L. Edgar Otto 13 May, 2012
Defining a PhD as an independent project, the lonely determination of what can be a contribution or a style of seeing things on one's own without the art being overseen by those in higher in position in the institutions of learning and research rarely is done the old fashioned way of doing original and fundamental projects.
I find it interesting that the questions as to how geometry and mathematical analysis in general is understood and debated on the frontiers of today's physics - not that long ago was a public debate on the Internet as a matter of Sacred Geometry. This added fuel to such debates beyond the obvious first postings of what is the reference sections of our book libraries hard to check out, heavy, and becoming more and more accessible to everyone.
It more than fulfills my dream of carrying the whole library at the Chapel Hill campus in '74 on a small card- after all the whole Bible then could be printed on an area of a square millimeter. It is quite and awakening really to go past the idea of concrete pages or that in many ways ideas endure better in virtual space than the fine arts of ink and pigments.
So, in the area of Sacred Geometry on the web in the early 90's we had to gentlemen, I have talked to both, and eventually one theory came to court in Buffalo as to who owned the vision. One that occurred to Stan Tennen of meru.org which Dan Winter used freely without attributing the source, evidently. Dan was here to talk to the water department about things that can improve the water by such geometry.
One great dispute between them was the special role Mr. Winter gave to the golden ratio in his spirals and all and the stacking of dodecahedra in the DNA (but who knows if this was a general idea or someone else's? I do know that after reading Klein in '66 I myself stacked these things in relation to the structure of DNA only I used icosahedra. There of course are first blush theories needing refinement in the many levels of complexity including how we read the general code as an algebraic code. Mr. Tenen appeared on the Art Bell show after someone else published a popular book on such code analysis, but Newton himself had this as a major area of his thinking, that and he was our last great astrologer.
But for me, in that it is falsifiable science as modeling I tend to descend from Tycho and Kepler in their models and the compromise of world systems of models - only this should be done with higher dimensional spaces such as the polytopes in four space where the golden ratio is the key value over our three space square root of two in relation to volumes.
We cannot deny that that irrational number is special among the irrationals as the slowest one but Mr. Tenen argued that it was just one making such spirals among many and was nothing special. This is a usual debate found in sacred geometry or other mysteries concerning Fibonacci spiraling as an accident of say pressure on a sunflower or an active law of nature in at least the symmetry of living things. Tenen also had a metaphor of a candle in a tent of which there is a great looping of the torus like spirals involved.
Now Tenen had what he called a vision of mystical force with the realization that we could view the origin of the Hebrew alphabet in the handedness of wires or other models of other materials viewed and twisted certain ways and so developed the models as if they came from some deeper space or symmetry- and such visions of theory seem to impress us with something deep and unifying, sacred perhaps and other worldly. So I ask you (btw Korean writing is sensibly based on the structures of the mouth as an alternative to picture languages and to western sequential alphabets.)
I suggest also that the cvcvc general structure of Semitic language has in its core the idea of triality as in the quarks or of three space as limited within what for most appears a subjective idea of time as the fourth dimension. If we divide the world of Platonic perfection as a circle or sphere this way then if this is a stand in for the universe as if the One, the Good, the God as in Spinoza's pantheism then to develop string theory is very much the idea of the development of the Christian trinity and last year others have remarked on this thought.
So much of modern physics (beyond the less than adequate power of analysis and the non rigorous understanding of say quantum theory in terms of complex space or the separation of such spaces into the real and imaginary parts that works with perhaps not understand why yet we can use this principle to see structures and go beyond their compass a bit) as if such an epiphany or mystical vision is now thought physics rather than metaphysics. (Clearly such a method or mechanism that seems consistent and works is within quantum theory in complex space consideration over continuity and the discrete that something like the at first questionable and later accepted but limited idea of "renormalization" is a grounding or explanation of this duality as one result for wave mechanics.) Look up the equations.
Now, if it is considered physical and not sacred geometry that we observe mass by the difference in handedness of spinning particles, in matter the anti-matter rarer and spinning in the opposite sense around some hidden influence (some interpret as a mental influence) on the quantum level of physics (and yes what happens when things are reduced again linearly as a three way system of our early idea of strings- which quark is the center and why do flavors mix in other particles or half mirrored ones?) How is this different from the total vision of Tenen with his twists of bits of wire not a matter of Sacred geometry as explanation?
We can have total theories that are intelligible and consistent and yet as different theories seem to either side as pseudoscience to the grounding of ones own science and the meet and renormalize in the usual and Euclidean topology of space or the mechanism thought deeper or not as a total theory. We ask of a generalization, especially where in something like scale the grounding of the theory is mutually contradictory yet in the physics these are complimentary how do we adjust the subjectivity as a model and ground for a theory of everything in this matter of phase spin that still leaves us with a dramatic mysterious vision outside the mechanism as if something is there mysterious, as if moreover our reasonable ideas of chance can only be understood beyond our human intuition as a great mystery, one consistent perhaps in a philosophical stance, as all such stances are tenable, that this proves the unknown that there is a God or no God. or even a theory of everything or none.
It is the usual result of such initial visions of higher structures in the abstraction of thinking if not the reality of space itself that at first, and apparently even to "God particles although this applied as a watered down secular metaphor such as the crosses on Cimbrian flags, that we feel something hidden of which we see and touch at least in our minds as actually sacred.
I note today Lubos rants against the understand of basic physics by Hossenfelder (perhaps she was the model for the lady competitor in the show Big Bang of which we read in the post that Lubos contains all things in such a model as a theory of everything if there is to be other generalities imagined.) She says she just does not read him and I suspect I can no longer comment on his blog and why should I expect civil discourse. However, it is quite clear to me that from my view with a lack of education that both of these working physicists seem rather primitive to me in their writings- I suspect that the grounding of all things is not just some form of the vague term "quantum gravity".
I certainly disagree with Lubos that there is no third way in physics but agree the changes from the higher physics to say the familiar one of Newton in everyday experiences is not a very great and compelling issue or area in which to breakthrough- the geometry of Einstein, as he seems well enough to know himself and called a little demented in old age for such dreams of unification at a time of no such theory thought there sacred or not, at a time when geometry especially the spherical kind was no long a subject in the curriculum at American universities ( a genius like Coxeter reset things again as well as the need to design computers back to the old plane or brane of the drawing board of ideas in reflection.)
Of course if you will not nor cannot see or trust that a third way was consistent as far as it goes to some completion of a model or system and in some directions all systems of that which since the beginning science seeks what is hidden in nature then one simply cannot see it- but intellectually those who can from some original and fundamental or climb to even the given steep curve of expertise in learning will and can, and they well see as those in some future near misses of some almost reached essential idea, and science or not this will be laughable or forgotten, or given some random name of those who discovered something back when while that no longer matters or the life of those who bore or claimed the name or were at once at the frontier of discovery or invention or contrivance of concepts.
In the development of the alpahnumeric age, at the beginning, it is clear that such a pattern of hidden visions of this model, or its establishing into symbols, while setting up the structure of wisdom in the generality of the discrete and continuous for a little deeper reasons that the two great physics, in the understanding of infinite things and there meaning a few finite symbols can describe the greater scope as an indefinite compass if extended- but in the understanding of the finite things, the mechanism or hidden vision of such a symbol system, we can encompass a wide reach of our intellect and imagination to which at least in its measure our gathering of information or dreams is not out of reach of most anyone. In the trials of life as said of a God that tests his subjects it seems not more than the soul can bare.
Most such alphabets tend to be set into or develop into such a pattern of simple geometric structures and the number of them with a bias toward one or the other of some count of mirrors as if points of duality (of polyhedra) and where they change over time, as if a mixing of hidden symmetries of such particles as in the shift of pronunciation in spoken language often in a law of predictable cycles- the hidden meaning of our sounds and symbols can be contained and influenced by such triality as that which underlies the vision of strings that the atomic phenomes and phenemes have some levels of depth as if a subatomic structure. Whether this is seen as one or another mirror that has the strength of a core vision so as to measure the open or closed cathedral of our intellect and consciousness shows it more in the focusing into events than some simple debate of a two way dialectic which seems to be the ongoing source of conflict between humans in matters of philosophy as an ongoing rebirth of life and death ideologies.
This is not to say that such enterprises of our thinking is not useful work to do in our society, nor that it should not be encouraged and protected in academic freedom or with the laurels of tenure on which a fresh young Einstein sometimes milks by his contribution for a lifetime, after all the people want the spectacle of gladiators an hope to escape their lot as slaves, to escape or rise up against the old order. All perhaps very Freudian in some respects of hidden dreams.
But this just cannot be all there is even in a world of closed physics that in the replication and inheritance of prestige the sons and daughters merely pass on the same ideas in the similarity of something like the selfish genes and do not reach for their world a wider place of new and original fundamental theories, open to the mainstream as idea in our just right balance of wisdom, not monsters at the extremes. Know ye not natures has a suggestion of what is outside that that can arise as a surprise or is physics a private destiny that reaches to the utmost vanishing of that seen in the distance as our thought still race with Achilles we of the moment on the one unitary level of an arrow in an instant of some higher flight that still cannot be said to contain anything but the mystery of rest and motion- if you cannot question this you may be good scientists and engineers but you are no philosopher.
How do you get a philosopher off your doorstep? - Pay for the pizza. I find it interesting that today in the USA that we have doubled in the last couple of years to over ten thousand the number of PhD's going from graduate school directly to welfare.
* * * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment