From: Richard Loggins (brloggins@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jan 06 2005 - 03:40:39 GMT
Hi MSH,
I realize I'm not the freindliest of people. Its something I'm working on. My commentary was not meant to be discourtious or unthoughtful, but to point out that your statement was, at best, wildly misleading. Let me explain. As Kieth pointed out (although I can't find his original post to you) Euler has a more generalized equation that relates an exponent of e to sines and cosines. Naturaly, all waves (and therefor Shrodingers wave equation) can be described by combinations of sines and cosines and so can be related to Euler's generalized relation. But the famous special case of Euler's generalized equation involving e, i, pi, 1, and 0 which you talked about is NOT used as "the BASIC equation of ANY wave motion, a wave on water, the sound waves coming from an air raid siren, or electromagnetic radiation." That's just poppy-cock but if you got that information from Scientific American magazine I wouldn't be surprized. I'm a math teacher and being a stickler about such things is my
nature, but perhaps your Phd buddy could show me wrong.
As to your larger point that we should be wow'd by the correlation between math and so-called physical reality, and that there is more to it than tweeking equations until it fits the data, let me remind you that math is as much a creation of our intellect as the physical world is, and since the original purpose for math was to count objects in a subject-object world of our making, it shouldn't come as any surprize that the relationship comes full circle and applies the other way round. As a consequence math, excepting its creative aspects, has nothing to do with Quality, as it exists solely in a closed world of impersonel objectivism, and our cultures' worship of math, instagated I think by those who are in awe of something they incompletely understand, right down to the philosophic level, is sympomatic of it's failure to be awed instead by the primary reality of quality and value. I don't know..it could be that maybe I'm the insane one or it's just the whiskey talking. I'm from
Jersey too. Whereabouts are you? Want to have a drink sometime? - Rich
Mark Steven Heyman <markheyman@infoproconsulting.com> wrote:
Hi Rich,
Nice to hear from you again, and thanks for the courteous and
thoughtful commentary.
On 3 Jan 2005 at 20:25, Richard Loggins wrote:
MSH said: "The whole of quantum physics depends upon
this simple equation. It is the basic equation of any wave motion, a
wave on water, the sound waves coming from an air raid siren, or
electromagnetic radiation."
rich:
Oh come on. you must be joking. You can't really believe everything
you read on the internet.
msh says:
LOL. Well, yes, obviously I've over-simplified things to make my
point in a few paragraphs. But you've made the simplification more
extreme by limiting my point to the two sentences above. The fact is
that equations in the form I've described are found throughout the
physical sciences, and are especially obvious in any discussion
surrounding the Schroedinger equation, which was the first thing
that gave people confidence in such a crazy system as quantum
mechanics.
As for your comment about the internet as a source of information, I
don't believe anything I read there, or anywhere else, unless I can
discover independent corrorboration. But why should reading an
article, say, on The Scientific American website be any less reliable
than reading the magazine itself?
Finally, I should emphasize that I'm not suggesting that these
equations somehow prove that God exists and that she's a
mathematician. My point is that the correlation between math and
physical reality is more than just measuring things, then tweaking
equations till they are useful.
Thanks,
Mark Steven Heyman (msh)
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