• Dirac, Penrose, and Wolfram

    From nixtaken@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jun 8 05:46:10 2020
    By the standards of the physics community, Paul Dirac is the tops because he hated poetry and only the manliest of men hate poetry as much as Dirac did.

    Physics is only really good when it is masculine and when it proclaims that only math is beautiful. Paul Dirac was exemplary in all of these respects. He was so masculine that women frightened him.

    Heisenberg took him out to go dancing with some “nice girls” and Dirac skeptically asked him, “but how do you know which ones are nice?”

    Here are some quotes from Paul Dirac:

    “God used beautiful mathematics to create the world.”

    “Pick a flower on earth and you move the farthest star.”

    “I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry. They are in opposition.”

    “In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”

    The flower, earth, star quote makes me think that he tried to write poetry but wasn’t very good at it, and the last quote suggests to me that he read someone’s poem and didn’t understand it. He sure was good at math, though.

    He was so good at it that he didn’t really believe in the interpretation of his equation which won him the Nobel Prize. I happen to agree with him on this point. Antimatter is a stupid, redundant interpretation.

    When a person attempts to reduce physics to its essence, the language or conceptual basis they choose shouldn’t impact the result that much, yet despite our best efforts, it always does. When Dirac mused about the most fundamental concepts, he did so
    in his favorite language: math.

    "The physics of the future, of course, cannot have the three quantities h-bar, e and c all as fundamental quantities. Only two of them can be fundamental, and the third must be derived from those two. It is almost certain that c will be one of the two
    fundamental ones. The velocity of light, c, is so important in the four-dimensional picture, and it plays such a fundamental role in the special theory of relativity, correlating our units of space and time, that it has to be fundamental. Then we are
    faced with the fact that of the two quantities h-bar and e, one will be fundamental and one will be derived. If h-bar is fundamental, e will have to be explained in some way in terms of the square root of h-bar, and it seems most unlikely that any
    fundamental theory can give e in terms of a square root, since square roots do not occur in basic equations. It is much more likely that e will be the fundamental quantity and that h-bar will be explained in terms of c^2. Then there will be no square
    root in the basic equations. I think one is on safe ground if one makes the guess that in the physical picture we shall have at some future stage e and c will be fundamental quantities and h-bar will be derived."

    Math is, of course, a product of geometry and philosophy in which the fundamental things in the universe are defined by motion that occurs in circles and lines while nothings are defined by the difference between the positions of the centers of the
    circles that define the things.

    From what Dirac wrote, I see that the speed of light, c, defines the maximum possible rate of motion in a line and that the charge, e, defines the circumference of a circle produced by something that travels in a circle at the speed of light. This is the
    smallest possible circle and the maximum amount of energy or mass that can be concentrated in a given space.

    Circulation and vibration define a spherical space with a minimum volume given by Planck’s constant and a radius determined by a point’s position and momentum changes. This is a way to describe the uncertainty principle and it is why Planck’s
    constant is the smallest distance change that can occur for a given momentum change or the smallest momentum change that can occur for a given position change. Similarly, it can be thought of as the area of a squishy, ephemeral bubble-like fundamental
    particle. Since the area of the circle is related to the circumference, that is why Planck’s constant can be derived from the charge, e, and to get a deeper understanding, it is useful to understand how surfaces and volumes relate to each other
    regarding rotation.
    ...

    https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/dirac-penrose-and-wolfram/

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