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Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

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Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#31

Post by tb »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #23
sarehu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's complete nonsense. There's nothing about Godel's theorem that says the physical rules of the universe can't be described. You're babbling religiously.

"A small number of scientists claim that Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves that any attempt to construct a TOE is bound to fail. Gödel's theorem states that any non-trivial mathematical theory that has a finite description is either inconsistent or incomplete." That's from the Wiki, FWIW. I'm not big on using Wiki as a source. "Babbling religiously" is right on the line in my opinion. It makes you sound like an a…

You appear to misunderstand the meaning of the terms "inconsistent" and "incomplete" in the context of Gödel's theorem.

"Inconsistent": There is at least one statement within the system that can be proved both true and false.

"Incomplete": There is at least one statement within the system that is true, but cannot be proved to be true within the system.

Since Gödel's theorem applies to formal systems in mathematics, it does not say anything about the possibility or impossibility of constructing a "complete" (whatever that means) mathematical description of our reality.

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#32

Post by DanielBMarkham »

tb wrote: post #31
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A small number of scientists claim that Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves that any attempt to construct a TOE is bound to fail. Gödel's theorem states that any non-trivial mathematical theory that has a finite description is either inconsistent or incomplete." That's from the Wiki, FWIW. I'm not big on using Wiki as a source. "Babbling religiously" is right on the line in my opinion. It makes you sound like an a…

You appear to misunderstand the meaning of the terms "inconsistent" and "incomplete" in the context of Gödel's theorem. "Inconsistent": There is at least one statement within the system that can be proved both true and false. "Incomplete": There is at least one statement within the system that is true, but cannot be proved to be true within the system. Since Gödel's theorem applies to formal systems in mathematics, i…

Thank you.

If I understand your last statement correctly, you are saying that a complete but non-formal mathematical system could exist which models our reality.

I'm not sure that's where you wanted to go, but I appreciate the help and clarification.

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#33

Post by aswanson »

DaniFong wrote: post #27
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read a bit of Wolfram, he asks a provocative question: suppose the universe is, in fact, discrete and not continuous. If this is the case, and I think that's non-controversial now, then it may be that Sir Newton took us way down the wrong road with his discovery of the integral. We've been doing continuous math-type things with a universe that simply does not work that way. The integral was simply a cheat -- a…

I didn't think the question of continuous versus discontinuous universes has ever really been resolved in a convincing way. Do you have any references?

No references and I may be going down the wrong path here, but wasn't there some relatively recent activity with respect to the quantization of space, with the Planck length being the minimal quantum?: http://www.scienceandresearchdevelopmentinstitute.com/planck...

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#34

Post by donw »

ninguem1 wrote: post #28
donw wrote: post #2

My knowledge of mathematics is dwarfed by anybody with a higher degree in the subject, and Algebra (the abstract kind, not the kind with lots of letters) was my worst subject, but part of me is a bit pleased that E8 might be related to an important bit of physics. It's a rather interesting structure, although not 'the largest' as the article claims, as there are some which (if I recall correctly), reach into million-…

E8 is an exceptional Lie group (ie a group that is also a manifold, hence in particular infinite). You seem to be mixing it up with the exceptional finite simple groups. Wikipedia explains.

Spoken like a man with a drastically better grasp of group theory than my own. :)

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#35

Post by hhm »

gaika wrote: post #8
whordeley wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. That made perfect sense. Can you summarize?

From the link: "the overlap between the set of people who know some group theory and those who are (still) interested in giving Lisi’s “Theory of Everything” a passing thought is empty."

Lisi replies to the article too...

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#36

Post by hhm »

brentr wrote: post #11

I don't remember where I read it, nor the exact wording, but there is a quote that is perfect for this. It went something like this, "Godel proved incompleteness. Anyone who thinks there is a theory of everything laughs in the face of Godel." My point is that physics does not exist in a vacuum. It is built up from observational data found in nature and taken from experiments. If mathematics can't come to complete tru…

You can have a theory of everything that is incomplete. There are no problems with that. And that's what people is looking for... ToE doesn't mean "a complete theory of physics", in the logical meaning of complete.

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#37

Post by rguzman »

rguzman wrote: post #9

I really don't know enough to say one way or the other, but for those who care, here is some skepticism about Lisi's paper: http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theor...

This also an older post back from when Lisi's paper first came out: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=617 Again, I don't really know too much about this stuff, but it should be interesting to anyone who'd like to get to the bottom of how credible the paper is.

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#38

Post by DaniFong »

aswanson wrote: post #33
DaniFong wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think the question of continuous versus discontinuous universes has ever really been resolved in a convincing way. Do you have any references?

No references and I may be going down the wrong path here, but wasn't there some relatively recent activity with respect to the quantization of space, with the Planck length being the minimal quantum?: http://www.scienceandresearchdevelopmentinstitute.com/planck...

As far as I know the question is completely theoretical: we haven't been able to use the idea to produce any predictions which we might use to measure whether the universe is this way or isn't.

Also, that linked paper seems to be nothing other than numerology. It is interesting that the numbers are so close, but that could be a pure coincidence.

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#39

Post by wheels »

d0mine wrote: post #5

No, he has not. http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/001505.htm...

I find that blog post characteristic of what's wrong with academia. Lisi's obviously not a nutjob, and obviously not an idiot, and he's treated with contempt for proposing a big idea that might be wrong; might even be spectacularly wrong. Academia as a whole would usually rather see people get back in line and go on solving irrelevant problems. I found it encouraging that in the originally linked article that he at least did find some people in the scientific community that would treat him with a modicum of respect even if it was just in taking the time to explain why his theory doesn't fit the bill.

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#40

Post by bootload »

gaika wrote: post #6

Have a pleasure of knowing Garrett, his foot once helped bring traffic to my site: http://joe.jaanix.com/22679-nuke-cerenkov-glow :) You might also soon hear about his friend mentioned in the article, Brandyn. He's working on a problem that is just as important as ToE. They had a running joke: who would find ToE first, Garrent by math and thinking or Brandyn by inventing AI that would do it for him.

*"... Have a pleasure of knowing Garrett, his foot once helped bring traffic to my site: http://joe.jaanix.com/22679-nuke-cerenkov-glow :) ..."

Hey Joe thanks for reminding me of jaanix again. I seem to remember it being reviewed in HN a long while ago. Looking at it again the sig/noise is pretty good. Is the site pulling HackerNews from RSS?

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