Change your thinking, change your life!

Consequences Of A

Spring-And-Loop Theory:


Math Sucks

"Saying what needs to be said about the most sucky parts of physics"


 

#001

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.
- Stephen William Hawking (1942-2018)

A theorem is based on assumptions.

Find a flawed assumption and you crash a theorem.

But they are otherwise impersonal.

They don't lend themselves to ad hominem attacks.

Which is a good thing.

But they can be replicated perhaps too easily, with a minimum of explanations expected or often given.

Thus they become more like commandments than merely possible proposed maybe relationships.

They become laws.

And laws all too often suck.

#002

What's the best part of being a mathematician? I'm not a religious man, but it's almost like being in touch with God when you're thinking about mathematics. God is keeping secrets from us, and it's fun to try to learn some of the secrets.
- Paul R. Halmos

#003

They think that differential equations are not reality. Hearing some colleagues speak, it's as though theoretical physics was just playing house with plastic building blocks. This absurd idea has gained currency, and now people seem to feel that theoretical physicists are little more than dreamers locked away in ivory towers. They think our games, our little houses, bear no relation to their everyday worries, their interests, their problems, or their welfare. But I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to take it as a ground rule for this course. From now on I will be filling this board with equations. And when I'm done, I want you to do the following: look at those numbers, all those little numbers and Greek letters on the board, and repeat to yourselves, "This is reality." Repeat it over and over.
- Jose Carlos Somoza (1959-)

Wikipedia lists the man as a 'spanish author'.

Not even a 'scientist', never mind a 'physicist'.


Math taught as dogma.

Sucks.

#004

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will find themselves very much enlightened.
- James Clerk Maxwell

I would love to see a renormalizer try to express their math-jacking in words.

Real explanations begin with models, based on sound assumptions.

Fantasies begin with math, apparently.

#005

Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.
- Brian Greene (1963-)

Staggering amounts of hubris on display here.

From one of the key proponents of String Theory.

Math fantasy theory.

#006

Non-mathematical people sometimes ask me, "You know math, huh? Tell me something I've always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?" I can only reply "The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of 'infinity' as if it were a number. It's not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?' I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. 'Infinity,' 'truth,' 'beauty' -- those are not numbers."
- John Derbyshire

Yet QxD theories do exactly this. tEmP theories literally lead to an infinite series...of infinities. Which is, er, infinitely bad.

Yet they stick with QED & QCD & QFD. The Larry, Curly & Moe of physics.

Feynman's supposedly great contribution (to QED) and David Gross's similarly supposed great contribution (to QCD) both hinge on the replacement of infinities with the-answers-from-the-back-of-the-book.

Excising their lunacy with measured values.

In short, tEmP theories are:

Broken bits + measured values = QED = QCD = QFD

It is kinda beautiful. In that it is perfectly devoid of any working bits.

tEmP theorists are like the street wino -- who lives only on booze -- only their preferred libation is money.

Bloodhounds are jealous of tEmP theorists' ability to follow a scent stench.

#007

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.
- Ernst Mach

Sadly, this is no longer strange sounding but simply the way it is, and clearly showing how useless mathematics is to the field of physics.

Who is to say what is "unnecessary thought"?

Classic cart-before-the-horse stuff.

#008

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in. The grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peas, so pages of formulae won't get a definite result out of loose data.
- Thomas Henry Huxley

Physics today is dominated by rock grinders and rock smashers.

Could it be any more primitive?


Back to the quote...
The grinding is, of course, the most trivial part of the whole process. And happens at the end.

First one must find something worth cultivating -- a process that has been ongoing for thousands of years.

Second one must figure out how to cultivate it -- a process that, despite thousands of years of serious effort, is still changing today (mostly for the worst, via chemical fertilizers, chemical sprays and genetic modification.

All of that gets you a seed.

Now you need to water it -- with some water systems being thousands of miles long.

Seed + water + sun + time = growth.

Harvesting used to be 100% by hand. Then we developed tools for slicing and cutting the grass. Then the more efficient scythe. Leading to the combine harvester -- a million dollar machine that has to move from farm to farm to pay for itself.

80,000 pounds of seed don't transport themselves, so we need seriously large fleets of seriously large trucks.

Taking it all to skyscraper-sized storage silos.

Then we get to that last grinding step. Seems pretty minor now doesn't it?

#009

The best that Gauss has given us was likewise an exclusive production. If he had not created his geometry of surfaces, which served Riemann as a basis, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone else would have discovered it. I do not hesitate to confess that to a certain extent a similar pleasure may be found by absorbing ourselves in questions of pure geometry.
- Albert Einstein

It turns out that fancy geometries and vector calculus has nothing to do with how life works.

But boy those mathematicians are spiffy!

Autograph, mister?

#010

Kepler had to realize clearly that logical-mathematical theoretizing, no matter how lucid, could not guarantee truth by itself; that the most beautiful logical theory means nothing in natural science without comparison with the exactest experience. Without this philosophic attitude, his work would not have been possible.
- Albert Einstein

And without learning this lesson, physics today continues to piddle on itself.

By the way, it is not "exactest experience" that matters.

It is the right model.

#011

If the NSF had never existed, if the government had never funded American mathematics, we would have half as many mathematicians as we now have, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
- Paul R. Halmos

#012

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
- Maria Mitchell

There is no poetry in science, nor should there be.

And beauty is relative.

But yes there is more to science than math and logic.

There is also puzzle resolution -- putting things together in new ways that are better than old ways.

But that's about it.

Satisfaction at putting a tough puzzle together, but no poetry.

Poetry sucks almost as much as math sucks.

Because neither is fundamental.

Models -- good models -- are.

#013

A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.
- Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac

tEmP theories rely on fall guys coming up with stupid sub-theories that can then be promoted by everyone.

Should the stench of the sub-theory get too strong, they can always be sidelined.

Dirac was the Mr. Math of physics. The oddest of odd ducks, he was useful for making tEmP theories more mathematical.

#014

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attEmPt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
- Vannevar Bush (Mar 11, 1890-1974), "Endless Horizons", 1946

Logic is essential to identifying what might be wrong.

It is always a lack of application of logic that sinks a ship.

tEmP theories are based on an inner circle, a priesthood, waving their incense and blessing the latest vomit as fine fare for feeding followers.

tEmP theories are like Windows 10 -- designed from the ground up to ensnare the 99%, profit from them, report everything they are doing to the 1%, so that there is 0.00% chance of a 99%er delivering 100% truth to their fellow 99%ers.

#015

It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.
- Daniel Bernoulli

#016

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.
- John Forbes Nash Jr. (06/13/1928-2015)

The good life, like good theories, begins with basics.

Building sound models on basics works.

Getting lost in math problems, or using math to rescue broken theories, is ill-advised. Going mad is just one way this will work out badly for the math guys.

#017

I ask you my friends not to condemn me entirely to the mill of mathematical calculations, and allow me time for philosophical speculations, my only pleasures.
- Johannes Kepler

Philosophical thoughts are indeed pleasurable. Or interesting. Or fruitful.

Math is a grinding mill, or forced march. Math is what happens after you say "Fire!".

Philosophy is whether you should even own a gun; Whether it will be carried on your person or remain locked in the safe; whether you would rather move than own one; and a whole host of other thoughts.

#018

Mathematicians are like a certain type of Frenchman: when you talk to them they translate it into their own language, and then it soon turns into something completely different.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)

Albert Einstein definitely fell into this trap.

But then he was a man of words instead of a man of models.


Back to the quote...
This was entirely the goal of getting more and more math into physics.

Take a subject similar to chemistry and steer it away from a scientific approach, toward a more witchcraft or pulp fiction-inspired one.

#019

It is worth the trouble to invent a new symbol if we can thus remove not a few logical difficulties and ensure the rigor of the proofs. But many mathematicians seem to have so little feeling for logical purity and accuracy that they will use a word to mean three or four different things, sooner than make the frightful decision to invent a new word.
- Gottlob Frege, "Grundgesetz Der Arithmetik", 1893

If the math is so great and powerful, why have multiple meanings to a word?

The answer, of course, is that they want to keep their broken theories.

tEmP theorists also take the other approach -- coming up with an endless array of words to describe the ether.

#020

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method -- more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records -- of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.
- Nicholas Murray Butler

No.

What you list are the PROBLEMS with math dominating physics.

The notions that math is supreme, mathematicians are gods, and math is pure are the prelude to spectacular disaster.

Buckle up.


Back to the quote...
The phrase "defying the senses to follow its splendid flights" needs to have its mouth washed out with soap.

#021

Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day physics text books and publications.
- Edwin Armstrong

#022

The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment. The sciences must proceed to first causes.
- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

#023

The results of mathematics are seldom directly applied; it is the definitions that are really useful.
- Gian-Carlo Rota

Spring-And-Loop Theory 'gets' why a physicist has to have an academic background, but a physicist needs, above all, to be free.

The physicist who didn't wear socks was free.

The tEmP theorist who swung a pendulum into his students was free.

And the greatest critique of modern physics -- Alexander Unzicker -- is free.

The person learning differential equations, on the other hand, is less free than they were before they learned them.

They've been given a hammer, and are more likely to use it on all things.

#024

So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction.
- Alfred North Whitehead

And thus pure mathematics is quite useless to physics.

Except as a pail to bail out lunacy like String Theory.

And QxD.

#025

As physics advances farther and farther every day and develops new axioms, it will require fresh assistance from mathematics.
- Francis Bacon

The opposite is true.

tEmP theories need to go on a math-reduced diet.

#026

At this stage you must admit that whatever is seen to be sentient is nevertheless composed of atoms that are insentient. The phenomena open to our observation do not contradict this conclusion nor conflict with it. Rather they lead us by the hand and compel us to believe that the animate is born of the insentient.
- Titus Lucretius

There is a core intelligence behind all of life.

Not human, but there nonetheless.

And the reason we think of it as life? It is energy. Vibrating pulsating energy. The energy of life.

Without it, nothing.
With it, everything.

That's pretty God-like.

#027

When a physician is called to a patient, he should decide on the diagnosis, then the prognosis, and then the treatment. Physicians must know the evolution of the disease, its duration and gravity in order to predict its course and outcome. Here statistics intervene to guide physicians, by teaching them the proportion of mortal cases, and if observation has also shown that the successful and unsuccessful cases can be recognized by certain signs, then the prognosis is more certain.
- Claude Bernard

Great, diagnosis by statistics.

What could possibly go wrong?

This diagnosis brought to you by the number 1(%).

[And opposed by the letter Q.]

#028

Some of you may have met mathematicians
and wondered how they got that way.

- Tom Lehrer

At least Tom was a mathematician with a sense of humor.

Definitely less sucky.

#029

Just by studying mathematics we can hope to make a guess at the kind of mathematics that will come into the physics of the future. If someone can hit on the right lines along which to make this development, it may lead to a future advance in which people will first discover the equations and then, after examining them, gradually learn how to apply them. My own belief is that this is a more likely line of progress than trying to guess at physical pictures.
- Paul Dirac

You couldn't have been more wrong, Paul.

It is a toss-up (between Dirac and Feynman) but I'd say Dirac was the most overrated physicist.

But I'm always open to other nominations.

Calabi–Yau, is that you?

#030

The physicist, in preparing for his work, needs three things:
mathematics, mathematics and mathematics.

- Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen

Hard to imagine anything more wrong.

The science fiction writer needs only one thing: his typewriter.

The math theorist needs only one thing: his chalkboard.

The physicist needs only one thing: his entire range of life experiences.

And a lot of time.

Guess that's two things.

#031

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
- Maria Goeppert-Mayer

"Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus.

She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie."

- Wikipedia

#032

Before you generalize, formalize, and axiomatize
there must be mathematical substance.

- Hermann Weyl

#033

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also to seduce.
- Benoit Mandelbrot

That little harlot has been busy with tEmP theorists.

#034

That I have been able to accomplish anything in mathematics is really due to the fact that I have always found it so difficult. When I read, or am told about something, it nearly always seems too difficult, and practically impossible to understand, and then I cannot help wondering if it might not be simpler. And on several occasions it has turned out that it really was more simple!
- David Hilbert

"recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries."

Born on January 23, 1862, he was a 5 under a 5 in the middle -- most active -- period of his life. The 5 can do anything it puts its mind to.

One of the math good guys, for sure.

Sadly, he helped Einstein with relativity. [And apparently did the ultimate heavy lifting, before graciously turning over credit to Einstein.] Fritz Haber comes to mind.

#035

Poincare was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something more than logic, he believed, makes mathematics what it is.
- Eric tEmPle Bell

"More than logic"?

Math, in a nutshell,

Sucks.

#036

The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.
- Andrew Wiles

This key difference between math and physics is insightful.

For progress to occur in math, things must get ever more weird.

For progress to occur in physics, things must get ever more simple.


Quite serious about this difference.

Academy forces publish-or-perish.

PoP leads to metric tons of crap dumped each year.

Physics needs to be decrapified. And Spring-And-Loop Theory provides the basic framework to do exactly this. Making new physics potentially the biggest growth area in science for many years to come.

Math sucks, now and forever, because all the easy and/or useful math has already been done.

#037

Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
- Warren Edward Buffett (1930-)

#038

Only dead mathematics can be taught
where the attitude of competition prevails.
Living mathematics must always be a communal possession.

- Mary Everest Boole

tEmP theorists.

Proud members of the church of math.

And fierce competitors, thanks to Nobel.

#039

Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.
- Richard Hamming

"Richard Wesley Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, sphere-packing (or Hamming bound), and the Hamming distance."
#040

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.
- Douglas Noel Adams, "Life, The Universe And Everything"

#041

But as no two theoreticians agree on skin friction, or any other subject -- some not agreeing today with what they wrote a year ago -- I think we might take all their results, add them together, and then divide by the number of mathematicians, and thus find the average coefficient of error.
- Hiram Maxim, in 1908

#042

Many who have never had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.
- Sofia Kovalevskaya

True.

Just like the field of science fiction.

#043

By destroying the biological character of phenomena, the use of averages in physiology and medicine usually gives only apparent accuracy to the results. Averages confuse, while aiming to unify, and distort while aiming to simplify. Averages are applicable only to reducing very slightly varying numerical data about clearly defined and absolutely simple cases.
- Claude Bernard

A simple, basic point.

Which is a very good thing.

Averages are rock grinders, crushing the life out of things.

Modelling is more important than data collection/averaging.

But harder to profit from.

#044

"Can you do Addition?" the White Queen said. "What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?" "I don't know," said Alice. "I lost count." "She can't do Addition", the Red Queen interrupted.
- Lewis Carroll

We are drowning in data

and starved for sound theories.

#045

The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events.
- Gian-Carlo Rota

What a miserable field.

#046

There are several kinds of truths, and it is customary to place in the first order mathematical truths, which are, however, only truths of definition. Physical truths, to the contrary, are in no way arbitrary, and do not depend on us.
- Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

What a great phrase -- "truths of definition".

1 + 1 = 2.

Whoop-dee-doo.

#047

Distrust even Mathematics; albeit so sublime and highly perfected. We have here a machine of such delicacy it can only work in vacuo, and one grain of sand in the wheels is enough to put everything out of gear. One shudders to think to what disaster such a grain of sand may bring a Mathematical brain. Remember Pascal.
- Anatole France (1844-1924)

The problem with the field of Math is that it is unbounded.

What math problems are worth thinking about?
Which ones will drive us mad?

No one seems to know. Or care.

#048

Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something.
- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

#049

The humanization of mathematical teaching, the bringing of the matter and the spirit of mathematics to bear not merely upon certain fragmentary faculties of the mind, but upon the whole mind, that this is the greatest desideratum is, I assume, beyond dispute.
- Cassius Jackson Keyser

Huh?

The above paragraph scored a 22.5 on the Gunning Fog scale, earning a rating of "very difficult to read". [A rating of 12 requires the reading level of a high school senior.]

#050

Do not imagine that mathematics is harsh and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealisation of common sense.
- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

"Ethereal: extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world."

Translation: math is the vaporization of common sense.

#051

Don't tell me of facts. I never believe facts; you know. George Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.
- Sydney Smith

True enough.

Fact: Your desk is "solid".
Reality: Your desk is pure energy.

#052

During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become mathematical.
- Augustus De Morgan

Scary.

#053

Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.
- Alfred W. Adler

This makes for a field of desperate people.

And is even more true for physicists.

#054

Physics is too difficult for physicists!
- David Hilbert (1862-1943)

Or too simple...

#055

Equations seem like treasures, spotted in the rough by some discerning individual, plucked and examined, placed in the grand storehouse of knowledge, passed on from generation to generation. This is so convenient a way to present scientific discovery, and so useful for textbooks, that it can be called the treasure-hunt picture of knowledge.
- Robert P. Crease, "The Great Equations: Breakthroughs In Science: from Pythagoras to Heisenberg"

This is ridiculous.

Equations are more like guns or knives. Weapons that can be used for good or evil.

And when there is more money in evil, count on that happening.

#056

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.
- William S. Anglin

#057

Every common mechanic has something to say in his craft about good and evil, useful and useless, but these practical considerations never enter into the purview of the mathematician.
- Aristippus of Cyrene, (435-356 BC)

Publish-or-perish creates desperate people.

#058

Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher;
every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.

- Gottlob Frege

Mathematicians are more related to street people than philosophers.

#059

Everyone believes in the normal law, the experimenters because they imagine that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact.
- Gabriel Lippmann

The "normal" Model of tEmP theories is more like a giant mound of Swiss cheese.

Or a T-Rex turd.

#060

Everyone now agrees that a Physics where you banish all relationship with mathematics, to confine itself to a mere collection of experiences and observations, would be but a historical amusement, more fitting to entertain idle people, than to engage the mind of a true philosopher.
- Aime Henri Paulian

Ah, who is suggesting physicists banish math?

It is unbridled math, runaway math, math without any sort of basis in a model or sound principles, that destroys what it touches.

#061

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true! Facts, shmacts.
- David Cohen

Quite so.

Theories can be equally meaningless. e.g. Flat Earth.

It is only the marriage of the two
that tests the metal of both.

Things that pass this dual test have value.

#062

The Golden Gate Bridge is a giant moving math problem.
- John van der Zee

How so?

It was an engineering problem.

Mathematicians can't even see when a problem is gone,
having been replaced by a solution.

No wonder math sucks.

#063

Florence Nightingale was a great administrator, and to reach excellence here is impossible without being an ardent student of statistics. Florence Nightingale has been rightly termed the "Passionate Statistician". Her statistics were more than a study, they were indeed her religion. For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his "Physique Sociale" is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed -- and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief -- that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. But to do this, she held we must study statistics -- the measure of Nature's purpose.
- Karl Pearson

Applying this approach to physics, we run into a very serious statistical problem.

Everywhere we look in space, we see a uniform, and very cold, tEmPerature.

When we calculate that the tEmPerature should be 10120 higher.

That's a 1 with one hundred and twenty zeroes after it.

tEmP theories are off by a factor of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.

That's:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

But no tEmP theorist is troubled by this.

No tEmP theorist actively talks about this. None reject the Standard Model.

tEmP theorists appear to be perfectly wrong.

Which is very unlikely, from a statistical point of view.

#064

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.
- Gian-Carlo Rota

tEmP theorists don't even bother to show their math footsteps.

That way there is never a need to remove them.

#065

From the theoretical point of view one would think that monopoles should exist, because of the prettiness of the mathematics.
- Paul Dirac

Looney tunes.

#066

Genetics is the first biological science which got in the position in which physics has been in for many years. One can justifiably speak about such a thing as theoretical mathematical genetics, and experimental genetics, just as in physics. There are some mathematical geniuses who work out what, to an ordinary person, seems a fantastic kind of theory. This fantastic kind of theory nevertheless leads to experimentally verifiable prediction, which an experimental physicist then has to test the validity of. Since the times of Wright, Haldane, and Fisher, evolutionary genetics has been in a similar position.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky

MUMBO JUMBO.

I wonder what he meant...

17.9

#067

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
- Henri Poincare

Geometry is neither, and is rarely used by anyone.

Math, when forced into physics, is not true, but is advantageous.

Speaking of money grubbers, the money tEmP theorists make is undeserved.

Let's stop paying them.

#068

Geometry is the most complete science.
- David Hilbert

How about counting? Isn't that the most complete?

Or the Periodic Table of the Elements. We're pretty much done with that one too.

Only a mathematician would put "geometry" and "complete" in the same sentence.

Arrogance sucks.

#069

Good work is not done by humble men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking "Is what I do worth while?" and "Am I the right person to do it?" will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. This is not too difficult: it is harder not to make his subject and himself ridiculous by shutting his eyes too tightly.
- G. H. Hardy (1877-1947), mathematician

The typically deranged ramblings of a mathematician.

The point is that everyone is important.

Everything we do is important.

And if you can't convey the importance of your subject, you just might be a mathematician.

#070

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
- John McCarthy (1927-2011)

Arithmetic? Useful.
Higher mathematics? Not so much.

#071

Here's to pure mathematics.
May it never be of any use to anybody.

- an oft-used toast

#072

How can it be that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?
- Albert Einstein

Math is terribly suited to coming up with a new theory based on sound assumptions.

Math is a pen and paper to a writer -- a great way to fictionalize.

That's how it can be.

#073

How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of understanding mathematics? We have here a problem that is not easy of solution, but yet must engage the attention of all who wish to devote themselves to education.
- Henri Poincare

(1) Some of the 9 qualities (like the 3) are simply not good at math.

(2) Most people have unbalanced names -- the greatest handicap there is.

(3) It is more profitable for the 1% to keep them ignorant.

#074

I admit that mathematical science is a good thing,
but excessive devotion to it is a bad thing.

- Aldous Leonard Huxley

tEmP theorists worship their "math".

Where "math" is defined as "the stuff we use to create the results we want".

#075

I am afraid all we can do is to accept the paradox and try to accommodate ourselves to it, as we have done to so many paradoxes lately in modern physical theories. We shall have to get accustomed to the idea that the change of the quantity R, commonly called the 'radius of the universe', and the evolutionary changes of stars and stellar systems are two different processes, going on side by side without any apparent connection between them. After all the 'universe' is a hypothesis, like the atom, and must be allowed the freedom to have properties and to do things which would be contradictory and impossible for a finite material structure.
- Willem de Sitter, "Kosmos", 1932

I'm ashamed of this mathematician for putting all of that down on paper.

Another of his "accomplishments" is:

"the de Sitter universe. a solution for Einstein's general relativity in which there is no matter and a positive cosmological constant. This results in an exponentially expanding, empty universe."
Sit gives Dirac a run for his money.
#076

I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. The tedium was relieved by a few courses that seem to be qualitatively different. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps. Beginning from a few intuitive postulates, far reaching consequences could be derived, and I took immediately to the sport of proving theorems.
- Steven Chu, the physicist who trapped light with lasers

"think in clear, logical steps...beginning from a few intuitive postulates"

By jove I think he's got it.

Dude's last name should be Tao.

#077

I began to study arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connection with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.
- Henri Poincare

What makes this great is that Poincare is describing a sudden realization.

It happens to be mathematical, but it could be on any subject.

It is this intuitive, bringing-it-all-together that is the valuable thing.


In contrast, pursuing the steps of a mathematical proof or derivation is about as interesting as chopping several cords of wood.

One relentless push after another.

Can't go that way, must go this way.

Of course you end up somewhere, but so what.


Humans are the remarkable part of any equation.

#078

I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it''s all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, are the culmination of -- and couldn't exist without -- the many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them.
- Sir Andrew John Wiles

He had to seclude himself in an attic. For 10 years. To prove Fermat's Last Theorem.

This is how great things are done. In the "dark", most of the time. By oneself. And with flashes of crystal clear realization.

Couldn't have described the process better myself.

But....

Now what?

Fermat's was one of the last big math problems.

It had worldwide respect and interest, remaining unproven for 358 years.

There are so very few of these problems, and so many mathematicians that must PoP.

#079

I can scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
- Thomas Babington Macaulay

I feel your pain.

Mathematics: the "Roberts Rules of Order" of science.

The irony is that in physics, mathematics is given such prominence, yet the biggest problems in physics -- like "The Vacuum Catastrophe" -- are carefully relegated to a very large page called the "List of unsolved problems in physics".

By the way, tEmP theorists hate calling it "The Vacuum Catastrophe".

If you type that into Wikipedia, you get redirected to the "Cosmological constant problem".

I prefer "The Vacuum Catastrophe" but it could be even more strongly worded.

"The Physics-Is-Broken Problem"?

"Physics is getting dumber every day but bragging more and attracting parrots from every country who squawk on and on about how infallible the Standard Model is" problem would probably be ok, if we could acronimize it. How about the first letter of the first word -- P -- coupled with the short last word -- "is"?

The "Physicists-prefer-money-to-self-respect" problem is also gaining traction.

#080

I cannot waste time in these classes and these books, memorizing the weak assumptions of lesser mortals.
- John Nash

Math sucked

even to a Math genius.

#081

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac among real mathematicians.
- G.H. Hardy (1877-1947), mathematician

Count away.

Who cares?

I wonder how many physicists are real ping pong players.

Let's count them, shall we?

#082

I had a dislike for mathematics, and was hopelessly short in algebra. One extraordinary teacher of mathematics got the whole year's course into me in exactly six after-school lessons of half an hour each. And how? More accurately, why? Simply because he was an algebra fanatic -- because he believed that algebra was not only a science of the utmost importance, but also one of the greatest fascination. He convinced me in twenty minutes that ignorance of algebra was as calamitous, socially and intellectually, as ignorance of table manners. That acquiring its elements was as necessary as washing behind the ears. So I fell upon the book and gulped it voraciously. To this day I comprehend the binomial theorem.
- H.L. Mencken

Perhaps humor is the best way of looking at math.

#083

I have hardly known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
- Plato

Ouch, baby.

Very ouch.

#084

I have no fault to find with those who teach geometry. That science is the only one which has not produced sects; it is founded on analysis and on synthesis and on the calculus; it does not occupy itself with the probable truth; moreover it has the same method in every country.
- Frederick the Great

Way to go.

Zero applicability.

But way to go.

#085

Philosophy is written in this very great book which always lies open before our eyes (I mean the universe), but one cannot understand it unless one first learns to understand the language and recognize the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures. Without these means it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it; without these there is only clueless scrabbling around in a dark labyrinth.
- Galileo Galilei, "The Assayer", 1623

Fair enough.

But note that there is nothing mathematically complicated in geometry.

Really, in this context, "geometry" means a simple model.

#086

I know a good many men of great learning -- that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently -- and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
- H.L. Mencken

I wouldn't go quite this far.

Schooling can at least provide a basis.

Spring-And-Loop Theory came about precisely because I had both k12 schooling, and advanced schooling.

#087

I learned to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.
- Paul Dirac

The second most destructive paragraph in all of science.

See #104 for the most.


Back to the quote...
Dirac was probably the most boring person in all of science.

Both as a person, and what he allegedly accomplished.

Wow was he the perfect stooge to further tEmP theories.

#088

I love mathematics not only because it is applicable
to technology but also because it is beautiful.

- Peter Rosza (1905-1977)

I love coffee for the same reason.

#089

I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer such a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are; and it is useless to disguise the fact that "what things are" is often very difficult for our intellects to follow.
- Alfred North Whitehead

When math wants to expand, cancer-like, it just creates new notions like a four-dimensional viewpoint.

Then it promptly cements such dreams by saying that nature is this way.

Adding the insult that our intellects are just too feeble to understand.

Man does math suck.

#090

Perhaps the best reason for regarding mathematics as an art is not so much that it affords an outlet for creative activity as that it provides spiritual (!) values. It puts man in touch with the highest aspirations and lofiest goals. It offers intellectual delight and the exultation of resolving the mysteries of the universe.
- Morris Kline

Fantasy.

Math + fantasy = profit

#091

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.
- Mark Twain

There are lies...

Darn lies...

And interesting people like Mark Twain.

#092

If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical transformations of each other (but would still be completely useless).
- John von Neumann

A man and his math

are soon floundering.

A moment of silence for a soul lost.

#093

If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.
- Carl Friedrich Gauss

We all need to reflect more on important issues.

Finding a mathematical truth is one thing, but figuring out why your health is bad is quite another.

Science is a job, treating our body like a tEmPle is a grave responsibility.

#094

If the proof starts from axioms, distinguishes several cases, and takes thirteen lines in the text book, it may give the youngsters the impression that mathematics consists in proving the most obvious things in the least obvious way. - George Polya (1887-1985), "Mathematical Discovery: On Understanding, Learning And Teaching Problem Solving"

And? The quote has no point.

If the proof is exhaustive, takes decades to achieve and is published in the expensive scientific journals? Nobel-time baby!

Utility? No one in academia cares.

#095

If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 percent are insoluble, while 19+ percent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a percent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic to swim in that half percent, asking the questions through which some progress can be made.
- Hermann Bondi (1919-2005), a steady state theorist

If you follow Bondi, you'll learn how to add percentages.

Assuming you are not allergic to generalizations.

The reality, of course, is that every problem is soluble.

#096

In mathematics there are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the stability of a theory.
- Gian-Carlo Rota

There is a third and most serious category of mistake in fields overly reliant on mathematics.

It is where the model, and thus the assumptions, are just flat out wrong.

This is the most serious category of mistake and makes all effort, money, time and publicity based on it worthless.

From a benefit to science or country point of view.

It still remains extremely valuable to the tEmP theorists paid to promote it, and the companies paid to build the systems based on it.

Can you say LHC? Sure you can.

#097

In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I've done work in mathematical linguistics, without any professional credentials in mathematics. In this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. But I've often been invited by universities to speak on mathematical linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these subjects; the mathematicians couldn't care less. What they want to know is what I have to say. No one has ever objected to my right to speak, asking whether I have a doctor's degree in mathematics, or whether I have taken advanced courses in the subject. That would never have entered their minds. They want to know whether I am right or wrong, or whether the subject is interesting or not, whether better approaches are possible. The discussion dealt with the subject, not with my right to discuss it. But on the other hand, in discussion or debate concerning social issues or American foreign policy, the issue is constantly raised, often with considerable venom. I've repeatedly been challenged on grounds of credentials, or asked, what special training do I have that entitles me to speak on these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are outsiders from a professional viewpoint, are not entitled to speak on such things. Compare mathematics and the political sciences -- it's quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content.
- Noam Chomsky

How much better physics would be if that were true.

But he misreads the physics community.

They will listen to you...provided you talk mainstream physics. And that's it.

That is the only requirement; the only filter -- if you are pedalling the same baloney as they are, they will listen.

By the way, I'm shocked Chomsky was able to say something that scored a readability rating of just 13.5.

This might be his best work.

#098

In order to translate a sentence from English into French two things are necessary. First, we must understand thoroughly the English sentence. Second, we must be familiar with the forms of expression peculiar to the French language. The situation is very similar when we attEmPt to express in mathematical symbols a condition proposed in words. First, we must understand thoroughly the condition. Second, we must be familiar with the forms of mathematical expression.
- George Polya

No model of mainstream physics reflects a thorough understanding of life.

Therefore no translation is needed! :-)

"Honey? What time is Gladiators on?"

#099

Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician".
- David Hilbert's response upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry.

Math is more like scifi.

Fantasyland for those who have time for such things.

Intuition is the valuable attribute for people trying to solve problems.

Back to the quote...
So much for poetry involving imagination, lol.

Poetry is like makeup -- cosmetic.

#100

Irrationality is the square root of all evil.
- Douglas Hofstadter

Not really.

Yes, if someone is a psychopath, then they are irrationality personified. But there are few of these in life.

The 1%, on the other hand, are at least 1% of life -- 70,000,000 completely evil humans, spending all day every day thinking of how they can continue to screw the 99%.

The latter group is not irrational. They are insane, and act more like robots than psychopaths but they are highly rational and predictable, within their distorted world view.

#101

Is not mathematical analysis just a vain game of the mind? To the physicist it can only give a convenient language; but isn't that a mediocre service, which we could have done without; a veil, interposed between reality and the physicist's eye? Far from that, without this language most of the initimate analogies of things would forever have remained unknown to us; and we would never have had knowledge of the internal harmony of the world, which is, as we shall see, the only true objective reality.
- Henri Poincare

Mathematics is both essential and problematic.

No wonder it drives mathematicians crazy.

The key to rationality is to be grounded in the basics. To have a working model built on sound assumptions.

Math doesn't always have this.
String Theory never has this.

#102

It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules which might be applicable elsewhere.
- Rene Descartes, about the mathematician Pierre de Fermat

The same could be said about Edward Witten.

He is always widely praised by tEmP theorists.

But any exposure to him will leave you devoid of general rules and applicability elsewhere.

#103

It is perplexing to see the flexibility of the so-called 'exact sciences' which by cast-iron laws of logic and by the infallible help of mathematics can lead to conclusions which are diametrically opposite to one another.
- Vasco Ronchi

tEmP theorists add dimensions faster than a teenager texts.

These "exact" sciences are quite worthless (or worse) without good models based on sound assumptions.

But conflict is good for the media (and so they encourage/reward it).

While answers don't sell newspapers and so never appear there.

#104

It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts. If the facts are right, the proofs are just a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly.
- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)

THE UGLIEST STATEMENT EVER MADE BY A PHYSICIST.

Feynamn sucks more than math sucks.

And that ain't easy.

#105

It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labor.
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, mathematician, of his 'dx/dy' notation

Like most of math, this is both good and bad.

Collecting data is good and bad. Just ask the LHC.

It gets gargantuan amounts of data but few are privy to how that is sorted and filtered.


Back to the quote...
As inferior as data is to knowledge, nothing is more destructive to good science than "reducing the mind's labor".

#106

It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.
- Paul Erdos

You're weird, Paul, but probably not as weird as PAMD.

Beauty is a pretty useless metric for anything.

Which is probably why tEmP theorists use it so much.

#107

_SBN _SMP (_SIMPLICITY) Kant, discussing the various modes of perception by which the human mind apprehends nature, concluded that it is specially prone to see nature through mathematical spectacles. Just as a man wearing blue spectacles would see only a blue world, so Kant thought that, with our mental bias, we tend to see only a mathematical world.
- James Jeans

We look for order. Order is mathematical.

We look for patterns. Also mathematical.

And at the lowest level, all we have is math.
Not fancy smancy math. Not 10 or 11 dimensions math.
Just simple basic math. Form is geometry, i.e. math.

Time? Distance? Sight? Sound? Math, math and more math.


But.

We don't get anything done by saying everything is math.

It takes models.

Just ask any kid.

"Do you want to play with numbers, or play with your interlocking blocks?"

The answer will be more insightful than the best talk any mathematician has ever given.

#108

Le Verrier -- without leaving his study, without even looking at the sky -- had found the unknown planet [Neptune] solely by mathematical calculation, and, as it were, touched it with the tip of his pen!
- Camille Flammarion

He did this with intuition. And a different model.

Without intuition, the numbers were non-sensical.

Without a different model, the problem remains a head scratcher.

#109

Learning chiefly in mathematical sciences can so swallow up and fix one's thought as to possess it entirely for some time but, when that amusement is over, nature will return, and be where it was, diverted but not overcome by such speculations.
- Gilbert Burnet

Nature will return, yes, but the math students have become older.
Shorter of breath and several days closer to death.

School is done, they are out of money.

A living must be made and so they maintain their pact

with the math suck monster.

#110

Many will, no doubt, prefer to retain old unsystematic names as far as possible, but it is easy to see that the desire to avoid change may carry us too far in this direction; it will undoubtedly be very inconvenient to the present generation of chemists to abandon familiar and cherished names, but nevertheless it may be a wise course to boldly face the difficulty, rather than inflict on coming generations a partially illogical and unsystematic nomenclature.
- Henry Edward Armstrong (1848-1937), chemist

Chemistry's new names will be like "new math", and "common core".

All designed to move us into "partially illogical and unsystematic" ways of thinking.

So cheer up! Worse is yet to come.

Unless this Q Anon thing is correct...

Which I think it is.

#111

Mathematical physics is in the first place physics and it could not exist without experimental investigations.
- Peter Debye, 1913

True, but doesn't go far enough.

Physics is in the first place physics and could not exist without testable models. Anything that gets in the way of testability, and/or requires faith, and/or tells us we should pursue "beauty" should be excised like a painful boil.
#112

Mathematicians come to the solution of a problem by the simple arrangement of the data, and reducing the reasoning to such simple operations, to judgments so brief, that they never lose sight of the evidence that serves as their guide.
- Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier

Nothing about this is truthful.

You describe the work of scientists -- chemists, physicists, biologists, etc.

Mathematicians get involved in the esoteric world of math, meeting and marrying other mathematicians there.

They start math families and have math children.

In the end they all go crazy together.

#113

Mathematics certainly would never have come into existence if mankind had known from the beginning that in all nature there is no perfectly straight line, no true circle, no standard of measurement.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

And interesting point.

It serves to emphasize how theoretical math is.

Following math with Boxer blinkers blinds the horse.

#114

Mathematics has not a foot to stand on which is not purely metaphysical.
- Thomas De Quincey

Yup, math sucks.

#115

Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.
- John Edensor Littlewood

#116

Mathematics is like childhood diseases. The younger you get it, the better.
- Arnold Sommerfeld

Sommerfeld was a great coach to other scientists.

Sadly, many teachers think there is only teaching.

#117

Mathematics is like Hamlet's Ophelia.
Charming, and a little mad.

- Alfred North Whitehead

And "a little mad" is no threat to the 1%.

#118

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates. Indeed, the beauty and elegance of the physical laws themselves are only apparent when expressed in the appropriate mathematical framework.
- Melvin Schwartz

The man has everything backwards.

Models and abstractions that yield insights do so when governed by the laws and constraints of physics.

Any math portion needed is trivial.

Especially now that we have computers.

#119

Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring, it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems -- general and specific statements -- can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences.
- Erik Christopher Zeeman

Agreed, but not in a good way...

Math is like plumbing.

It has to work, but the closer you get to it, the more you'll stink.

#120

Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.
- George Polya

Exactly like being a science fiction writer.

Cheap = not valuable. There is a reason why they call it "pulp fiction".

Conversely, thinking extensively about something is extremely expensive; few are good at it and nothing trumps the results that come from it.

#121

Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.
- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

#122

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attEmPt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional.
- Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923)

Yes.

Like physics 'truths', they are based on assumptions.

It is the assumptions, and the model built from them, that matters.

#123

Medical All statistics are like a bikini bathing suit:
what they reveal is interesting; what they conceal is vital.

- Unknown

#124

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.
- Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903), physicist

Not any more, J. Willard. Not any more.

Dr. Gibbs was outstanding in numerous fields -- physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering.

Great minds did great things 120 years ago.

Physics desperately needs that to happen today.

#125

More discoveries have arisen from intense observation of very limited material than from statistics applied to large groups.
- W.I.B. Beveridge, "The Art Of Scientific Investigation", 1950

So what do tEmP theorists do instead?

They record trillions of collisions, study at trillions of galaxies and scan the Universe for unlimited numbers of Earth-like planets.

Why?

Misdirection.

#126

Most variables can show either an upward or downward trend, depending on the base year chosen.
- Thomas Sowell

The manipulations behind tEmP theories are legendary.

Global warming is pretty well manipulated as well.

A friend of mine said that the Chinese taught their children to "Make thy heart small".

Make your ambitions small, 99%er.
You can't do it.
Oh, and trust us.
- the 1%

#127

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
- Gottfried Leibniz

Music, like most art, is emotional.

Math, like most fantasy, has no need to connect to reality.

The greatest true pleasure comes from helping others.


Spring-And-Loop Theory is a 100% giveaway.

Not because I crave a great deal of pleasure,
but so that everyone can get the benefits.

tEmP theorists are a science priesthood.
That needs to be defrocked.

#128

Nature does not make leaps. If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).
- Benoit Mandelbrot

Understanding begins with a realistic model (i.e. built on simple, basic, immutable assumptions).

Here, math guy says everything is math.

Next, hammer guy says everything is a hammer.

#129

Nature works on a different plan. Her fundamental laws do not govern the world as it appears in our picture in any direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture.
- Paul Dirac

Speak for yourself, math guy.

You couldn't. tEmP theorists can't.

Spring-And-Loop Theory can.

#130

Non-standard analysis frequently simplifies substantially the proofs, not only of elementary theorems, but also of deep results. This is true, e.g., also for the proof of the existence of invariant subspaces for compact operators, disregarding the improvement of the result; and it is true in an even higher degree in other cases. This state of affairs should prevent a rather common misinterpretation of non-standard analysis, namely the idea that it is some kind of extravagance or fad of mathematical logicians. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather, there are good reasons to believe that non-standard analysis, in some version or other, will be the analysis of the future.
- Kurt Godel

Huh?

Math guy rambles with words.

Just 12.5? Checked it twice. Now I don't trust the scale.

The pain I felt trying to scan read that paragraph (twice) was at least a 19.

#131

On all levels -- primary, secondary and undergraduate -- mathematics is taught as an isolated subject with few, if any, ties to the real world. To students, mathematics appears to deal almost entirely with things which are of no concern at all to man.
- Morris Kline

Note the tone.

Kline blames teachers, suggesting we are teaching math wrong.

No, math just sucks.

#132

One hears a lot of talk about the hostility between scientists and engineers. I don't believe in any such thing. In fact I am quite certain it is untrue. There cannot possibly be anything in it because neither side has anything to do with the other.
- David Hilbert

David Hilbert, as a mathematician, was neither a scientist nor an engineer.

And so was hardly qualified to talk about either.

Lack of qualification never stops mathematicians.

#133

One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put 'common sense' where it belongs: on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labeled 'discarded nonsense'.
- Eric tEmPle Bell (1883-1960)

The third most destructive paragraph in all of science.

Notice how the three worst are all on a Math Sucks page?

#134

One of the first and foremost duties of the teacher is not to give students the impression that mathematical problems have little connection with each other, and no connection at all with anything else. We have a natural opportunity to investigate the connections of a problem when looking back at its solution.
- George Polya

First sentence has a double negative, so I have no idea what he was not trying to not say.

Second sentence confirms that math dude ain't good at writtin'.

The thing is that this is not just some random nobody.

George Polya is one of the top ten most famous mathematicians (with Ramanujan, Hilbert, Fermat, Wiles, von Neumann, Hardy and Erdos being perhaps more famous).

How can math not suck when mathematicians are not able to not write?

#135

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.
- G.H. Hardy

More useful in the self-serving furtherence of mathematics, perhaps but technique will always be secondary to why.

Why are you calculating at all?

What are you calculating?

What are the assumptions, the basis?

Does a recent result break your pet theory?

And, if it does, will you have the guts to dump your baby?

#136

Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1856

Without models we got nothin', honey.

Boggles the mind that a man this well known could say something this stupid.

Oh wait, I just read the first sentence of his wiki:

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets."
Poets suck
might be a future talk
composed in iambic
pentameter.
#137

Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie but admits that, under analysis some of them won't stand up either.
- Evan Esar, 1949

#138

Statistics is a science which ought to be honorable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam. A wise head is required.
- Thomas Carlyle, "Chartism", 1839

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

#139

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.
- Evan Esar, 1949

tEmP theorists inhale stats and excrete darkness.

#140

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Just like what Barry did.

The national debt before Hussein was more than doubled before Soetoro left office.

Math sucks almost as much as leftists suck.

#141

The "seriousness" of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. - G.H. Hardy

Yes, those math ideas are the core, and the rest is mechanical detail.

But, on average, math is quite worthless and useless.

So the average math idea need not never see the light of day. Not.

#142

The application of algebra to geometry has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.
- John Stuart Mill

If this is so great, does anyone reading or hearing this right now know what the heck JSM is talking about?

I love John Stuart Mill but I don't for a second think this is any big deal.

Math couldn't fight its way out of a wet particle collider.

#143

The concept of an independent system is a pure creation of the imagination. For no material system is or can ever be perfectly isolated from the rest of the world. Nevertheless it completes the mathematician's "blank form of a universe" without which his investigations are impossible. It enables him to introduce into his geometrical space, not only masses and configurations, but also physical structure and chemical composition.
- Lawrence Joseph Henderson, 1917

Yes, math has destroyed physics.

By creating it.

Based on Harry Potter, apparently.

#144

The development of mathematics toward greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules.
- Kurt Godel

The development of steel has led to the ability to cut stuff that needs to be cut using nothing but a cutting tool made out of steel.

#145

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
- Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), on an article about 10th or 8th grade math being enough to graduate

tEmP theories, like most fiction, don't require reasoning.

#146

The faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation.

The promiscuous collection and tabulation of data have given way to a process of assigning possible meanings, merely supposed real entities, to mathematical terms, working out the logical results, and then staging certain crucial experiments to check the hypothesis against the actual empirical results.

But the facts which are accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all. With the advance of mathematical technique in physics, the tangible results of experiment have become less and less spectacular; on the other hand, their significance has grown in inverse proportion.

The men in the laboratory have departed so far from the old forms of experimentation -- typified by Galileo's weights and Franklin's kite -- that they cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all; instead, they are watching index needles, revolving drums, and sensitive plates. No psychology of 'association' of sense-experiences can relate these data to the objects they signify, for in most cases the objects have never been experienced. Observation has become almost entirely indirect; and readings take the place of genuine witness.
- Susanne Langer, 1942

#147

The genius of Laplace was a perfect sledge hammer in bursting purely mathematical obstacles; but, like that useful instrument, it gave neither finish nor beauty to the results.
- Augustus De Morgan

Wait, particle smashing produces neither results nor beautiful realizations?

#148

The goal of scientists in their own science is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.
- Claude Bernard

Let's put this one down to a language barrier.

Freedom fries!

#149

The great masters of modern analysis are Lagrange, Laplace, and Gauss, who were contEmPoraries. It is interesting to note the marked contrast in their styles. Lagrange is perfect both in form and matter -- careful to explain his procedure, and though his arguments are general they are easy to follow. Laplace on the other hand explains nothing, is indifferent to style, and, if satisfied that his results are correct, is content to leave them either with no proof or with a faulty one. Gauss is as exact and elegant as Lagrange, but even more difficult to follow than Laplace, for he removes every trace of the analysis by which he reached his results, and studies to give a proof which while rigorous shall be as concise and synthetical as possible.
- W.W.R. Ball, "History Of Mathematics", 1901

So the math guy born in 1736 was reasonable,
the math guy born in 1749 was arrogant and
the math guy born in 1777 was even more arrogant.

We have a trend here.

As time goes on, math guys get more arrogant.

I believe we can summarize with: a = k*t

#150

The greatest advantage to be derived from the study of geometry of more than three dimensions is a real understanding of the great science of geometry. Our plane and solid geometries are but the beginning of this science. The four-dimensional geometry is far more extensive than the three-dimensional, and all the higher geometries are more extensive than the lower. - Henry Parker Manning, "Geometry Of Four Dimensions", 1914

We need to use three or more hammers at once,
so that we will have a real understanding of hammers.


Back to the quote...
Henry tells us we need to understand geometry of more than three dimensions -- i.e. something we will never be able to visualize, analogize, nor use in the real world -- so that we can understand the great science of geometry.

We need to drink gallons of alcohol so that
we can understand the great qualities of alcohol.


If you can't sell your field in three dimensions,
you'll never sell it in more than three (string theory).

#151

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed in Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science 'more geometrico.'
- Hermann Weyl

Mathematicians never tire of propping up mathematics.

Even when there is no reason to celebrate what they have accomplished.

String Theory -- the most mathematical of physics theories -- is also, easily and without a chance of debate, the most useless.

#152

The importance of group theory was emphasized very recently when some physicists using group theory predicted the existence of a particle that had never been observed before, and described the properties it should have. Later experiments proved that this particle really exists and has those properties.
- Irving Adler, "Groups In The New Mathematics", 1967

I predict the people who make predictions,

and the people who write about the people who make predictions

and the people who make equipment for people who make predictions

will ALL find their predictions coming true.

#153

The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of 25 or 30. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.
- Alfred W. Adler

Drivel.

A field that is remarkably useless finds that few people over some random age accomplish much after they get older.

Because they have moved on...to basket weaving.

#154

The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. Whereas the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.
- G.H. Hardy

Neither mathematicians nor tEmP theorists are in contact with reality.

As there is not enough money in reality.

For the amount of cocaine they want to snort.

#155

The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. To be sure, his art originated in the necessity for clothing such creatures, but this was long ago; to this day a shape will occasionally appear which will fit into the garment as if the garment had been made for it. Then there is no end of surprise and delight.
- Tobias Danzig, "Number: The Language Of Science", 1930

This is a realistic assessment of mathematics.

And is surely recognizable by any Lord of the Rings fan.

How "surprising and delightful"!

#156

The person who did most to give to analysis the generality and symmetry which are now its pride, was also the person who made mechanics analytical; I mean Euler.
- William Whewell

Bill was also a priest.

And theologian.

Just sayin.


Back to the quote...
Imagine what it is like to be immersed in a field where "generality" and "symmetry" are the keynotes.

In general, most postage stamps are symmetric.

The beauty of sugar cubes like in their symmetry, and general sweetness.

Generally, butter should be symmetrically scraped from the butter block.

Want more?

Then subscribe to the Symmetry for Generalists mailing list, hosted on www.tEmP-theorists-make-better-fallacies.com.

It's free (of thought)!

#157

The presentation of mathematics where you start with definitions, for example, is simply wrong. Definitions aren't the places where things start. Mathematics starts with ideas and general concepts, and then definitions are isolated from concepts. Definitions occur somewhere in the middle of a progression or the development of a mathematical concept. The same thing applies to theorems and other icons of mathematical progress. They occur in the middle of a progression of how we explore the unknown.
- Michael P. Starbird

Right.

Models, based on sound assumptions, can lead to theories.

Such theories might have some mathematical basis.

Unless it is something like the Flat Earth thing.

tEmP theorists, like science fiction writers, begin wherever they please.

No wonder physics today is a battle of competing dogmas.

#158

The research worker, in his efforts to express the fundamental laws of Nature in mathematical form, should strive mainly for mathematical beauty. He should take simplicity into consideration in a subordinate way to beauty. It often happens that the requirements of simplicity and beauty are the same, but where they clash, the latter must take precedence.
- Paul Dirac

Only Dirac could write something this stupid.

tEmP theorists will have a 20 foot statue of Paul Dirac in the entranceway to their Museum of Stupid Physics Theories.

Richard Feynman's picture will be on each sheet of toilet paper.

Also...almost forgot...math sucks.

#159

The crudest numerical scales, such as that by which the mineralogists distinguish different degrees of hardness, are found useful. The mere counting of pistils and stamens sufficed to bring botany out of total chaos into some kind of form. It is not, however, so much from counting as from measuring, not so much from the conception of number as from that of continuous quantity, that the advantage of mathematical treatment comes. Number, after all, only serves to pin us down to a precision in our thoughts which, however beneficial, can seldom lead to lofty conceptions, and frequently descend to pettiness.
- Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), "On The Doctrine Of Chances", 1878

#160

The sciences, even the best worst -- mathematics and astronomy -- are like sportsmen who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1883

Things have only gotten much worse since then.

Seizing prey produces "tangible results".

Making the search for research funds much easier the next time.

#161

The spectacular thing about Johnny von Neumann was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, nor his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity. He was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory but instead computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed, Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce an answer.
- Paul R. Halmos

Richard Feynman was probably the fastest physicist ever.

He also did more to destroy physics than any other physicist.

Now, what were you saying Paul?


Intuition is the prized attribute of a scientist.

The problem is...you can't easily teach it.

And if someone develops it? Harder to brainwash them.


Ok, intuition is bad and speed is great!  

#162

The steady progress of physics requires for its theoretical formulation a mathematics which gets continually more advanced.
- Paul Dirac

There are few people that Spring-And-Loop Theory disagrees with more.

#163

The subject I most disliked was mathematics. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument.
- Malcolm X

That says a lot, and none of it good.

Hear ye, hear ye!

All ye who want to create a new religion must use math to speed up the brainwashing process.

Signed,

Every tEmP theorist ever

#164

The word "mathematics" is a Greek word and, by origin, it means "something that has been learned or understood", or perhaps "acquired knowledge", or perhaps even, somewhat against grammar, "acquirable knowledge", that is, "learnable knowledge", that is, "knowledge acquirable by learning."
- Salomon Bochner

Wikipedia says "Mathematics (from the Greek for knowledge, study, learning").

Simple and clear.

Trust a mathematician to screw up something this simple.

#165

Theoretical physicists accept the need for mathematical beauty as an act of faith. For example, the main reason why the theory of relativity is so universally accepted is its mathematical beauty.
- Paul Dirac

Dirac was so important to the degeneration of physics.

As to the supposed universal acceptance of Relativity, consider this counterpoint:

COASALT: Relativity


Cliff notes: Relativity pried ether physicists away from the ether.

#166

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Einstein.
- Carl Friedrich Gauss

Except Einstein wasn't (David Hilbert had to do the heavy lifting).

And Newton was many different scientists in one -- physicist, chemist, math guy, etc.

with the math stuff that Newton came up with...being invented at the same time by another guy.


Has a math guy ever been able to make a point?

Serious question.

#167

There is no more common an error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
- Alfred North Whitehead

#168

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence". Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating -- peeling apart. Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.
- John Updike

Headline: Fiction Writer Thinks He Is A Physicist

Tag line: Proceeds to insult his readers.

Footnote: Full story at 11.


The whole point is that there is nothing simple about tEmP theories.

They don't make sense. They are not meant to make sense. They are meant to lead to more and even stupider theories.


Richard Feynman lead the way in many areas. Some of his misdirections were sophisticated enough to fool most of today's physicists. Others, like his 3,500 word "cargo Cult Science" ramble about dumb people not understanding anything, are consumed and praised by an even wider audience.

Feynman was behind QCD, the ugliest tattoo in physics. And stated -- not maybe, not hypothesis, not theory, not proposition, not conjecture -- stated that gravity can be ignored in the nucleus.

We need less (ideally zero) people like Richard Feynman.


So getting back to that quote...
If Richard Feynman can't be trusted, don't ya think maybe, just maybe, random fiction writer poets should for sure not be trusted with sciencey stuff?

#169

To be sure, mathematics can be extended to any branch of knowledge, including economics, provided the concepts are so clearly defined as to permit accurate symbolic representation. That is only another way of saying that in some branches of discourse it is desirable to know what you are talking about.
- J.R. Newman

In areas as important as economics, it is essential that the spokespeople make no sense whatsoever.

Otherwise people might figure out the shell game.

In these fields mathematics is perfect for obscuring things.


By the way, notice the use of the word "extended" in that quote.

You see, you don't just USE math -- like any old hammer -- to pound the number nails into wood.

No, you EXTEND math -- great wonderful omnipotent math -- to this field and that, bringing everything into the dominion of math because math and only math is the one true god.

MATH SUCKS MORE THAN JUST BOLD AND ALL CAPS.

#170

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
- John Maynard Keynes

Not that Keynesian economics were any better.

When it doesn't blow, math sucks.

#171

True optimization is the revolutionary contribution of modern research to decision processes.
- George Bernhard Dantzig

Dantzig developed the Simplex algorithm used in linear programming, which is indeed a "true optimization" system.

Traffic light systems are the main beneficiary but there are probably plenty of "off label" uses whereby companies figure out how to extract extra money from consumers.

Linear programming is one of the few non-suck areas in math.

#172

Until now, physical theories have been regarded as merely models which approximately describe the reality of nature. As the models improve, so the fit between theory and reality gets closer. Some physicists are now claiming that supergravity is the reality, that the model and the real world are in mathematically perfect accord.
- Paul Charles William Davies, "Superforce", 1985

First 2 sentences? Great.

Last Sentence? Utter crap.

Note that this math guy lacks the good sense to see that a CLAIM, by its very word choice, is utterly worthless.

Because the claimer's conclusion appeals to the math guy in him.


Selling one's soul to math. Weird.

By the way, amazing how many math guys have Paul for a first name.

Paul = 4-1-5, with 4 being the math number.

#173

We may as well cut out group theory. That is a subject that will never be of any use in physics.
- James Jeans

Since 'Group theory' is a part of mathematics.

And Sir Jeans was a math guy (in addition to being a physics guy).

We can confirm that we have...a sensible math guy sighting.

Call the National Audubon Society!

#174

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems".
Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

- Gian-Carlo Rota

This ably shows the deficiency of mathematics by itself.

This person actually thinks they made a point, and probably even a useful one.

Math guys prove theorems. Period.
Writer guys write sentences. Period.

Only a math guy is not happy with this.

#175

What I remember most clearly was that when I put down a suggestion that seemed to me cogent and reasonable, Einstein did not in the least contest this, but he only said, 'Oh, how ugly.' As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, he really rather lost interest in it and could not understand why somebody else was willing to spend much time on it. He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics.
- Hermann Bondi

Physics today is backside-of-a-mule ugly.

The human form is beautiful.
A hand wadded up with bandages and tape is ugly.

Therefore tEmP theorists have mummy hands.

#176

What is mathematics? This question, if asked in earnest, has no answer.
- Salomon Bochner

This guy again.

Sigh.


Math is numbers.

Humans have known this for thousands of years.

Most humans look at math with same amount of interest as they look at a garbage dump.


What matters is the quality of things.

Mathematicians (and useless people like tEmP theorists) constantly redirect us toward the worship of math.

Because otherwise we might become more interested in the quality of things.

ContEmPlate the Tao of living.

And ultimately find the right way to live life.

Can you imagine the hole this would blow in our mostly useless world today?

#177

When the difficulty of a problem lies only in finding out what follows from certain fixed premises, mathematical methods furnish invaluable wings for flying over intermediate obstructions.
- Arthur Mellen Wellington

That quote begins with "When" but should be read as "If".

IF you have fixed premises (i.e. assumptions), then yes all you need to do is crunch the numbers.

Flowery language that talks about wings and flying is not needed.


The point is that bad premises wreck everything.

With them you get weapons of mass destruction like fluoridation and microwave radiation.

So once again we arrive at the same conclusions -- math guys are stoned on math, think math is everything, worship at the altar of math. And fail to see just how much math sucks.

#178

When the most abstract and "useless" disciplines have been cultivated for a time, they are often seized upon as practical tools by other departments of science. I conceive that this is no accident, as if one bought a top hat for a wedding, and discovered later when a fire broke out, that it could be used as a water bucket.
- James Roy Newman

Many things are like this -- a slot screwdriver can double as a wood chisel.

In a pinch.


Pharmaceuticals rely on this.

A given drug is found to cause this, that or the other thing and next thing you know it is being sold because it "cures" something.

The whole herd of side effects that go with this drug (i.e. this poison) are then conveniently ignored because there is money to be made.

Until somebody grabs a headline with "New wonder drug kills brain cells in parrots".


tEmP theories are left-handed monkey wrenches.

That get employed to build skyscrapers.

Out of unicorn farts.

That get as tall as the moon.

Before crashing like thunder.

Into a smelly pile.

That ferments the next stupid theory.

#179

Q. Where should I start?
A. Start from the statement of the problem.
Q. What can I do?
A. Visualize the problem as a whole as clearly and as vividly as you can.
Q. What can I gain by doing so?
A. You should understand the problem, familiarize yourself with it, impress its purpose on your mind.

- George Polya, "How To Solve It: A New Aspect Of Mathematical Method", 1957

Where is the "new" in this?

This is "Problem Solving for Dummies". >

Mind you, there are thousands of tEmP theorists that would benefit handsomely from the most cursory glance at it.

#180

Why is geometry often described as "cold" and "dry"? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line. Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.
- Benoit Mandelbrot

Math guy creates fractals.

Math guy sees fractals everywhere.

Fractals are beautiful (if you don't know what beauty is).


Back to the quote...
The first sentence is key.

Geometry, like logic, is "cold" and "dry"...in the sense that it is inflexible when it comes to logic.

It follows logic and that's it.

Therefore geometry is not used by tEmP theorists.

Instead they come up with stupid models. That force changes. That they make. Without math. That they tout. Without reason. That get taught to everyone.

Yup, one big circle jerk.

Turns out it is geometrical after all.


Spring-And-Loop Theory thinks that mathematics is fundamentally unsuited to describing the universe.

Because math is unsuited to describing anything.

Math is counting. Math is inevitability. Math is "if this then that".

All worthless without a theory, built on and in harmony with simple, fundamental assumptions.

All of which Spring-And-Loop Theory provides.

Oh no, another circle.

#181

When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.
- Lord Kelvin

The math hammer strikes again.


If you can express it in words...

If you can express it in a model...

If you can express it based on assumptions...

Then you have a theory.

Probably a tEmP theory.

But, with a sufficiently simple model, and the least number of the most sound assumptions, you might just have a Spring-And-Loop Theory.

#182

If statesmen had a little more arithmetic, or were accustomed to calculation, wars would be much less frequent.
- Benjamin Franklin

Statesmen are great at personal arithmetic, a subset of regular arithmetic that simply leaves out everyone else.

Bankers are more cooperative, but in the worst way -- making sure everyone in the banking system benefits from the sickest activity on Earth.


Back to the quote...
Statesmen having a little more math is an unrealistic hypothetical.

We have to stop proposing things based on unrealistic hypotheticals.

But we also have to be prepared to fight for something better as all of human selfishness wants us to fail.

#183

Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.
- Unknown

The first sentence is ridiculous.

Philosophy only has one objective -- to understand all aspects of life.

While saying it has no rules is the grossest of gross insults.

I wonder which religious person came up with that first sentence.

A proper philosophy has rules and advice -- advice for all, rules for oneself -- but those who wish to control us don't want us to learn what is good for us.

So philosophy must be mocked, and math praised.

Math threatens nothing but the minds of mathematicians.

The second sentence is valid.

Math sucks.

#184

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements.
- Leonardo da Vinci, "Treatise On The Flight Of Birds", 1505

Ok, apparently da Vinci was no scientist.

And didn't know the difference between math, science and engineering.

Copied the copter.

Painted girls without smiles.

Who doesn't?

#185

Nature's great book is written in mathematical language.
- Gallileo

Number things are written with numbers.

Word things are written with words.

Are we getting anywhere with this?

#186

The Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
- Sir James Jeans, early founder of Quantum Theory

That escalated quickly.

Punch the "great archtiect" (i.e. religion) button.

Then hit the math button.

Mumble about great thoughts for the philosopher's vote.

And bring it home with a "great machine" phrase to make the engineers swoon.

Inside the park touchdown!

#187

One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.
- Isaac Asimov

Yes, this is the promised value of mathematics.

Imaginary, of course, but promised.

Like Democrat plans for the 99%.

#188

A wall is happy when it is well designed, when it rests firmly on its foundation, when its symmetry balances its part and produces no unpleasant stresses. Good design can be worked out on the mathematical principles of mechanics.
- Isaac Asimov, "Foundation's Edge"

#189

Now we can see what makes mathematics unique. Only in mathematics is there no significant correction -- only extension. Once the Greeks had developed the deductive method, they were correct in what they did, correct for all time. Euclid was incomplete and his work has been extended enormously, but it has not had to be corrected. His theorems are, every one of them, valid to this day. Ptolemy may have developed an erroneous picture of the planetary system, but the system of trigonometry he worked out to help him with his calculations remains correct forever. Each great mathematician adds to what came previously, but nothing needs to be uprooted. Consequently, when we read a book like "A History of Mathematics", we get the picture of a mounting structure, ever taller and broader and more beautiful and magnificent and with a foundation, moreover, that is as untainted and as functional now as it was when Thales worked out the first geometrical theorems nearly 26 centuries ago. Nothing pertaining to humanity becomes us so well as mathematics. There, and only there, do we touch the human mind at its peak.
- Isaac Asimov

This is, briefly, far too complimentary of math.

Math does make solid progress.

But this is good and bad.

It is great because it means we can build off it.

It is bad because it ultimately narrows the field and forces math guys to become crazy (or leave the field).

There is nothing exalted about this.


Math, in the sense Asimov refers to here, is more like chemistry. You can build with it. Nothing more, nothing less.

#190

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.
- Isaac Asimov

True enough.

There are plenty of coincidences around.

Observant people see it.

And it means approximately nothing.

Except that the observer is observant.

Whoop-dee-doo.

#191

One of the things that determines the curriculum in music schools is: which of the current fashions in modern music gets the most grant money from the mysterious benefactors in Foundation-Land. For a while there, unless you were doing serial music (in which the pitches have numbers, the dynamics have numbers, the vertical densities have numbers, etc.) -- if it didn't have a pedigree like that, it wasn't a good piece of music. Critics and academicians stood by, waiting to tell you what a piece of [cow pie] your opus was if your numbers didn't add up. Forget what it sounded like, or whether it moved anybody, or what it was about. The most important thing was the numbers.
- Irving Charles Krauthammer (1950-2018)

This is the logical end result of math worship.

#192

Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.
- Irving Charles Krauthammer (1950-2018), of Andrew Wiles

What Andrew Wiles accomplished was epic.

Heroic.

And has nothing to do with anything else on Earth.

#193

There is no model of the theory of gravitation today,
other than the mathematical form.

- Richard Feynman

tEmP theorists have been taught to be stupid.

By people like Richard Feynman.

One hundred years of brainwashing and misdirection have cemented their ignorance.

The Great Awakening is needed.

For you, if not for them.

#194

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.
- Stephen Hawking

In fact there are precious few jobs for mathematicians.

My brother, a chess master in his spare time while still in high school, never used his math degree.

Instead he worked for the phone company his entire life. A job that will rot brain cells better than any other.

I know because I did it for two summers while earning enough to earn my chemical engineering degree.

#195

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.
- Stephen Hawking

Are you only writing a physics books to make money?

Generalizations suck.

Almost as much as math sucks.

#196

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.
- Stephen Hawking

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualize Unicorns directly.

However, from a purely fantasy point of view it's just as easy to visualize unicorns as it is to think of horses or cows.

Stephen Hawking. Making math suck. In 11 dimensions.

#197

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
- Stephen Hawking

Childish.

On the level of a punk kid running from doorstep to doorstep, pressing the doorbell and running away.

Gee, what will they do? Ha ha ha ha ha!


Stephen Hawking, in addition to showing, once again, how useless mathematics is, neglects to mention the importance of philosophy (not religion) in our lives.

Hawking raises a philosophical question, yet leaves philosophy out of it. Philosophy doesn't suit his scientific dogma (that looks an awful lot like religious dogma when you start talking about big bangs and such).

Hawking was the poster child of tEmP theories.

And now he exists only in bronze. Forever locked in his ignorance and nonsense.

#198

A typical Math Sucks video

There are an infinite number of these problems.

None useful.

They make playing Angry Birds look interesting.

#199

Maxwell's equations led to the elegant math
describing the standard model of physics.

- Alanna Mitchell, "The Spinning Magnet", p. 148

Math doesn't "describe" anything.

A model based on sound assumptions does.


Back to the quote...
...equations...led to...equations...

Well, yeah. Pot leads to more pot.

So...quote fail.


The problem with the statement is that James Clerk Maxwell first came up with model (very much like the Spring-And-Loop Theory model).

The second-best model ever created to describe the Universe.

He then decided to disregard it because he couldn't be 100% sure it was right.

He found no flaws in it, mind you.

He was just that much of a purist (like most mathematicians).

He then created his Maxwell equations.


The lesson is that the model came first.

And math gained precedence only when a human lost confidence in his model.

Saying his equations -- his second best effort -- led to the elegant math of the Standard Model is not saying much at all.

A small garbage dump, added to for years and years, leads to a larger garbage dump.


The harsh reality is that the Standard Model is one of the most embarassing thing man has ever created.

It should be called the Politically Correct model.

The Smashed Particles Model.

Or the Dogmatist's Model.

#200

Math conquers a kid's game

wtg

#201

Life is good for only two things,
discovering mathematics
and teaching mathematics.

- Simeon Poisson

A quote to make one hate the mathematician.

And pity the man.

#202

I am no longer living in my prime. I won't be again until I'm 107.
- Dirk Struick, on his 104th birthday

Cringeworthy.

#203

It is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case.
- Richard Feynman

If Feynman was right, this would just be cruel.

Fortunately he isn't.

This is one of those times where I fight back the urge to raise my voice, gesticulate and curse mightily.


Life is dead simple.

At the lowest levels, life has less ingredients than 3-fingered Dan has fingers.

tEmP theorists, however, would make no money from such a simple system.

And so they should give offerings at the altar of Feynman, since he paved the way for them to milk the physics cash cow for billions upon billions of dollars of UNEARNED money.


Corrected:

It is impossible to explain DISHONESTLY the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics.
Thanks to math, tEmP theories can bury their B.S. to the nth degree.

Common sense need not apply.

tEmP theorists write the math songs that make the whole world sting.

Kuh.

#204

Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment.
- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)

True.

And more importantly, the math can all check out, yet still be quite useless and wrong for the problem it is applied to.

Nobody knew this better than Feynman.

#205

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)

People hear what they want to hear.

Only those of the highest character want to hear goodness from others.

The rest feel threatened by it.

And proceed to say and do the worst possible things in an impossible attEmPt to preserve their own state (of ignorance).

Fortunately the karmic load of doing this ultimately sinks them spiritually.

#206

The scientist has to take 95 per cent of his subject on trust. He has to because he can't possibly do all the experiments, therefore he has to take on trust the experiments all his colleagues and predecessors have done. Whereas a mathematician doesn't have to take anything on trust. Any theorem that's proved, he doesn't believe it, really, until he goes through the proof himself, and therefore he knows his whole subject from scratch; he's absolutely 100 per cent certain of it. And that gives him an extraordinary conviction of certainty, and an arrogance that scientists don't have.
- Erik Christopher Zeeman

So what.

The goal is to accomplish things.

One actually learns more from failure than from success (i.e. studying every proved theory).

To accomplish great things, one must fail.

There's a reason teachers don't assign problems where the answer is neatly printed in the back of the book.

#207

Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.
It will drive the nonsense out of your head!

- Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Spectacularly wrong.

Not sure why.

A writer wrote it so it must be true. Write?

#208

Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key -- and we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn't look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.
- Robert Heinlein

When you study what libraries carry, and more importantly what they don't carry, you will see the significance of this.

Truth can and is easily ignored...by libraries.

So, yes, library science is the foundation of all sciences, all religions, and all aspects of life.

AS WELL AS ALL FALSEHOOD. ALL LIES. AND ALL LIBERAL BIAS.

#209

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
- Robert Heinlein

We are all imperfect.

All flawed.

All dumb.

And all beautiful.

Unlike math.

That sucks.

#210

Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself any more.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

That was the goal, Albert.

Just as the goal of Relativity was to delete the ether.

#211

He [a mathematician] has shown little psychological insight. Mathematicians are often so. They think logically, but they lack an organic connection.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

What an understatement.

Even though Relativity was flawed, Einstein didn't suck.

#212

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics. There was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.
- Voltaire [Francois-Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)

Not that this is a good thing for physics...


Art must have imagination.

Science usually doesn't need it.

Except for those very few times where there is a puzzle to be solved.

Best example from the past? The Ptolemaic system.
Best example from the today? The Standard Model (with its hundreds of problems).

#213

I have no faith in political arithmetic.
- Adam Smith (1723-1790)

I have no faith in politicians.

#214

Anyone attEmPting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
- John Von Neumann

This is about as cute as a math quote gets.

The reality is that every random number generator is deterministic, to one degree or another.

Because determinism is not the problem.


Random number generators need a seed.

A starting number.

That must not be deterministic.


Pretty embarassing to be correcting a math guy in their math area.

But that gets back to the cuteness of this quote.

I didn't say great, or even good.

Because math sucks.

#215

A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.

Math humor.

Look away.

It's hideous.

#216

Set Theory is one of those "one of those type things" type things.
- Eryk Zimmerman

Dying of laughter here.

Or not.

#217

Mathematics is a logical method. Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition that we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions that do not belong to mathematics to others that equally do not belong to mathematics.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

#218

I have found a proof of Fermat's conjecture, but Haiku is too short.
- Jim Propp, Math prof, MIT

Haiku sucks suckers

less than unusuable math

sucks sucker suckers.

#219

Unfortunately, mathematics is about theory. Your question actually has practical applications. I can't really answer it.
- Alejandro Ortega

#220

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
- John Von Neumann

Math guy gets an 'A' for the first math-free sentence.

Models aren't mathematical.

Saying that everything in the Universe is energy isn't mathematical.


The second and third sentences are simply wrong.

Again, this is all pretty embarassing since this quote contains the word 'math' and was written by a mathematician.

Models gain math elements after we measure something.


The Flat Earth model gains math elements after we measure the curvature of the Earth (or a million other measurements).

The math is plopped into the Flat Earth model.

And the model breaks.

Just like tEmP theories break.

#221

I could stop here, but I'm going to subject you to a bunch of math.
- David Haussler

#222

The problem with higher mathematics is that after a while you begin to see dark at the end of the tunnel.
- Saul Devitt

#223

Math vs Physics - Numberphile

Robbert Dijkgraaf is a string theorist.

No laughing.

Please.

#224

The mathematics is not there until we put it there.
- Arthur Eddington

And?

#225

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
- Joyce Carol Oates

#226

How Data Science Powered The Search For Flight MH370

First comment: "Their work revealed that the plane had flown into the remote southern Indian Ocean. They didn't know where exactly."

Amazing

how much math sucks.

#227

The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie The Laws Of Nature

"New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called octonions."

I'm here to help.

#228

The smallest units of matter are not physical objects, but forms, or in Plato's sense, ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.
- Werner Heisenberg

Dude was born 43 years after Planck.

He has no excuse.

#229

If you torture the data long enough, Nature will confess.
- Ronald Coase

Lies, meet darn lies.
Darn lies, meet lies.

Lies, meet statistics.
Statistics, meet lies.

Darn lies, meet statistics.
Statistics, meet darn lies.

One big happy family.

#230

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem of what to say and how to say it.
- Edward Roscoe Murrow (1908-1965)

"What to say" = what are you trying to model?

"how to say it" = what are the assumptions?

Math is not "how to say it".

Because assumptions drive the bus.

Doesn't matter if you want to talk about how good vaccines are. Your ASSUMPTION that they are good (or at least that their good outweighs their bad) is what matters, and will either turn out to be true, or FALSE.

If it fails, the math didn't matter.

And if it proves to be true?

Then and only then do you need to go to the next level of detail.

The math.

How much? When? For how long? How effective? Side effects? etc.

#231

If your experiment needs statistics, then you ought to have done a better experiment.
- Ernest Rutherford

Said the man who relied, probably more than anyone else at that time, on statistics.

He fired stuff at an atomic nucleus.

Some of it bounced back.

With statistics he was able to calculate the size of the nucleus relative to the size of the atom.

#232

It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.
- Warren Buffett

tEmP theorists are precisely wrong.

To the 10th decimal place in most cases.

#233

P-hacking vs rigor.
- Steven Novell's "The Skeptic's Guide To The Universe", pp. 193-203

Wiki:

"Data dredging (also data fishing, data snooping, data butchery, and p-hacking) is the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant when in fact there is no real underlying effect. This is done by performing many statistical tests on the data and only paying attention to those that come back with significant results, instead of stating a single hypothesis about an underlying effect before the analysis and then conducting a single test for it."

Without this, there would be no LHC.

#234

Greatest secret of them all -- the power of the Name. How your name creates your nature. The letters of your name are merely symbols, given significance by their mathematical position.

Non sucky math.

At last!

My favorite subject, as a child, was mathematics.

In school I was, typically, the biggest liability the teacher had.

Eventually they realized the trick was to seat me next to someone who was not good at math. I'd help them during class instead of (ok, in addition to) being a nuisance. And they got something better out of me.


I got off the math bus after first year calculus.

Oh, I took more of it.

Had to.

But I never inhaled.


 


 

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