Anonymous Coward,
The one thing I want to make clear throughout this is that the main question here is why must you remain anonymous? Is it because you do not believe your words and do not want to have your name associated with them? Is it because you do not want your department chair or funders to see your childlike namecalling and ad-hominem attacks that you use instead of logic and reason? Is it because you think that simple logic and reason is not enough, and that snarky namecalling and childish put-downs accomplish what your logic and reason cannot? Please focus on my questions here, and please answer, as I am answering your questions, even though you do not want to meet at high noon, but you prefer to catcall from behind a mask and shoot your opponent in the back, like a coward.
Niels Bohr had a lot to say about the Cowboy Code, and therein we can find insights as to why your behavior ultimately loses both on the cultural and scientific levels:
From: http://holasunshinegirl.blogspot.com/2006/07/westerns-and-niels-bohr.html
"The great Danish Physicist Niels Bohr, an avid Western film fan, wondered why in all the final shoot-outs, the hero shoots faster even if his adversary is the first to reach for his gun. Bohr asked himself if some physical truth might not explain this convention. He came to the conclusion that such a truth did indeed exist: the first to draw is the slowest because he decides to shoot, and dies. The second to draw lives because he is faster, and he is faster because he doesn't have to decide, he is decided. This brilliant discovery was the result of a whimsical empirical research: Bohr and his assistants went off to a toy shop, bought water pistols , and back in their laboratory duelled for hours and hours."
--http://holasunshinegirl.blogspot.com/2006/07/westerns-and-niels-bohr.html
So it is that you decided to shoot first in the dark of night, from behind a mask like a lowly outlaw, and thus made my decision for me. EBohr--a Dane--had a great appreciation for the Cowboy--for honor and integrity--for Truth and Justice. Too, too many postmodern "physicists," such as yourself, have lost that honorable, noble spirit. The classic, epic showdown goes back 2800 years to The Odyssey, when Odysseus rides back on into his home, disguised as a beggar. Eventually he alone strings the bow and slays all the false suitors to his wife who kicked him around and spat on him--that eternal faceless, nameless mob which you, and all too many postmodern physicists, run with. But alas, they banned *The Odyssey* from the academy, and thus your behavior dominates.
What we have here is an evolution and paradigm shift, and deep down you sense it. That is the source for your emotional vitriol. If you were certain that I was wrong, you would calmly state so and let your Word--let your Name--let your Reason speak for themsleves. But as you are driven by emotions you do not understand, and as you do not have faith in your Word nor reason, and are embarrassed by it and/or your Name, you hide behind anonimity. Perhaps you do not wish to badmouth MDT, as you sense that in a year or so you may be seeking funding to support your MDT research.
A few major forces have ever driven the evolution of physics: The realization that math is actually telling us something about the *physical* nature of reality, the realization that one thing that was formerly believed to be stationary moves, the realization that two disparate entities are actually the same--as in space/time, wave/particle, mass/enegery, and the relaization that we must not ignore physical realtity just to have some fancy-shmancy math/science fiction.
Well, MDT is driven by all these forces.
Consider the equation x4 = ict .
x4 represents the fourth dimension. Now Einstein taught us that dimensions are very, very real *physical* entities. They can bend. They can warp. They can *move*. The fourth dimension is a *physical* entity.
i is the imaginary number--the square root of -1.
c is the *physical* velocity of light. c is a *physical* entity. we generally know it by the *physical* enity of the photon.
t is time--that *physical* parameter--that ever-moving force none can deny, except for some advanced postmodern physicists, who wish to keep quantum gravity, which does not exist, and get rid of time, which does, in fact, exist.
So it is that we have a *physical* equation telling us the relationship between *physical* entities.
x4 = ict.
The glaring mistake you make, pilgrim, is asserting that
x4 = ict is not a physical equation, relating physical quantities. How embarrassing! No wonder you must remain anonymous. Imagine if your department chair or funders found out!
I take great pride in MDT's simplicity, elegance, and boldness. You, the anonymous masked dwarf, like all too many physicists over the past thirty years whence Homer's Odyssey was deconstructed, adhere to a debased religion in which postmodern physics must be complicated, snarky, convoluted, indecipherable, filled with advanced, meaningless math that is used to select and promote groupthinkers, and to intimidate and cajole indie thinkers and lone cowboys, while building postmodern bureuacracies (like the machines did in The Matrix)rather than to exalt and explain--rather than to actually perform physics. Your fallen, mean spirit is the dominant brand and trademark of postmodern physics and academia, and your behavior can be seen throughout the internet and academy, where young physicists are taught to engage in groupthink math and snark independent thinkers who come forth with simple logic and reason. The Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek's THE ROAD TO SERFDOM has two chapters entitled The End of Truth and Why The Worst Get on Top. Because of the nature of the system, you feel you are forced into anonymity.
But more and more of us, who agree with Einstein, are banding together, and time, as a *physical* entity, is on our side:
"Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone." --Albert Einstein
As physicists, it is not our job to wallow in snarky, meaningless mathematics and use it to convolute and confound the simple, so as to build postmodern bureaucratic empires, but it is our job to figure out what the math *physically* means.
That is *exactly* what MDT does--it goes back to Einstein's 1912 paper and tells us what the equation x4 = ict *physically* means, granting us new insight into a hitherto unsung feature of the universe--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
"But even if the radiation formula should prove to be absolutely accurate it would after all be only an interpolation formula found by happy guesswork, and would thus leave one rather unsatisfied. I was, therefore, from the day of its origination, occupied with the task of giving it a real physical meaning." --(Max Planck, 1919 Nobel Prize address, 'The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory')
Something that was once considered to be mere math, is seen to have physical content, implicatioons, and meaning. Something that was once more or less considered to be stationary--the fourth dimension--is seen to be moving. 'Tis a revolutionary affront to the church of wormholes and time travel worthy of burning me at the stake, you can bet all the well-funded, anonymous cowards agree.
And too, where so many dismissed x4 = ict as "meaningless math," I actually noted that it has physcial meaning. Now I know that the highest form of postmodern physicists today are those who can look at an equals sign and deny it exists, just as the postmodern lit professor denies Shakespeare's and Dante's greatness, but I look at an equals sign and see it for what it is, just as I see x4, i, c, and t for what they are--entities in Einstein's 1912 Mansucript which are related in a *physical* manner.
And from MDT's simple postulate and equation we naturally get all of relativity in a 4D universe where the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions: dx4/dt = ic. This also shows that time, as measured on our watches, is an emergent phenomena that arises because the propagation of photons, which are but matter carried upon the fourth expanding dimensions. The expansion of the fourth dimension distributes locality and thus is the cause of quantum entanglement, as well as qm's general features such as wave-particle duality and its probabilistic nature, wherein a photon has an equal chance of being found anywhere upon the nonlocal, spherically-symmetric probability distribution defined by the expansion of the fourth dimension, manifested in our three spatial dimensions. Entropy, and time and all its arrows and assymetries, can also be seen to arise naturally from MDT, and too, all the dualties--space/time, energy/mass, and wave/particle--are shown to have a common source.
Yes, anonymous coward, I am going to have to stick with Moving Dimensions Theory's simple beauty and elegance, which unifies so much of our entirety with a comon *physical* model. All the NSF mondey in the world, and the approval of your department chair and grad students, could not force me to change my mind--the fourth dimension moves and expands independent of the three spatial dimensions.
And I encourage you to choose MDT over your anomymous, cowardly, snarkfest behavior, which is intellectual violence unbecoming of a physicist.
For your unmanly, dishonorabe snark and bitter mean-spiritedness, we cannot forgive you, anonymous coward, and we hope you change your ways are man up and walk into town with your head held high, proud of your word and honor--proud of the Name your parents gave you. But for your refusal to recognize that the simple math can sometimes be telling us something profound and new about physics, perhaps we *can* forgive you, as even Planck did not believe the deeper implications of the quantum theory he developed. Einstein did.
Planck lectured at Columbia, "Consequently, there remains only the one conclusion, that previous electron theories suffer from an essential incompleteness which demands a modification, but how deeply this modification should go into the structure of the theory is a question upon which views are still widely divergent. J. J. Thompson inclines to the most radical view, as do J. Larmor, A. Einstein, and with him I. Stark who even believe that the propagation of electromagnetic waves in a pure vacuum does not occur precisely in accordance with the Maxwellian field equations, but in definite energy quanta hv.
I am of the opinion, on the other hand, that at present it is not necessary to proceed in so revolutionary a manner, and that one may come successfully through by seeking the significance of the energy quanta hv solely in the mutual actions with which the resonators influence one another. A definite decision with regard to these important questions can only be brought about as a result of more experience."--(From Max Planck's famous Columbia Lectures)
From: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Einstein_and_photoelectric_effect.html
"Experimentalists railed at the prospect of what Einstein's equation of the photoelectric effect implied. Robert Millikan, the very man who showed that the equation really did work, would have nothing to do with its physical interpretation. In 1915, Millikan wrote: "The semicorpuscular theory by which Einstein arrived at his equation seems at present wholly untenable." Three years later, Ernest Rutherford, the great New Zealand physicist who probed the structure of the atom, said there appeared to be "no physical connection" between the energy and frequency in Einstein's hypothesis about light quanta. It didn't seem to make sense that a particle could have a frequency, or that a wave could act as if it were made of energetic particles. The two concepts seemed to rule each other out." --http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Einstein_and_photoelectric_effect.html
Well, at least they all used their names when they railed against a new theory. Sure, they were all great physicists, but first and foremost, like Bohr, they were rugged *cowboys*.
Gamow loved cowboys & Westerns too. Check out, "Mr. Tompkins Gets Serious: The Essential George Gamow, The Masterpiece Science Edition (Hardcover)
by George Gamow."
"The Cowboy Experiment
Father's nickname was Joe. Niels Bohr and my father were addicted to western movies while they were in Copenhagen together. All the cowboys in these movies--Gary Cooper types--were called Joe. That's how Father's nickname came about--he was named after a typical cowboy movie hero.
Bohr had some difficulty with cowboy movies. Being a great physicist he took things very literally. After seeing one of the many films in which there was a shootout between a good guy in a white hat and a bad guy in a black hat, Bohr asked Father, "How is it possible that the man in the black hat always reaches... "
--http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Tompkins-Gets-Serious-Masterpiece/dp/0131872915
Even more important than MDT is that we bring that classic, epic, western, heroic, cowboy spirit on back; for it is the true source of all enduring art and sicence, of truth and freedom, of rugged romance, beauty, and elegance--that rugged, lone truth seeker is how physics has ever advanced.
"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." --Max Planck
"The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demands for "conscious" control or "conscious" planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme--while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the superindividual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of social purpose." -F.A. Hayek, The End of Truth, The Road to Serfdom
You can stand him up at the gates of hell, but he won't back down. Bruno, Socrates, Galileo, Dante, Einstein, Gamow, and Bohr--they all walked and spoke freely in plain sight, and stuck by their guns when the chips were down. They, like Odysseus, were classic, epic cowboys, always standing up against the anonymous, faceless mob for truth, reason, and justice.
Well, we've all got a showdwon commin'. And if you call down the thunder, you've got to man up and face it at high noon--you can't just run and hide and use snarky, postmodern math in the dark of night, sneaking up anonymously behind the mysterious stranger. For ultimately, as Feynman knew, science is not advanced by those seeking fame and fortune--tenure and titles--but by those seeking truth and classic, epic honor.
Perhaps we ought make a list of Bohr's and Gamow's favorite Westerns.
"Bohr was very fond of seeing Western (cowboy) movies in which gun duels are quite common. In all such duels, the villain draws his gun but the hero always shoots down the scoundrel first. Bohr had an explanation for this phenomenon, ascribing this as the difference between wilful and conditioned thinking. "The scoundrel has to think and decide when to go for his gun, which slows his action, while the hero acts faster because he acts, without thinking, the moment he sees the scoundrel reaching for his gun." When nobody agreed with his theory, he bought a pair of toy guns and playing the hero, tried duels with his pupils. Surprisingly, he 'killed' everybody who tried to take a shot at him first." --from http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/030420/dmag21.htm
The one thing I want to make clear throughout this is that the main question here is why must you remain anonymous? Is it because you do not believe your words and do not want to have your name associated with them? Is it because you do not want your department chair or funders to see your childlike namecalling and ad-hominem attacks that you use instead of logic and reason? Is it because you think that simple logic and reason is not enough, and that snarky namecalling and childish put-downs accomplish what your logic and reason cannot? Please focus on my questions here, and please answer, as I am answering your questions, even though you do not want to meet at high noon, but you prefer to catcall from behind a mask and shoot your opponent in the back, like a coward.
Niels Bohr had a lot to say about the Cowboy Code, and therein we can find insights as to why your behavior ultimately loses both on the cultural and scientific levels:
From: http://holasunshinegirl.blogspot.com/2006/07/westerns-and-niels-bohr.html
"The great Danish Physicist Niels Bohr, an avid Western film fan, wondered why in all the final shoot-outs, the hero shoots faster even if his adversary is the first to reach for his gun. Bohr asked himself if some physical truth might not explain this convention. He came to the conclusion that such a truth did indeed exist: the first to draw is the slowest because he decides to shoot, and dies. The second to draw lives because he is faster, and he is faster because he doesn't have to decide, he is decided. This brilliant discovery was the result of a whimsical empirical research: Bohr and his assistants went off to a toy shop, bought water pistols , and back in their laboratory duelled for hours and hours."
--http://holasunshinegirl.blogspot.com/2006/07/westerns-and-niels-bohr.html
So it is that you decided to shoot first in the dark of night, from behind a mask like a lowly outlaw, and thus made my decision for me. EBohr--a Dane--had a great appreciation for the Cowboy--for honor and integrity--for Truth and Justice. Too, too many postmodern "physicists," such as yourself, have lost that honorable, noble spirit. The classic, epic showdown goes back 2800 years to The Odyssey, when Odysseus rides back on into his home, disguised as a beggar. Eventually he alone strings the bow and slays all the false suitors to his wife who kicked him around and spat on him--that eternal faceless, nameless mob which you, and all too many postmodern physicists, run with. But alas, they banned *The Odyssey* from the academy, and thus your behavior dominates.
What we have here is an evolution and paradigm shift, and deep down you sense it. That is the source for your emotional vitriol. If you were certain that I was wrong, you would calmly state so and let your Word--let your Name--let your Reason speak for themsleves. But as you are driven by emotions you do not understand, and as you do not have faith in your Word nor reason, and are embarrassed by it and/or your Name, you hide behind anonimity. Perhaps you do not wish to badmouth MDT, as you sense that in a year or so you may be seeking funding to support your MDT research.
A few major forces have ever driven the evolution of physics: The realization that math is actually telling us something about the *physical* nature of reality, the realization that one thing that was formerly believed to be stationary moves, the realization that two disparate entities are actually the same--as in space/time, wave/particle, mass/enegery, and the relaization that we must not ignore physical realtity just to have some fancy-shmancy math/science fiction.
Well, MDT is driven by all these forces.
Consider the equation x4 = ict .
x4 represents the fourth dimension. Now Einstein taught us that dimensions are very, very real *physical* entities. They can bend. They can warp. They can *move*. The fourth dimension is a *physical* entity.
i is the imaginary number--the square root of -1.
c is the *physical* velocity of light. c is a *physical* entity. we generally know it by the *physical* enity of the photon.
t is time--that *physical* parameter--that ever-moving force none can deny, except for some advanced postmodern physicists, who wish to keep quantum gravity, which does not exist, and get rid of time, which does, in fact, exist.
So it is that we have a *physical* equation telling us the relationship between *physical* entities.
x4 = ict.
The glaring mistake you make, pilgrim, is asserting that
x4 = ict is not a physical equation, relating physical quantities. How embarrassing! No wonder you must remain anonymous. Imagine if your department chair or funders found out!
I take great pride in MDT's simplicity, elegance, and boldness. You, the anonymous masked dwarf, like all too many physicists over the past thirty years whence Homer's Odyssey was deconstructed, adhere to a debased religion in which postmodern physics must be complicated, snarky, convoluted, indecipherable, filled with advanced, meaningless math that is used to select and promote groupthinkers, and to intimidate and cajole indie thinkers and lone cowboys, while building postmodern bureuacracies (like the machines did in The Matrix)rather than to exalt and explain--rather than to actually perform physics. Your fallen, mean spirit is the dominant brand and trademark of postmodern physics and academia, and your behavior can be seen throughout the internet and academy, where young physicists are taught to engage in groupthink math and snark independent thinkers who come forth with simple logic and reason. The Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek's THE ROAD TO SERFDOM has two chapters entitled The End of Truth and Why The Worst Get on Top. Because of the nature of the system, you feel you are forced into anonymity.
But more and more of us, who agree with Einstein, are banding together, and time, as a *physical* entity, is on our side:
"Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone." --Albert Einstein
As physicists, it is not our job to wallow in snarky, meaningless mathematics and use it to convolute and confound the simple, so as to build postmodern bureaucratic empires, but it is our job to figure out what the math *physically* means.
That is *exactly* what MDT does--it goes back to Einstein's 1912 paper and tells us what the equation x4 = ict *physically* means, granting us new insight into a hitherto unsung feature of the universe--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
"But even if the radiation formula should prove to be absolutely accurate it would after all be only an interpolation formula found by happy guesswork, and would thus leave one rather unsatisfied. I was, therefore, from the day of its origination, occupied with the task of giving it a real physical meaning." --(Max Planck, 1919 Nobel Prize address, 'The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory')
Something that was once considered to be mere math, is seen to have physical content, implicatioons, and meaning. Something that was once more or less considered to be stationary--the fourth dimension--is seen to be moving. 'Tis a revolutionary affront to the church of wormholes and time travel worthy of burning me at the stake, you can bet all the well-funded, anonymous cowards agree.
And too, where so many dismissed x4 = ict as "meaningless math," I actually noted that it has physcial meaning. Now I know that the highest form of postmodern physicists today are those who can look at an equals sign and deny it exists, just as the postmodern lit professor denies Shakespeare's and Dante's greatness, but I look at an equals sign and see it for what it is, just as I see x4, i, c, and t for what they are--entities in Einstein's 1912 Mansucript which are related in a *physical* manner.
And from MDT's simple postulate and equation we naturally get all of relativity in a 4D universe where the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions: dx4/dt = ic. This also shows that time, as measured on our watches, is an emergent phenomena that arises because the propagation of photons, which are but matter carried upon the fourth expanding dimensions. The expansion of the fourth dimension distributes locality and thus is the cause of quantum entanglement, as well as qm's general features such as wave-particle duality and its probabilistic nature, wherein a photon has an equal chance of being found anywhere upon the nonlocal, spherically-symmetric probability distribution defined by the expansion of the fourth dimension, manifested in our three spatial dimensions. Entropy, and time and all its arrows and assymetries, can also be seen to arise naturally from MDT, and too, all the dualties--space/time, energy/mass, and wave/particle--are shown to have a common source.
Yes, anonymous coward, I am going to have to stick with Moving Dimensions Theory's simple beauty and elegance, which unifies so much of our entirety with a comon *physical* model. All the NSF mondey in the world, and the approval of your department chair and grad students, could not force me to change my mind--the fourth dimension moves and expands independent of the three spatial dimensions.
And I encourage you to choose MDT over your anomymous, cowardly, snarkfest behavior, which is intellectual violence unbecoming of a physicist.
For your unmanly, dishonorabe snark and bitter mean-spiritedness, we cannot forgive you, anonymous coward, and we hope you change your ways are man up and walk into town with your head held high, proud of your word and honor--proud of the Name your parents gave you. But for your refusal to recognize that the simple math can sometimes be telling us something profound and new about physics, perhaps we *can* forgive you, as even Planck did not believe the deeper implications of the quantum theory he developed. Einstein did.
Planck lectured at Columbia, "Consequently, there remains only the one conclusion, that previous electron theories suffer from an essential incompleteness which demands a modification, but how deeply this modification should go into the structure of the theory is a question upon which views are still widely divergent. J. J. Thompson inclines to the most radical view, as do J. Larmor, A. Einstein, and with him I. Stark who even believe that the propagation of electromagnetic waves in a pure vacuum does not occur precisely in accordance with the Maxwellian field equations, but in definite energy quanta hv.
I am of the opinion, on the other hand, that at present it is not necessary to proceed in so revolutionary a manner, and that one may come successfully through by seeking the significance of the energy quanta hv solely in the mutual actions with which the resonators influence one another. A definite decision with regard to these important questions can only be brought about as a result of more experience."--(From Max Planck's famous Columbia Lectures)
From: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Einstein_and_photoelectric_effect.html
"Experimentalists railed at the prospect of what Einstein's equation of the photoelectric effect implied. Robert Millikan, the very man who showed that the equation really did work, would have nothing to do with its physical interpretation. In 1915, Millikan wrote: "The semicorpuscular theory by which Einstein arrived at his equation seems at present wholly untenable." Three years later, Ernest Rutherford, the great New Zealand physicist who probed the structure of the atom, said there appeared to be "no physical connection" between the energy and frequency in Einstein's hypothesis about light quanta. It didn't seem to make sense that a particle could have a frequency, or that a wave could act as if it were made of energetic particles. The two concepts seemed to rule each other out." --http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Einstein_and_photoelectric_effect.html
Well, at least they all used their names when they railed against a new theory. Sure, they were all great physicists, but first and foremost, like Bohr, they were rugged *cowboys*.
Gamow loved cowboys & Westerns too. Check out, "Mr. Tompkins Gets Serious: The Essential George Gamow, The Masterpiece Science Edition (Hardcover)
by George Gamow."
"The Cowboy Experiment
Father's nickname was Joe. Niels Bohr and my father were addicted to western movies while they were in Copenhagen together. All the cowboys in these movies--Gary Cooper types--were called Joe. That's how Father's nickname came about--he was named after a typical cowboy movie hero.
Bohr had some difficulty with cowboy movies. Being a great physicist he took things very literally. After seeing one of the many films in which there was a shootout between a good guy in a white hat and a bad guy in a black hat, Bohr asked Father, "How is it possible that the man in the black hat always reaches... "
--http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Tompkins-Gets-Serious-Masterpiece/dp/0131872915
Even more important than MDT is that we bring that classic, epic, western, heroic, cowboy spirit on back; for it is the true source of all enduring art and sicence, of truth and freedom, of rugged romance, beauty, and elegance--that rugged, lone truth seeker is how physics has ever advanced.
"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." --Max Planck
"The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demands for "conscious" control or "conscious" planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme--while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the superindividual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of social purpose." -F.A. Hayek, The End of Truth, The Road to Serfdom
You can stand him up at the gates of hell, but he won't back down. Bruno, Socrates, Galileo, Dante, Einstein, Gamow, and Bohr--they all walked and spoke freely in plain sight, and stuck by their guns when the chips were down. They, like Odysseus, were classic, epic cowboys, always standing up against the anonymous, faceless mob for truth, reason, and justice.
Well, we've all got a showdwon commin'. And if you call down the thunder, you've got to man up and face it at high noon--you can't just run and hide and use snarky, postmodern math in the dark of night, sneaking up anonymously behind the mysterious stranger. For ultimately, as Feynman knew, science is not advanced by those seeking fame and fortune--tenure and titles--but by those seeking truth and classic, epic honor.
Perhaps we ought make a list of Bohr's and Gamow's favorite Westerns.
"Bohr was very fond of seeing Western (cowboy) movies in which gun duels are quite common. In all such duels, the villain draws his gun but the hero always shoots down the scoundrel first. Bohr had an explanation for this phenomenon, ascribing this as the difference between wilful and conditioned thinking. "The scoundrel has to think and decide when to go for his gun, which slows his action, while the hero acts faster because he acts, without thinking, the moment he sees the scoundrel reaching for his gun." When nobody agreed with his theory, he bought a pair of toy guns and playing the hero, tried duels with his pupils. Surprisingly, he 'killed' everybody who tried to take a shot at him first." --from http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/030420/dmag21.htm
The one thing I want to make clear throughout this is that the main question here is why must you remain anonymous? Is it because you do not believe your words and do not want to have your name associated with them? Is it because you do not want your department chair or funders to see your childlike namecalling and ad-hominem attacks that you use instead of logic and reason? Is it because you think that simple logic and reason is not enough, and that snarky namecalling and childish put-downs accomplish what your logic and reason cannot? Please focus on my questions here, and please answer, as I am answering your questions, even though you do not want to meet at high noon, but you prefer to catcall from behind a mask and shoot your opponent in the back, like a coward.
Niels Bohr had a lot to say about the Cowboy Code, and therein we can find insights as to why your behavior ultimately loses both on the cultural and scientific levels:
From: http://holasunshinegirl.blogspot.com/2006/07/westerns-and-niels-bohr.html
"The great Danish Physicist Niels Bohr, an avid Western film fan, wondered why in all the final shoot-outs, the hero shoots faster even if his adversary is the first to reach for his gun. Bohr asked himself if some physical truth might not explain this convention. He came to the conclusion that such a truth did indeed exist: the first to draw is the slowest because he decides to shoot, and dies. The second to draw lives because he is faster, and he is faster because he doesn't have to decide, he is decided. This brilliant discovery was the result of a whimsical empirical research: Bohr and his assistants went off to a toy shop, bought water pistols , and back in their laboratory duelled for hours and hours."
--http://holasunshinegirl.blogspot.com/2006/07/westerns-and-niels-bohr.html
So it is that you decided to shoot first in the dark of night, from behind a mask like a lowly outlaw, and thus made my decision for me. EBohr--a Dane--had a great appreciation for the Cowboy--for honor and integrity--for Truth and Justice. Too, too many postmodern "physicists," such as yourself, have lost that honorable, noble spirit. The classic, epic showdown goes back 2800 years to The Odyssey, when Odysseus rides back on into his home, disguised as a beggar. Eventually he alone strings the bow and slays all the false suitors to his wife who kicked him around and spat on him--that eternal faceless, nameless mob which you, and all too many postmodern physicists, run with. But alas, they banned *The Odyssey* from the academy, and thus your behavior dominates.
What we have here is an evolution and paradigm shift, and deep down you sense it. That is the source for your emotional vitriol. If you were certain that I was wrong, you would calmly state so and let your Word--let your Name--let your Reason speak for themsleves. But as you are driven by emotions you do not understand, and as you do not have faith in your Word nor reason, and are embarrassed by it and/or your Name, you hide behind anonimity. Perhaps you do not wish to badmouth MDT, as you sense that in a year or so you may be seeking funding to support your MDT research.
A few major forces have ever driven the evolution of physics: The realization that math is actually telling us something about the *physical* nature of reality, the realization that one thing that was formerly believed to be stationary moves, the realization that two disparate entities are actually the same--as in space/time, wave/particle, mass/enegery, and the relaization that we must not ignore physical realtity just to have some fancy-shmancy math/science fiction.
Well, MDT is driven by all these forces.
Consider the equation x4 = ict .
x4 represents the fourth dimension. Now Einstein taught us that dimensions are very, very real *physical* entities. They can bend. They can warp. They can *move*. The fourth dimension is a *physical* entity.
i is the imaginary number--the square root of -1.
c is the *physical* velocity of light. c is a *physical* entity. we generally know it by the *physical* enity of the photon.
t is time--that *physical* parameter--that ever-moving force none can deny, except for some advanced postmodern physicists, who wish to keep quantum gravity, which does not exist, and get rid of time, which does, in fact, exist.
So it is that we have a *physical* equation telling us the relationship between *physical* entities.
x4 = ict.
The glaring mistake you make, pilgrim, is asserting that
x4 = ict is not a physical equation, relating physical quantities. How embarrassing! No wonder you must remain anonymous. Imagine if your department chair or funders found out!
I take great pride in MDT's simplicity, elegance, and boldness. You, the anonymous masked dwarf, like all too many physicists over the past thirty years whence Homer's Odyssey was deconstructed, adhere to a debased religion in which postmodern physics must be complicated, snarky, convoluted, indecipherable, filled with advanced, meaningless math that is used to select and promote groupthinkers, and to intimidate and cajole indie thinkers and lone cowboys, while building postmodern bureuacracies (like the machines did in The Matrix)rather than to exalt and explain--rather than to actually perform physics. Your fallen, mean spirit is the dominant brand and trademark of postmodern physics and academia, and your behavior can be seen throughout the internet and academy, where young physicists are taught to engage in groupthink math and snark independent thinkers who come forth with simple logic and reason. The Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek's THE ROAD TO SERFDOM has two chapters entitled The End of Truth and Why The Worst Get on Top. Because of the nature of the system, you feel you are forced into anonymity.
But more and more of us, who agree with Einstein, are banding together, and time, as a *physical* entity, is on our side:
"Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone." --Albert Einstein
As physicists, it is not our job to wallow in snarky, meaningless mathematics and use it to convolute and confound the simple, so as to build postmodern bureaucratic empires, but it is our job to figure out what the math *physically* means.
That is *exactly* what MDT does--it goes back to Einstein's 1912 paper and tells us what the equation x4 = ict *physically* means, granting us new insight into a hitherto unsung feature of the universe--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
"But even if the radiation formula should prove to be absolutely accurate it would after all be only an interpolation formula found by happy guesswork, and would thus leave one rather unsatisfied. I was, therefore, from the day of its origination, occupied with the task of giving it a real physical meaning." --(Max Planck, 1919 Nobel Prize address, 'The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory')
Something that was once considered to be mere math, is seen to have physical content, implicatioons, and meaning. Something that was once more or less considered to be stationary--the fourth dimension--is seen to be moving. 'Tis a revolutionary affront to the church of wormholes and time travel worthy of burning me at the stake, you can bet all the well-funded, anonymous cowards agree.
And too, where so many dismissed x4 = ict as "meaningless math," I actually noted that it has physcial meaning. Now I know that the highest form of postmodern physicists today are those who can look at an equals sign and deny it exists, just as the postmodern lit professor denies Shakespeare's and Dante's greatness, but I look at an equals sign and see it for what it is, just as I see x4, i, c, and t for what they are--entities in Einstein's 1912 Mansucript which are related in a *physical* manner.
And from MDT's simple postulate and equation we naturally get all of relativity in a 4D universe where the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions: dx4/dt = ic. This also shows that time, as measured on our watches, is an emergent phenomena that arises because the propagation of photons, which are but matter carried upon the fourth expanding dimensions. The expansion of the fourth dimension distributes locality and thus is the cause of quantum entanglement, as well as qm's general features such as wave-particle duality and its probabilistic nature, wherein a photon has an equal chance of being found anywhere upon the nonlocal, spherically-symmetric probability distribution defined by the expansion of the fourth dimension, manifested in our three spatial dimensions. Entropy, and time and all its arrows and assymetries, can also be seen to arise naturally from MDT, and too, all the dualties--space/time, energy/mass, and wave/particle--are shown to have a common source.
Yes, anonymous coward, I am going to have to stick with Moving Dimensions Theory's simple beauty and elegance, which unifies so much of our entirety with a comon *physical* model. All the NSF mondey in the world, and the approval of your department chair and grad students, could not force me to change my mind--the fourth dimension moves and expands independent of the three spatial dimensions.
And I encourage you to choose MDT over your anomymous, cowardly, snarkfest behavior, which is intellectual violence unbecoming of a physicist.
For your unmanly, dishonorabe snark and bitter mean-spiritedness, we cannot forgive you, anonymous coward, and we hope you change your ways are man up and walk into town with your head held high, proud of your word and honor--proud of the Name your parents gave you. But for your refusal to recognize that the simple math can sometimes be telling us something profound and new about physics, perhaps we *can* forgive you, as even Planck did not believe the deeper implications of the quantum theory he developed. Einstein did.
Planck lectured at Columbia, "Consequently, there remains only the one conclusion, that previous electron theories suffer from an essential incompleteness which demands a modification, but how deeply this modification should go into the structure of the theory is a question upon which views are still widely divergent. J. J. Thompson inclines to the most radical view, as do J. Larmor, A. Einstein, and with him I. Stark who even believe that the propagation of electromagnetic waves in a pure vacuum does not occur precisely in accordance with the Maxwellian field equations, but in definite energy quanta hv.
I am of the opinion, on the other hand, that at present it is not necessary to proceed in so revolutionary a manner, and that one may come successfully through by seeking the significance of the energy quanta hv solely in the mutual actions with which the resonators influence one another. A definite decision with regard to these important questions can only be brought about as a result of more experience."--(From Max Planck's famous Columbia Lectures)
From: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Einstein_and_photoelectric_effect.html
"Experimentalists railed at the prospect of what Einstein's equation of the photoelectric effect implied. Robert Millikan, the very man who showed that the equation really did work, would have nothing to do with its physical interpretation. In 1915, Millikan wrote: "The semicorpuscular theory by which Einstein arrived at his equation seems at present wholly untenable." Three years later, Ernest Rutherford, the great New Zealand physicist who probed the structure of the atom, said there appeared to be "no physical connection" between the energy and frequency in Einstein's hypothesis about light quanta. It didn't seem to make sense that a particle could have a frequency, or that a wave could act as if it were made of energetic particles. The two concepts seemed to rule each other out." --http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Einstein_and_photoelectric_effect.html
Well, at least they all used their names when they railed against a new theory. Sure, they were all great physicists, but first and foremost, like Bohr, they were rugged *cowboys*.
Gamow loved cowboys & Westerns too. Check out, "Mr. Tompkins Gets Serious: The Essential George Gamow, The Masterpiece Science Edition (Hardcover)
by George Gamow."
"The Cowboy Experiment
Father's nickname was Joe. Niels Bohr and my father were addicted to western movies while they were in Copenhagen together. All the cowboys in these movies--Gary Cooper types--were called Joe. That's how Father's nickname came about--he was named after a typical cowboy movie hero.
Bohr had some difficulty with cowboy movies. Being a great physicist he took things very literally. After seeing one of the many films in which there was a shootout between a good guy in a white hat and a bad guy in a black hat, Bohr asked Father, "How is it possible that the man in the black hat always reaches... "
--http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Tompkins-Gets-Serious-Masterpiece/dp/0131872915
Even more important than MDT is that we bring that classic, epic, western, heroic, cowboy spirit on back; for it is the true source of all enduring art and sicence, of truth and freedom, of rugged romance, beauty, and elegance--that rugged, lone truth seeker is how physics has ever advanced.
"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." --Max Planck
"The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demands for "conscious" control or "conscious" planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme--while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the superindividual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of social purpose." -F.A. Hayek, The End of Truth, The Road to Serfdom
You can stand him up at the gates of hell, but he won't back down. Bruno, Socrates, Galileo, Dante, Einstein, Gamow, and Bohr--they all walked and spoke freely in plain sight, and stuck by their guns when the chips were down. They, like Odysseus, were classic, epic cowboys, always standing up against the anonymous, faceless mob for truth, reason, and justice.
Well, we've all got a showdwon commin'. And if you call down the thunder, you've got to man up and face it at high noon--you can't just run and hide and use snarky, postmodern math in the dark of night, sneaking up anonymously behind the mysterious stranger. For ultimately, as Feynman knew, science is not advanced by those seeking fame and fortune--tenure and titles--but by those seeking truth and classic, epic honor.
Perhaps we ought make a list of Bohr's and Gamow's favorite Westerns.
"Bohr was very fond of seeing Western (cowboy) movies in which gun duels are quite common. In all such duels, the villain draws his gun but the hero always shoots down the scoundrel first. Bohr had an explanation for this phenomenon, ascribing this as the difference between wilful and conditioned thinking. "The scoundrel has to think and decide when to go for his gun, which slows his action, while the hero acts faster because he acts, without thinking, the moment he sees the scoundrel reaching for his gun." When nobody agreed with his theory, he bought a pair of toy guns and playing the hero, tried duels with his pupils. Surprisingly, he 'killed' everybody who tried to take a shot at him first." --from http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/030420/dmag21.htm
The one thing I want to make clear throughout this is that the main question here is why must you remain anonymous? Is it because you do not believe your words and do not want to have your name associated with them? Is it because you do not want your department chair or funders to see your childlike namecalling and ad-hominem attacks that you use instead of logic and reason? Is it because you think that simple logic and reason is not enough, and that snarky namecalling and childish put-downs accomplish what your logic and reason cannot? Please focus on my questions here, and please answer, as I am answering your questions, even though you do not want to meet at high noon, but you prefer to catcall from behind a mask and shoot your opponent in the back, like a coward.
Niels Bohr had a lot to say about the Cowboy Code, and therein we can find insights as to why your behavior ultimately loses both on the cultural and scientific levels:
From: http://holasunshinegirl.blogspot.com/2006/07/westerns-and-niels-bohr.html
"The great Danish Physicist Niels Bohr, an avid Western film fan, wondered why in all the final shoot-outs, the hero shoots faster even if his adversary is the first to reach for his gun. Bohr asked himself if some physical truth might not explain this convention. He came to the conclusion that such a truth did indeed exist: the first to draw is the slowest because he decides to shoot, and dies. The second to draw lives because he is faster, and he is faster because he doesn't have to decide, he is decided. This brilliant discovery was the result of a whimsical empirical research: Bohr and his assistants went off to a toy shop, bought water pistols , and back in their laboratory duelled for hours and hours."
--http://holasunshinegirl.blogspot.com/2006/07/westerns-and-niels-bohr.html
So it is that you decided to shoot first in the dark of night, from behind a mask like a lowly outlaw, and thus made my decision for me. EBohr--a Dane--had a great appreciation for the Cowboy--for honor and integrity--for Truth and Justice. Too, too many postmodern "physicists," such as yourself, have lost that honorable, noble spirit. The classic, epic showdown goes back 2800 years to The Odyssey, when Odysseus rides back on into his home, disguised as a beggar. Eventually he alone strings the bow and slays all the false suitors to his wife who kicked him around and spat on him--that eternal faceless, nameless mob which you, and all too many postmodern physicists, run with. But alas, they banned *The Odyssey* from the academy, and thus your behavior dominates.
What we have here is an evolution and paradigm shift, and deep down you sense it. That is the source for your emotional vitriol. If you were certain that I was wrong, you would calmly state so and let your Word--let your Name--let your Reason speak for themsleves. But as you are driven by emotions you do not understand, and as you do not have faith in your Word nor reason, and are embarrassed by it and/or your Name, you hide behind anonimity. Perhaps you do not wish to badmouth MDT, as you sense that in a year or so you may be seeking funding to support your MDT research.
A few major forces have ever driven the evolution of physics: The realization that math is actually telling us something about the *physical* nature of reality, the realization that one thing that was formerly believed to be stationary moves, the realization that two disparate entities are actually the same--as in space/time, wave/particle, mass/enegery, and the relaization that we must not ignore physical realtity just to have some fancy-shmancy math/science fiction.
Well, MDT is driven by all these forces.
Consider the equation x4 = ict .
x4 represents the fourth dimension. Now Einstein taught us that dimensions are very, very real *physical* entities. They can bend. They can warp. They can *move*. The fourth dimension is a *physical* entity.
i is the imaginary number--the square root of -1.
c is the *physical* velocity of light. c is a *physical* entity. we generally know it by the *physical* enity of the photon.
t is time--that *physical* parameter--that ever-moving force none can deny, except for some advanced postmodern physicists, who wish to keep quantum gravity, which does not exist, and get rid of time, which does, in fact, exist.
So it is that we have a *physical* equation telling us the relationship between *physical* entities.
x4 = ict.
The glaring mistake you make, pilgrim, is asserting that
x4 = ict is not a physical equation, relating physical quantities. How embarrassing! No wonder you must remain anonymous. Imagine if your department chair or funders found out!
I take great pride in MDT's simplicity, elegance, and boldness. You, the anonymous masked dwarf, like all too many physicists over the past thirty years whence Homer's Odyssey was deconstructed, adhere to a debased religion in which postmodern physics must be complicated, snarky, convoluted, indecipherable, filled with advanced, meaningless math that is used to select and promote groupthinkers, and to intimidate and cajole indie thinkers and lone cowboys, while building postmodern bureuacracies (like the machines did in The Matrix)rather than to exalt and explain--rather than to actually perform physics. Your fallen, mean spirit is the dominant brand and trademark of postmodern physics and academia, and your behavior can be seen throughout the internet and academy, where young physicists are taught to engage in groupthink math and snark independent thinkers who come forth with simple logic and reason. The Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek's THE ROAD TO SERFDOM has two chapters entitled The End of Truth and Why The Worst Get on Top. Because of the nature of the system, you feel you are forced into anonymity.
But more and more of us, who agree with Einstein, are banding together, and time, as a *physical* entity, is on our side:
"Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone." --Albert Einstein
As physicists, it is not our job to wallow in snarky, meaningless mathematics and use it to convolute and confound the simple, so as to build postmodern bureaucratic empires, but it is our job to figure out what the math *physically* means.
That is *exactly* what MDT does--it goes back to Einstein's 1912 paper and tells us what the equation x4 = ict *physically* means, granting us new insight into a hitherto unsung feature of the universe--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
"But even if the radiation formula should prove to be absolutely accurate it would after all be only an interpolation formula found by happy guesswork, and would thus leave one rather unsatisfied. I was, therefore, from the day of its origination, occupied with the task of giving it a real physical meaning." --(Max Planck, 1919 Nobel Prize address, 'The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory')
Something that was once considered to be mere math, is seen to have physical content, implicatioons, and meaning. Something that was once more or less considered to be stationary--the fourth dimension--is seen to be moving. 'Tis a revolutionary affront to the church of wormholes and time travel worthy of burning me at the stake, you can bet all the well-funded, anonymous cowards agree.
And too, where so many dismissed x4 = ict as "meaningless math," I actually noted that it has physcial meaning. Now I know that the highest form of postmodern physicists today are those who can look at an equals sign and deny it exists, just as the postmodern lit professor denies Shakespeare's and Dante's greatness, but I look at an equals sign and see it for what it is, just as I see x4, i, c, and t for what they are--entities in Einstein's 1912 Mansucript which are related in a *physical* manner.
And from MDT's simple postulate and equation we naturally get all of relativity in a 4D universe where the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions: dx4/dt = ic. This also shows that time, as measured on our watches, is an emergent phenomena that arises because the propagation of photons, which are but matter carried upon the fourth expanding dimensions. The expansion of the fourth dimension distributes locality and thus is the cause of quantum entanglement, as well as qm's general features such as wave-particle duality and its probabilistic nature, wherein a photon has an equal chance of being found anywhere upon the nonlocal, spherically-symmetric probability distribution defined by the expansion of the fourth dimension, manifested in our three spatial dimensions. Entropy, and time and all its arrows and assymetries, can also be seen to arise naturally from MDT, and too, all the dualties--space/time, energy/mass, and wave/particle--are shown to have a common source.
Yes, anonymous coward, I am going to have to stick with Moving Dimensions Theory's simple beauty and elegance, which unifies so much of our entirety with a comon *physical* model. All the NSF mondey in the world, and the approval of your department chair and grad students, could not force me to change my mind--the fourth dimension moves and expands independent of the three spatial dimensions.
And I encourage you to choose MDT over your anomymous, cowardly, snarkfest behavior, which is intellectual violence unbecoming of a physicist.
For your unmanly, dishonorabe snark and bitter mean-spiritedness, we cannot forgive you, anonymous coward, and we hope you change your ways are man up and walk into town with your head held high, proud of your word and honor--proud of the Name your parents gave you. But for your refusal to recognize that the simple math can sometimes be telling us something profound and new about physics, perhaps we *can* forgive you, as even Planck did not believe the deeper implications of the quantum theory he developed. Einstein did.
Planck lectured at Columbia, "Consequently, there remains only the one conclusion, that previous electron theories suffer from an essential incompleteness which demands a modification, but how deeply this modification should go into the structure of the theory is a question upon which views are still widely divergent. J. J. Thompson inclines to the most radical view, as do J. Larmor, A. Einstein, and with him I. Stark who even believe that the propagation of electromagnetic waves in a pure vacuum does not occur precisely in accordance with the Maxwellian field equations, but in definite energy quanta hv.
I am of the opinion, on the other hand, that at present it is not necessary to proceed in so revolutionary a manner, and that one may come successfully through by seeking the significance of the energy quanta hv solely in the mutual actions with which the resonators influence one another. A definite decision with regard to these important questions can only be brought about as a result of more experience."--(From Max Planck's famous Columbia Lectures)
From: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Einstein_and_photoelectric_effect.html
"Experimentalists railed at the prospect of what Einstein's equation of the photoelectric effect implied. Robert Millikan, the very man who showed that the equation really did work, would have nothing to do with its physical interpretation. In 1915, Millikan wrote: "The semicorpuscular theory by which Einstein arrived at his equation seems at present wholly untenable." Three years later, Ernest Rutherford, the great New Zealand physicist who probed the structure of the atom, said there appeared to be "no physical connection" between the energy and frequency in Einstein's hypothesis about light quanta. It didn't seem to make sense that a particle could have a frequency, or that a wave could act as if it were made of energetic particles. The two concepts seemed to rule each other out." --http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Einstein_and_photoelectric_effect.html
Well, at least they all used their names when they railed against a new theory. Sure, they were all great physicists, but first and foremost, like Bohr, they were rugged *cowboys*.
Gamow loved cowboys & Westerns too. Check out, "Mr. Tompkins Gets Serious: The Essential George Gamow, The Masterpiece Science Edition (Hardcover)
by George Gamow."
"The Cowboy Experiment
Father's nickname was Joe. Niels Bohr and my father were addicted to western movies while they were in Copenhagen together. All the cowboys in these movies--Gary Cooper types--were called Joe. That's how Father's nickname came about--he was named after a typical cowboy movie hero.
Bohr had some difficulty with cowboy movies. Being a great physicist he took things very literally. After seeing one of the many films in which there was a shootout between a good guy in a white hat and a bad guy in a black hat, Bohr asked Father, "How is it possible that the man in the black hat always reaches... "
--http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Tompkins-Gets-Serious-Masterpiece/dp/0131872915
Even more important than MDT is that we bring that classic, epic, western, heroic, cowboy spirit on back; for it is the true source of all enduring art and sicence, of truth and freedom, of rugged romance, beauty, and elegance--that rugged, lone truth seeker is how physics has ever advanced.
"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." --Max Planck
"The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demands for "conscious" control or "conscious" planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme--while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the superindividual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of social purpose." -F.A. Hayek, The End of Truth, The Road to Serfdom
You can stand him up at the gates of hell, but he won't back down. Bruno, Socrates, Galileo, Dante, Einstein, Gamow, and Bohr--they all walked and spoke freely in plain sight, and stuck by their guns when the chips were down. They, like Odysseus, were classic, epic cowboys, always standing up against the anonymous, faceless mob for truth, reason, and justice.
Well, we've all got a showdwon commin'. And if you call down the thunder, you've got to man up and face it at high noon--you can't just run and hide and use snarky, postmodern math in the dark of night, sneaking up anonymously behind the mysterious stranger. For ultimately, as Feynman knew, science is not advanced by those seeking fame and fortune--tenure and titles--but by those seeking truth and classic, epic honor.
Perhaps we ought make a list of Bohr's and Gamow's favorite Westerns.
"Bohr was very fond of seeing Western (cowboy) movies in which gun duels are quite common. In all such duels, the villain draws his gun but the hero always shoots down the scoundrel first. Bohr had an explanation for this phenomenon, ascribing this as the difference between wilful and conditioned thinking. "The scoundrel has to think and decide when to go for his gun, which slows his action, while the hero acts faster because he acts, without thinking, the moment he sees the scoundrel reaching for his gun." When nobody agreed with his theory, he bought a pair of toy guns and playing the hero, tried duels with his pupils. Surprisingly, he 'killed' everybody who tried to take a shot at him first." --from http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/030420/dmag21.htm