Hi Israel,

Ref. [6] is to be found in the line of [5] because the contest allowed just one page of references. The original sapere aude seems to be no longer available via http://www.btinternet.com/~sapere.aude . An impressive list of those who signed [5] and some papers by Paul Marmet also disappeared.

I already replied to your very comprehensive reply to my comment that mentioned Gericke as someone who made very convincing as well as fertile experiments. Perhaps you know that von Essen called Einstein's 1905 paper on moving bodies the worst one he ever read mainly because Einstein did not perform experiments.

While I am not a physicist and I did not deal with Einstein's relativity for all the more than 40 years when I was teaching at Otto-von-Guericke-University, I cannot hide that his method of synchronization looks naively subjectivist to me.

I consider the method by Poincaré (Potier) only convincing in case emitter A and receiver B do not move relative to each other.

Regards,

Eckard

PS: Being short of time at the moment, I promise to reply more in detail and to all others later.

Dear Georgina,

Having looked in vain for the word choice, I suspect you meant chosen which occurs twice on p. 3 and once in Appendix B. In the latter case one has the choice between looking at the plane +, +i either from above or from below. Accordingly one sees the phasor exp(iwt) rotating anti-clockwise or clockwise, respectively.

Fig. 1 on p. 3 might be a blasphemy because it calls the birth of Christ an arbitrarily chosen event from which on we are calling a year either a positive AD (anno domini) or a negative BC (before Christ). If I hurt feelings, I apologize for that.

Regards,

Eckard

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    • Post #11

    Dear Eckard,

    I'm sorry for causing confusion.I just meant the words you chose to use in that one particular sentence would not have been chosen by someone with English as a first language. The rest of the essay is so very well written, demonstrating great linguistic skill.

    You wrote :"Let's call most basic assumptions pre-mathematical as to remind of how children get familiar with elementary notions." It would have sounded more natural if you had said "reminiscent of "instead of "as to remind of". Also "children become familiarised" (or -ized) would have worked better than "children get familiar". The meaning of the sentence is still clearly conveyed.I intended the observation of so few errors to be a compliment rather than a criticism. Re. mentioning the birth of Christ, you certainly have not hurt my feelings

    Its very well written, fascinating and, for me, educational essay. Well done. Regards, Georgina

    Hi Eckard

    Ok, thanks for the explanation about the references. I did not know about the comments on Einstein's paper, thanks for the information.

    I made a comment in reply to you in my thread regarding the one-way measurement according to Gift. His experiment has no scientific validity.

    Best regards

    Israel

    Dear Eckard Blumschein,

    Thus, coherently-cyclic-universe is asymmetric and dynamic as the mathematical representation of universe in entirety is a pre-mathematical intuition, when we ascribe a cycle of it in potential infinity that has actual infinity of cycles.

    With best wishes,

    Jayaker

      Hello Steve,

      Nice to see you again. Perhaps you managed reading a lot of essays. I am mainly interested in what I consider reasonable outsiders like Janzen, Kadin, Kerr, Perez, Reiter, and Merryman whose essay I will look at next.

      Regards,

      Eckard

      Dear Georgina,

      My mistake is obvious: When you wrote "word choice" you meant choice of words. In German we would write in this case wordchoice or word-choice. I mistook "word choice" as the word "choice".

      My essay tries to show that similar mistakes in science are still to be found. I will read your essay because I consider the meaning of the notion reality utterly important. Einstein referred to the perspective of an observer. This might be a key mistake.

      Regards,

      Eckard

      Dear Jayakar Johnson Joseph,

      Admittedly, I am facing difficulties when I am trying to understand your sentence. English is not my mother language. I have no idea what "Thus" refers to. I would write either "the" or "a" coherently-cyclic universe. Perhaps you meant "a" in the sense you are suggesting it. Well, such assumption is clearly speculative. What did you mean with "ascribe ... in"? I only know "ascribe" in connection with "to". If I ascribe a cycle of a cyclic universe to infinity, shouldn't this infinity then be actually infinite? In my humble understanding a genuine cycle is actually endless. The spiral of (nearly) identical cycles you seem to imagine is potentially infinite. Please accept that I am not interested in such perhaps futile speculations.

      Regards,

      Eckard

      Hi Israel,

      I do not share your positive attitude toward intuition to which your comment of Aug. 9, 5:30 GMT refers. Reality might differ from intuitively interpreted abstraction. Devlin is certainly correct when he reveals that while epsilontics is rigorous, the interpretation as continuity is intuitive, in other words a questionable petitio principii.

      What about S. Gift, may I ask you to briefly explain in what and why he is wrong? Admittedly, I did not yet deal with his claimed measurement. Teaching at the Westindies he seems to be an outsider. However, I only judge on the basis of factual arguments. The reason for me to quote Bruhn [29] was to show how those who used to prejudge simply ignore experimental results and infer from their generalizing intuition that Einstein was a genius who was always correct that anything else must be wrong.

      Regards,

      Eckard

      Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman,

      I admire your brilliant ability to emphatically comment even on mutually contradicting essays, and I feel your comment on mine more fair than I could expect after I quoted Kadin who plausibly at least to me explains why he does not consider photons particles. You might blame my lacking qualification for my failure to immediately grasp your slightly different concept.

      While I do not deny that intuition can provide the basis for questioning certain assumptions, my essay tries to show to what extent science has been based on rather shaky intuition.

      Well, on the first glance my essay seems to just reiterate well known deficits. My lists of enigma, suspected basic flaws and confessions coincides by chance and only in part with my criticism of arbitrary decisions made from a more or less intuitive background.

      I am the nobody to whom even a Norman Cook is a nobody. I recall Jont Allen admitting something similar more briefly: No model (of cochlea) fits all data.

      Dear Eckard,

      You are correct that I find mutually contradicting essays interesting and to some degree convincing. There are a few arguments here that I am unable to decide between, and others in which I wonder if some middleground is possible.

      As for Kadin, I do not recall his exact stance on photons as particles. I certainly do not envision photons as material particles like electrons. The question is whether there is any 'local' energy packet (and hence equivalent 'local mass density') as Einstein and Dirac and many others concluded. If so, then this will induce the C-field circulation I have described in my essay. It is my assumption that such localization does apply, as the implications of the alternative seem completely unrealistic to me. And it seems indisputable that photons carry momentum, which is the 'source' of the induced circulation. I hope you might reconsider my approach with this in mind.

      You say "on the first glance my essay seems to just reiterate well known deficits." Re-reading my comment I realized what my first sentence sounded like and I disliked my own wording. A good part of the reason that I am mindful of the basic problems with math is because of your previous essays and arguments on FQXi. So I would soften that sentence in favor of the third sentence.

      You state that "No model (of cochlea) fits all data". I am not an expert on physiological structure and function, but I believe that biological reality is so many more orders of magnitude more complicated than elementary particle physics, gravity, etc, that multiple models of biology are more to be expected.

      What I would NOT change is my final sentence, "Thanks for a well thought out, well written, well referenced essay. It is excellent and I wish you good luck in the contest."

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Hello Eckard,

      Thank you. I am always happy to see your deterministic road.

      There are several relevant essays. Your line of reasoning is rational, it is the most important. I am going to read yours still one x and the other essays also. It is cool this year. I play like a child, after all, the innocence is our best friend.

      I wish you good luck for this contest.

      Regards

      Dear Edwin,

      I intend learning from you to regard concerns of others at least as important as my own. Therefore I will try and first tell you what might be of interest with respect to your C-field. You know that I do not understand anything in this area. Kadin wrote: "This transformation from a real wave F(x,t) to a complex wave psi = exp(imc2t/h_bar)F contributed to the widespread belief that the matter wave was an abstract mathematical representation rather than a true physical wave in real space." Then he dealt with the earlier established evidence for Wave-Particle Duality for several quantum entities. His Table 1 is convincing to me. The evidence for photons to be particles is just a weak one. I understand the spin of electromagnetic waves as their polarization. And why should wave not have energy? Strong evidence for being a particle is the property of atoms and the like to be arranged in lattices with certain distances from each other. I am also declined to take seriously the arguments by Dieter Zeh and Eric Reiter. Moreover, you pointed me to Michael Goodband. See Tom's reply to my belonging questions to Michael. That's already all I can possibly do as to support you.

      Let me once again stress my intention to show that intuitive attitudes are not just to be found if young people are having problems to swallow formalized so called counterintuitive theories but the other way round, at least some of such allegedly rigorously founded theories are actually based on hidden possibly questionable pre-mathematical intuitions. Accordingly I decided to choose the title of my essay QUESTIONING PRE-MATHEMATICAL INTUITIONS and not questioning theories by means of intuition.

      I apologize for sending my last reply unintentionally unsigned.

      Regards,

      Eckard

      Dear Eckard Blumschein,

      Actually I have learned many profound details from your essay and when I was analysing my work with that, I unintentionally started the sentence with, 'Thus'.

      Your descriptions on this article provide me vital intuitions to confirm my assumption that the universe is infinite. Hope you may understand my anxiety of concluding.

      You may please visit

      With best regards,

      Jayakar

      Steve,

      Doesn't determinism imply monism, the block universe, and denial of free will?

      I consider determinism the belief in the possibility to calculate the future. Therefore I do not see myself on a deterministic road.

      Yuri suggested to somehow unite Permanides and Heraklitos. I do not see any factual justification for that. Of course, mandatory idolizing in particular of set theory and of SR led to many desperate maneuvers by those who are a bit coward and maybe even ready to be a bit less honest. Yes, your innocence is my best friend.

      Which essay do you consider relevant with respect to the issue I mentioned above? In other words, which are the most hurting ones?

      Regards,

      Eckard

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      • Post #26

      Eckard,

      You really take a sledgehammer to the whole rickety structure. I certainly don't have anywhere near the depth of knowledge you possess, so thank you for adding me to the list of those you consider worth reading, even if my essay wasn't what you may have liked to see.

      Reading various of the entries in this contest, there are many more serious proposals to really question the conceptual foundations than I had expected, so it gives me some hope a real paradigm shift might be in the foreseeable future. Possibly after this contest is over, some organized effort can arise from those looking outside current boundaries. It is safe to say there is little momentum within the status quo that isn't fantastical speculation, so maybe the momentum will switch to the outside. As I've put it before, the future is a continuation of the past, as long as current structure can absorb new energy, when it can't grow further, then the future becomes a reaction to the past.

      Best wishes and congratulations on a take no prisoners essay.

      That list you asked for.

        Dear John,

        Your judgment Is seemingly the opposite from other reactions. I copy what Yuri Danoyon wrote to me:

        -- Dear Eckard, My correspondence with other Nobel laureate G.Hooft about Blumschein essay

        Yuri:"What is your attitude to essay Eckard Blumschein?

        http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/833 I think that it raises for discussion a very important issue for the revision of the foundations of modern physics"

        His answer:"I found this essay too long and too boring to read. My superficial search for anything touching upon the foundations of physics led to negative results." --

        Frank Wilczek preferred not to answer at all. Meanwhile I got aware that he had advocated for a preferred frame of reference.

        Thank you very much for providing the link to cosmologystatement.org So far I did not manage opening it. However, this might be my fault.

        Best,

        Eckard