mathematical abtractions as "point particles" exist. Physicists do not worry about existence. They only care to get a prediction.

Very nice! I entered this text: “Whereas most of his preceding lectures simply come to an end, Feynman ends this one more philosophically, speculating that the order in the universe we see today is not a statistical fluctuation but a memory of initial conditions.”

These are the questions:

Which of the following is true?

A) Most of Feynman's lectures simply come to an end)

B) This lecture ends more philosophically)

C) Feynman speculates that the order in the universe is a statistical fluctuation)

Answer: B

What does Feynman speculate about the order in the universe?

A) That it is a statistical fluctuation)

B) That it is a memory of initial conditions)

C) That it is something else entirely)

Answer: B

What is the order in the universe?

A) Random

B) Organized

C) Unknown

Answer: B

How does Feynman end this lecture?

A) With a question)

B) With a thought)

C) With an answer)

Answer: B

What does Feynman speculate about the order in the universe we see today?

A) That it is a statistical fluctuation)

B) That it is a memory of initial conditions)

C) That it is something else entirely)

Answer: B

“Let’s say we have some complex field [. . .] Just to keep things as simple as possible, let’s say that the field is only a function of time.”

This is not simplifying things. First they assume that spacetime is not space and time separately but a different entity then reduce this entity to time only. Then we are not dealing with spacetime. This is like assuming a cube then reducing the cube to one dimension but calling the line a cube. It’s not.

Great video, thanks. But I don’t understand why they call this thing “beautiful”. To me it looks as ugly as tax law.

> Rather than perceiving the world in real time, we’re actually experiencing a memory of that perception.

I’ve had a similar theory. I say that we perceive the world (or time) as if looking behind through the rear window of a forward moving car. We can only see past events.

“ Whereas most of his preceding lectures simply come to an end, Feynman ends this one more philosophically, speculating that the order in the universe we see today is not a statistical fluctuation but a memory of initial conditions. “

Page 30, Pascal triangle as fractal

Photons, by definition, exhibit both properties of waves and particles. But here too a clear definition of particle is lacking. Physicists say photons are quanta, and use quanta and particles as synonyms. Photons have zero mass so they don’t have a finite radius as miniture billard balls. So, we have no idea what Victor sends. By convention he sends “particles” and we are forbidden to ask how this word particle is defined. A good example showing that physics is done by authority.

You are right, I understand. But professional physicists too refuse to define the meaning of the word particle. For instance I asked physicist Joan Baez if he had an article where he clearly defines particle and he said "No." https://twitter.com/cavendish_exp/status/1580176599391285248...

4:85 While she is explaining the experiment, she says that “Victor sends a particle to Alice and Bob simultaneously.”

But the word particle in physics and especially in Quantum Mechanics is undefined. High energy physicists call a statistical “bump” in data a particle. A particle can be a wave. It can be a sphere with a finite radius. Or it can be a mathematical point. All these things and many more are called "particle". So we have no idea what Victor sends to Alice and Bob unless she takes the time to define it, but she doesn’t.

"[Bell] showed that if you only assume two things those things being local realism locality meaning you can't travel faster than the speed of light and realism which means that things have definite values whether or not you measure them..."

I don't think it is justified to assume that "things have definite values" independent of measurement.

I agree. Willpower requires rational thinking. If you are able to think nationally regarding food then you won’t need any of tricks suggested in the article. In my case, my reason is blinded during overeating and I become aware of it only afterward. Even I try to be aware of overeating I can’t. None of the suggestions in the article will work in practice.

In other animals, like cats, what to eat is decided by smell only. An algorithm inside evalutes the smell and sends feedback: eat or do not eat. Another algorithm stops the eating process. But for humans reason must enter to choose food. There is packaged food for instance and our judgment is influenced by marketing. For humans eating has become too complex.

«Physics is just “natural philosophy.”»

Used to be but not anymore. The difference is, natural philosophers, like Henry Cavendish, were amateurs, physicists are professionals. They are "Doctors of Philosophy", the professional offsprings of Scholastic Doctors of Philosophy. The switch from amateur to professional occurred with the advance of the science of electricity. Physicists were seen as the experts and they built the foundation of electrical industrial applications. But there is academic physics, which is like fine arts with no rules and restrictions and there is applied physics with strict rules.

"Philosophers call this “epistemological” uncertainty – uncertainty to do with lack of knowledge."

Nature is self-similar. If we observe epistemological uncertainty in the macro world, the same will be true for the micro world.

This is an example of physicists appropriating a philosophical question and trying to solve it by data analysis.

I don't agree. Our perception of the world is colored in the gut and served to the conscious mind. When I was living in New York, the jingle of the ice cream truck draw me crazy, it was torture. But for kids, it was happiness because the gut microbes feeding on sugar send a message to the conscsious mind to buy the sugary stuff and they created an irresistible desire for it. This is all done in the guts. Some people can remain cool under any adverse situation because they have a healthy gut.

"Philosophers call this “epistemological” uncertainty – uncertainty to do with lack of knowledge."

Nature is self-similar. If we observe epistemological uncertainty in the macro world, the same will be true for the micro world.

This is an example of physicists appropriating a philosophical question and trying to solve it by data analysis.

Mental ilness is in your gut. That's where we should be looking at.

"According to the standard story, which is unfortunately still found in many physics textbooks, quantum theory emerged when it was realized that classical physics predicts an energy distribution for black-body radiation that disagrees violently with that found experimentally. In the late 1890s, so the story continues, the German physicist Wilhelm Wien developed an expression that corresponded reasonably well with experiment – but had no theoretical foundation. When Lord Rayleigh and James Jeans then analysed black-body radiation from the perspective of classical physics, the resulting spectrum differed drastically from both experiment and the Wien law. Faced with this grave anomaly, Max Planck looked for a solution, during the course of which he was forced to introduce the notion of “energy quanta”. With the quantum hypothesis, a perfect match between theory and experiment was obtained. Voila! Quantum theory was born.

The story is a myth, closer to a fairytale than to historical truth. Quantum theory did not owe its origin to any failure of classical physics, but instead to Planck’s profound insight in thermodynamics."

This proves that physics is an unregulated professional field ruled by authority. Physicists have no respect for history and feel arrogantly that they can write history anachronistacally to create a physics myth.

Same corruption of history happenned with one of the most fundamental experiments in physics, the Cavendish experiment. Physicists decided that Cavendish measured Newton's constant of gravitation for the first time. This is propaganda. Newton's constant was defined a century after Cavendish's death. But, for physicists that's a small and irrelevant detail.

Unregulated professionals lie and cheat. Physicists are professionals and they lie and cleat to further their careers.

"These tombs [were] so frequently raided by tomb raiders that there was no guarantee that anything exciting would be down there."

From a wider angle, what are archeologists doing? Aren't they raiding tombs too? They are disturbing someone's tomb. They claim a higher goal of revealing how these ancient people lived, but they are still tomb raiders.

Probability, seems to me, cannot be fundamental, because, a machine built to flip a coin with always the same pressure, can be adjusted to always give heads, or tails. In such a setup there won't be probability.

From George Boole's The Laws of Thought, p.244: "Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with _all_ the circumstances affecting the occurence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave neither room nor demand for a theory of probabilities."

Can we deduce from this that nature is not probabilistic?

"...Sometimes light is a wave, sometimes it's a particle."

If light in these experiments is behaving as wave, then, there would be nothing surprising about a wave acting as itself even though it is far away from the origin. I mean, if we look at waves created on a pond by a stone, we will see that they behave exactly the same way even though they may be moving in opposite directions.

In physics the word particle can have many different meanings depending on the context. Particle does not necessarily mean a spherical object with a finite radius. I wonder how they define a particle in this context, for example in this nice diagram from the press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/fig3_fy_en_22_ent...