Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum The Lost Simplicity

have you ever given a thought why Newtonian Physics crashed?
It was beautiful, simple and easily understood.
Why Nature decided it needs Quantum Mehanics?
What was her actual problem when she decided to create exotic laws to handle the smallest of the particles...?
Why was she unable to handle the electrons around the nucleus without Quantum jumping?

The topic is scientific and those who love Newton has some genuine questions for todays science..
If it was necessay to ditch the classical Physics then we must recreate the magic of lost simplicity ...
Can string theory can ever look as simple as the Laws of Newton?
Personally whatever we may prefer but we must understand the desire and needs of other human beings(they may belong to the branch of Arts).

How elegant are the computer programs on elegant machines that model the quantum world? Is the mathematics still beautiful but extensive?

Aloha, Charlie

Mathematics has always been very serious about itself and probably it doesnt care about any 'real' truth... it has its own set of defintion and it rules its own universe...Some very complex mathematical puzzles have long existed without taking any help from the experiment....And the 'real' experiments almost never ever solved the complex Mathmatical problem ... the ingredients required for the verification of Maths is Maths itself.
A mathematical truth denied in real world becomes a sperate branch of study with its own imaginary laws like a complex number ....
To a great extent mathematics has gone beyond the comprehension of a common man..
Discuss Complex No. and you will find yourself taking a square root of negative number... and give credit to Maths that it dared utilize its non confirmity to reality with efficency and now we have seperate branch to study which gives valuable tools for computing Virtual World in Quantum Physics...
Another example is infinity - infinity =0
This is real world scenario in Qunatum Physics(correct me if i am wrong Mr.Feynmaan)
but Mathematically it is wrong.. now what do you call this...
The Beauty is there but its not for everyone anymore...
Quantum computing will give us new solutions but will also create new problems as we simplify Strings to the level of Newtonian simplicity(not literally:-))
Can anyone explain why the imaginary no. plays such a vital role in a real world...

Imaginary numbers are no more imaginary than real numbers. They're just called imaginary numbers because we couldn't at the time think of a physical interpretation of them.

I recall a teacher once telling me that for some time the Greeks wouldn't use exponents greater than 3, because there could be no physical interpretation.

But a mathematics consists of several parts:
1) a specialized vocabulary
2) a grammar for constructing meaningful statements that are given
3) a set of rules (also a grammar) for producing other statements from the given statements

These rules have to produce true statements from true statements. And there's a lot of effort that goes in to assuring that they do.

The thing is that while the starting and ending statements for real world type problems must be in terms of mathematics that have a physical interpretation - the interim statements don't need to have physical interpretatio. It's not that they don't - it's that they don't have to.

It's not clear to me that the rules that exist are not simple. True, they might not be as simple as F=ma, but we don't have to model 1e6 equations in 1e6 unknowns either. As complicated as it is, it's not near so complicated as we could imagine.

as per you the mathematical process is independent of Physical process...or rather all equations while doing the derivation do not mean anyhting...Only end result matters...
You mean to say that while doing mathematization of physical world , there is no need (and it not possible) to attach physical meaning to each and every Mathematical equation..
I disagree becuase we started with Naturally occuring variables and at any point of time Mathematics is expressing something related to reality...
An equation is just an equation ... it is shorthand for a mathematical 'Truth'... when the variables are real then it expresses a real 'truth'
I call imaginary nos. imaginary because majority of us are still unable to relate it to anything real in the world:-))
I can now relate 3 to anthing which is 3.

I'm NOT SAYING that there is NO physical meaning associated with intermediate equations, I'm saying that there doesn't need to be and that if there is, we don't need to know it.

What matters mathematically is that we are sure of the givens (inputs) and of the production rules (mathematics).

There is an explanation of this - which is a bit drawn out - in George Boole's "The Laws of Thought."

Planck's constant (h, enforces uncertainty in measurement; h-bar is the fundamental unit of action), Newton's constant (Big G, scales gravitation), and lightspeed (c, enforces information transfer delay) define physics:

"I'm NOT SAYING that there is NO physical meaning associated with intermediate equations, I'm saying that there doesn't need to be and that if there is, we don't need to know it."

I feel any equation consisting of physical variables must represent reality at every point during its derivation... My reason for such a belief is following :
Imagine Newton trying to understand gravity...
he fails to capture Einstien's thought and ends up with his classical theory of gravity.
In this whole process his equations were never obejctively correct but it reffered to reality in the best possible way.His "incomplete" understanding has a physical meaning and it is highly accurate...
When a incomplete derivation has a physical meaning then why cant we attach meaning to the incomplete derivation(yet consistent) equation...
if it takes n steps to get x formula to define a reality then the n-1 step also represents the segregated reality.
And it is geuine to demand the reality mapping of the input , process and the output.
I think Gravity has been incorporated in the M-Theroy (String) using the 11th Dimension.

One of the great strengths and great wonders of mathematics is that it allows us to think about things abstractly. Those 'things' might be from our own reality or they might be from completely imaginary reality.

If we can find physical meaning at every step of the derivation, that's fine. But it isn't necessary to accept the results as correct.

If we are using imaginery states in our equations then we must resolve the paradox here.
I can think of one possibility .. the so called imaginery part is also real and has a physical significance not understood by us... just as 3 was not understood by the Greeks.

Btw it is necessary to accept the results as correct at everypoint during the derivation.
I dont think logical inconsistency of the process is allowed.