spoirier

Well ok sorry if my sentences may have lacked exactness, but given the context I did not think it could lead to that ambiguity. When I wrote "We do know the fundamental laws of physics underlying every accessible physical phenomena", I meant : the phenomena that are accessible under the scope of reasonably affordable means, which have a chance to be involved in any profitable industrial applications for the next few centuries. Not phenomena that can only take place in a billions dollar accelerator which must consume a huge lot of energy just for the sake of providing some information about the subtle properties of high energy physics. And while its cost may decrease in the future, it will still keep a huge cost and, in my opinion, no use except testing theories of physics can be expected. Now, taking your previous message where you seem to have already specified the perpective that you maintain : "the potential is there to be able to develop some novel energy source, or propulsion source, or many other technologies that could go a long way toward alleviating some of those issues. Such as war over energy sources like oil. " If I understand well, you claimed that the current state of knowledge in physics leaves a non-ridiculous chance (does not exclude) that future discoveries in particle physics would provide new profitable energy sources. Are you serious ? Do you maintain this claim, did you hear it from any particle physicist, and/or do you expect particle physicists to agree with it ? "Why does science have to lead to profitable technological application to be worthwhile? " I thought I was clear that this was not my claim, it is not the subject I was trying to discuss here. But if you insist to discuss this, here are my views. I can indeed be senstive to some claims that something or something else in life can be "worthwhile" even if they do not lead to profitable technological applications. The problem is that many people have completely different ideas about what is "worthwhile" : music, theater, football, sending humans to space at much higher costs than robots in proportion to the amount of scientific goals, and many other things. But meanwhile, aside this sort of World Miss contest that are these discussions about whether something or something else is "worthwhile", there are some other people with completely different concerns: whether they can eat tomorrow, whether they can remain safe, not be raped, when is their home island going to be submerged by the sea. And future generations are probably going to have many other concerns too : why did their f***ing grandparents support those policies of public deficits that lead their countries to bankrupcy, why did we continue so much release of greenhouse gases that has lead the world to so many droughts, hurricanes, rise of sealevel and other disasters. But the most serious concern in my opinion is the extinction of so many species and the resulting destruction of their DNA information. Indeed, this is the world heritage of millions of years of evolution, that amounts to yet unexplored and irreplacable amounts of scientific knowledge worth thousands of libraries in the hands of future scientists in the next millions of years, that is being burnt right now. If one wants to be reasonable and long-sighted in the assessment of priorities between different concerns and "worthwhile" things that are not directly profitable, I think this should be priority number 1. While, in this long term, well, particle physics has all its time. If we don't build more powerful accelerators to discover the secrets of high energy physics in this century, we will still have all the time to do it at lower costs in next centuries, with nothing lost.

"your main assumption is that our current models do not need any further refinement." Sorry but no, this was definitely not my assumption. I was inviting to a precise discussion on a precise subject, but you are continuously destroying any possible meaningfulness of the discussion by your way to systematically reformulate questions into senseless ones or completely different ones. You continuously try to replace one subject that I was trying to address by some completely different suject or by too vague claims to make any sense. You try to reformulate one specific claim of mine by some much more vague sentence that might have completely different interpretations ; you expect your reformulation to be valid as one of the possible interpretations of this claim can indeed be mine, but it also leads to completely different interpretations which have absolutely nothing to do with what I meant, and which I actually of course disagree with. And I strongly protest against this way of distorting my views, which is extremely fallacious and far away from any decent reason. This is becoming ridiculous (Uh I mean I think this must be so in the eyes of any logical person, which you seem not to be), and anyway extremely illogical, unscientific practice that you are having here. So your formulation of what you pretend to be my claim, does not make any sense, by the fact you use the word "need" in a senseless way, outside the context of what it is about. For the word "need" to make sense, you have to specify a purpose. A claim of "need" of something can only make sense relatively to a purpose, did you ever notice this ? Your sentence is expressed in such a way that the obvious reaction will be "Of course, our current models do need refinements !" The problem is : need for what purpose ? Answer : of course, it is for the purpose of making a complete and fully consistent picture of the universe. So, a purely theoretical purpose. Yeah but this is completely out of subject. Because while on the other hand, I do have sensitivities to this theoretical purpose, the problem is that this was not the subject which I was proposing to discuss here. What I was trying to discuss here, is the kind of "need" relative to the purpose or measure that is the financial measure of possible applications for the interest of people who are not theoretical physicists. I even wonder if you still remember that such people exist and that, as they are the ones actually providing the funding of fundamental research, it can make some sense to discuss whether they will benefit this research in the long term. I understand that they already greatly benefited from past discoveries of fundamental physics and therefore they owe some thanks to physicists, but still, it is yet another question. The question exists, and the different variants of the questions should not be confused with each other. It may not be among the most serious questions of the world, but it exists... So my claim is very general : I see no possible kind of profitable technological application of future discoveries from high energy particle physics that is not clearly unlikely, to an extreme, ridiculous degree. If you don't think so, it's up to you to specify a (vague and general but still something) kind of profitable technological application which you think is not ridiculously unlikely in the next millenium. Either from the examples I gave or any other one (I can still give more suggestions if you like : producing wormholes or other teleportation apparatus for visiting other star systems, time machines to go and capture dinosaurs or to prevent the holocaut from having happened, or to save Evariste Galois from having been killed at that young age...) "You throw another number out there, 10^-100. Where exactly do you get that?" You seem seriously unable to read a sentence and catch its meaning. If you had the ability to read and understand a sentence, you would have noticed that this number does not need to come from anywhere, as replacing it by 10^-50 or 10^-100000 would not have changed the actual meaning of the claim the least bit, and there needs not be any reason to justify a choice of a number to put in the expression of a sentence whose meaning is independent of this choice.

Calculations don't need to be exact : a factor 100 or even 1,000,000 times more or less likeliness does not matter when discussing probabilities approaching 10^-100 or smaller. Your remark about the fact much research is wrong in general, and particularly in medicine, is completely out of subject. The subject here is : how accurately do experimental results for any phenomena that might be industrially useful, thus only those at quite lower energy levels than those currently experimented in the LHC, confirm the Standard Model of particle physics. An important example of how well it is confirmed, is the coincidence between theoretical predictions and experimental results for the magnetic moment of the electron. This calculation involves quite a deal of the contents of the theory. This and many other things, all contribute to confirm that the theory is very good to an amazing accuracy. We are definitely not lost in the clouds there. You want citations ? I did not take time searching for best ones but okay, here is something: The book "Beyond the science wars", http://books.google.fr/books?id=ZQWv6swqU40C I did not check it all but for example, page 53, under the title "Disciplinary Dilemmas": "Practitioners of the social sciences have not learned, in their own disciplines, much that is operationally indisputable, readily reproducible, and internationally agreed to; so they cannot easily conceive such a thing to be possible in any field. Knowing in their own discipline that ideology governs "knowledge" as well as theory, they presume that must be so in all fields." http://www.particleadventure.org/standard_model.html "The Standard Model is a good theory. Experiments have verified its predictions to incredible precision, and all the particles predicted by this theory have been found". http://www.frogheart.ca/?tag=standard-model-of-particle-physics "The Standard Model of Particle Physics has been a triumph of particle physics – many thousands of experiments have confirmed predictions of this simple and elegant model." If I said that fundamental research in monetary theory is valuable, it's because I already found a theoretical solution with rather detailed description of one aspect of the solution (P2P credit) and some general principles for how to look for the needed details on the other aspect (how to stabilize the value).

Well that is quite simple to calculate this. What are the industrial and other human needs except for the pure intellectual curisity of physicists, in very general ways: - How to process tools, objects (clothes, housing etc) - Processing energy (from available sources to their use) - How to make food - Health (biology) - How people can connect : travel and communicate with each other, - Any kind of useful information processes from human/practical information sources to human/practical targets. Thus, not information about the ultimate laws of physics for the pure sake of knowing these laws, but information about what we can do on this Earth in practice for the sake of living and having fun on this Earth when oneself is not a particle physicist. This is the financial measure I was mentioning. Now let us specify the kinds of potential advances of fundamental physics. I was speaking about the possible discoveries in particle physics, what we can find in particle accelerators. I was not speaking about other possible fields that may also be callled "fundamental research" depending on your vocabulary, where I agree that possible applications may be expected : quantum computing and other quantum phenomena : superconductivity, states of matter, biochemistry, interpreting DNA, managing nuclear reactions in nuclear plants, etc. I also did not mean to enter the discussion of another possible field that may also be called "fundamental research" : personally I do think a completely different kind of fundamental process still needs to be examined that may have important human applications (so that in this sense I am less skeptical on the potential of fundamental research than what many other physicists'views logically imply even if they won't explicitly declare these logical implications): those of mind/matter interaction and parapsychology, related to the underlying origin of the quantum measurement paradoxical issues. I don't mean to enter this point, but only to point out that anyway this has in common with the above that it is also disconnected from particle physics, dark matter and the unification of physics theories. My point is that the many physical (i.e. not psychical) phenomena which may have possible industrial applications, and that are not all yet understood phenomena (so a lot of discoveries there is possible), are now separated from the current edges of fundamental physics, as they are mere indirect logical consequences of the known laws : those quantum electrodynamics and nuclear physics as they are largely established now. So, how can I know the value of the quantity I mention ? Well, stretching my imagination to consider a possible industrial application of still unknown laws of particle physics, I have a proposition : the industrial production of magnetic monopoles. That would be awesome, uh ? The problem is: any perspective of profitable industrial production of magnetic monopoles in the 3rd millenium is extremely unlikely. Because, we already had detectors of magnetic monopoles from cosmic rays on the International Space Station, and neither there nor generally anywhere else could any magnetic monopole be observed. And, you know, some cosmic rays are much more energetic than any individual collision in the LHC. So, how to go from a total absence of any magnetic monopole ever detected, including from very high energy processes such as cosmic rays, to a profitable industrial production of them ? Such a speculation would seems quite crazy to me. Now, what else ? Dark matter ? We don't need to know what dark matter is made of, to already notice that its interaction with ordinary matter is so scarce that it has no chance to serve as a profitable source of energy in a reasonable future while much more practical energy sources (solar, nuclear etc) are available. Or do we ? The interactions between dark matter and ordinary matter are so exceptional, that such interaction events, if observed, can only provide information for the pure intellectual interest of physicists or astronomers, and not any socially or industrially useful information in the list of practical interests I mentioned above, or would they ? They cannot even be useful for us to communicate with aliens and receive and try to apply their experience of how to organize a peaceful, prosperous, happy society, or would they ? Now do you have any other idea of potential industrial applications of future discoveries in particle physics ? For example, do you think there is any chance to discover that these high energy particle collisions which have this very tiny chance to produce Higgs bosons, would turn out to be the best tool to cure cancer thanks to this property ? Or to produce any substance with any industrial application ?

Maybe I was not clear, as the claim you attribute to me is definitely not what I meant. What I meant is not any claim about the abstract/physical "existence" of unknown things (as I'm perfectly aware of this existence of unknowns), but a claim about the average expectable financial value of any industrial application in the 3rd millenium, of the discoveries of the answers to these questions which you are mentioning. My claim is that these "plenty of large open questions" that you are mentioning, no matter how large they are in the minds of physicists (and I do agree they are large there), are anyway close to a total of zero in this financial scale of measure. " I don't know if you meant to toss me into your characterization of "high level scientists ready to tell any bullshit to politicians in order to keep the credits on their projects" No I did not mean you, sorry. I meant in the risk of such bias in general.

Sorry, but I did really read and understand your post, and you did not succeed to refute anything that I said. I had already understood what you just explained further as I had already read it many times before from others. First : You misunderstood me if you try to defend fundamental research as if I was attacking it : I did not mean to deny the value of fundamental research. Instead, I meant the necessity to broaden the scope of fundamental research, (and try to redistribute it to better reflect the shares of potential usefulness of different fields), to encompass completely new fields that are currently completely let down by everybody because they are currently neither in the scope of usually admitted "fundamental research" nor of "applied research", and I gave an example : the fundamental research in the theoretical foundations of money, in order to design new money systems on cleaner and more optimal foundations. Second : I am perfectly aware that : someone has said around 1900 -- "you know, Newtonian physics is pretty darn excellent is all the 'accessible physical phenomena' we have today, there really isn't much a need for anything else" However, my point is that this comparison between the situation now and this claim of that time is superficial and in fact invalid. My claim is that not only in retrospective but also actually at that time and contrary to now, that optimistic claim which you quote was irrational and baseless. People of that time were just over-enthousiastic about their recent discoveries, and in fact they did not really know how much their fundamental physics could really explain. They were in fact many unexplained phenomena, especially the detailed laws of chemistry, which they actually could not explain. The gap was not small. The gap was very big and right under their eyes. They just did not yet evaluate it properly, because they did not yet have the time to check things and make a proper assessment on the question. The situation now is very different. Contrary to then, the currently established laws of fundamental physics encompass the ultimate explanation of almost everything we can experiment in physics, to an amazing accuracy (well, I'd say, except conciousness, but this another debate). My point is that now and contrary to then, the claim that no new discovery in particle physics (in particle accelerators) can anymore have any technological application with any significant economic benefit for the next 10,000 years (well, of course possibly except the economic benefit of better managing the shares of funding to the theoretical research activities among competing theories of physics, please let this aside), is clearly sure at 99.9999... %, and any other opinion is just ridiculous and based on ignorance. Yet this does not mean that I want to stop this research; on the contrary I do think it should keep a place (as I do think that its only real goal, that is pure intellectual curiosity, has its part of legitimacy). What I want is the known truth on the subject to be said, in order for the choice of its share of funding to based on reason and not on lies (because pretending that the perspectives of technological applications of something cannot be reliably predicted while in fact they can, is a lie). Because just looking at history and making the quote you made to compare the situation now with the end of 19th century, and just satisfying yourself with your very vague considerations, without entering the effective look at what we do currently know in physics, is just a superficial viewpoint giving an ignorance-based conclusion, that cannot be taken seriously by anyone who did take the effective look at the current knowledge which you are refusing to take. "And hence we wouldn't have a working set of GPS satellites" That argument is nonsense. Research is based on the actual problems. And there were actual problems at that time, so that the continuation of research in fundamental physics was inevitable as determined by the actual needs and gaps to be filled. The fact that some people seemed to pretend otherwise ran no risk of stopping the inevitable continuation of fundamental research as determined by the effective needs anyway. As for relativity, and while it was in fact already implied in the equations of 19th century electromagnetism (but just required time to notice), its application to GPS is not even a good example to support your point. Relativity is not at the basis of GPS. It is only at the basis of the necessary corrections in the GPS data, to cancel the distortion from relativistic effects in the computations. Even if relativity theory had not been seeked for, at any time of history when some technology or observation would have been faced with the relativistic effects, these effects would have been directly measured from these observations and thus integrated in the calculations (and relativistic formulas themselves would have been deduced from these observations), so that the necessary relativistic corrections to the GPS would have been made on time anyway. So I perfectly agree that fundamental physics had tremendous applications, especially quantum physics. I just wanted to point out that in details your arguments are flawed, so that your personal conclusions from your inaccurate reasonings cannot be taken seriously. And in general, even when an argument is put forward for a conclusion with which I agree, I do not like to see when the chosen example is bad and if the argument is flawed, and I feel the necessity to criticize the argument (and give right ones instead).

While this is usual, I am amazed to see such absurd irrational fallacies and acts of faith in the name of science, and even sometimes by high level scientists ready to tell any bullshit to politicians in order to keep the credits on their projects. People still fancying that anything might be possible because, supposedly, "nobody knows" what can be discovered, and what can have potential applications. What is this based ? On history, maybe ? Of course, in general, it is true that scientific research can be useful, and that some discoveries in fundamental science had wonderful application. But... Is this a good reason to tell any bullshit and to worship science in a religious way, practically ignoring everything that has been discovered as if it could just be completely overthrown tomorrow ? Of course it is true that fundamental physics has found wonderful applications that were not previously expected. But this were unexpected details from a time when, precisely, the laws of physics were not known yet. We knew that the laws of physics governing everyday phenomena were not yet known at that time. Therefore it was always clear and logical, that, of course, the discovery of these yet unknown laws underlying the everyday phenomena could potentially have tremendous applications to our daily lives, and that the details were not known yet. But now the situation is very different. We do know the fundamental laws of physics underlying every accessible physical phenomena, at least those that have any chance of being economically affordable to involve for any potentially useful technological application outside the pure concerns of the curiosity of physicists. And even if we don't know what dark matter is made of, its well-known character of extreme scarcity of its interaction with ordinary matter is anyway sufficient to reliably conclude that it will never become any usable source of energy in any foreseeable future worth caring of now. This does not mean that there is no more possibly useful fundamental research at all, but only that such a potential must be found in other fields of research, outside particle physics in a strict sense. For example, somewhere in between the fundamental laws and the macroscopic effects, there may be a lot of possibilities of how to better manage energy (more efficient solar panels, new forms of energy storage etc). Maybe some new quantum effects could help there. However we do know that any new possibly useful phenomenon there will be just another consequence of the already known laws of quantum physics, so that there is no more use of wondering what can happen beyond them. And there are many more fields of research that can bring breakthroughs too. I mean, fields of research that can be about as intellectually wonderful as research in theoretical physics, but still outside it. Such as, what I did : a conception of a new monetary theory, for a stable and decentralized online money system. Or also (another theory that I did not fully write yet), a theory of how to make an optimized (and also decentralized) online dating system, that will give the best possible chances for user to find their match in a minimum time spent on the computer, in a network of millions of user. This is also a genuine theoretical work. It does not require to imagine that the basic laws of physics might be turned upside down tomorrow nor after a few decades. And I did find the plan of a solution. The same for the job market, which has a similar mathematical structure. The point is : as long as no genuine thinker effectively comes to these subjects, but all remain in the clouds of the Higgs boson and the like, well, sorry but, this is precisely what keeps the world from making any progress. In short : why insist to pretend that the best usefulness of scientific research should be seeked in the very exact fields of research where it is clear from well-established scientific knowledge that they are not the right ones for this purpose anymore ? Therefore leaving some other much more plausibly useful research areas completely ignored with absolutely nobody there, while just a little bit of work there could make a huge difference ?

In case it was not clear : for me too the core motivation was curiosity. Being famous is not a significant goal for me. Instead, it is a moral concern to find something widely useful to do. I was curious and puzzled about how the world works (in economical aspects and not only in physical ones), what are its troubles and how they may be resolved. I also have satisfaction in doing such findings for the first time, and the importance and novelty I found in my searches often came from the fact they are important theoretical problems that other people did not resolve yet, because true thinkers usually went away to "another planet" and abandoned these problems to more short-sighted people. I know the world of pure mathematics is huge, I did go quite far in abstraction and I did feel how wonderful it can be, but I personally feel that "going too far" in pure abstraction may reduce the relative interest of things per quantity of efforts, because of the increasing complexity that makes further progress harder and harder, and purely remaining in the abstract may end up in relative dullness in the long term. For example I can agree it was wonderful to develop all those dazzling concepts at the basis of the poof of independence of the Axiom of Choice and the Continuum Hypothesis, but then, as this independence turned out to remain stable by lots of large cardinal axioms, it seems to me that further insistance of trying to "resolve" the continuum problem by desperate searches for more axioms that might determine it, though the acceptability of such further axioms is much less clear, becomes of poor value. I have a feeling that the possible interest of still higher searches in this and other purely theoretical fields is slowly dying out. The same in physics : what's the point of finding out already in this 21th century more of how the universe behaves at the fundamental physics level, while we already know the laws determining almost all physical phenomena except in the first 10^-7 s after the big bang and in a specially designed 7.5 billion euros accelerator ? All right it may still be somehow interesting, but... is it really more interesting than to wonder whether and how this world can survive one more century without falling into any world war, global chaos and huge irreversible loss of biodiversity, frequent natural disasters and the like, given the overpopulation and environmental destructions ? And whether with the right intelligent work we can do something about it ? Personnally, I find the latter more intellectually challenging.

I sympathize with this motivation, as it has some similarities with my own aspirations (to combine a passion for mathematics with an ambition to make something worldwide important from it). However I came to a quite different definition of the purpose (or rather I have 2 main purposes). Indeed I don't think your expression of the purpose is realistic, while I see mine are much more realistic. In fact my plans are already set, I know well enough where I am heading to, the solution is clear enough for the perspective of success to be already, reliably in sight. However it needs more work to be complete and I lack the time and energy to make the necessary steps, so I need help. So I wonder if you might like to join my efforts. Let me explain. First start with a critical analysis of your purpose. You have 2 points : "I'll be living and breathing mathematics, all day, everyday, for the rest of my life." Fine. Like many others already did, you want to (metaphorically) quit this planet in order to rebuild your life in the pure etheric universe of mathematical abstractions, very far from the world of material needs, financial worries and work requirements, bureaucracy, hurricanes, global warming, environmental destructions, political debates, news about wars and other conflicts and mass starvations. But... you also wrote that you wish... "to discover something that will make me famous and put my name in math books around the world" Uh... to be famous around which world, please ??? Would you be trying to refer here to the currently present mankind on the Earth planet ? Are you sure ? But then, how do you want to reconcile this with the previous point ? This question may look like a joke, but I think it is quite serious and I'd have many remarks in support to this kind of concern. If you'd like to ignore the problem and be optimistic for your purpose, let's say okay, consider the possibility for a minute. It's possible. Others did it and succeeded. Still rather recently, by some very huge theoretical work they succeeded to resolve some old very difficult problems: - The 4 colors theorem - The classification of finite simple groups - The Fermat's last theorem - The Poincaré conjecture (note that Grigori Perelman who found the proof also fully dedicated his life to mathematics as you consider doing) Meanwhile, some great advances have been made in theoretical physics: - The Higgs boson - Theoretical possibilities of supersymmetry and superstrings but no experimental confirmation yet - Non-commutative geometry - Loop quantum gravity Very fine. The only problem is... WTF ?? Indeed... I once read about an interesting theorem in complexity theory, that may be summed up as "Difficult theorems are useless". I'm not naive to just assume it as true for concerns far away from the formal expression of that theorem (which I did not look at), but I find it interesting to raise it as a question in different situations : can anything be considered as an exception to this "rule", whatever the kind of usefulness you are looking for ? Now apply this question to the above cases : they were very hard and wonderful discoveries indeed, but what are they for ? Did they help to make the world safer, happier, more wealthy or better preserved from environmental destructions ? Seems not. Were the names of their authors put "in math books around the world" ? Not even. Because the contents of these discoveries are quite far from the ordinary studying curriculum. If these mathematicians had not made these discoveries, what would have happened instead ? These discoveries would probably have been done by other mathematicians just a few years later. There is a tradition of caring about authors in philosophy, not in mathematics. In mathematics, if theorems are named after authors, it is much more just for the sake of naming theorems, than for paying attention to their authors as individuals. I remember when I did my PhD, another math PhD in the laboratory said to me "I am a shit". I asked why, and she explained : "I produce an article, and it enters a library". That is, just one more article among many thousands of others. Many important findings had co-discoverers : different mathematicians who independently made the same discovery at the same time. Or, some mathematicians make a discovery and then when trying to publish it they discover that someone else already independently made and published that discovery a little before them. In such a case, none of them is individually useful to mankind : delete the contributions of one of them, and his discoveries will still appear on Earth from other authors at either the same time or a little later. And even if there are 1 or 2 decades of delay, so what ? How much is a few years, or decades, compared to the history of humans on Earth ? In these conditions, why should it matter who discovers what and at what time ? It is nice to try to bring a contribution to the world, but what contribution is it ? If it is only a contribution for the interest of other mathematicians who are themselves wondering what they can contribute to the world, then... you are only competing with them in the race to make the same discoveries, and the only thing you bring is that you make it harder for them to still find something else to discover (obliging them to learn more and go further before they can find anything new). How good is that, finally ? But... if the aspiration for a mathematician is to be original, then what is original in trying to race for the same purpose as many others (the purpose of making oneself a name), and making their work harder ? This is why I found little sense in "research in mathematics" as it is usually conceived. I'm also aware that, while my intelligence is locally rather exceptional (in the experience of my math teachers in high school and first years of higher education), it still cannot suffice to stand a worldwide competition. Not only I cannot http://settheory.net'>Cleaning up the existing knowledge in maths and physics as for the basic concepts that millions of students currently have to learn (and waste time on because it was not cleaned up yet), so as to make it easier (instead of harder) for other people to learn it and possibly reach the point of being productive for further discoveries. - Analyzing the troubles and developing models of solutions for economic and political issues. In particular, I made a mathematical theory of a decentralized online money system. I already (roughly) resolved the P2P credit aspect, but another aspect of the problem (stability of value based on term markets) still needs to be better mathematically theorized for letting the whole thing really work well. And other aspects of the project needs work in order to start it all and make it more complete. It's possible, and not even so difficult, to make breakthroughs for solving important world's problems, and be famous. I see no point to hide it. I don't even fear that anyone might steal the idea. Not only because I care much more to see it implemented than to be main contributor (or even, to be known as the discoverer), but also because, in my experience, nobody is interested. Most people much prefer to stay lazy-minded and coward (and eventually to follow the crowd in their vain and standardized ways of using their intelligence and "trying to be the best" : PhD, Nobel etc), than to dare understanding and trying to do something completely different that will actually have the best chances of success but in a completely unusual manner. As the very idea of thinking big and being after huge purposes in unusual ways repels most people (no matter that it may actually be easier than many shorter-sighted projects), and between the risk to succeed and the insurance to fail, most people usually choose the latter.

Somehow I agree that many things in this world somehow behave as if they were a conspiracy. Howevery I don't think it is an intention. Rather the effect of a general lack of intelligence in the majority of humans, who may try to "do their best" but have little clue how to do it. And even if they had the competence to make the best education system that is possible, it cannot suffice to change young idiots into genuises. The education system has to adapt to the low abilities of the pupils. Think how was education worldwide a few centuries ago. Or a few millenia ago. Was it better ? No. Nowhere in the world could anyone learn better than they can now. It was not a conspiracy, just that the knowledge was not there. Many superstitions, many religious teachings, that formed ideological obstacles to the development of science. Consider the glory we give to Galileo and Newton for their scientific discoveries that may now be considered rather obvious concepts. Since the many thousands of years that humans are on Earth, nobody had been able to discover those things before. But in average, humans were no less stupid than now. Was it a conspiracy ? Or rather, the fact that even the currently present humans on Earth are really naturally very stupid in average anyway, no matter the cultural environment ? Consider all religions. Many of them are based on the idea that any contrary opinions and other religions are the Devil's conspiracies, or conspiracies of the sinful nature of humans who are proud of their own thoughts and want to reject God. What conspiracies led so many people to believe that ? Consider Nazism and its horrors. Was it a conspiracy ? Or rather, the sincere but stupid opinions of many Germans with a natural inclination to believe that much of their problems were the effect of a Jewish conspiracy ? Consider Marxism and the Soviet Union. Was it a conspiracy ? Or rather the sincere but stupid opinions of many people with a natural inclination to believe that their problems were a conspiracy of evil capitalists that need to be sent to Gulag, and that those who do not adhere to communist ideals are mentally ill and need to be reeducated ? What conspiracy could lead so many people to the so absurd belief that the world may be about to end... this very day ? In Europe where I live, some of the convictions widespread in the US seem just mad, such as Young Earth Creationism (even Intelligent Design is usually considered indefensible), and climate-skepticism. Given the scientific findings, climate-skepticism seems an expression of an outstanding conspiracy of some financial lobbies of oil (or maybe of wealthy people who don't want to be disturbed in their confortable waste of natural resources) that so many people deny the very existence of this scientific consensus and the emergency to reduce the use of fossil carbon. However these climate-skeptics see the warning voices as a conspiracy of politicians and scientists trying to defend the public funding of their jobs. But the result of this fear of conspiracy, is going to be that the Earth and biodiversity will be seriously damaged for thousands, even millions of years, by... either the conspiracy of paranoia and/or the egoism and short-sightedness of lazy-thinking people who did not want to be disturbed in their immediate material confort. Consider that so many thousands of people adhere to the Zeitgeist movement, whose ideas are quite stupid indeed and similar to Marxism (but they ignore the similarity). They are obsessed by the fear of the conspiracy of free market and of plans of worldwide government, and the only solution they see to this problem and they are trying to set up, is... their own totalitarian system. Just one more conspiracy of stupidity, it seems. I have my own observations of how the world behaves as a conspiracy, in an aspect of things that I still never saw someone else so fully describe, but which I do consider as the worst, clearest and strongest conspiracy of all in the world. Still I don't think it is anyone's concious evil intention to set it up. Just a conspiracy of the incredible stupidity of the overwhelming majority of people who don't notice the obvious.

I think it is great to want to learn physics at such a young age, because I did it myself : I understood Special relativity at about 13, and General Relativity at 16. But I was quite dissatisfied at the available literature then (there was no Internet at that time). In fact, and despite the fact that school and higher education (unfortunately) took much of my time, I learned about as much by rediscovering things by my own research, than by learning from formal eduction or books. (Well of course I would probably not have been able to discover comparably many things if they had not been already known, as the outside information guided this search, but...). And I still do think there is a general lack of cleaning up the explanations of theories by most authors. So I undertook to write my own math and physics courses, to provide the optimal explanations that I found possible and still not available elsewhere (as far as I could see). It may seem not so big if you only look at the number of pages, but it is very dense in concepts, so that by reading it slowly you will learn much more than reading other courses more quickly. It is still far from complete but it already contains a good start (with the foundations of mathematics) and some other information, including one of the key reasonings by which I could find an expression of General Relativity (having not succeeded at that time to follow the calculations in a book) : the case of the universal expansion. (Sorry I assumed there some basic knowledge of mechanics and geometry that I did not introduce yet - this will need to be completed, or you can easily find it elsewhere anyway). With a little bit of courage you can also obtain the Schwarzschild's black hole by the same method. I intend developing it in the next months, so hopefully, starting reading it now, the time you read what is ready there, it will become more complete.

I don't know how it is done for photons but I can describe an example that gives entanglement (this way is very impractical to do, but...). If you take an atom of helium and shoot away the nucleus by a high speed neutron, the electrons that formed a pair are then free to go apart, and their spins are entangled. You must NOT use a magnetic field to separate them (otherwise you will get each in a definite state of spin, without entanglement). Instead you must just let them repel each other, then verify that you have exactly one electron on "each side" in some way. But many other processes give entanglements, even if they are not very practical either. For example if you take an atom in a definite excited state, and then wait the fraction of second so that there is 50% chance for it to have come down to the ground state by emitting a photon, then the state of the atom is entangled with the state of the electromagnetic field around (that may contain or not contain the photon).

The presence/absence of the particle at every position, is entangled with its presence/absence at every other position. So the problem is to explain what is quantum entanglement. I have described this in my introduction to quantum physics.