Given my limited math skills, what I'll say here is completely irrelevant and beside the point. Yet, my incompetence notwithstanding, I can't refrain from having my own misinformed opinions.

I don't think Yanniru is an idiot. He does say strange things now and then but so do all of us. Besides, it's completely beyond me how an idiot could get a PhD from Harvard; having a post-secondary degree myself I know how hard it is to get one. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

So I take it that if Yanniru cannot see for himself what Dick is trying to say, I'm sure he is competent enough to be convinced of a mathematical truth or to recognize his limitations. Then again, the same goes for Dick, so I'm sure the whole problem here has more to do with Dick's temper or Yanniru's attitude than anything logical. Which is too bad.

" So what you really derived is the wave function, which of course follows from the shift symmetry "

One famous sculptor, whose name I can't remember, on being asked how he was able to create such stunning masterpieces, said something like this: "It's simple! I start with a raw stone and chisel away everything that is not the statue"

I always had it with me that physics is nothing but a subset of math. The real questions for me are quite easy to ask but very difficult to answer: how do we determine what portion of math is physics, and what do we call the rest?

Dick claims to have answered my first question. I'm not competent to judge what he's done, but to me that is entirely beside the point. If Dick didn't do it someone else will. The second question, though, sounds a lot more interesting to me, and that no one has even brought up. So I'm still waiting.

• Opps-typo - yanniru - July 16, 2002 - 13:53 UTC
• Opps-typo - yanniru - July 16, 2002 - 13:57 UTC
  • Yes but... - aurino - July 16, 2002 - 14:57 UTC
    • Most math relationships cannot be verified experimentally - yanniru - July 16, 2002 - 20:31 UTC
      • Math can not be validated experimentally? - doctordick - July 16, 2002 - 21:59 UTC
        • Infinite series, maybe? - stormcrow - July 17, 2002 - 05:24 UTC
          • The infinite, and beyond... - aurino - July 17, 2002 - 13:20 UTC
            • Infinity, being n+1, can be "inability to quantify" - carefuluniverse - July 18, 2002 - 00:52 UTC
            • I don't think that was my point :) - stormcrow - July 18, 2002 - 01:09 UTC
              • There are infinitudes in nature...only if considered abstractly - carefuluniverse - July 18, 2002 - 02:06 UTC
                • I dunno - stormcrow - July 18, 2002 - 02:30 UTC
                  • that's right; you dunno - carefuluniverse - July 18, 2002 - 15:11 UTC
        • Try some higher math - yanniru - July 17, 2002 - 13:30 UTC