Re: Landau letter, Re: Mathematica as a New Approach...
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- Subject: [mg128021] Re: Landau letter, Re: Mathematica as a New Approach...
- From: Ralph Dratman <ralph.dratman at gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2012 05:10:47 -0400 (EDT)
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I agree with John Doty. Without experimental verification, there would be no distinction between our description of the world and some endless discussion about dancing angels. But we do possess the ability to make measurements -- to compare received theory and recorded facts with our ideas. Performed continually all around us, the tests and re-tests lead to an amazingly consistent picture of our world as a real place with real physical laws. Even more surprisingly, the functioning of human technology demonstrates our great mastery of the situations and substances of that world. Can you doubt the little GPS in your car, and what we put in the skies to make it work? Do we now have a large robot functioning on Mars? Did we build a fire beside which the sun is a cold mist, and find within it a rare and tiny gem named Higgs? And here we encounter a genuine paradox: the confirmation -- ubiquitous, vivid, inarguable -- of the General Theory of Unreasonable Effectiveness. Ralph Dratman John Doty wrote, > But there's no physics here. It's all fantasy. There's nothing in this > that can be detected or measured by any achievable enhancement of human > senses. >