Just a quick shout out to my friend Steve Olson; who is doing the Wendy’s kick for a million tomorrow night. He got his name drawn, then made it past the quarter and semi finals to get a chance to kick for the chance of winning a bunch of prizes tomorrow.
See the quarter final here; the semi final here.
I will post the final video as soon as it’s up. Good luck Steve!
Edit: You made a good effort Steve. Here’s the final video.
I came across an interesting article, which was written way back in 1960 by Eugene Wigner, titled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. I wouldn’t normally reply to the deceased, but a few people have mentioned the article and support the viewpoint that it is a remarkable coincidence that we have laws of physics which can be expressed nicely by mathematics. I have had other discussions in which it was argued that the existence of laws of physics points to a higher intelligence of some sort (usually referred to as god).
The article excellently sums itself up in it’s conclusion,
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.
and I couldn’t disagree more (alright, maybe I could if he were a creationist or similar). To begin with, in much the same way that the universe is not fine tuned for life, mathematics as a whole is not particularly suited for describing reality. There have been many more mathematical theorems in history which are not used to describe any aspect of reality than those that have.
Mathematics is, at it’s most basic, an extension and continuation of formal logic. Because of this, some branch of mathematics can be used to describe any logically consistent system. Given that mathematics is just the study of logical conclusions, anything that obeys logic can be described by math. The fact that any particular bit of math applies to a particular situation in reality is mere coincidence. The only “remarkable” condition for the effectiveness of mathematics is that the universe be consistent. And, as we know from mathematics, if the universe had one inconsistency, then it would have to have every conceivable inconsistency (and probably some you can’t conceive of as well). Given that we have never observed even a single inconsistency, we can reasonably assume (though never completely prove, thanks Gödel!) that we live in a consistent universe. As such, it is perfectly reasonable (in fact, inevitable) that mathematics be so effective in the natural sciences.
My wife and I bought a new house, and I’ve been extremely busy with moving/renovating/repairs lately that I haven’t had any time to post. Hopefully I’ll be able to start posting more regularly again.
I got up this morning, checked my feeds, and found that ScienceDaily has a new article up. They claim that Einstein was wrong, and that his theory of relativity (the first clue that there’s a problem should come from the fact that they don’t differentiate between special and general) is inconsistent. Their source? A professor of politics. Through most of the article, I found myself wondering if they would ever actually give an example. They finally do, the so-called “Clock Paradox”. What they call the clock paradox is actually just a restatement of the Twin Paradox, which was long ago resolved in both special and general relativities (actually, it was never a problem in general relativity, because GR can use non-inertial frames).
This “paradox” can, in fact, be tested yourself. Just take a really accurate clock with you to the top of a mountain, leave one at home, and when you get back, the one you took with you will be behind the one you left home. Rank him on the crackpot index, and post your results in the comments.