--- On Thu, 12/23/10, einseele <einse...@gmail.com> wrote:
============== G old: What makes no sens is speculation about the pataphysical nature and reasons of the counter-clockwise structure of our "world" and about its clockwise structured shadow counter-world. =========== E: I liked this the most and you are a good writer, no doubt Unfortunately physics is beyond reach to me, and I want to call the attention to your line above. It has humor, makes sense, denotes high education levels, and the special rhythm of good literature You could have it said totally different, but you chose the literary pathway, why But even in case you decide to say the same using a cold approach the question should sustain, because whatever we said/write is always the barrier between us and that we want to refer. Language has two ends, like a bridge, we are stuck on this side. This is an old debate and I will not add anything of value of course, we dont have any other means but language. I do regret yes, when the thinker does not take this in account, or when s/he tries to discover special brain circuits or chemicals to bypass what is obvious, which is the fact that we are separate forever from the same we want to grasp on. I'm also a defender of poetry, which IMO is the closest form to understand that that we will never be able to say. Your line is a good case of what I'm saying here. ============= G: Thanks very much indeed. I'm gratified and if I answer only now, it's due to a catastrophe: the cats have pissed on my keyboard which started displaying some strange, rather poetic things having however nothing to do with what I tried to type. So I had to wait and steal enough coins from the cats' milk savings box to by a new one. Back to poetry, most great scientists were also artists in some way, often mixing it up with their science. Outside his science Einstein played violin, but within it considered intuition as 90% of physics, maths making the vague intuition more precise. He was choosing his axioms mainly by esthetic criteria and wanted theories to be beautiful. Our discussion started with the abstract "nature" of mass. Now, here is what Feynman says about the "nature" of another abstraction, to wit, energy. If that's not poetry then it's well imitated: *** There is a fact, or if you wish, a law governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law – it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call “energy,” that does not change in the manifold changes that nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is a strange fact that when we calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same. It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy “is.” We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reason for the various formulas. *** As for literature, I play with it in my idle moments and some of the results may be seen in http://findgeorges.com/ROOT/WRITINGS/LITERATURE/ Most are in French and if you don't read it, have a look at PASSION WEEK and EXECUTIVE BATH POLISHERS. Cheers Georges. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to epistemol...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
