Mach's principle

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Imagination is free for all. But surely you can understand that someone with a Phd in a certain discipline, would be able to imagine something that is more possible or more realistic to achieve than you or I.
A child may Imagine a ghost, or a Bigfoot, or some other apparition...What does the parents do? They reassure that child that they are just imagining things, and that what they are Imaging is impossible and just a product of an over reactive childish mind.
I imagine humanity going to the stars one day. I imagine eventual evidence that we are not alone. I base those Imaginations on observations and knowledge that I have now and by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Those Imaginations may one day eventuate and none defy the laws of physics as we know them or GR
You see the difference?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

This has been some of our best banter ever, and I do appreciate it. Couldn't do any of this without you.

I can afford to be a Maverick because nothing is at stake for me. I have no academic, religious, or theoretical agendas at all. I've learned a lot of physics here; some of it by the nice folks here fixing my conceptual mistakes. For the most part, they are omissions. What physics I know best is from the 1970s and 1980s, but as it turns out, those were some pretty good years.

I recognize why academics work the way they do. I studied teaching methods enough to know that as a practical matter, even if its wrong, if students are paying tuition, you have to teach them something. And so Professors will teach stuff they don't understand themselves, and command respect from their students and get it because they have the threat of a assessing a failing grade to problem students, which is a nice racket.

I don't care about getting published. Ever. I don't do blogs, Facebook, or Twitter. I don't care about turning a nickel by syndication or by spamming anyone.

When I became a physics teaching intern I learned about the prevailing theories of education by folks like John Dewey. I detested almost everything about John Dewey and what he stood for, particularly when I learned about education's real priorities. And all of my teaching mentors worshiped the ground Dewey walked on, and it made we want to retch. Other life matters also interfered with my desire to teach, but at long last I gave up trying.

They taught me all about teaching science and math in the Common Core curriculum too, and I liked that about as much as Dewey. There seems to be a lot of unsettled opinions about Common Core going around now, and it's only five years later. The only thing worse than education is politics. Who is it that is supposed to be happy with paying for an education that turns out to be nothing but a load of crap, and whose fault is that, really?

But I loved it when they taught me the real stuff that always rang true, and that would include pretty much everything Einstein ever wrote or said. It seems we tend to agree about that point most of the time. We are not so different as you may think.

I gave up on the "shoulders of giants" metaphor. What giants? Seriously, it's been worked to death. Which giants were you standing on, exactly? Phillip Morrisson was a great popularizer of physics, and he was also a dwarf. What do you suppose he thought of that metaphor? Did you know, they took the "Physics of Lilliput" out of the old PSSC Physics texts because the physics lesson on cross sectional strengths of bones at different scales offended him?

Newton was no giant of Alchemy, nor of humane or even Christian treatment of counterfeiters, and was heretical enough about the Holy Trinity and the religion he pretended to minister to be burned at the stake. Good thing Hooke never found out his weakness. Galileo was a giant. Newton was spongeable. But the Principia was quite good.

Einstein was a giant among giants.

Emy Noether was even taller.

Gell-Mann was standing mostly on the shoulders (and more often than not, the toes) of Feynman. Feynman was a giant for certain. Gell-Mann's work required a new free parameter to be added every time something in QCD didn't quite work out. They used to be called fudge factors. Gell-Mann damaged physics notation to make it more incomprehensible even as Feynman was adding graphics to make QED easier conceptually.

Bohr harassed a young Schröedinger to tears about his wave equation before realizing the formulation was equivalent to an earlier matrix treatment by a member of the Copenhagen school. No giant there, really. A bully, maybe. No one teaches Bohr's models anymore; they're useless. Schrödinger's are dead useful.

Fermi was a giant.

Wolfgang Pauli couldn't get along with anyone, but he was definitely a giant.

So why didn't they teach us about any of that? It's important to pick the right giants' shoulders to stand on. Some provide better foundations; others provide better views. Some just obfuscate. And those who can't do, still teach.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

That's nice, but I'm a big softy at heart anyway.
Besides that, I believe always in calling a spade a spade.
Tell me something...Did you ever accept the nonsense from four posters on this forum who all claimed to have a TOE?
In those cases, and those excessive egos, I would call a spade a shovel in all four incidents.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

You call 'em like you see 'em. Even if it's me. I can take it.

 

I certainly call ' em like I see 'em, although taking it or otherwise is irrelevant.
It neither affects me one way or the other.