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Posted by Harvey on September 22, 2003 22:45:05 UTC

It's very easy to be led astray, so I would like to set the record straight with regard to some of these comments:

On the issue of "knowable data" and "unknowable data", he wants the first to be something we "know" and the second to be something we "don't know". Now, if anyone is aware that such division he suggests is impossible, Harv knows that. In spite of the fact that he knows that (or perhaps because of it), he insists that I mean what he thinks I mean. I have made the separation between "knowable data" and "unknowable data" for one reason only. The constraints which are to be imposed are different! "Knowable data" constitute what is real and "unknowable data" is hypothesized.

The classification is just a fabrication to arrive at symmetries. He could just as well chosen '1' data and '2' data. He just wants the division of data, that's it. The concepts themselves are labelled in such a way so that it sounds reasonable. But, as I've pointed out, the concepts are fallicious since he completely leaves out the pragmatic acceptance of knowledge, not whether it is 'true' or 'not true'.

his perspective a difference cannot exist unless he can delineate it. I am afraid the concept of a difference which can not be delineated is too abstract for his mind to grasp.

He misses the point here. It's not whether we can delineate a difference, it is whether we have a proper definition to begin with. For example. Let's say I say that there are two types of data, 'calinou data' and 'non-calinou data'. Now, if someone says to me, "I don't know what calinou and non-calinou data is, can you explain it?". I come back with some lame definition such as "calinou is data that is psi and non-calinous is data that we think is psi, but is not psi." Now, that person really complains "look, you keep throwing terms at me that I don't know what those terms mean. I have no idea whether there is calinou data or non-calinou data and I have no idea what psi or not psi is, can you please tell me?" I come back with: "you hold a perspective that a difference cannot exist unless you can delineate it. I am afraid the concept of a difference which cannot be delineated is too abstract for your mind to grasp". What should this person say to me? I am saying and throwing at them just incredible amounts of bull because I am using terms that have no reference to reality, and then I have the gall to ask that someone just accept that such terms exist? C'mon. If you can't give a exact meaning to your terms, then just label them '1' and '2'. But, Dick doesn't do that. Why? One simple reason. Accepting these terms in their typical contexts is necessary to establishing credibility for his conclusions.

It follows (for a rational person anyway) that a conceptual difference exists between what is "real" and what is "hypothesized" even when you have no information to perform the separation. Somehow that concept is simply beyond Harv's comprehension.

This is what Dick simply doesn't understand. The concepts of 'real' and 'hypothesized' are very tricky terms. When you say something is real, you could be referring to a hundred different meanings. The scientist doesn't generally need to be too concerned about them since the models they generate are based on observables based on specific conditions of those observables being observed. We don't have to worry whether quarks exist or not, we only need to know under what conditions we can observe them. Dick doesn't talk in terms of observation or conditions of observation. He talks in philosophical terms and then cries foul when his ontology is challenged as if I'm doing something that science already accepts as a given way to talk. He completely misses the point that observables are very specifically referenced in the context of their observability, and that's how science avoids these metaphysical issues.

What Harv wants is a verifiable prediction which will show the current physics is wrong. He neglects to take into account the fact that any time anyone uses Quantum mechanics to calculate an experimental result, the validity of that result is direct verification of my model. Anytime anyone uses classical mechanics to calculate the trajectory of a cannon shell the result is direct verification of my model. Anytime anyone uses relativity it is a direct verification. I know this is true because I explicitly show that each of these models used by the learned physics academy is an approximation to my model.

Not so. I want predictions that extend our physics, not prove our physics wrong. If he wants to say that Einstein is wrong about Mercury's orbit, then he needs to show where he is right and Einstein wrong, but this is a separate issue.

Nonetheless, if Dick has been as successful at explaining the unification of QM and GR, then why is Dick not able to predict the accelerating expansion of the universe? You just can't leave off such key and important items such as this and claim to have unified two important fields. The point is that this is what verification of a hypothesis provides, it gives us measurable data to see if a theory is right. Again, if Dick had really produced fundamental work, all of this kind of predictions should pop right out of that work and then some. It is not so difficult to take something fundamental (e.g., inflation, big bang theory, quantum mechanics, special relativity, general relativity, etc, etc) and produce predictions. Dick has done everything but produce predictions that have a chance of being verified as correct, and that only tells me that this work is religious work. It might be good to give you a sense of religious understanding (to yourself), but it has no merit as a tool to understand nature if it cannot produce observables that also are correctly tested.

I am astonished that Harv would actually say such an absurd thing. If TOE is so easy, where are all these models?

I kid you not. If you read string theory papers and quantum loop gravity papers (and the list goes on and on from there), you will see all kinds of results from physics being reproduced. Recently work in string theory reproduced certain entropy equations calculated for certain kinds of black holes, does that mean that this particular string theory is automatically correct? Dick doesn't realize how far these 'TOEs' are in describing the same physics that he has described. The issue isn't so much in producing Dirac equations of old QED, it is in producing new QED, QCD, inflation, black holes, dark energy, etc. Dick's work has not even scratched into these areas. He is way too concerned about physics that is decades old.

Harv certainly cannot qualify as a decent judge as he has never taken the trouble to understand what I have said.

I'm not going to pretend to be a judge of the mathematics. I don't feel I have to actually. The philosophy behind it is so skewed that I see it as deeply flawed from the onset.

However, if you allow the possibility that more is going on here than simple direct contact, then enforced ignorance arises. It is not a question of assuming the ignorance, there is no way to know and to think you can know is insupportable.

Whenever you construct a symmetry, it really doesn't matter if you construct it based on your ignorance or as a symmetry that exists in nature or some combination. What matters is that symmetry is accepted as a given and then with this given you can produce results with that symmetry that lead to interesting predictions. This is why, I suspect, Dick hasn't produced anything new. He has simply taken the source of symmetry as important without realizing that it is not the source of the symmetry that is necessarily important, but the results of the symmetry. Noether showed the results of symmetry arguments, and using symmetry cosmologists and particle physicists are busy trying to find other symmetries that can explain the laws of physics that we have. Dick has simply taken advantage of those older symmetry arguments, perhaps dressed them in purple when they were formerly dressed in green, and is trying to sell his work off as something fundamental when, in conceivable fact, it is nothing but the same ole' symmetry arguments redressed in a different outfit. I deeply suspect that this is the case, but unfortunately I'm not a mathematician or physicist, so it is outside of my area. Although, I think it is deeply suspicious when someone uses symmetry to produce what has already been produced using the same symmetries. Just changing the argument from symmetries of nature to symmetries of our knowledge means nothing to me, especially when the definitions he uses are hardly definitions. They are, I suspect, convenient terms to make those gullible enough to accept them as being legitimate terms when, in fact, they are just means by which to introduce the Noetherian symmetries to construct his physics results.

Quantum mechanics is deducible from my fundamental equation and so are the general relativistic effects. I solved the problem of the conflict between Quantum and relativity almost twenty years ago.

So, ask him to tell you about dark energy. Get some predictions for inflation. What kind of inflation, when did it start, etc. If he really has a TOE (which contradicts what he said about his model not being a theory, btw), then he'll gladly be able to answer many of the tough questions about the early universe and elementary particle theories.

You can't get any more fundamental than my fundamental equation and chapters two through four show exactly how it "complexifies"... into the equations of physics with which a decent physicist should be familiar!

By fundamental I don't mean a fundamental equation of Dick's work, I mean a fundamental equation that produces extraordinary unified physics such that all the phenomena of physics just flows out of it in a kind of eureka moment. Alan Guth relates a moment such as this when he was working on inflation for the first time and how easily the universe's inflationary expansion could account for the major problems of the big bang. Feynman related a similar 'moment' when he was able to take his path integral and unify QED and produce Lamb's shift, etc, with relatively simple equations. The difference between those experiences and Dick's work is that these guys produced new predicted results whereas Dick didn't produce those kind of predicted results. This demonstrates, in my opinion, a lack of a fundamental approach. You know when you have a fundamental approach, the equations speak volumes about a deeper description of the universe and it forces a paradigm shift in how you think about the universe. In addition to that, it creates new observables.

Speaking of Unbelievable, I will agree with Harv, I am quite unbelievable. That's why no one believes me!

I said he is unbelievable because a work of a physicist was mentioned bearing close resemblance to Dick's work, and he is not at all interested. That is unbelievable. Why would someone be like that unless they didn't care what others thought? This shows a great deal of egotism.

I will be gone again for a few weeks, my wife and I want to see the world before we die.

Dick: Be safe and have a good journey. My 'cavils' are well-intentioned.

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