Greek Philosophy to String Theory to Mozart’s Magic Flute - Logic Failures and Pure Inspiration
In this video I connect pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus to Brian Greene and other String Theorists, with some music by Mozart along the way! What were some of Heraclitus' theories of the universe? What makes them similar to the modern physics concept of String Theory? String Theory attempts to create something that has since eluded modern physics: the unification of all forces, of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, into one Grand Unified Theory of Everything. But after decades of promises without any evidence to show for it, String Theorists are starting to back away from their decades of research. Why?
The Elegant Universe (1999) by Brian Greene on Amazon: amzn.to/47a0mKl
Προφερά της κλασικής αρχαίας ελληνικής γλώσσας:
el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Προφορά...
Recommended videos:
Angela Collier on the Lies of String Theory: • string theory lied to ...
PBS Space Time on String Theory: • Why String Theory is W...
Brian Greene explains String Theory in 2 minutes: • What is String Theory?
Brian Greene explains String Theory in 20 minutes: • String theory - Brian ...
Brian Greene on StarTalk: • The Edge of Our Unders...
Gregory B. Sadlery on Core Philosophy: • Core Concept Videos - ...
🦂 Support my work on Patreon:
/ lukeranieri
📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks:
luke-ranieri.myshopify.com
🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus"
learn.storylearning.com/lu-pr...
🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon:
/ 54058196
☕️ Support my work with PayPal:
paypal.me/lukeranieri
And if you like, do consider joining this channel:
/ @polymathy_luke
🏛 Latin by the Ranieri-Dowling Method: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/co...
🏺Ancient Greek by the Ranieri-Dowling Method: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/co...
🏛 Ancient Greek in Action · Free Greek Lessons:
• Ancient Greek in Actio...
👨🏫 My Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata playlist · Free Latin Lessons:
• Greetings in Latin · L...
🦂 ScorpioMartianus (my channel for content in Latin, Ancient Greek, & Ancient Egyptian)
/ scorpiomartianus
🎙 Hundreds of hours of Latin & Greek audio:
lukeranieri.com/audio
🌍 polýMATHY website:
lukeranieri.com/polymathy/
🌅 polýMATHY on Instagram:
/ lukeranieri
🦁 Legio XIII Latin Language Podcast:
/ legioxiii
👕 Merch:
teespring.com/stores/scorpiom...
🦂 www.ScorpioMartianus.com
🦅 www.LukeRanieri.com
📖 My book Ranieri Reverse Recall on Amazon:
amzn.to/2nVUfqd
Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart
#philosophy #stringtheory #mozart
00:00 Intro
00:22 Why I use the Magic Flute Overture
02:02 What is String Theory?
14:46 10-dimensional space-time
21:38 String Theory's failures
25:03 Empty promises of String Theory
31:06 Heraclitus & Pre-Socratic Philosophy
33:15 Logic errors in modern physics
33:49 It's "phenomenon" in the singular!
35:47 Hypercorrections and language evolution
37:05 Origin of "ain't"
49:01 Philosophy of Heraclitus
String theory dominated research funding for 30 years. Most theoretical physicists HAD to become string theorists in order to stay employed. Sir Roger Penrose was an early supporter then realised it was a dud. Fortunately, he had a well enough established reputation and wasn't dependent on fashion.
You know, I still have an intuitive feel that there is promise in it. I’m sure I’m being seduced by the same illogical aesthetics as the string theorists, but I can’t help but love it.
This is one of the old polymathy style long-form videos, and I'm all here for it!
Thanks, my friend! Yes, a stream of consciousness video; it felt like flying a helicopter at low altitude over desert buttes without colliding with them: kind of rough, with lots of dust blown into the air, but ultimately it worked out haha.
Another thing that unites String Theory and Ancient Philosophers is that String theory reduces all of our complexity to a combination of two aspects: the quantitative (the strings) and the qualitative (the vibrational modes), which is almost exactly the same as Aristotle's notion of hyle (primary matter) and form. Gotta love how some things don't change even 2500 years later /sarcasm
Mathematicians have a concept called an "equivalence class". Without going into the definition, everything in an equivalence class usually satisfies some sort of property. In the context of trying to figure out how the world works, there are equivalence classes for models that explain the world, so everything in the same equivalence class makes equivalent predictions. So for instance there is an epicyclic model that's in the same class as the Copernican model, since with enough epicycles you can account for all the same data. In as far as we can tell, there is no difference between a universe where one is true vs the other. However as often the case when working with equivalence classes, we find it easier to work with "representatives" of those classes instead. Representatives are useful since they provide concrete examples and serve as shorthands. We can pick any member of a class to serve as representative, but just because they're all apart of the same class does not mean they're equally easy to work with. Some models are simpler, and since our tasks are hard and our brains are limited, we pick the simpler model, not because of any axiom that says simpler is correct, but because a simpler model is easier to reason with, so we are more likely to make further progress with it. It is strictly a matter of pragmatism. To illustrate, we would not have likely discovered Newton's laws if all we had available were the epicyclic model of the solar system. We *could* have, in principle, but it would have been much more difficult. The Copernican model provides all the same predictions as the epicyclic model. Even Copernicus knew this was the case. It may not have been clear at the time how the two were mathematically equivalent, but it takes a long time to realize these things, and even without realizing them we can still make many useful discoveries in the meantime. However in order to do so we need to make hypotheses regarding what is likely to result in other discoveries.
The way you express awe and the way you combine the sublime feeling of listening to music with the sublime feeling of thinking you have understood a remarkable theory that explains everything around you is so familiar. I've had these specks of awe back when I was just a teenager.
Then we have an appreciation of similar and good things.
37:05 "I amn't" is still very common in Ireland. I used to use it when I was in my early teens in favour of "I'm not" and only recently, in my early 20s, have I begun to attempt to bring it back into my active vocabulary
Φίλε Λούκα είσαι μια έμπνευση!
I love your enthusiasm for all this stuff, including and especially the linguistic tangents. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for watching! I appreciate the comment.
The point Heraclitus was tries to make when talking about war was probably not war, but change. His "logos" can be understood as the essence of the harmony of two antagonists, and this confrontation can have many faces such as war, or fire, or a river that doesn't stay the same.
That sounds like a better explanation.
Been watching your videos for a few years now and even though I'm "only" 19 years old I really enjoy every single one of them! Keep up the good work and stay safe :)
You exactly answered the questions that popped up in my head the last weeks :D Gracie mille! Danke :D
A combination of really powerful messages are conveyed in this episode and the interactions amongst them are explored not only very eloquently and harmoniously but with a measured and controlled enthusiasm and with the intent to inspire a very great deal - all in all, very enjoyably. Also, it was very much worth the wait to reveal the connection with Heraclitus - I confess of not knowing that connection beforehand
Heraclitus' conclusions might be uncomfortable, but he was describing reality as it is, not as we would have it be. War is inescapable, and terrible, but wishing it would go away does not make it go away. Indeed, wishful thinking about peace often enables war. Remember also that Heraclitus was very likely to have himself been a soldier or warrior; he probably knew war on a personal level.
You’re quite right; my interpretation is probably an exaggeration. Another commenter pointed out Schopenhauer’s essay On Women, and what a load of nonsense it appears to us in the modern day just 170 years later. A question for further inquiry: is there universal morality across time? We denounce slavery of people in the past; will future generations denounce us for enslaving animals for food? (This comes from someone who is not a vegetarian.)
@@polyMATHY_LukePeople slaying domestic animals for food is as unlikely to ever go away as people slaying each other over whatever random reason.
I found his gut reaction to Heraclitus' penchant for war by thinking of Nazi Germany quite humorous, and then bringing up democracy was the cherry on top. As an American I suppose we have a blind spot for how aggressive and bellicose America is while nonetheless being a "democracy" (a democratic republic). Also, one can't ignore how tyrannical ancient Greek democracy was, how tyrannical the Roman republic was, and of course how tyrannical European democracies were (especially the latter end of the colonial "democracies") and still are.
@@FaithEdits If the Nazis came back to power all colored people, all Muslims, all LGBT people and all people with disabilities would promptly disappear as would the rule of law because the courts would no longer operate independently of political authority. No matter how lame and plutocratic America is or how many foreign policy blunders it makes, you can't compare it to that. It's a whole new level of evil.
I just love this side content. Really spices things. Keep up dealing out newer info on cosmic research.
Ευχαριστώ Γιάννη! I absolutely will do more; I’ve always loved these subjects. Thanks.
String theory will waste a decade of your life and it doesn't work.
I have heard that. In that same interview on StarTalk Brian Greene says that now the standard model actually can do much or nearly all of what string theory needed to do with strings. Interesting.
@@polyMATHY_Luke They need to focus on developing spacial distortion physics that we can use. We are too small to ever know the mass of the universe(U). Christ in the apocrypha of John acknowledged that truth. I have been focusing on quantum equilibria of quantum field mechanics.
Michio Kaku needs to know that ASAP. LOL!
String Theory is still the best explanation for gravity on the quantum scale. I love how it just comes naturally from the theory.
@@OscarRuiz-gj3mp He has been told many times. They make money conning you out of research money trying to explain the Universe without a purpose other than to be that guy
All claims of physics are based on the fallacy of presuming maths does something more than describe. It's like saying a sentence is true because it's grammar is correct ("It's true cos it's written down"). All talk of dimensions, separate particles, time etc have no reality beyond equations/propositional logic. The problem arises when trying to describe fundamental reality through propositions, which by definition is non propositional just as a word is a symbol of that which is represents and not the thing itself.
It is hard for some people to accept that Pythagoras (numerology) and Parmenides (argument from contradiction) are wrong.
@@williambranch4283 yes. I still see people who think the universe is composed of sacred geometry
27:16 A really powerful message is conveyed here. My take on this, though, is more general; I think the problem is far wider. It is not just that we, as a society, are characterised by a lack of understanding really basic physics and by extension the basic tennets of science, it is that we do not develop the tools of rational thinking and scientific method as a primary means of developing our own judgment when posed with any question and some random related or unrelated information. In my mind, these tools, which cannot exist without language, is what we ought to learn how to use at school so that we can employ them as a rake to sift through all the unrelated ideas and thoughts so that we can be left with the fewest possible thoughts of substance out of which we can then construct an answer. The differenting and most crucial factor here is the use of language and the understanding of its principles and limits. Science, physics, mathematics work because they are use specialised subsets of our natural language which ideally aim to be the minimal subsets of the latter that are fit for a particular purpose: that which serves each of these highly specialized subjects.
Hey, Luke, I enjoyed this video and I look forward to your Plato project. The major problem that I find with studying pre-socratics is that we have so little of their writings. How much can we really know from scattered fragments and doxographia? Even the best guesses will be so wildly speculative and prone to so much distortion. I came to this realization by reading Diogenes Laertius' Lives and Works of the philosophers. We're always warned to take those writings with a grain of salt, but we tend to take the sections about the pre-socratics much more seriously than those about Plato and Aristotle. But think about it and do the following mental exercise. Imagine that we had lost everything written by them, those wonderful dialogues and books. And then try to reconstruct their thoughts and theories and worldview strictly from those comments (hey, you may even throw in a few fragments and references from later philosophers who mention them, such as Cicero, Epictetus and others). In any case, I wouldn't read Heraclitus' passages on war as a prescriptive warmongering, nor even as social/political philosophy, but that he was using imagery familiar to his ancient audience as means to explain his metaphysical views. By the way, I loved the part about the "ain't". I find it annoyingly weird those paradigmatic changes that doesn't make much grammatical sense, for example, saying "Where are you going to?" rather than "To where are you going?" thanks for your work!
Even as early as Plato and Aristotle, it was evident from their commentaries that the Presocratics were being distorted and Heraclitus most of all. And speaking of bad interpretations of Heraclitus, thank you for pointing out that the fragments that mention war are not prescriptions for a political policy of constant literal warfare.
You're quite right! We only have fragments of Heraclitus, so my interpretation of what he might have meant isn't really worth that much. Also: whither are you going?
would love longer videos like this! (:
Thanks! Happy to hear it. I have some really long ones on polýMATHY PLUS you might like.
11:56 My brain went to Tolkien's Silmarillion and the music of the Ainur
I can’t believe I forgot to mention that! I shall try to remember for next time I talk about string theory; thanks for mentioning it.
Πολύ καλό βίντεο.Να είσαι καλά.
Ευχαριστώ!
I liked this one. I remember getting into a debate about "Why we should now call anything at a Planck Length its 'atom' according to the Ancient Greeks." And I was like, "Uh...no, I don't think the Ancient Greeks would have agreed with that." Atom is a good word for what they meant then, and now. An atom is the smallest unit that maintains its uniqueness, once you go subatomic you're not dealing with unique things but the same things in different amounts and groupings. Also if you could cut something at a Planck length...it stops existing. Nonexistence would mean it is not an atom for it has to exist to be an atom.
To me atoms seem funny because nothing exists as an isolated 'thing', thats just an abstraction. The only real atom is the entire universe.
Thou art verily a polymath!
Well, a wannabe one. Or in the most generous sense, I just like learning about different things.
@@polyMATHY_Luke We are alike in that regard :-)
13:42 the cool thing about particle accelerators is the time dilation. Take a proton and set it on the table, and it will decay in an instant. Get it moving close to the speed of light and it'll live long enough to do laps around the LHC.
I really love this more relaxed - improvising format, however you put many subjects for discussion, I will comment just on three. 1. Physics and natural sciences in general (biology, chemistry, geology etc) do not try to explain the world. They just build models to *describe* the world (more precisely: our perception of the world). The world cannot be explained. Furthermore, no natural scientist is interested in explaining. For example, take gravity. It cannot be explained and nobody tries to do it. But there are models for it. You can *describe* gravity as a force, or as space curvature. Or or or... But, of course, if the description gets very smooth for our needs, if we can make predictions, if this works with other models, then very often we have the illusion, that we are explaining. But this is - strictly logically speaking - impossible. 2. Term "elegant" is really used often in math. Best example is the "Theorema elegantissimum". This happens, because mathematicians tend to see a beauty in math, since this is an abstract structure, and abstract structures do have an aesthetic value (e.g. ornaments, abstract painting, music, football etc). Yes, you have a point here. But: we can repair that sentence: "among many models, we select the simplest one". This can be stated, since simplicity *is* something that can be defined mathematically (through information content vs. length, s. mathematical entropy etc.). 3. AFAIK Heraclitus was not interested in Ethics (i.e. how should one live?) but mainly in Ontology. So, he is not recommending anything. He is just... describing by creating a model (he was a natural philosopher). One of his ideas was, that everything exists due to its opposite, life/death, cold/warm etc. so that the eternal dispute ( = the War) is the father of all things. One can understand this much easier, by looking into the theory of Empedocles, where Love and Hatred make the atoms construct and destruct things in our world.
Okay, Luke I am not studying ancient Greek, I have only started Familia Romania (to start learning Latin). It is the middle of the night (well, almost 03:00) and I am listening to fall back asleep. Sorry, but your voice is soothing.
Very kind.
As far as I know, the ouverture to Die Zauberflöte is Mozart's only pure instrumental music that includes trombones. Listen to how effective they are in the transition to the fugato-allegro! His music has been a special interest of since I was a young teenager. I compose music in old styles and similar to Mozart, I let classicism, baroque and romanticism meet.
Regarding ain't, it is a word often used by Lord Peter Whimsey, the very upper class and classically educated character in the detective novels of Dorothy L Sayers, herself a translator of Dante.
Excellent video
Very kind! Thanks for watching
As a greek, I am very pleased with your works. Please make more videos introducing our language and culture!!!🥰💪👏👍
Είσαι πολύ ευγενικός! Ευχαριστω.
I lack the educational refinement to respond to you in Greek as Luke can, but as a Westerner and a Christian I can give you and the Hellenic nation nothing but thanks for the creation and sustaining of our cultural and intellectual life. I'm just reading through the fragments of the presocratics now--it took me a long time to get through Homer, some of the Platonic dialogues, and some of Aristotle--and all I can say is wow. Almost nobody realizes how deeply they thought thousands of years ago. And then there is the princely Archimedes, who already in the BC era produced so many beautiful results in geometry.
Luke is not pro Greek. Like most he unethically tries to whitewash the former Yugoslavians little switch of identity into antihellenic founders of the Hellenistic period. Like most he blames us for his own lying by ridiculously claiming them "Macedonians"
ASTRONOMICAL LEVELS OF BASEDNESS
Your polymathy is a direct consequence of being polyglot. The brain of a polyglot by maturity is different than that of the monolingual. You are such a good example ;-)
Very kind! I just follow my interests
This was intensely interesing.
Thanks for watching! I appreciate it
39:50 I haven't checked lately but I think it is used throughout the UK e.g. "I ain't going home yet." 40:31 I did not realize that this construction "for her and I" had become used so frequently. I was still left with the impression that the construction "you and me are" was a much more common mistake - maybe this is slowly receding. 42:11 Tut, tut! 49:03 You're kidding, right? I had completely given up on that by this time... I am surprised that you are not making a reference to youtube's favourite construct "of off"! This is the top offender in youtube by my count.
"It's all about perspective" is such a fundamental true statement that it actually gives an insight into nature of reality. There's an ongoing attempt to look for structures outside of space-time, the hypothesis is the fundamentally reality is a singular conciousness looking at the world from different perspectives. That makes u, me and every living thing the same thing. It's nothing nothing new, Dharmic philosophy, so that'd be Hinduism and Buddhism and stuff has figured this out ATLEAST 2500 years ago. There in the West too gnostics weren't far off, btw Plato was one of them. The basic idea is if you dissolve your ego, destroy your perspective, disregard everything your senses and your mind tells you, whatever's left is the ultimate reality, pure consciousness.
In Hinduism yes, but there is no universal conciousness in buddhism. That is discarded as a speculative concept of self. There is only a nominalist consciousness, as such any universality comes from mutual interpenetration of all phenomena. As for space time, if space by definition is the absence of something then declaring space has properties and can bend is akin to saying something can act upon nothing - such things can only happen in equations and bears no resemblance to reality.
9:45 Check out this year's Nobel Prize in physics. We might be getting closer to that resolution.
Thank you for highlighting dr. Sadler. I have been following him for a decade now and he's truly fantastic
He really is! A recent discovery for me and wow what a scholar
Just like the Luminiferous Aether. We thought we were about to put a bow on physics, but nope.
What a wild ride! This is a really fun video. Expected to hear about strings and learned that I ain’t wrong to say “I ain’t”! Yes, string theory has been really bad for the credibility of science (and the later multiverse stuff isn’t helping), but in my world even more damage is the takeover of the funding agencies by string theory (about 1990) so you could not get funded if you didn’t do string theory. Since funding determines PhD topics, this resulted in a generation (or more) of Sheldons, who are having a hard time doing anything else, and utter neglect of possibly more fruitful alternative approaches to understanding nature. Theoretical physics is only now starting to dig itself out of this hole.
Very well explained. Indeed, this is a problem that Angela Collier pointed out as well: the funding went towards string theorists, but they may have over promised what they could deliver.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Regarding whether string theory is "correct" or "disproven", I think both stances are way unjustified. String theory is just (and always has been) a very interesting idea worth pursuing. Where things went off the rails is when the string theorists oversold it as "it has to be true" and somehow convinced almost everyone so no other approach (such loop quantum gravity) was able to get support. Happily that situation has changed. I studied this stuff as a grad student at Berkeley in the early '80s, just when strings were taking off. By 1985 the initial justifications/motivations for strings (and supersymmetry) were known to be wrong but they just changed the motivations to something else. (For example, in the early days it was believed that string theory would be unique, now we know that there are many many many many solutions.) By that time I had lost interest in string theory because I didn't believe the motivations so it's a good thing I didn't pursue a career in theoretical physics. But I understand the motivations, even the current ones. I personally don't find those motivations motivating, much less convincing, and I don't believe that string theory describes the universe. But I might be wrong and support those who want to keep poking there. So long as there's room for other approaches. (and in case you're still reading, my aesthetic problem with string theory is that it thinks in terms of discrete very small actual strings (rather than actual particles), which violates my read of physics which says that fields are the primary entities and particles (or whatever) are emergent from interactions. I find that much more elegant than modes of vibration on strings. In other words string theory is too classical and conservative for me, and is not elegant enough.)
Do you have a video about Latin's "sonus medius"? At first I thought it would be about the Greek /y/ sound, but it would be likely a close central vowel [ɨ] or its rounded counterpart [ʉ]. But I can't find many sources about this topic.
Heh you know about as much as the rest of us! The latter two are probably the way to go, the third being where it was earlier, but by Caesar’s time it was headed to the second there, eventually to [i] - Caesar recommended the spelling change of optumus > optimus we still consider standard. Perhaps I’ll make a video.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thanks for answering 😄
I am reminded of the pronouncement, "'Ain't' ain't a word 'cause the teacher says it ain't."
On this subject I highly recommend Sean Carrol's 'Something Deeply Hidden'.
For the philosophical side check out his book 'The Big Picture".
The Fragments of Heraclitus have changed my life, straight up
They’re really lovely.
@@polyMATHY_Luke truly I think 67 is particularly beautiful, if a bit uncomely to us contemporary people, in expressing its monistic perspective on God/Logos and the universe
23:47 PBS Spacetime also has a video titled 'Why String Theory is Right'. Where Matt talks about how pretty String Theory is. There's also a ton of videos related to the topics. AdS CFT correspondence, quantum invariance, etc.
It's an excellent video, as all of them are on that channel. I like Ask A Spaceman's videos on the whole thing; it really shows physicists' frustration with string theorists.
The Violin comparison reminds me of Arthur Schopenhauer's claim that music is a representation of the will (i.e the hinterwelt, the metaphysical)
His essay on women is crazy
Very cool! I’m not familiar; I’ll look it up.
I just read it, Caleb. I’d say it’s a classic example of the “times” one lives in limited one’s capacity for truly rational thinking. How many sexist and racist things have philosophers and social scientists proclaimed over the years? Is our forward thinking generation of 2023 immorally backward even in our common sense thinking for the citizens of Mars circa 2171?
@@polyMATHY_Luke The future will judge us just the same way we judge people of past eras. Schopenhauer had some values that would be considered "progressive" today. He cared very much about animal rights for example.
When Heraclitos talks about war he maybe refers to even a mental struggle and conflict in between diversity,and pluralism. In the Greek mythological system godness Harmony is daughter of god Ares...so maybe we have to find balance after accepting diversity.It's just one point of view
That’s a very reasonable interpretation. I don’t think my interpretation is as mainstream, but probably exaggerated.
The way I like to think of String Theory isn't as little strings, but rather as an interaction between two membranes. Let's say you have two planes that are parallel. Now grab a point on one plane and pull it so that it stretches out into a cone that passes through the other plane. So, now you have a cone interesting a plane. Now look at where they meet. It's a circle. A string. These strings might just look like strings from our perspective. When really it's just how the fundamental fields are overlapping with each other. This does explain why there is a seemingly endless way the strings in String Theory can be shaped.
Thanks for this great video. I have been observing this fallacy all my life. The really odd thing about it is that almost all people understand in almost every context that this way of arguing is a fallacy - except in, say, "holy" contexts. People say all the time things like: "If there was no God, then life wouldn't make sense, so there must be a God." And the same people recognize the very same way of arguing as invalid in almost every other context. Maybe something similar happens to theoretical physicists when it comes to the universe.
I suppose that’s what I was thinking about to. Physics is the study of nature, of the entire university. The divine is the supernatural, meaning something something that exists outside of the universe. Does that mean God doesn’t “exist” in the physics sense? What does existence mean if all existence is by definition not the supernatural - does this imply God cannot exist since existence implies being part of the universe? Ah but yet, what lies beyond the universe? How did it come to be? We know based on current data and analysis that the universe had a beginning, meaning creation, and possibly implying a creator. But what does a creator mean outside of the universe? A universe within a larger universe? All really interesting and important philosophical questions. I think rational arguments can be made for either side. Something I didn’t touch on was why we observe beauty in things like gas giant atmospheres or galaxies or granite rocks - is there universal, objective beauty? Thanks for the compliment and for watching.
@@polyMATHY_Luke "We know based on current data and analysis that the universe had a beginning" Eh, not really. We are getting into semantics now but we don't really have a reason to believe our universe had a beginning just with the proof that we have right now. We just can't "look" past ~10^-32 seconds after the big bang(and as of now calculating anything at t=0 seems impossible, even with "Theory of everything") and with our "primitive" understanding of electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces we only really start to understand what's happening after a minute or so after the big bang. As countreintuitive as it sounds, the universe itself may very well have no beginning. Besides, "beginning" can only exist when time exists and time as we know only started to be a concept after the big bang. So a correct statement would be "We know based on current data and analysis that TIME had a beginning". The universe might've begun precisely at the moment when time began, and that would make things a lot simpler, but we can't just assume it's true just because it makes the most logical sense. It also doesn't really imply creation (although it's certainly possible!), from the most recent data we can conclude that the universe is VERY likely flat(it's pretty much accepted as a fact in the cosmological community, but to actually prove it you'd have to travel tremendous distances) and a flat universe COULD support an ex nihilo model. I'm not nearly competent or smart enough to have an idea how feasible an ex niholo model really is but from what I understand it's a theoretical possibility.
In defence of "aesthetics": Let me preface by saying I'm not going defend everyone's aesthetic senses, as they obviously can contradict each other, but I will say that, over the course of your education, you get exposed to different examples of what works and what doesn't. For example, you might consider n > l to be a really weird sound change, since (afaik) it's very rare in Indo-European languages, but for me, with much more exposure to Sinitic languages, it's so overdone that I'm tempted to tell languages to get new material. (Currently, Cantonese is undergoing the change, and Hokkien has neutralized the two, with /l/ being the primary allophone, and a few more.) I think that gets baked into your "aesthetic sense", and when you're faced with a solution to a new problem, this problem-solution pair gives off vibes that match some proportion of the examples in your head. If that proportion is high, then you'll think of it as obvious, and if it's lower, you might go "I *guess* I can see that", and if it doesn't match anything you've seen, then you'll consider it ridiculous. I think what string theorists (and other people) are trying to get across when saying that some theory is "aesthetically pleasing", what they're saying is that the solution gives off the same "vibes" as other solutions to other problems they've learned about. Like maybe, this looks like how some other physics problem was solved before (considering extra dimensions led us to general relativity, after all), or how positing extra entities allow us to make a simpler theory (like how quarks were first posited to simplify the particle zoo, or how the Higgs boson was proposed so we could describe the electromagnetic and weak forces as facets of an electroweak force), or how string theory has already given us a deeper understanding of physics,* so it's probably worth hammering away at it more. I think it's hard to recognize what the data that gives us this intuition are, and so it just ends up coming out as "vibes" or an "aesthetic sense", and our explicit explanations of why we think a certain solution is more likely boils down to "elegance", when what's going on in the neural networks in our heads is an implicit comparison between this problem and ones we've faced before. * This often gets glossed over in discussions of string theory, but the holographic principle (information in a volume is encoded on the boundary surface of that volume) has been used to great success in understanding electrical conduction in crystals with weird properties. It also checks out, as in it gives us the right answers when we use it to calculate quantities we already know about when quantum mechanics and gravity interact, somthing that cannot be said for its competitor, loop quantum gravity (they have to set a free constant to exactly cancel out all the other factors they end up with when calculating black hole entropies, for instance). While I'm not a staunch defender of string theory, it's at least understandable why string theorists continue to think it's viable, namely, because it's the only theory that we have so far that might work.
To my ear “for you and I” sound formal, but “for you and me” sounds very informal.
Right, which is why the error has occurred. Prescriptively, it’s important to recognize that “for you and I” is not formal, but entirely incorrect; indeed, to the ear of most, it’s a sign of lack of education (as are most such mistakes). I’m not telling you what to do - this is merely the general prescription.
17:22 I wonder, what happens if instead of a set number of compacted dimensions, you do the calculations for an infinite number of dimensions?
Haha no idea! I'm no theoretical physicist.
You should read Wolfgang Smith's books.
In regards to choosing theories for their "eloquence". I think what physicists and the like mean is which option has the less baggage. For example, with String Theory you get quantum gravity intrinsically. Which makes it look more appealing than doing something like modifying Newtonian Mechanics. Where you are adding stuff onto an equation. An Occam's Razor approach. There is some interesting correspondences from when Einstein was working on Relativity. I believe there was a line from Einstein like "your math is beautiful, but your physics is crap."
PBS Spacetime has a video on the beauty in physics and math kzhead.info/sun/q6qEl62Hj2p_hX0/bejne.htmlsi=1keuaq7AjV3aa7B0
So, string theory is a bit like abiogenesis...A lot of hot air...
just like all claims
You should also explain the correct use of "criterion" (singular and rarely used) and "criteria" (strictly, plural, but used indiscriminately).
Ah very good idea
I am still able to understand what you are saying, but I have a Physics degree, know some ancient Greek and Latin from school, modern Greek and Italian. Any other prerequisites ... and I am done. 🙂
Ωραία!
15:10 I always think of it as if a five dimensional being passed a tesseract through our universe. You'd see a cube appear from a point. Grow to a certain size, and then start to shrink until it disappears.
Right, that would be like drawing a square on a piece of paper and saying that it's only a slice of a cube. Which also works.
I really enjoyed this very inspiring video, thank you! As to your tangent on emphatic object pronouns being repurposed as emphatic subject pronouns in French, Italian, and, to some extent, in English as opposed to German which can use the actual nominative pronouns emphatically ("Wer?" "Ich!"), I would like to add that I think there is, as it were, an additional layer of linguistic logic to this. In my native Swiss German dialect, we can use the nominative pronouns emphatically ("Wär?" "Ii(g)!") just like in Standard German. However, for example, the phrase "If I were you" would be "Wenn ich du wäre" in Standard German, but "Weni dii wär" (literally: "Wenn ich dich wäre") in my dialect. What's happening there? Before you say, oh, it's probably the influence of French - admittedly, this is probably a factor, but, in my opinion, not the main factor. You see, as most Alemannic dialects, my dialect lost the morphological distinction between nominative and accusative centuries ago (interestingly, while preserving the free word order that is typical of inflective languages such as Standard German). This means that, unless the second subject is a pronoun, grammatically, copulae behave exactly like transitive verbs (think about it). What I believe happened was that peu à peu the collective linguistic subconscious started generalizing this observation (as well as the rule that a clause can usually only have one subject) and, therefore, re-analyzing copulae as transitive verbs. This again means that nowadays in the only cases in which it would make a difference, i.e. when the second subject of the copula is a pronoun, this pronoun, in analogy to transitive verbs, is put into the accusative. So in Bernese German something very similar as in French happened, but emphasis was not a factor: We do have emphasized and non-emphasized versions of all pronouns in all cases ("I" - "Ii(g)", "mr" - "miir", "mi" - "mii"). The typical mistakes Swiss-German children make when first learning Standard German also underpin my theory that this "re-analysis" of copulae is the main driver. First, they will often use the nominative instead of the accusative, but then once they get the hang of the accusative, another typical mistake is to use it after the copula. Therefore, I think the need for an "emphatic" version of some nominative pronouns is only part of the story in French, Italian, and English. The tendency of languages without a morphological distinction between nominative and accusative in nouns to re-analyze copulae as "ordinary" transitive verbs may have played a role as well.
Also, don't you think my theory is incredibly elegant ;-)?
Well explained! Thanks for telling us about that; Swiss German goes unexamined far too often by outsiders.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thanks! I love the dialectal diversity of both Italian and German since dialects, in some respects, are almost like time machines in regard to language evolution. Also, while thinking about copulae and the pretentious "It is I." in English, I realized something else: Chi è? *Sono* io. - Wer ist da? Ich *bin*'s. - Quis est? Ego *sum*. (Not sure about that last one, my active Latin is extremely bad, apologies!) On the other hand: C'est qui? C'*est* moi. So the weird thing about "It is I" is that while the pronoun is in the nominative, the verb is still in the third person - a phenomenon that does not occur in any other language that I know of. If English grammar really were supposed to work like Latin or German grammar, the answer would be "I am it."
35:30 : Mathematical elegance is not really beauty (although it does seem more beautiful to a mathematician, hence the name ‘elegance’); it's _simplicity._ Kepler's platonic solids would have been fairly elegant if they had matched observations; but even if they had, they wouldn't have been as simple as Newton's explanation, which explained the orbits of the planets _and_ the motion of falling bodies by a _single_ universal law of gravitation. That's a perfect example of Occam's Razor: needing fewer hypotheses to explain the observations. String theory never provided an elegant explanation of anything, but the string theorists _hoped_ that it would. If they could just find the right Calabi-Yau manifold and perform the necessary calculations to check, then they could have explained the zoo of subatomic particles (which _is_ a complicated mess) with a simple (hence elegant) string theory. But they never got it to work (never mind checking it against observation).
"Hit eom ic" (ich bin's). Or, if you want the Irish, "'S mi" (or "'S mise").
37:07 There's a Laurel and Hardy gag in here somewhere
Αγαπητέ Λουκά, Το ξέρουμε , το ξέρουμε... με αγάπη και στοργή Ορφανίδης Κωνσταντίνος
Isn’t elegance a specific defined term in engineering, math, physics and such meaning roughly simplicity? Even in aesthetics, elegance isn’t synonymous with beauty. I don’t see how that could be a definite mistake to choose between theories on an initial working basis.
my friend Polymathy, I would like in one of the next videos you make, to deal with some more specific topics, regarding information that exists in ancient written texts, but it is coded. A good starting point would be verses θ' 555-569 of the Odyssey. You will understand what I mean. thanks.
So these subatomic particles are actually vibrating strings that exchange vibrations when they interact with each other, and the vibrations and interactions are governed by... what?
So the fundamental forces are mediated by the exchange of particles like photons in the case of electromagnetism. And the force particles are also explained in string theory to be strings themselves that emanate from particles of matter, thus creating fields of force. This isn’t much different from the Standard Model which also holds that subatomic particles emit and absorb particles that mediate force.
Speaking of connections: Not sure if you intentionally chose the same image that The Strokes used for their “Is this it” album on the advertising post for this video, but the back of that album is artwork of an ancient Greco-Roman city. 🙀🤫🖖😂
Very cool! I hadn't make that connexion. Good band.
Primus
If anyone wants to learn Heraclitus' philosophy, aside from the primary source of the fragments, I recommend Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which covers Heraclitus and other Presocratics. The explanation in this video, that Heraclitus is "like String Theory" and just saying "you need war" while appealing to "intuition" and harmony is frankly terrible and has nothing to do with Presocratic philosophy. Philosophy is a lot more than pointing out logical fallacies, but if you want to illustrate this "aesthetic fallacy," then you only need to look at your boi Plato. Plato thought that ultimately the True, the Good, and the Beautiful all converge, and his political philosophy uses the actual mathematical ratios of harmony to prescribe a specific harmonious structure of society. But much worse than Plato himself is the state of scientific theory and how it shapes the way ordinary laypeople conceive of reality, and it shapes it in a way where people have adapted a shitty Platonism which they aren't even aware is Platonism. There are so many supposed "materialists" influenced by pop science who believe that the mathematical "laws" of physics are the eternal, transcendent, ideal structure of reality. This is essentially a form of Platonism that people have uncritically absorbed, all while "science communicators" like N.D. Tyson tell people that philosophy is worthless and all you need is the correct version of scientific realism (which is really just a mathematical Platonism).
You're quite right! My picking on Heraclitus was definitely extreme, and highly out of context. I suppose it's how my philosophy professor picked on Hawking - was that really fair, if we are so ignorant of the complexities of the math and physics?
When Heraclitus says that war brings the best out of people, well, i guess you could say that he's technically right. Then again he didn't mentioned the sheer brutality and crimes that take place. Moreover, the fact that war *can* bring out some merits, like bravery, self-sacrifice comradery etc. doesnt mean wars *should* happen.
Good points.
I am often amazed that educated folks who love science and theories of cosmology, physics and alien life--which I also love--rarely have an equivalent interest or understanding in the necessary continuum of intellectual progress that got human knowledge this far, including-- geometry, orbital mechanics, cell biology, mammalian evolution, simple machine principles, the foundational elements of civilization, language and consciousness, paleopsychology or, the most troubling gaps-- history, geography and ethics. I'd love to hear a video by a smart, measured observer like Luke addressing this paucity if he sees the same phenomenon or any worth in it.
electric motor: 1834 Maxwell Equations: 1862..
The electric motor is not a consequence of Maxwell’s equations, nor did I mean to imply that; I was speaking of all modern technology being the product of scientific understanding and unification of electricity and magnetism. Maxwell’s equations allow for radios, modern electric circuits, and optical technologies.
Obviously there's some truth to that, but in general science claims more credit than it deserves.. some other examples: vaccination came way before immunology, the steam engine before thermodynamics, selective breeding before genetics. The most world changing technologies came from practical human cleverness, theoretical unification followed later. (btw, tnx for the Greek lessons!)@@polyMATHY_Luke
I'm not sure what you mean by "science claims", perhaps you mean "some (theoretical) scientists claim"? In any case, the first electric motor was invented in the 1740s by Andrew Gordon, a monk who was also a scientist. He wrote many scientific works on electricity such as Phaenomena electricitatis exposita (1744), Philosophia utilis et jucunda (1745) and Physicae experimentalis elementa (1751-52).
10:17 Of course a 1- dimensional string forming a loop creates something 2- dimentional, which only if it vibrates in the level it defines will it remain 2- dimensional, in a different case and if it vibrates also outside this level, it becomes 3- dimensional. I find this mathematically speaking correct, but I suspect it is quantum mechanically wrong.
I thought that Sheldon Cooper resolved this problem and got a Nobel prize... 😋🤣
Quite so: bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/Super-Asymmetry
String theory is the mathematically simplest thing to consider if you accept that two things are simultaneously true: that general relativity is correct, and that the universe is quantum mechanical. This is because of something called the Weinberg-Witten theorem which proves that general relativity cannot be described by a quantum field theory in which the graviton is a point particle. So the next simplest thing to consider are fundamental quanta that behave as 1D strings (or higher dimensional objects, (mem)branes). Personally as a theoretical physicist I advocate people consider letting go of general relativity as fundamental - there is little reason to keep it this far other than people's attachment to Einstein.
Thanks for your perspective.
"Ain't" became unfashionable because it was Northern, not Wessex (London, Courtly), English.
Right
'Tis I.
35:00 - 42:00 ain’t is definitely coming back, I’m surprised you think it’s only a European thing and very surprised you don’t foresee it making a comeback ever. There are probably 100,000,000 Americans between Texas and Virginia who use that word every day.
Right, but it’s used by those speakers freely in all six persons of the verbal paradigm, and is considered substandard. What I don’t foresee is ain’t or amn’t returning to the first person singular, exclusively, in speech considered standard.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Ohh gotcha. I must've missed that nuance. I agree about it's current usage, though I could still foresee ain't becoming a 1p sing exclusive at some point, though it's certainly not a guarantee.
Mēchanica quantī cum relātīvitāte speciālī fēlīciter prōcēdunt. Quaestiō difficilis est relātīvitās generālis.
46:04 This is not a scientific principle, it is a methodology (well, science is a methodology in itself primarily so, therefore, this is a methodology about a certain problem in applying another methodology). In the end, scientists are in essence little boys and girls who really enjoying playing with this really amazing, immense, fictitious toy which, to top it all, they also get to invent themselves. So, you cannot really take the pure enjoyment factor out of the practice of engaging in the study of science, mathemetics or whatever - people, especially people who are really talented, gifted in these fields, would simply stop pursuing them. The question is, what is beauty? Is it, in the favourite terms of scientists, simplification and abstraction taken to the absolute degree? I'm inclined to say yes. If for a moment it were possible to explain everything by a single mere symbol, a single point, that would be the ultimate aesthetic goal. It would not be fun any more but it would serve the purpose of pleasing aesthetically. 46:40 This could be taken as an extreme take on this principle. In essence, in abstract sciences as mathemetics or physics, when you have a problem to which you do not have an overbearingly evident, prominent solution but instead you have many somewhat likely candidates for a solution and moreover, each of these solutions, to compound matters further, does not correspond to the same exact problem but to a slight (or not so slight but still related) variation of the original problem, then suddenly your original problem, which was quite tidy, becomes a huge, absolutely intractable one within the confines of a single mortal's life. Then, applying the principle provides a simple and tried (well, so far) way to go forward and to keep progressing. So this principle primarily applies to physics and is a physicists' caprice but it does have its place in a different manner in mathematics also. The reason therefore why physicists like it is two-fold: it makes their job easier and it also makes it more enjoyable - these two going necessarily together. 46:44 "I thought this was science" As an addendum to the above, a slight comment on this: science is practised by human brains, i.e. by people that know next to nothing and who are always on a quest to learn a tiny bitsy bit more. Science is not practised by a machine, a contraption that knows everything and that is engaging with the universe in order to write down its functioning - which it already somehow knows. We do not know anything. We go into the darkness. We only have a torch that somehow helps us move forward without stumbling too much, most of the time. That's all we have. Science is just a little tiny torch. It's not an end in itself. It's not the absolute truth. I think you say as much at the very end. 51:13 "It's a really beautiful idea" - here and in the following, 51:16 "sounds a lot like string theory, doesn't it?" you are making an excellent case of how to apply this priniciple by applying it yourself: you derive enjoyment out of discovery of similarities (two cases of finding similarities: one of the idea of Heraclitus, the other the similarity between his observation and string theory).
Tall guy or low ceiling?
If you mean my recording studio, low ceiling.
3'25" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Hahahae, oportet dīcere aliōquī īrāscuntur suā ignōrantiā.
26:44 Woah! Did you just call journalists illiterate in science? The very people who inform us about, well, the world? I always thought it was just a Greek journalists' thing - that if you'd ask them what the three laws of Newtorn are, they'd probably need to confer with each other for a bit and come to a consensus before they'd blurt out a response. It's actually very amusing because every week or two here, they report on an amazing application of technology or invention made by either students or a university project team and most of the time, these attempts cannot bear down to any serious scrutiny (e.g. economic feasibility or viability, performance when compared with other solutions or even just the very basic existence of an actual need that these inventions supposedly serve), i.e. they're just the equivalent of pyrotechnics to scientific applications experiments for purely educational reasons - other universities or schools around the world also do them but they do not go on national tv to boast about them.
Yes, the principal theme of Mozart's symphony is a "nice tune", and the Gioconda is a nice picture. Good God.
Keep in mind that much of my audience probably doesn’t have much experience with classical music, so it helps to understate what you and I might take for granted as masterpieces to those who might not “get it” without more experience. Aristotle was fond of understatement for such rhetorical purposes.
Very good episode Luke! Yes, we know that the pronunciation of Attic Greek was different to that of Modern Greek in some letters but I think you are in agreement with me when I say that the not only the pronunciation of koine Greek but the language itself is very very similar to that of Modern Greek!
Thanks, my friend. As for Koine Greek, not at all: it is fundamentally identical to Classical Attic. The differences can be listed on a single page. While Katharevousa has been made, through extremely artificial means, similar to forms of Ancient Greek, Dimotiki and Modern Standard Greek are incredibly different from any form of Ancient Greek. I don't know why the education system in Greece insists on cherry-picking a few sentences from the Koine Bible to show their students, to make them believe that Koine Greek was virtually the same as Modern Greek, which is an obtuse lie. Actually, I do know why: it justifies the modern language (in their minds) if it many or most of its characteristics are found in antiquity. As for the pronunciation of Koine, no again: the pronunciation for most of the Koine period, including the Hellenistic Period which goes until the end of the 1cBC, was virtually identical to the Classical Attic pronunciation I use in this video. This has been further confirmed by Ben Kantor's new book on the Pronunciation of New Testament Greek, for which see my review on the channel polýMATHY PLUS coming out tomorrow. Only by the very end of the Koine Period, in the 5cAD, do we finally have a pronunciation that is similar to that of Modern Greek, but not for all speakers or regions.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I disagree. As a Greek I can tell you that Koine Greek is very easy to understand even without formal training. In church for example we can follow the gospels and make sense 90% of them (at least). The psalms and other non-prose parts of the liturgy are more difficult to understand but certainly not impossible the reason being that they are based on poems and as such they make use off metaphors and poetic terms or words and are hard to understand. Moreover, I am not referring only to New Testament Greek but any another text in koine Greek. The same goes for those texts as well. Pronunciation-wise I am not an expert but as I understand it from other scholars what I said in my first answer holds. By the way if we go back before Κοινή Ελληνική to the time of Herodotus, I can tell you that we can understand much of it - less than when reading koine Greek, certainly -and if we go even further back to the time of Plato, we can understand even less but certainly recognise words and sentences and even make sense of parts of the text. It depends on the writer and the complexity of languages he writes in. What I want to highlight here is the amazing continuity of the Greek language and I am sure even you who, as I can see has knowledge of the Modern Greek language as well as the Koine and Attic forms, can see that Greek has changed relatively little considering the very long period that the language has been spoken. Greek is still Greek be it Koine, Attic, Byzantine and Modern which does not hold for Latin and the Latin-based languages. The reasons are well documented but let's leave it for another occasion!
Omne videum vidi, ac id maximum ex tuis esse puto! Modum in quo philosophiam archaicam physicaque connexuisti me attonitum effecit. Hoc videum opus magnum, serio! Ex quo innumera praecepta novi. Prosequere sic, quia magnus homo es. Ave! P.S. Me paenitet quominus syllabarum longitudines nescio: heu, scholae Italicae Latinam bene non docent (locutio ecclesiastica, eruditio in vertendo, defectus loquendi, et cetera).
I was in grad school in the 80's when all the particle theorists were jumping on the string theory bandwagon. They had to do this because that's where all the jobs were. And I can also remember the concerns in the 90's that the SSC, and later, the LHC would end with the "nightmare scenerio" which was "the Higgs and nothing else" Well, guess what.... that's where we are. No supersymmetry, no evidence for string theory. And it's getting more and more pathetic as string theorists cling to this theory in the face of mounting last of evidence. It's also a bit shameful the way they have been pitching string theory as if it's a foregone conclusion.
That's what happens to some of the people who believe in the multiverse. They just believe it because it's beautiful. I have some friends who saw the multiverse in a movie and decided that it was real. It may be cool to think about, but it being beautiful and cool doesn't mean it is real.
You seem to think in the same way as me, which I love
Very interesting comparison
Qui auget scientiam auget et dolorem
I swear I could distinctly hear a mic drop in Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene's debate on string theory 😂
Hahaha. Truly wonderful stuff. I never tire of physicists debating.
@@polyMATHY_Luke As a Physics PhD, I fully agree with you on that 😄
So, here's a word for you Luke: Πολυπράγμων.
Μῶν καλεῖς με πολυπρᾱ́γμονα, πολύπρᾱκτε;
@@polyMATHY_Luke 😁 You are, and here's yet another word for you _Πολυσχιδής_ and this I wish you always be.
I enjoyed the video up until the immediate dismissal of certain aspects of Heraclitus for what amounts to your "gut feelings". After telling this parable about your philosophy professor I hope you realise how this feels like a contradiction. Just as you ought not prefer some theory for its elegance, you should not dismiss one for its vulgarity. I do not pretend to know a great deal about Heraclitus but from watching the video suggested, it seems that he does not always speak in plain language and that talk of war may in fact be at least partly metaphorical. Regardless of this I found your dismissal very out of character.
Absolutely! Nor did I intend to imply otherwise. Like I said in the video, I’m exaggerating that φιλόνεικος characteristic that Heraclitus seemed to suggest. The reality is we only have fragments of Heraclitus, so we don’t have a super clear idea of what he meant. My interpretation of him as being pro-war may be an exaggeration, or perhaps not; but it was also very much a part of life back then. Consider how important war and combat were in the times depicted in the Iliad. Thus Heraclitus’ fragments at the very least reveal something of the culture of the times, which is important and fascinating to me, but probably doesn’t make for the way I personally would like to see the world. But this is normal in the study of philosophy: we read various philosophers at different times in our lives, and we like some things and find others unpalatable. A good example is how most of us probably disagree with Socrates’ (or rather Plato’s) negative feelings about artists and poets (seen in Plato’s Ion), or his insistence that poets and performers are not real artists and have no talent because they just get their inspiration from the Muses. I don’t feel that way, and it’s possible Plato’s didn’t feel that way either, and simply sought to challenge the reader’s assumptions. That’s what you saw in my commentary on screen. Not a rejection of Heraclitus, just as I don’t reject Plato, but I don’t agree with everything they say. Have you read a philosopher that made you feel that way? Even Descartes changed his mind about cōgitō ergō sum since he realized that it wasn’t essence that was proved by thinking, making it exsistō later. So even philosophers can disagree with themselves.
What the... Halfway into this video and still nothing. So uncharacteristic of LR. 😳
"Healthy skepticism" about science (the science)...Careful there, you are treading on very thin ice (cough, cough...pun intended)
Haha.
"For her and I" always drives me crazy. I don't understand why people don't just ask themselves whether "for I" would be correct. By the way, do you know why Americans came to say "would have" as a pluperfect construction rather than "had"? It seems a lot of extra work. It always makes my ears hurt.
There is nothing wrong with “would have” as there are three equivalents to Latin “habēbat” : would have, had, was having. This isn’t pluperfect though in either language, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to. The reason, as I explained in the video, for the “for her and I” is because “me and her” was stigmatized as a subject formulation, which is right, but then those only partially educated in grammar - 80% of high school and college graduates - avoided the formulation irrespective of position in a sentence. The same reason that ain’t has been extinguished. But yes, it drives me crazy too.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I’m not talking about the use of “would have” as conditional, which would be a completely normal usage,
interesting that you release this as Jupiter / Zeus is opposite Mercury and Mars from our geocentric viewpoint. Mozart who wrote Magic Flute which is all designed about the 4 Elements and their dynamic creative power that must be kept in balance by the magus would be amused. I would be very sorry if all became knowable
Not a real theory more of an hypotheses that lead no where. Untestable, but pretty.
It seems so.
Occam's razor tends to necessitate Elegance. So while I am in no way generally defending Stephen Hawking, your philosophy professor's objection was itself inelegant.
That could be!
There's the Occam's razor fallacy: the simplest solution is not always the correct one.
I always hate "string theories" for being to much unscientific by any means of methodological understanding of how Science works, in my case, the magic flute it´s modern classical mechanics and reggaeton are branes since I had 12..... even the mathematics of "strings" are in my case distasteful, like comparing XX century sculpture ideals with Policleto canon, ugly versus elegant
Man... Keep sharing your personal ideas, feelings and intuitions, but better as incidental comments. Or else, at length, but then more seriously. It's not serious to call superstrings, branes, etc., the whimsical, aestethical prescription of science communicators for the universe. It's wrong to claim that a theory, to be right, needs to be provable. It's wrong to claim that superstring theory has been disproven. It's wrong to claim that Hawking pretended that things had to be elegant. As much as one should be wiser than just fall for aesthetics, it is perfectly legitimate to value and ponder this side of things, even for philosophical reasons. Because elegance often has to do with simplicity, clarity, efficiency, and actual degree of likelihood. Take for instance good old Occam's Razor, quite universally embraced. If one is to find working descriptions of reality, it is not just legitimate but even sensible to enjoy what you are doing. This bias will sometimes discourage people from exploring key discovery avenues, which can make us miss our goal or important aspects of reality, but good scientists never forget how discoveries may await us precisely where we don't necessarily feel drawn to. Please don't misappreciate presocratics. They were the giants on whose shoulders Socrates stood (e.g. Xenophanes's shoulders). You seem to have a very naive understanding and intuition of presocratics, to the point of interpreting Heraclitus in an absurdly literal or superficial way. Xenophanes was a great philosopher that could strike you with unforgiving logic. His were the reasoning and wisdom behind Socrates' catchy saying about knowing nothing, which in fact nuanced Xenophanes. Heraclitus talk about "God", "war", etc., is far more profound than implied here. Your are misunderstanding him. He's talking about the nature of reality and that which lies behind the ocurrence of the natural world as perceived by us and approachable by science/philosophy, more profoundly than you seem to be understanding him.
"It's not serious to call superstrings, branes, etc., the whimsical, aestethical prescription of science communicators for the universe." I did not say that, but String Theory has been highly criticized by physicists in the terms that I used in the video, q.v.: kzhead.info/sun/msqLcpGfh4GFg30/bejne.htmlsi=BZkvxvokXwgBphuV kzhead.info/sun/nt2aj7CQmJGvZH0/bejne.htmlsi=Zfk-W8nnRTG-HMLW "It's wrong to claim that a theory, to be right, needs to be provable." A scientific theory first needs to be coherent - this exists no single string theory, which already evades testability - but it must be falsifiable, testable, or at least make predictions that can be observed. Not satisfying these requirements, many physicists have shown that string theory is not a "theory" in the scientific sense, as Relativity is a theory or quantum mechanics or Newtonian physics. "It's wrong to claim that superstring theory has been disproven." I did not make that claim. For some of the various string theories, supersymmetry was essential for it to work. When supersymmetry was demonstrated not to exist (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry#Current_status could it with different experiments? possibly, but then it would be a very different string theory with a very different theory of supersymmetry associated with it) it mean that the theories of string associated with supersymmetry were invalidated, and that new theories of strings have been developed to find other explanations for how a string theory could work. But it's not the same string theory anymore. "It's wrong to claim that Hawking pretended that things had to be elegant." As I demonstrated in the video where Neil deGrasse Tyson picks on Brian Greene, many mainstream physicists have criticized theoretical physicists for prioritizing elegance and beauty. "As much as one should be wiser than just fall for aesthetics, it is perfectly legitimate to value and ponder this side of things, even for philosophical reasons. Because elegance often has to do with simplicity, clarity, efficiency, and actual degree of likelihood. Take for instance good old Occam's Razor, quite universally embraced." Agreed. But if you find any of my commentary "wrong" on string theory, I suggest you take it up with mainstream physicists, whose conclusions and perceptions I have related in the above video. "Please don't misappreciate presocratics. They were the giants on whose shoulders Socrates stood (e.g. Xenophanes's shoulders). You seem to have a very naive understanding and intuition of presocratics, to the point of interpreting Heraclitus in an absurdly literal or superficial way." While I appreciate that you watched the entire video, I don't think you heard what I was actually saying. Having read nearly all of the surviving fragments of the Presocratic philosophers in the original Greek, I don't believe my understanding of them could be called "naïve;" my reaction was primarily to the philosopher professor's commentary, to his interpretation of Heraclitus, to his contextualization of the text. Nevertheless I appreciate the comment. See the videos I linked to the physicists who criticize string theory in the manner I related. As for the presocratics, we don't actually disagree on anything.
It doesn’t work because it’s compartmentalized. These theories are not proven. These theories are incompatible. You’re a pilot right? For some reason I thought you were. Can you have gas pressure without a container?
You can, actually, have pressure without a container; interstellar gas exerts pressure on itself and on objects since the particles are still moving, and thus hitting the object in question.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I can’t believe you responded. I’m a fan. Love the Latin. I was irritated this morning. I’m also a flat earther. Thanks for all your excellent content. Now on the gas pressure question all I can say is, “prove it.” Space is fake bro. Have you checked on Jackson? Think he might be getting ready to mind some p’s and q’s.