studiot

This to introduce a discussion on the proposition that Philosophy is still valuable in this day and age, dominated as it is by scientific considerations. Some have argued that Philosophy has become redundant in modern times and that Science can somehow replace all its functions. I argue that this is not the case, but that the issues have moved on for some and we would be well served to stop re-enacting old battles and put our efforts into new matters. By way of example here is a sequence of instances culminating in a modern day issue. The ancient Greeks were so distressed about irrational numbers that they tried to forcibly suppress knowledge of them. In the Middle Ages, a similar thing happend with the discovery of imaginary numbers. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Science learned to exclude uncomfortable matters 'by definition'. Today that exclusion process is being applied to 'information' and full consideration of its nature. I argue that Philosophy offers an independent forum for the conduction of such consideration, regardless of how useful and successful a tightly conrolled scientific definition might be.

And thereby lies a mathematical contradiction. Mu-nought and epsilon-nought in your formula are scalar constants. That means they are independent of direction. The condition for them to become direction dependent is that they are no longer scalars but in fact tensors (not even vectors will do). This is in fact achieved under non isotropic conditions. However the rub is that there is no such thing as the square root of the ratio of two tensors.

Hopefully the trash can is not quite full yet. I would recommend anyone who would like further informatuion to start their own thread, rather than try to disentangle this one.

I thank you for responding to one thing I said, but I am sorry that you simple demonstrated that you don't know what you are talking about. If you want more explanation all you had to do was ask. Instead you chose, yet again, to challenge an attempt to help with nonsense. How can a point in space be counted a zero ? This means that if I label a point 'zero' and I am counting points that I have no points ie you are saying a point is not a point ! I am becoming weary of putting time and effort into this to no apparent purpose.

The first two lines are not true. I recently quoted Euclid axioms which state exactly the last line to someone. Was that someone yourself ?

I agree with both you and swansont, however I was holding off infinity until we had determined other definitions since CE is mixing up physics and maths, as several people have now commented. It should also be pointed out that there is more than one type of infinity (or meaning to the word) which makes things more complicated. I have already pointed out the easier question that we need CE's definition of natural numbers. So thank you for this @Conscious Energy OK so you wish to include 0 in the natural numbers. That is fine. Some Mathematicians include zero some do not. Personally I prefer to start at 1 because it makes the philosophy of numbers easier and more elegant. Either way we can state the following axioms to obtain all the natural numbers. 1) 0 is the first number. 2) Every number has a successor number, obtained by incrementing that number by 1. It follows from these two axioms that 0 is the smallest natural number but there is no largest natural number. This leads directly on to one type of infinity as a non terminating process.

Yes and I have several books on the philosophy of the Natural Numbers, along with large sections in many more maths books. You are using a different version of the Natural Numbers from the rest of us. You have not answered my question: Further, just because this is the philosophy section, it does not entitle you make make unsupported claims such as "youcannot have space without time", most especially not in support of other wild musings. You have asked several such questions and been answered before. Even though, just like with the Natural Numbers I do not know what you mean by the much more difficult notion to tie down, that of infinity. Be all that as it may, I will offer you some hopefully useful thoughts on these questions. But they will only be useful if you take some note of them, instead of immediately trying to challenge them with unconventional interpretations of conventional definitions. OK so space, with or without time and Infinity for a physical object. Using zero and the positive integers we can propose temporal and spatial dimensions as follows: Let S1, S2, S3, S4.......... denote spatial dimensions. Let T1, T2, T3, T4.......... denote temporal dimensions. Then for each of 0, S1, S2, S3, S4.......... spatial dimensions we can propose 0, T1, T2, T3, T4.......... temporal dimensions Now we can do the maths of how each of these situations would operate, ie what our universe would be like if there were eg say only two spatial and one temporal dimensions, two spatial and zero temporal, two temporal and zero spatial and so on. Then we can do the physics and compare our observations on our universe to see which one matches our maths the best. Again there are many books and meaty subsections of books and papers doing exactly this. The results of this is why we believe our ordinary sense impression that there are three spatial and one time dimensions. For any other combination we can derive mathematical results we do not observe. OK so to consider an physical object existing in this 3 + 1 universe and the relationship to infinity. Let us say a building stone in a dry stone wall. Say we move this brick 1 metre to the left, so that instead of being the fourthe stone from the left hand corner of the wall it is now a cornerstone. What have we done ? Well we have changed its spatial position and in doing so did the stone disappear at any point in the move and reappear anywhere else or did it at some instant occupy every point lying between its initial and final position ? I would say we have no evidence that any stone has ever done the former but has only ever passed through every point on its way. So what links the initial and final points ? Mathematically the word is continuity. And continuity requires infinite division. Now you have mentioned Planck lengths. Swansont has told you that we cannot measure within a PL. But he did not say that the points in the space within do not exist, just that we can't measure there. And continuity requires the existence of these points. So by the mathematics of continuity (infinite division) we have a physical infinite. The interesting thing to learn from all this is that an infinite sum can add up to a finite total, which is the principal underlying 'limits', another specialist term that you are so loosely bandying about. Note the importance of recognising and taking note of what others say.

Surely it is time this thread was moved from physics to the rotary trash can ?

I asked you to be mathematically precise. So please avoid mixing up mathematics and other topics, particularly physics. This thread is claimed to be about the 'Natural numbers', which is a precisely defined mathematical description. Do you know what the natural numbers are ?

You need more precise mathematics for that. In particular you need to understand what is meant by finite and infinite. Every (individual) Natural number is finite. But the collection of all natural numbers is infinite.

You have been offered a lot of good thoughts and information about wind power. Have you investigated any of them ? What does a "boat with a turbine on all ends" look like ? There have been designs for 'sailing' cargo ships, as large as oil tankers, using one multiple fans of the type sensei described. and some prototypes have been built and tested. I do not have up to date results on these, but early indications were promising. However this is the energy to power one ship. Do you have any idea of the impellor size on a conventional wind generator ? It's diameter or radius is enormous, The stresses involved after turning the rotation axis to the vertical would be commensurately enormous at that extended radius. This fact once limited the size of sailing ships. A final comment. Why do you seek to extract energy from infrequent peaks in the wind's power ? Surely slow and steady but reliable is the way forward ? Especially if you wish the installations to last many decades.

A very perceptive observation, except I would not make it such an absolute statement, ie suggest A particularly productive part of the political pendulums swing is in the change of direction. +1 I vote contemptuous.

So start your own thread. PS my apologies for the poor spelling in my previous posts.

Yes good point. I haven't yet read the new 2021 book, so I'm keeping an open mind, and the idea may turn out to be just huff and puff or it may lead somewhere. So I have tried to give just the unarnished bare bones for all to assess.

This is better discussed in the politics section of the board, rather than the science section. I do believe I already said all this. But I also meant that the solution requires the will to implement it and that is socio-economic / political. Many changes will be needed, there will also be false turns.

This is the meat of the linked article from Quanta Magazine. Anybody interested in discussing this idea ?

Hello, jacobus and welcome. I note cheyennegregory hasn't been back since last March, but I see that you are both from the more northerly parts of the globe. I would recommend you both read this book by the late physicist, Sir Fred Hoyle. Fred offers calculations as to the energetics of both the starting and stopping of ice ages and then devotes several chapters to examining mechanisms that can lead to both starting and stopping of ice ages and most importantly the timescale over which occurs. I cannot stress enought the brevity of the starting timescale. This brevity is due to the energetics of solar radiation and partly, but only partly due to the solar and terrestrial relative positioning and requires another powerful event to activate the on and off triggers.

Well spotted, the full paper is a 3.6MB PDF - not to bad, and better it's free. +1 I have sent a copy to my friend, who is chair of the Exmoor Beekeepers Association, for comment.

I don't believe I wrote anything in my response that could be taken as describing you as a nuisance. Since I put some thought and effort into it, I would be grateful for a proper response.

Well, 2% solution means 2g / 100 ml as the measures are given in mls. So 12 to 15 ml contain 2 x 12/100 to 2 x 15/100 g or 0.24 to 0.30 g added per kg. Also since you have confirmed they were working in millimoles (added to 100g of honey) We have from my previous calculation 0.024 to 0.03 g added to 100g or 0.24 to 0.3 g per 1000g or 1kg. this is all consistent. So I would suggest this piece suffers in translation It is not clear if an additional 1.2 to 1.5 ml of solution was added to a 500g jar, in addition to the trehalose treatment already made. This is what the text literally says. So I would suggest you need to try 0.24 to 0.3 g /kg. This would explain why the trehalose was added as a solution, not a quarter gramme 'pinch', which might not dissolve and distribute evenly.

First question : do you really mean between .07 and .087 millimoles per 10g of honey or do you mean moles ? The molecular weight of trehalose is 342.3 g/mole so So this makes the addition either between 0.024 g/100g and 0.03 g/100g or between 24 g / 100g and 30g / 100g. Please confirm which was in the article.

Perhaps but I am asking you to think about continuity and the consequences of what you mean by time travel ? The popular version of time travel, which you ae putting forward seems to imagine a sequence of individual, separate sausages lying along some part of the time line. So if you 'moved' the sausage at say t = 10 to another point on the timeline, you would generate a gap in time where that sausage originally was. This of course is quite different from what we experience when the sausage is laid along a space axis and you 'move the sausage'.

Didn't you mean chattle fence ?

Yes we should all do our bit. +1 But try getting my family to switch of the light or television etc when they leave a room. "Methinks the Lady doth protest too much." Perhaps your subject (Climate Change) is just too large to fit into one thread. Perhaps you should treat it like eating an elephant. So taking one of your points only, popultion control as quoted. This alone need at least one thread to itself and is a socio-economic / political issue not a scientific one. I would just like to note that nature has always (and still is) exercising its own form of population control. Swansont has noted that the birthrate has fallen in most of the more developed countries. But other subtler factors are also in play. It is not too long since negative population control was exercised by a state (The award of Heroine of the Societ Union to women had had 5 or more children). At that time Canada and some other countries had open door policies to immigration, Austrialia even paid peopel to come. On the opposite side of artificial control, genocide was practised somewhere or another on the plant almost continually throughout history and sadly is still going on today. Perhaps that is why it is such a sensitive subject. But all this requires a proper airing in a dedicated thread. Finally yes many other (scientific)approaches to sustainability have been published in the past from Schumacher's "small is beautiful" https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/books/michael-braungart/cradle-to-cradle/9780099535478?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0fbD5I2f8wIVBYBQBh0p9wAxEAQYAiABEgKpUPD_BwE to Allaby and his "Limits to Growth" To Cradle to Cradel by Braungart and McDonough https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/books/michael-braungart/cradle-to-cradle/9780099535478?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0fbD5I2f8wIVBYBQBh0p9wAxEAQYAiABEgKpUPD_BwE These thoughts are not new.

This is not actually true and demonstrates the difficulty with analogies. The radius of curvature at any point is defined as the radius of a circle which exactly matches the curve at the point concerned. The curvature is defined as the reciprocal of the radius of curvature. For flat geometry or straight lines the curvature is zero. If the curve is a circle then the radius of curvature is the same at every point. If we now let that circle expand so that the radius tends to infinity, the reciprocal of that radius tends to zero ie straight or flat. But for your parabola, the radius of curvature is different at every point and remains finite at all points between the vertex and infinity. So its curvature is never zero, except at infinity and the vertex. These two examples do nicely show the difference between local and global however. For a circle, changing the radius affects every point on the circle equally. That is global. For a parabola the fact that the parabola radius of curvature approaches infinity as the parabola approaches infinity does not affect (the curvature of) any of the points on the parabola which already have a finite curvature. Curvature for a parabola is local to each and every point on it. It's not zooming out that makes things approximately flat, it's zooming in.