What Hath God (the Particle) Wrought
L. Edgar Otto Monday, 23 July, 2012
I find it clear that there are strong views, rather confused as to the certainty of fact or faith in foundations, as to the so called discovery or verification of the Higgs and its mechanism. Philosophically, this is a continuation of the creative patterns of the open prospects and closed scope of man's imagination. The circle of books is said to be the basis of our beliefs (culture), morals, and dreams. But this has it dark interpretation- as world without traditions, all higher concerns relative so pointless to apply some value to, and in the end the dreams of a robot or mad tremors of a grounding in chance and chaos.
The game of science is not a lottery or a struggle only where the commitment to a faith or method is at risk from the evidence of the day, there is resistance of course if the last generation does not vanish from the fray that the new with blind innocence chases the utmost refinement, room at the bottom of scale and the depth of probing the universe in which we imagine an absolute nothingness impossible and ever far away. New ideas, new media and the message and the nature of the aether's and carriers of signals, at first seem like items of worship to which these too become replaced as if an idol like all left empty patterns of our once living room to grow now petrified wood.
In the theory game apparently much depends on the bluff as much as the deal, even in an honest game- we reach too far sometimes in the bet, unjustified risks or fear of the risk taking- we exceed the intuition some of us can all a sense beyond the ordinary physical, beyond the depths of what seems to be nature dealing a new hand improbably and far beyond coincidence. So some it seems have claimed the pot, and some have folded out of the game and it is not clear if higher laws or gods know the hidden hands, if in a real sense those hands are so known before shown, only if something higher calls us then the suite and sequence is known, is actual in the moving record, and even then chance and weights and measures are full of jokers wild.
I sense that theories that are too simple, and simply seen, are not welcome to the dialog- also those that have a certain formality by their complexity but not complex beyond a certain point of the powers and endowments of the age. In the larval world of such discourse I find it most odd, even beyond wise people thinking they can win the game by calling each other crackpot- that in so many directions of a growing complexity in the landscape of say topology to one they are more disoriented than expert jugglers of a higher vision that is real that the simple bureaucratic mind in its veto cannot understand.
It is however difficult naturally on the frontiers to learn to distinguish the real and the false dream even with awareness of the problem. The spirit or its pretensions or its distant instinct can exist yet be off the bell curve in either direction. The extremes are at once a matter of humility as well a social and individual sense of pride or shame.
Certainty the landscape is vast for strings and for the idea of complex spaces in the projections beyond the current scope of physics that begins to feel at home with that level of numbers and rules for the limitations of a representational design- these the still somewhat mysterious questions of the projective plane and (quasically) going beyond it to swim in the new space not just keep our feet on the bottoms. How is it that Jester and Lubos, and Pitkanen can speak so much of the same sort of compactification space and conclude if the Higgs is needed or not or if there is a verification and one that would have come on any scale given the chance and intelligibility of physics. What are the abstract points in the theory that grounds such complex space if from my view each themselves can be a singularity in its widest sense- how much larger then is that of which physics cannot see and desires to bury its head by the sand reckoner's in a very wide count but finite sand?
The terms used by these physicist, who offer as if to publish or perish for the sake of the future game and its evolving, of some degree of relative complicated work under some idea of an umbrella that serves for the simplicity- at least to convince the lay of the need for the research and its cost and its promises, seem to approach a higher view here and there of which few may evaluate even among the experts- one cannot say off hand any theory along the way, or offering by a fellow human, will be a wasted effort and wasted career to abandon in their shame. What then will be the future as well as the state of our vision? I refuse to think that our generation, held back so long by the steep learning curve of the effort and distance from the deepest foundations at least in philosophy will forever abandon the spirit of the quest, the life force that we should recognize as much a part of us as our sentience this desire to enquire.
Are we in a new perhaps rude awakening or are we willing to give in to the cold so as to fall asleep, to say in the cosmology and this so called swan song of particle physics that this golden age, maybe the only one, has passed?
But somewhere on the coast far from the explosion of conquest and civilization as the dark age again falls upon us, a few lonely monks continue work to save what they can of civilization, and yes perhaps to enjoy illustrating what is their link to being alive or perhaps for God's work or the hope there is more that is something like it to what we ourselves may yet become.
Or accepting life to some point, we all part Anabaptist's looking for some certainty, tradition, in the constant technological change, make good jelly, raise barns together, get the descent down Bourbon Street out of our systems as we fatten the pig at the festival of Mardi Gras in the carefree but dangerous age before the hurricane, before the earth bled so much oil, before or levy failed as it seems to inevitably do until we reach again the carbon pure drinking water of the delta. The music of the spheres can be a twilight march or it can be the escape into the soundtrack of the jazz.
To the explorers to come, do not despair of the quest or the roadblock of self doubt and over done or empty pages, outlandish outfits, common metal coins, that the world and more is within your reach and is perhaps the highest of life work, as it is challenging still the mundane, for which the human spirit aspires. To command the forces of the destroyer you must also create and ride the quasar steps and half mourn we and others if failed stars for that is what stands out that gives our enterprise noble value.
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Some number play involving 89...
137.29189988773464578440136113308
337.524424...
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As complicated as the topology (pre-quantum) is we can see it as rather sterile and abstract to which it does not necessarily connect to the concrete or the process cement of physicality. It seems to do so but it can be empty in the sense of moving the same meaningless objects around in a room as if to make a difference in the cleaning it up. This too the rote of counting or the shifting of matrices as if we expect to glimpse what the transformations may touch and actually teach us.
As this blog has progressed I have tried to bring home from my isolated and independent views questions on the foundations. I apologize with excuse as I am not trained in the methods for entering the dialog with fellow bloggers before I knew how they were trained in and using the terms by which as written and of what I said it must be confusing at the best and unintelligible at the worst. As with the ambiguous mood and spirit of a poem that focuses many meanings my system also strives to have, or imagine it has, meaning there if we but seek it and after unique or random journeying hope to obtain the wisdom I plant within.
Kahler, compactification? I watch the theories form as if so many weeds in the prairie and yes they have beautiful flowers. Yes, these are not always the Prairie in a Can that the style of flowers reflect the wide openness not corrupted from the narrow path and original dream. Life, itself should not be described as if only meaningless objects moved from place to place in a limited room. While such theories are beautiful and have a fine mathematical physics development we can still ask if it is art.
But of the mysteries of numbers themselves there is more to consider, perhaps a wider role for the transcendentals in the Ramanujan like relations of pi and phi and Euler et al. As with the hidden we can imagine wider worlds and generalizations and feel somewhat assured that the invention of a compass is not needed to guide us, nor the clocks, as we find our direction leaving a rope behind us strait behind our wagon leaving tracks in the mud and grasses, long enduring our footprints, just a jumble there but full of forgetfulness, as we dare to cross some great divide.
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