Re: The Golden Ratio

On 3/17/24 6:08 AM, J. J. Lodder wrote:

erik simpson <eastside.erik@gmail.com> wrote:
 

On 3/16/24 1:49 PM, J. J. Lodder wrote:

Bob Casanova <nospam@buzz.off> wrote:
>

On Thu, 14 Mar 2024 19:21:00 +0100, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J.
Lodder):
>

Bob Casanova <nospam@buzz.off> wrote:
>

On Thu, 14 Mar 2024 13:58:30 +0100, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J.
Lodder):
>

Bob Casanova <nospam@buzz.off> wrote:
>

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:39:38 +0100, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J.
Lodder):
>

Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com> wrote:
>

On 2024-03-07 22:31:27 +0000, Bob Casanova said:
>

On 7 Mar 2024 17:51:40 GMT, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by dgb (David)
<david@nomail.afraid.org>:
>

On 7 Mar 2024 at 17:41:02 GMT, "J. J. Lodder":
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dgb <david@nomail.afraid.org> wrote:
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On 7 Mar 2024 at 09:38:23 GMT, "J. J. Lodder":
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Kalkidas <eat@joes.pub> wrote:
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dgb (David) <david@nomail.afraid.org>

Does this occur by accident?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go

den

_ra

tio

Or by design?

>
It will never be known.

>
There is nothing to know there,
>
Jan

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The thing to know, Jan, is that it hasn't all happened by accid

nt!

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It hasn't happened at all.

>
You are, of course, mistaken.
>

Wrong. Nothing "happened"; the so-called Golden Ratio, like
all mathematical relationships which describe observed
phenomena, is a property of physical

>
mathematical
>

   reality, no more. And,
of course, no less.

>
You are wasting your breath. Bob is an incurable materialist,
incapable of abstraction and idealisation,
>

Ummm, I didn't say that there are no parts of math which are
abstract, only that all math relationships WHICH DESCRIBE
PHYSICAL PHENOMENA are properties of those phenomena.

>
So the integers are a property of your football scores?
"No more, and no less", like you say,
>

Overgeneralizations and "football scores" aside...
>
If I understand you, the mathematical relationships which
describe observed physical relationships do *not* describe
those relationships?

>
Mathematical relationships are mathematical.
They have nothing to do with any reality at all.
>

Whatever you say, Jan; math has no relationship, descriptive
or otherwise, to reality. Got it.

>
Good to see that you finally got it.
You may move up one level in the cave,
and forget about beating the chalk out of those blackboard erasers,
>
Jan
>

I just went back and read wigner's excellent essay on"Unreasonable
Effectiveness of Mathematics", which I'd never read before.  I love his
last paragraph
>
"Let me end on a more cheerful note. 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. We
should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future
research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our
pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches
of learning."
>
It's a gift that's tricky.  The Lamb shift, the positron were
"predicted" by the math, but to make the electric and magnetic fields of
classical electrodynamics symmetrical, we'd need a "magnetron".  No such
beast.  Even without that chimera, time advanced potentials as solutions
are unphysical, but the proposed reasons are uneasy. Particularly
applying this to quantum electrodynamics has (I think) not yet been
explained.

 
Wigner wrote at would I would call a 'Lord Kelvin moment'.
As you know, Kelvin wrote at the end of the 19th century
that all problems in physics had been solved,
except for two 'little black clouds on the horizon'.
And indeed, mathematical physics, to which he had contributed so much,
had been succesful beyond expectations.
 
The 'small black clouds' on Kelvin's horizon
were tackled almost at once, by Planck and Einstein,
with two major scientific revolutions as a result,
and a whole century of new physics.
 
Wigner likewise stood at such a high point.
Quantum field theory was being unreasonably succesful,
the extraordinary accuracy to ten decimal places or so
hadn't been foreseen by anyone,
and the remaining problems (weak and strong interactions)
looked like they would be wrapped up soon in the same way.
There were only two small black clouds on the horizon...
(quantum gravity and explaining those dimensionless numbers)
 
Wigner has been less lucky.
The 'black clouds on his horizon' have expanded to fill the whole sky,
they have only grown blacker, and there is no solution in sight.
 
So we get plenty of books about 'The Crisis in Physics' instead,
 
Jan
 

All too true.  We've seen the "End of Physics" before, and we've seen
the abyss before.  Something always seems to show up that we didn't
expect.

It's turtles all the way down.