Finally, a poster at Men’s News Daily points me to something good! I guess PBS has a special about Issac Newton, which they will assuredly put out on DVD where I can get it sometime. It’s should be pretty interesting, because they go past that apple crap and the usual “inventor-of-calc-same-position-at-Cambridge-as-Hawking” trivia and into his work in things like religion and alchemy. There wasn’t a single intellectual persuit in the 1600′s that he wasn’t persuing and some of it was downright heretical, which of course was a big deal back then. It sounds great and I can’t wait to see it.
But that’s not the cool part. The cool part is where Mike LaSalle uses it as a launching point to be utterly baffling. One of Newton’s projects, apparently, was predicting the Apocalypse. He said 2060 was the year to wait for. Someone else, who is going on my mySpace friends list right fucking now, says something big is in the works for 12/21/2012. As far as I can tell, LaSalle puts more stock in this guy’s prediction than Newton’s, which is some balls, I’ll admit. LaSalle reconciles this by pitting Newton vs Einstien, giving the edge to Newton, but claiming that if Newton had been aware of time dilation, he’d of said 2012 as well. I have no idea what is going on in this post, but I love it. Love. It.
We’re also reminded that the sort of Sheer Human Genius evinced in a guy like Isaac Newton – a man of humble origins – only comes around once every 500 years in human history.
That got me thinking about “Science” as a human Institution, and how it develops over time, and who exactly are these amazing commoners who spring from nowhere and drive all of humanity forward with singularly original ideas?
Einstein, of course, is oft-cited as our local genius for having delivered E=MC2 to us.
The thing is, Newton was born in 1643, and Einstein was born in 1879 – 236 years later.
I guess he means local in time, rather than space, because I’m pretty sure Einstein didn’t live anywhere around me. We’d have a plaque or a statue or something if he did.
I’m also not sure where he gets this 500 years stuff, despite his citations at the end of the post. But if that’s what it takes to justify a Newton-Einstein cage match, then let’s roll with it. My money’s on Newton-you got to watch those lanky, sly ones.
When Isaac Newton watched the legendary apple falling from the tree, he assimilated and conceptualized and finally observed (in anthropic terms) the causal relationships between time, space and mass. A central feature of this new cosmological view was the Theory of Gravity.
I don’t know what my physics profs would have said about that paragraph, but I think I can guess what my high school writing teachers would have said.
The Theory of Gravity (and all the other ancillary mechanical and mathematical proofs originated by Newton), became a “thought-gift” to a world just-then ready to accept these fundamental Truths of Nature.
Truths-upper-case-T, eh? Sounds heavy. You know what’s tragic though? That Newton didn’t have access to all those great discoveries and theories that were established centuries after his death. He probably could have more accurately predicted Armegeddon, or perhaps actually turned lead into gold. At least, I think that’s the gist of it.
Genius though he was (perhaps humanity’s Top Gun), Isaac Newton could not have conceptualized Relativity without first having invented – for all the world – the very foundations upon which Relativity would rest some two and a half centuries later.
Had Newton the benefit of Einstein’s insights, he may have considered the impact of Time Dilation in his calculation predicting the date of Armeggedon at 2060AD.
I can’t make fun of Mike too much because I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not. I hope to God he is. I have to admit, though, that in reading the post all I could think about was that older guy in my quantum class who couldn’t sit through a discussion about an abstract concept without saying “Is that something like…?” and proceeding to ramble on about something completely freakin’ different while the rest of us just kind of gaped at him with open mouths and fantasized about hitting him with any one of Griffith’s excellent texts.
Einstein, of course, is oft-cited as our local genius for having delivered E=MC2 to us.
Ten buck says he has no idea what C is.
Ol’ Isaac has a special place in my heart since he’s spatially local to me – I pass his old school when I go to visit the folks. And, of course, we have the Isaac Newton Shopping Centre (mall), complete with enormous apple hanging from the ceiling.
E=MC^hammer, the other equation einstein came up with.
Fun fact number Teh One about Isaac Newton: Died a virgin. Fun Fact number Teh Two: He was supposed to be a totally self centered, obnoxious asshole to everyone, including his rivals and basically anyone who didn’t worship and stroke his ego like it was a divine thing.
So he’s basically the scientist mascot for Men’s News Daily.
How on earth didn’t you know about 12/21/2012 though? The long count mayan calender stops on that date, the freaky “singularity” libertarians are supposedly going to upload their conciousness to the computers on that day, it’s kind of ridiculous how much really cool stuff is happening on 12/21/2012, I for one have a prophesy that I’ll be astoundingly drunk.
I knew the Mayan calendar stopped sometime this century, but I didn’t know or remember the exact date. I like my conspiracy/metaphysics/pseudoscience as much as the next person, but beyond a couple of books on the Loch Ness Monster, tarot and of course a healthy collection of Robert Anton Wilson, I don’t spend as much time reading it as I did in high school.
What the fuck is this dude’s point? I’m a physicist and whenever anyone talks about Newton or Einstein, I get interested, but this guys seems to make the point that Newton was our 500-year genius and we can’t have any more for another 500 years. And that no tiene sentido. Am I just missing the point??
Am I just missing the point??
Yes, I am.
Isaac Newton could not have conceptualized Relativity without first having invented – for all the world – the very foundations upon which Relativity would rest some two and a half centuries later.
Sorry, but physics don’t work that way no more. What Einstein did was he showed that reality had four dimensions (which Newton trivialized into only three dimensions). What was the point of the post at MND?
Sorry, but relativity reduces to n-dimensional space in the low speed limit.
You’re a physicist?… what, like a meteorologist?…
You’re not missing the point. I think. What I got out of it was the the author of the post watches the occassional PBS special and knows words like conceptualized and anthropic, although it’s so garbled I’m not completely sure he’s using them correctly. I’m still really hoping LaSalle is doing some kind of satire, but a quick glance at other stuff he’s written didn’t provide enough context to make a good call.
I just had to emerge from lurker-dom to express my complete bafflement.
This must be how my humanities-studying friends feel when I start talking about Shakespeare or history.
except in the non-US world of course, where we put the date as 21/12/2012 … so they’re going nuts about the 20th of December (20/12/2012) instead of the 21st.
and
so who was the genius of the 12th Century, then? Henry VI* perhaps?
* (think: Investitures Struggle)
relativity reduces to n-dimensional space in the low speed limit.
Huh? You mean 3-dimensional space, right? N-dimensions are hypothetically possible (see string theory), but the special relativistic equations only describe four-vectors and how they transform. And I’m not exactly a physicist yet, since I’m still in college.
I could have been more clear:
I was referring to N-dimensional Euclidean space, which is also called Cartesian space or n-space. It is a standard exercise in general relativity textbooks to compute the number of algebraically independent components of the Riemann or Weyl tensors at each point of an n dimensional manifold.
Sorry.
Right, okay. My bad. Not your fault, I read your statement incorrectly.
Alright, what the hell is this:
http://mensnewsdaily.com/images/opt/bicameraluniverse_printable.gif
more cartesian whatsits:
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2006/07/06/depardeux-a-dual-exhaust-universe/
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2006/07/10/fermions-v-bosons-up-always-wins/print/
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2006/07/09/holy-grail-batman-the-fundamental-particle-is-us/print/
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2006/07/02/the-bicameral-universe-a-thrice-told-tale/
wtf? WTF??!!!
WTF indeed.
I love this:
The following article is an expression of opinion. I assert no “truths” other than those I believe are commonly accepted by the scientific or (responsible) religious communities.
Ok, so we can assume you aren’t a scientist and everything below those statements are direct ass-pullage. Thanks for telling us you are just a bullshiter. And no one believes in science. They trust the scientific method. No faith enters into it. Reproducible experimental results are the source of all science.
I must say, this guy is a lot like the timecube guy.
Why are they trying to educate their readership in the first place? I thought learning things was for sissy girly men.
I. Mobius – good. god. damn. Just, wow.
if we are talking about bosons, two is really ONE.
This and the restatement of the Pauli exclusion principle are the only two he makes that are based on any physics at all. It’s like he found some nutcase who took a few physics courses and then reproduced his ideas as science. And the graph he makes of the bicameral universe is just priceless.
I have to run some errands. Can someone else make the obvious “inside his cranium” joke? Thanks.
Chris, I want to stay as far away from inside his cranium as possible. I would say that, if a black hole existed anywhere near him (within the event horizon) he wouldn’t be troubling our poor craniums with bullshit pseudo-physics.
Oh, that was funny. It gave me this picture of Mike LaSalle being sucked into a black hole (think of an effect like when the Futurama ship got sucked into one) and his last thought being “hmm, different than I thought,” too pompous to panic, even at the very end.
I mean, come on, “the Blessed Country of Dostoevsky!“? “But what you don’t know, my dear Ejecta“? Someone thinks he’s a Renessance man.
Yes, December 21st, 2112 is, in fact, the end of the current “B’aktun”, a period in the Mayan long count, but note this, from Wikipedia:
“The last creation ended on a long count of 13.0.0.0.0. Another 13.0.0.0.0 will occur on December 21, 2012, and it has been discussed in many New Age articles and books that this will be the end of this creation or something else entirely. However, the Maya abbreviated their long counts to just the last five vigesimal places. There were an infinite number of larger units that were usually not shown. When the larger units were shown (notably on a monument from Coba), the end of the last creation is expressed as 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0, where the units are obviously supposed to be 13s in all larger places. In this age we are only approaching 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.13.0.0.0.0, and the larger places are nowhere near the 13s that would match the end of the last creation. (Schele and Friedel 1990: 430)
This is confirmed by a date from Palenque, which projects forward in time to 1.0.0.0.0.0, which will occur on 13 October, 4772. The Classic Period Maya obviously did not believe that the end of this age would occur in 2012. According to the Maya, there will be a baktun ending in 2012, a significant event being the end of a 13th 400 year period, but not the end of the world.”
The idea that the end of the B’aktun signles the destruction of the world is mostly an artifact of the New Age movement, which has polluted the study of Mesoamerican mythology to a very large degree (See Velikovsky’s Chariots of the Gods, for example, or Castaneda’s books).
This frustrates the heck out of me, because Mesoamerican mythology is quite fascinating. For example, rather then the small, personal time-scales New Agers attach to Classical Mayan dates, the information above indicates that the Mayan’s concieved of an unimaginably ancient cycle of time, going back septillions of years.
Another thing to note is that there is, if I recall correctly, evidence that the Classical Maya thought that the end of a B’aktun cycle would bring some sort of upheavel or great historical event.
But the point is, we’ll still be here.
Ouch:
“BTW – readers should disabuse themselves of the notion that a universe “filled” with blackholes would somehow rip us all apart. The “migratory” nature of consciousness as I have described it prevents The Eternal Present from ever falling within the event horizon of any black hole in your proximty. By definition, the Present is a transitional phase between potential and realization. If the universe really were filled with blackholes – you would never notice it because the Present is always just ahead of the escape horizon for matter. I also submit that the ‘Present’ represents the “leading edge” of momentum from the Big Bang. Thus the Present occurs at MC2, relative to the escape velocity of matter.”
Oh, man I can’t take anymore! STOP! Einstein has gotta be flipping him off from beyond the grave. Or at least giving him a raspberry.
Ah, yes, I recall the Eternal Present from quantum mechanics class, although I could never do that stupid integral that related it to consciousness. Well, actually, I could do an algebra-based localzed consciousness matrix in 2 dimensions, but I never quite got the integral form of the Universal Consciousness in higher dimensions. I think it had something to do with my chakras, which are not as open as they should be.
That, of course, wasn’t good enough for my honors committee and I ended up leaving Pulled It Out of My Ass University with a standard degree instead of an honors one.
So far I don’t know what to think. I came upon this thread because I am interested in the Mayan Calander. I heard THIS on radio station kpfa. It’s an interview with a woman who is an expert on astrology and the Mayan Calendar. I am totally spooked by all of this.
That Cartesian graph from the Mike LaSalle articles is a full-on copy of the Fibonnaci sequence. Check out the formula he uses and then compare it to the graph. It’s fucking bizarre because if you start counting out square roots all the way to 27, (the number of dimensions that LaSalle is predicting with his “formual” mc3 3 (it’s cubed, and then cubed again = 27), it’s a perfect Fibonnaci “circle”. Now that’s fucking weird and I don’t care who the fuck wrote it. I’m fucking freaked out.
Well, read the time-cube guy I linked to above (Don’t read too much, your brain will fucking melt). Then you won’t feel freaked out. Mike LaSalle seems to have listened to a few too many crazies (or is, in fact, crazy himself) who knew a little bit about physics, but only enough to be able to spout words associated with physics.
I should say, you probably will be freaked out, but you’ll be laughing your ass off as well.
I. Mobius, don’t let yourself get spooked by people playing with numbers. 9,999 times out of 10,000 you’ll be getting worked up over nothing, and that last time will turn out to be a coincidence.
Timecube is always bookmarked on my computer, but I can only read like six or seven sentences at a time on that site. It hurts too much.
I can’t understand timecube guy, but I think lasalle is reading this thread:
quote:
Human consciousness therefore is an emergent outcome of the staccato discontinuities between the side of the chamber that is inflating, and the side that is correspondingly deflating. (The passage of time that we perceive is an illusion populated by the end results of our past cumulative decisions.) Thus a more “concrete” explanation for the phenomenon we call the “Present” might be the following: two incredibly long but precisely balanced “trains” of causes (each carrying the entire mass of the universe), collide into each other with such force that it violates the Uncertainty Principle by nullifying it. The high-speed collision of these opposite particles has so much energy that – while most of the mass involved is simply annihilated, some of it is propelled outside the event horizon of either pair – making of itself a third party observer to its own annihilation. This would explain why the Present is Eternal, but can never be observed in the past or future tense – an observer can only observe his own total annihilation in the present tense.
I submit that a disoriented observer (e.g., a newborn baby) experiences time as a totality without causes – it’s as though the paradoxical conflict between creation and destruction is solved by allowing both to exist forever and simultanously..
So he’s trying to use vocabulary from quantum mechanics to prove the existence of God. Well, it’s a good thing he’s just a really smart layman with alot of time on his hands and not an actual physicist, because I’m pretty sure there isn’t alot of funding for that particular project right now.
I am also not clear on the formula. Does he mean (MC^3)^3 or (MC)^9? What are the units on “world lines” A? It would have to be something like the fourth root kg^9 * (m/s)^9 or kg^3*(m/s)^9 and what is that supposed to describe?
Perhaps I am just particularly blind to his brilliance. Maybe he should create an elementary text for us newbs.
I.Mobius, you’re not putting alot of stock in this guy, are you? Because there are way better metaphysicians out there with way more accesible insane theories to persue. Seriously, I’d learn Tarot before I’d actually sit down and do a real unit analysis of LaSalle’s theory. At least Tarot has some applications if you’re into meditation.
So he’s trying to use vocabulary from quantum mechanics to prove the existence of God. Well, it’s a good thing he’s just a really smart layman with alot of time on his hands and not an actual physicist, because I’m pretty sure there isn’t alot of funding for that particular project right now.
*sigh*
I would just like to take this opportunity to be completely self-aggrandizing and point out not only ooh ooh do I know someone else who tried to use mathematics as proof o’God–Hrosvitha Von Gandersheim, 10th century nun and playwright–I was IN the very play wherein this proof is made.
I don’t remember how the proof went. I do remember that later there were tits being cut off and disembowellment and stuff. Good times, man. I wrote about it here:
http://fetchmemyaxe.blogspot.com/2006/01/nobody-knows-im-thespian.html
Yes, I am a Real Live Actor-Type Person (sometimes), and I was -in this play,- which is clearly only a step away from a BRoadway revival. Who wants to touch me?
e^(πi) 1 = 0
Shite. there shouls be a plus-sign after the exponential. And it’s the coolest formula ever. If God exists, he definitely thought that one up. ‘Course, Euler was pretty awesome in his own right.
Plus signs tend to dissappear in wordpress, dunno why.
mattH, was that link supposed to go somewhere?