Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "This Physicist Says We’re Using Maths Entirely Wrong" video.

  1. Nah, Jordan Peterson is to Canada as crack cocaine is to the US. ;-)
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  2. None of this applies to physics because there are no sets in nature.
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  3. You said it. IF we had been using math wrong. But we didn't. :-)
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  4. Or... you could read von Neumann (1932). The solution is in chapter five or six, if I remember correctly and has been there for over 90 years, already. :-)
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  5. Real numbers are a convenience. They are not a physical model.
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  6. It's only a problem among a limited number of not very good theorists, but it is a problem among all people who failed to pay attention in high school. ;-)
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  7. Mathematics is not a model. It's an abstract extrapolation. We find five stones on the beach and we learn to count them. Then we count a bag full of rice and it's boring like heck. We say "F it!" and postulate that no matter how big the sack would be, we could always assign a number to its contents. THAT is how math is born. At some point you just give up looking at the real world and you say to yourself that you have enough evidence to just go with a simple rule. The intuitionist, however, goes one step further and says that "We don't know unless we do.". The little problem with that is that every time we do, we find that the intuitionist was just a drunken guy who was full of it and we could have saved us a lot of work because nature ALWAYS gives the result that ordinary logic predicts. In other words, that drunken a-hole made us run around for nothing. ;-)
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  8. LLMs can't think and they don't analyze the data they are being trained on for factual correctness or even consistency. You can easily train an LLM on data the says the Tuesday is only half as long as Monday and that the sky is green on December 12th, but only if the cat had four kittens in May and the LLM will reproduce these "facts" perfectly. They are thus perfectly designed to spread fake news. :-)
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  9. The simple answer is that nature doesn't compute. We compute to predict a few predictable things about nature out of an infinity of fundamentally unpredictable ones. You aren't looking at the math wrong. You are looking at nature wrong.
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  10. Superposition describes statistical independence, which is easily testable experimentally. This has nothing to do with your senses. You simply don't know what you are talking about. ;-)
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  11.  @ascohn  What is the philosophical side of "We can't predict when the Geiger-Mueller counter will click next.". Dudes, you need to get a life and simply accept trivial facts for what they are: absolutely trivial facts. ;-)
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  12.  @ascohn  I am simply pointing out that mentioning physics and philosophy in one sentence is a poor mental habit of the past. If that is similar to your position, then we are in full agreement. It is, of course, a historically common phenomenon. Planck, Einstein, and even Heisenberg who should have known better (and based on his own scientific writing actually did know better when he was young) and numerous others have been setting the public perception of science back over and over again be referencing completely unnecessary philosophical ideas that have nothing to do with proper scientific reasoning. My attitude is not pointless. We have known what drives quantum mechanics for almost a hundred years now but the way we are teaching this absolutely trivial subject surrounds it with an almost occult aura of deliberate obfuscation. This has to stop. This isn't religion. Everything here can be deduced logically from very simple first principles (ultimately it all follows from Galileo's relativity principle published in 1630!) and nature happens to agree with the result of that reasoning with absolutely astonishing precision.
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  13.  @ascohn  Physics is not about hopes and dreams. Physics is a rational description of nature. Most people simply don't manage to stay rational.
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  14. The universe doesn't use numbers at all.
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  15.  @srki22  I have never seen it use a number. I have only seen people use numbers. :-)
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  16.  @srki22  The universe doesn't care about you. You are dirt under its fingernails. You need to grow up. ;-)
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  17. No, it's not. ;-)
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  18. They isolate a physical system from the environment, let it evolve and then stop it cold. Curiously, that's exactly the way dice and slot machines work. Neither are cold enough to be quantum mechanical, though. ;-)
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  19. There are no proofs in physics. Physics is NOT mathematics. It's not even close.
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  20. Huh? Why would physics not be able to tell the difference? You mean the equivalence class that we call "harmonic oscillator" doesn't differentiate? No, it doesn't and that is by choice. The physicist is simplifying life by realizing that one does not have to recalculate everything from scratch every time because some systems are sufficiently similar that one can treat them once and then reuse the results. That does not mean that we can't differentiate the actual physical systems. Of course we can. It makes a hell of a difference whether you get crushed by a giant pendulum or electrocuted by a resonant LC circuit. ;-)
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  21. Quantum mechanics doesn't have problems. You may have a problem understanding it because the way we teach quantum mechanics has many problems, though, but that can be fixed by more studying.
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  22. You were clearly not paying any attention in high school calculus. ;-)
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  23.  @kencusick6311  The Planck length isn't anything other than a fanciful human invention that results from the combination of a few dimensioned physical constants.
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  24. We didn't make the rules for math. Nature did. Standard mathematical logic follows the behavior of objects in baskets.
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  25. No, it's not. "Close enough" in physics means that we are rejecting an infinity of deformations of the standard hypothesis. That's a sanity requirement, not strictly logical reasoning. Strict logical reasoning doesn't get you very far in physics at this level. You would get bogged down in minutiae that simply do not matter.
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  26. No, not really. Sabine likes to cover bullshit because it gives her more views.
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  27.  @Thomas-gk42  Intuitionist math is not even self consistent in mathematics and in physics it's just total nonsense at the kindergarten level. The statement "The red ball is in the box or the red ball is not in the box." is empirically true as long as there is a red ball and a box that it fits in. Dude, this is bullshit, plain and simple. :-)
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  28. That scenerio does not have time reversal symmetry because a single starting point can have an infinite number of endpoints but none of those endpoints will ever lead back to the starting point.
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  29.  @kreynolds1123  Time reversal symmetry is simply dynamically broken. There is nothing particularly strange about that. Eggs that broke after falling on the floor don't rearrange themselves and they don't jump back onto the fridge shelf.
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  30.  @kreynolds1123  Yes, they do. It's all a consequence of state space volume. Technically it's not even restricted to state space. I am not a mathematician but I suspect that it's true for all topologically ordered sets that have more than one effective dimension. There is almost always more "over there" than there is "right here".
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  31. Awh, your intellectual laziness is so cute when it is trying to cope. ;-)
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  32.  @herbyguitar  Is this physics PhD calling a guy who failed in high school intellectually lazy? Yes. ;-)
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  33. The point of math is not to "prove" everything in the first place. That was a very limited understanding of mathematics in the 19th century. Modern mathematicians are looking at a much more general idea of mathematics as an exploration of structures.
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  34.  @lukask.181  Even in computer science we aren't intuitionistic. The halt problem, for instance, only claims (and its proof proves) that there are programs that can not be proven to stop after a finite number of steps. It's not a constructive proof which programs do not stop. The set of programs that stop is not a constructive set and neither is the set of programs that don't stop. The entire program of intuitionistic mathematics is therefor a folly. It is internally as inconsistent as things come. Not to mention that you are losing extremely valuable tools like calculus in the process. There can be no such thing as intuitionist calculus. You can't do topology and you definitely can't do limits within that framework. Finally, intuitionist physics is total garbage. The red ball is either in the box or it is not in the box. You will NEVER find an empirical case for which that statement isn't true. Standard mathematical logic is, at the end of the day, an extrapolation of physical observations. Intuitionist logic is not. It's simply a contrarian fool's mental paradise.
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  35. Yes, because there is nothing deep about his bullshit. ;-)
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  36. Why are you telling us that you weren't paying attention in middle school? :-)
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  37.  @roberthunter6927  Yes, I agree. A theorist should have a better handle on physics. Some do not.
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  38. The Greeks were idiots and were conquered and subjugated by the Romans, who were engineers. :-)
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  39.  @Thomas-gk42  It doesn't take high school to detect bullshit. I could do it when I was eight years old. ;-)
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  40. Yes, the roots of (-4) have a very well defined meaning and you were supposed to learn about that in 10th or 11th grade. Why didn't you?
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  41. @ Yes, and you are the guy to teach me physics? How are you going to do that, actually? I am a retired physics PhD with decades of experience. I worked at CERN and a couple of US national labs and I happen to be the designer of one of the core components of one of the world's largest high energy physics detectors. So please, Sensei, teach your willing student something he doesn't know. ;-)
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  42. @ Awh, you are so cute when you are feeling sorry for yourself. ;-) FACT: we teach what complex numbers are in high school these days. If they didn't at yours, then ask for your money back. You were given a shitty education. ;-)
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  43. @ Quantum mechanics is the description of the behavior of Geiger-Mueller counters. Oh, wait, you don't know anything about that. ;-)
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  44. ​@garui. I am mesmerized by your total lack of attention in school and the resulting delusion that you are smart. ;-)
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  45. Awh, you are so cute when you are begging for attention. ;-)
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  46. There are fundamental differences between quantum gravity and QCD/Higgs mechanics. Both QCD and the Higgs mechanism are preserving unitarity, but classical gravity does not and it's not clear whether quantum gravity does, either.
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  47. Nothing will ever vindicate your failure in high school. ;-)
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  48. Why are you telling us that you failed in high school and are coping really, really hard? ;-)
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  49.  @steniomusich  I have never seen a better world among the binge drinkers. I only saw people who had lost their minds to the dehydrating chemical properties of ethanol. ;-)
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  50.  @steniomusich  I believe you. "Vodka" is the diminutive of "water". ;-)
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  51. All of that is entirely irrelevant both for physics and mathematics. ;-)
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  52. Physics is not mathematics. We don't do proofs in physics hence it doesn't matter what reasoning rules we allow or don't (which would be an arbitrary choice to begin with and nature doesn't care about arbitrary human choices).
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  53. We don't even teach Schroedinger's cat in undergrad physics. It's a pointless example of shoddy analysis. We do teach the classical equivalent of it in classical mechanics, though. Poincare's recurrence theorem is a good example for what happens if one extrapolates false assumptions too far.
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  54. It wasn't people who came up with logic. It was fruits and vegetables in baskets. You were clearly not paying any attention in middle school. ;-)
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  55. Numbering systems are arbitrary, but standard arithmetic is unique and THAT is the important difference. The problem with quantum mechanics is simply that we aren't counting objects but systems and most people don't know how to do that correctly. ;-)
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  56. @ for(i=0;i<1000;i++); does not require a mathematical proof of 170 pages. Absolutely everybody knows what we are doing there. Neither do mathematicians need a tome of an axiomatic arithmetic book like Bourbaki to solve the sum of the first n integers. The people who are doing that kind of foundational stuff are simply suffering from mathematician's OCD. They haven't changed anything about the field other than to add some crazy stories to it. Goedel in particular is completely irrelevant outside of mathematics. The only case it relates to are statements over infinite sets. There are no infinite sets in this universe. Never were, never will be. The halting problem is irrelevant for the very same reason. Most people who program computers DO NOT want the machine to halt. We are spending enormous effort on making software that never terminates because when your tv shuts down in the middle of a movie that's bad for your company's tv sales. What is relevant in reality is simply not what you are discussing here. Polynomial vs. non-polynomial complexity, now that is relevant even on small-ish problems but not assuming the excluded middle rule does nothing to solve those kinds of questions.
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  57. There is nothing to debunk to begin with. We are teaching in first year physics that "physics is the art of approximation". Sometimes a circle in physics is an approximation for an ellipse. Sometimes it's an approximation for a spiral and sometimes it's an approximation for an orbital. All these approximations are equally valid FOR THE RIGHT LEVEL OF SIMPLIFICATION. Anybody who can't live with that needs to leave the physics department and move to either math or philosophy.
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  58. True, she likes to do videos about bullshit. ;-)
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  59. Lots of nonsensical talk, zero physics intuition. The trivial reason why unitary groups and their representations play such a giant role in physics is because we are dealing with ensemble measurements.
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  60. How can you test that intuitionist math is useless in science? Well, according to intuitionistic logic the law of the excluded middle does not hold, but since in science you can trivially test for it experimentally and it always holds, intuitionistic logic is not a valid physical ontology.
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  61. @ It's the difference between math and science. A lot of interesting and very complicated things in math are absolutely trivial in science... and the other way around. The two fields share a few symbols but have vastly different content.
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  62. @ Yes, reality always obeys the law of the excluded middle. If you have one pineapple and one basket, then the pineapple is always either in the basket or it is not in the basket. You will never find a third case in nature. ;-)
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  63. We probably do, we just don't know it, yet. So far everything in physics could be derived successfully from the relativity principle, which goes back to at least Galileo in 1630. Your lack of science education is showing. Tuck it back in. It's ugly and this is a family restaurant. :-)
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  64. There are no problems with continuous quantities. High school calculus is a perfect example of trivial, highly useful math that "just works" as long as you keep functions well behaved. For less well behaved functions proofs get a little more complicated, but there are no fundamental problems even with that, it just keeps getting technically challenging.
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  65. A jab at a famous holier than though drug addicted narcissist is always a good thing, even if it comes from a fellow narcissist. Say about Sabine what you want, but she appears to be sober most of the time. JP, put the crack pipe down! You are scaring the children! :-)
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  66. Yeah, that sounds good until you actually learn something about numbers in middle school. ;-)
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  67. There is a difference: the more you know, the more Peterson sounds like the bullshitter that he is. In physics it's the other way around: the more you know the less outrageous the theory becomes. Eventually you will learn that what you thought was absolute nonsense is actually the only viable logical alternative.
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  68. No, you are not, because an intuitionist doesn't call it meaningless. They call it unproven. A physicist will call it meaningless and then tell the spherical cow joke. Always a classic. ;-)
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  69. @casey206969 Intuitionist logic is simply false for finite sets. A statement about a finite set is automatically either true or false. You can simply test it for every member of the set. Unless, of course, you are willing to also give up on finite set theory in an intuitionist framework.
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  70. Nobody ever told you in high school that precision is important. You were just not listening to what we actually told you. ;-)
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  71.  @Montycarlo10  Nothing in physics is probabilistic. Random numbers don't obey any conservation laws. When we talk about local conservation laws like energy and momentum conservation, that's not a joke. Nature sticks to that. Even at the quantum level. What is true is that we are doing a really, really horrible job at teaching quantum mechanics. What we should be teaching is that series of quantum measurements are independent, i.e. the results of future measurements can not be predicated based on past measurements, but we should also emphasize that independence is NOT the same as randomness. It's a different criterion altogether. Random variables don't have to be independent (there are formulas to deal with correlations) and independent outcomes do not have to be random. Instead the local measurement is entangled (correlated) with the state of an unobserved (and in many cases unobservable system). This allows for the preservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum and charge but still delivers SEEMINGLY random results. This is also the deeper reason why quantum mechanics is not at all like probability theory, even if it shares a few axiomatic assumptions with it.
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  72. I understand JP just fine. He is a drug addicted bullshitter. ;-)
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  73. It's not clear that the Ptolemaic model actually represents the "normal" of what people thought about the issue. It was mostly pushed for religious reasons in the West.
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  74. Bohr's model was known to be wrong from the start and it does not describe spectra correctly. It just happens to work for a few spectral lines of hydrogen reasonably well but it doesn't work for anything else.
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  75.  @solconcordia4315  Of course an atom without excitation is dark. Where would the energy come from to make it radiate?
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  76.  @solconcordia4315  So that's an atom with excitation, then. Dude, you are making kindergarten mistakes here. ;-)
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  77.  @solconcordia4315  Observation is irreversible energy exchange. That's undergrad physics. ;-)
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  78.  @solconcordia4315  A harmonic oscillator wants you to hold its beer. :-)
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  79.  @solconcordia4315  And what's up with the bullshit anyway? ;-)
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  80. The power of physics lies exactly in that. "Good enough" is MUCH more powerful than "perfect". Even the mathematicians know that because they love equivalence classes, they are just hard to come by if you have to be exact. In physics we do not and that's why we can treat a lot of things as equivalent.
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  81. @ Mathematics is not science. It doesn't talk about the natural world. The entire universe could not implement even a single real number.
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  82. The universe was never deterministic. That's just a temporary delusion that was favored by mostly less than stellar thinkers of the 17th to 19th centuries.
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  83.  @Thomas-gk42  Newton already noticed that he couldn't solve the three body problem, which means he knew better, he just didn't want to admit it. ;-)
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  84. Very few folks and nobody who knows physics. ;-)
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