Re: Baghdad

On May 27, 1:27 pm, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nonsense. It is entirely possible for a discovery to be made that is
inconsistent with either of them and that would therefore invalidate
them. (I assume you mean "string theory" rather than "spring theory".)

Yes, of course, string theory (but hey, spring theory
sounds nice, what if the strings are actually tiny
springs?). If a hypothesis resembles a piece of
wood, a theory resembles a funriture consisting
of several pieces of wood that were put together.
A hypothesis can be falsified entirely, while
a theory such as the string theories or M-theory
can partly be falsified: it is already partly established,
as a fecund theory that introduced a plethora of new
mathematical tools, and as way of thinking real big,
which was adopted by the many alternatives, for
example loop theory.

The world is much more simple than we ever
can imagine, and much more complex than
we ever can imagine, Goethe said.

Goethe's musings have no bearing on anything.

Sorry, but for me Goethe is more important than
your replies are. The basic idea of his wonderful
metamorphosis of the plants has been confirmed
by modern biology (see: Stephen Jay Gould,
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, chapter
on deep homology). Goethe said the world is
more than ten thousand years old, when
everybody assumed it was much younger,
and while string theorists are still looking out
for a world formula that can be written on a
T-shirt, Goethe provided a world formula
that can be written on the palm of a hand:
All is equal, all unequal ...

I hope for world peace. I hope you can see the distinction between my
hoping for it and its actual occurrence. I hope you'll understand the
difference between your hopes and reality but I don't see that hope
being realized any time soon either.

I hope for world peace too, and my contribution
is a fair history of civilization. A lot of work,
and gets me covered with a lot of dirt.

They are rigorously deduced or at least rigorously induced. If you don't
comprehend the difference between inventing, hoping, and rigorous
deduction and induction, then of course this conversation is never going
to go anywhere.

The question whether mathematical theorems
are discovered or constructed is a big problem
in the philosophy of mathematics. You can
by no means get around it by a couple of
such lines. What you call rigorous always
is rigorous for the time being, no longer for
a later time that will produce new standards
of rigorosity, and the question always remains:
why is it that a couple of signs can contain
and reveal so much reality? If you don't
wonder about this, you are no productive
scientist. All real scientists did wonder:
Goethe, Einstein, Feynman ...

I don't care what Karl Popper said.

And you don't care about Goethe, and you
don't care about Göbekli Tepe ...

Connecting them via convincing evidence and deductive reasoning, not via
hope and poetry and humming in a dark room.

Read how Andrew Wilson described his working
process: it is like stumbling around in the dark
and bumping into furniture, till, after a couple
of months, you learned where the furniture
stands and you find the light switch and turn
it on, then you get into the next room and the
same happens again, you stumble around
in the dark and bump into furniture ... The
basic process of finding new insights does
never begin by deductive reasoning, it is
a stumbling around in the dark, and, yes,
probably accompanied by a lot of humming.

.

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