"There is no mystery"

Have you heard about the connections between Monstrous Moonshine and String Theory? Dont worry about understanding the details. There are some short popular accounts that give the general idea. Don't worry if you dont regard string theory as physics. You just have to accept that it was developed out of physics rather than pure maths. Dont you think the connection is a little mysterious?

    Philip,

    I think we use the word "mystery" slightly differently. When I believe that there is a rational (in this case mathematical) explanation for something then I don't call it a mystery. (We just don't yet know what that explanation is.)

    With this in mind, to me the connections between Monstrous Moonshine and String Theory are "interesting" (but not mysterious). I am nearly 100% certain that eventually someone will figure it out.

    When you say that it (ST) was developed out of physics rather than pure maths, it makes me wonder about all the stuff I read about it elsewhere. The consensus seems to be that ST is pretty much all math (and no physics). I am also led to believe that the people who developed it were mathematical physicists, and that they started with mathematical representations of "strings," and "ran with it mathematically from there." If this is true, then a natural insight would have to be that the properties initially ascribed to the "strings" already "mapped" to Monstrous Moonshine (or at least to something from which MM can be derived).

    In any case, once you establish parity between math and physics in a given area, it is only natural to expect math to continue to apply to the same physics (viewed differently) as you develop it. The physics part follows its internal physical logic, and the math just mirrors it. You see it the other way around, and I can conceive of a sense in which your view of things is right.

    En

    Dear En,

    I just put on my forum an answer to your last post; if you wish, the ultimate and final. But it would be regrettable.

    Best regards

    Peter

      Dear Peter,

      I have not yet looked at your page to see the answer you refer to here. But I would welcome our discussion to continue beyond the confines of this forum (which will "expire"). For that (if you don't mind), please indicate an email address (on your essay page) to which I can write.

      I will reply to your latest comment today or tomorrow.

      Have a nice weekend.

      En

      4 days later

      Thanks En, I'll address the issues and continue this discussion on my page.

      But please note: There was no sarcasm in the piece that you quote! The genuine call for help should had been clear (to you, of all people) from the tortured Title of my essay and your own call for me to: "Please have mercy and consider the reader."

      With best regards; Gordon Watson: Essay Forum. Essay Only.

      Dear En Passant,

      Your essay is short, but sound on many points.

      Few have raised the case of categories (not in the mathematical sense, more in the spirit of Eleanor Rosch or George Lakoff), your qualities.

      The connection you express between mathematics and physics states clearly the basic idea of empirical knowledge, with only a pragmatic criterion, under conditions of repeatability or reproducibility.

      I won't paraphrase everything, I'd be longer than you.

      Very good points.

      Regards

        Dear En,

        This is nice and to the point. Your writing displays an interesting personal stance and I'm sure you enjoyed the exercise. I think that you're right when you're saying, in the third paragraph, that Wigner's expression should not be taken literally as it was more a metaphorical way of encouraging new lines of thought and maybe a feeling of delight in the face of the best known parts of the natural world.

        Warm regards,

        Alma

          Dear En

          I just posted on my forum a reply to your last comments.

          Best regards

          Peter

          Dear Vincent,

          I am glad you understood what I was saying.

          And I thank you for reading my essay. You already know that I could not care less about winning anything.

          But I am not only studying physics - I have to understand everything. If you would be so kind, could you tell me where your last name comes from?

          If I were to place it on a map, it would be somewhere in Western France (similar names also occur somewhere between Turkey and Eastern Europe). If you don't want to share this info, that's OK.

          En

          Dear Alma,

          I actually have many contacts with Romanians. They are extremely good at programming, and (in fact) BitDefender (the best antivirus program) is programmed by Romanians.

          Don't worry, the NSA can "get in" anyway. But their interests are not what we worry about (banking, etc.).

          En

          Dear Sujatha,

          Your last name (in Sanskrit) means something like "the man who has unstoppable force."

          It is simply impossible to take Vedic (Sanskrit) wisdom, and think it is applicable to modern day physics.

          I know you would like to make that case, and those people were very wise. But you need experimentation to do science. That did not develop until not that long ago in Europe. Yes, I am aware of Ramanujan and Sun Tzu, and they were brilliant in their way.

          Your paternal line is likely to be R1a (possibly Brahmin).

          En

          En,

          I suspect that someone is conducting a Turing test. Many of her comments simply do not make any sense.

          Regards,

          Gary Simpson

          In this case I want to inform you the bitter fact that the modern day maths emerged from Vedic Maths.

          And the other theories derived from "Good-old-Sanskrit", 'Sanskrit' being the mother of all her kin languages.

          Gary D. Simpson,

          What a business in the forum you exhibit!

          Your comments are turning more "Turing" these days since you're doing that business in every comment box, ain't you?

          - Miss. Sujatha Jagannathan

          Ahhhhh ... finally a comment that seems appropriate. Either you are a person or the AI has gotten better. Very good.

          Best Regards and Good Luck!!!!

          Gary Simpson

          Gary,

          I don't want to insult Sujatha Jagannathan in case she is not an automaton.

          Your perception of the "fluency" of her language is right. Her talk seems to me to be "canned" (and I mean that in more ways than one).

          But if you are right, then its creators are cheating. They intersperse regular (machine) dialogue with their human intervention whenever the situation gets too complex for AI (and purposely introduce human errors).

          Have no fear of AI. Below, I copy some text that I saw on the Internet just now. Strong AI is simply preposterous.

          It would mean that we can lift ourselves by our own bootstraps.

          En

          May 15, 2013 | Luke Muehlhauser | Analysis

          Strong AI appears to be the topic of the week. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones thinks AIs will be as smart as humans by 2040. Karl Smith at Forbes and "M.S." at The Economist seem to roughly concur with Drum on this timeline. Moshe Vardi, the editor-in-chief of the world's most-read computer science magazine, predicts that "by 2045 machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do."

          But predicting AI is more difficult than many people think.

          To explore these difficulties, let's start with a 2009 bloggingheads.tv conversation between MIRI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson, author of the excellent Quantum Computing Since Democritus. Early in that dialogue, Yudkowsky asked:

          It seems pretty obvious to me that at some point in [one to ten decades] we're going to build an AI smart enough to improve itself, and [it will] "foom" upward in intelligence, and by the time it exhausts available avenues for improvement it will be a "superintelligence" [relative] to us. Do you feel this is obvious?

          Aaronson replied:

          The idea that we could build computers that are smarter than us... and that those computers could build still smarter computers... until we reach the physical limits of what kind of intelligence is possible... that we could build things that are to us as we are to ants -- all of this is compatible with the laws of physics... and I can't find a reason of principle that it couldn't eventually come to pass...

          The main thing we disagree about is the time scale... a few thousand years [before AI] seems more reasonable to me.

          Those two estimates -- several decades vs. "a few thousand years" -- have wildly different policy implications.

          If there's a good chance that AI will replace humans at the steering wheel of history in the next several decades, then we'd better put our gloves on and get to work making sure that this event has a positive rather than negative impact. But if we can be pretty confident that AI is thousands of years away, then we needn't worry about AI for now, and we should focus on other global priorities. Thus it appears that "When will AI be created?" is a question with high value of information for our species.

          Let's take a moment to review the forecasting work that has been done, and see what conclusions we might draw about when AI will likely be created.

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