Is timeless travel possible?

 1. I call "timeless travel" the ability to travel distances without time passing.

2. Timeless travel is the defining property of Newton's force. This force forms orbits by bending straight lines into circles and then powers the orbit by interacting with the orbiting body. Newton's force achieves all these supernatural feats by traveling timelessly. Newton's force is everywhere at once. In physics the unit of being everywhere at once is called "Newton".

3. There is an absurdity here. Speed is defined as

$$s=\frac{d}{t}$$ .

4. But in timeless travel we have

$$s=\frac{d}{}$$

5. In timeless travel $t$ is not zero nor does it have any other value, it just does not exist in the formulas, that's what "timeless" mean.

$$s=\frac{d}{}$$ is a lame equation, where a term is missing. You would be surprised how wide-spread lame equations are in physics. They are not visible because the missing term is usually filled in with a placeholder term or a crutch.

6. And Newton the greatest sophist and self-promoting scientific fraud ever lived was able to sell this timeless travel as a physical thing and his disciples still protect Newton's lame definition of speed by using slimy and slippery tricks of rhetorical sophistry.

7. I think calling Newton's force "supernatural" does not make justice to Newton's fame, we ought to call it a fairy tale force.

Why short forces are short and why do physicists love equivocation so much?

0. Matt Strassler wrote a dumbed down popularization (“Why short range forces short range?”) that needs further deconstruction to be comprehensible.

2. Strassler has a tendency to overcomplicate what he tries to simplify for his lay readers by trying to coin cute words like "wavicle" in order to avoid mathematics or rather to protect his lay readers from the proprietary language physicists call “mathematics”.

In scholastic fields such as academic physics one of the highest rewards a professional physicist can hope to have is to coin a word that all his colleagues accept and use. Of course, the top reward is to have a physical unit named after you but for this you need to be a dead white male. After all, there are only a limited number of units that can be named but anyone can invent a new word such as “wavicle” and try to make it accepted into the physics jargon. You may obtain more professional points by establishing a new name then having published 100 papers in high prestige scholarly journals.

It looks like so far Strassler is the only one using the cute word “wavicle” because this is not really a new physical quantity but a new name for an old concept, namely, wave-particle duality. Strassler is just playing naming games.

3. The problem for me is that in physics fundamental words like field, wave and particle are equivocations. These words have at least two meanings, one valid in the "classical" realm and one valid in the "quantum" realm.

4. Just as Aristotelians divided the world into the terrestrial and celestial realms, each governed by distinct rules, modern physicists have partitioned the universe into two separate domains governed by different physical laws (three, if we include General Relativity). It is no surprise, then, that physicists have spent over a century attempting to "unify" these conceptual silos they have created—so far without success.

5. In the case of waves, the word “wave” refers to two fundamentally different entities both called waves. One of the waves can be "scaled up and down" arbitrarily and the other has a limit on how much it can be scaled down. These are two different entities.

6. The unit of study in physics for millennia has been the "particle" or the "atom".

7. Particles were defined as the indivisible units that made up the world. Physicists called these units "matter". Newton formalized this atomic materialist worldview and added his supernatural universal cause of all motion acting between particles and setting them in motion. Newton called this universal occult cause "force" and by propaganda he had the world accept his supernatural cause as a physical cause. Huygens, Leibniz and in our time Einstein all recognized that Newton’s “force” was a supernatural cause and criticized Newton for introducing occult causes to physics. But Newtonism won because Newton had successfully established his own school based on his supernatural cause he called “force”. Newton replaced Aristotle as the master of European scholasticism and his disciples filled in the gaps in Newton’s Principia and created the consistent system of units we know today as “Newtonian mechanics.” Newtonism also won over Einstein’s attempts to replace Newton’s occult force with his own gravitational theories that did not include supernatural causes, that is, his General Theory of Relativity.

8. But experiments done in the early 20th century confused physicists and they decided that the unit of study of physics must be fields not particles.

10. But physicists never dumped the word particle.

11. They started to call some properties of fields such as excitations "particles" and thus entered the realm of scholastic sophistry and proved that an atomic materialist worldview is the unquestionable dogma of physics. All experiments, regardless of what they say, must be interpreted to support the dogma of atomic materialism. Even if this can only be done by the sophistry of calling waves “particles”.

12. I think physicists' real problem is a professional problem not physics problem. They've been doing business as "particle physicists" for such a long time that they are unwilling to change their professional title to "field physicists" or "excitations of the field physicists" instead they keep changing the meaning of the word particle to save their professional title.

comment at HN 21.1.25

Your comment is helpful, thanks. I also discussed this with chatgpt and he said similar things: “Strassler’s term "indivisible waves" seems to be his unique phrasing to make these ideas more intuitive for a lay audience. Physicists usually use more formal language, such as ‘quantized excitations of a field’ or ‘wave-particle duality.’

But my problem is different.

Below I use the word “particle” to mean “a three dimensional indivisible unit,” and nothing else. A particle is not a mathematical point as Strassler suggests when he describes a particle as a “dot.” And a particle is not a wave. If Strassler decides to call waves “particles”, waves do not magically become particles. Ever since the scientific revolution we have not explained natural phenomena by magic.

I read Strassler quote again: 

In a quantum world such as ours, the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves, which for historical reasons we call “particles.” Despite their name, these objects aren’t little dots...

My interpretation of this quote is like this:

> In a quantum world such as ours the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves...

This means that the world is made of quantum fields and fields are waves and not particles [particle are indivisible units, Strassler calls them “little dots”].

This is a clear statement. Strassler is saying that our world is quantum and it is made of fields. Fields are not particles. The unit of study of physics is now fields, not particles. There are no particles in this world because the field is made of waves. These waves are not particles. But they differ from the classical waves because they can only be scaled down to a certain length.

> ...which for historical reasons we call “particles”. Despite their name these objects aren’t little dots [they are not indivisible units with extension].

Strassler’s quote makes it clear that the building blocks of the world are waves, not particles. In this world of ours there are no particles in the sense of indivisible units. It is only that Strassler chooses to call these waves “particles.” This is just a naming convention.

If someone decides to call “monkey” the animal we know and love as a “donkey”, obviously the long eared cute animal will not become a monkey just because someone decided to call it “monkey”. This play on words can only create confusion. If we are calling an animal with the name of another animal we are only exposing ourself as a sophist.

This is exactly what Strassler is doing. He is intentionally trying to corrupt the meanings of well established words by loading them with new meanings. He is playing naming games. Calling a wave particle does not make the wave a particle. Then why call a wave particle? No sane person would call a wave “particle” unless he has something to hide and wants to deceive us or even deceive himself.

To me, if true, the fact that the building blocks of the world are waves is a big and fundamental discovery because it proves that the world is not atomic and matterful as Newton assumed. There are no forces acting between particles because particles do not exist.

This is where the problem lies for physicists. Atomic materialism is their professional dogma and they need to save it despite the experiments contradicting it. But this dogma cannot be saved by using sophistry and calling waves particles.

 

Newton: A man with many fantastical attributes

1. Newton has many fantastical attributes:

   1. Newton is the thrice-great sophist, our Hermes Trismegistus of sophistry. Newton employs a technique of sophistry he invented himself called "in-your-face sophistry". Newton does not need to hide from you that he is deceiving you with his sophistry. This is how great a sophist he is. [Examples to come]

   2. Newton is the great appropriator. Newton never encountered a concept he could not steal by renaming it. He stole from Descartes by renaming Descartes' first law of motion as Newton's first law of motion. What a genius this Newton was! He stole Kepler's Third Law and rearranged its terms and called it Newton's Laws.

   3. Newton is the great euphemist and grandmaster of circumlocution.

   4. Newton is an occultist and supernaturalist.

   5. A genius of marketing

Newton's translation of Emerald Tablet

Newton did not consider his natural philosophy and his work in the supernatural as two separate endeavors.

We have Newton's translation of the Emerald Tablet: 

Tis true without lying, certain and most true.

That which is below is like that which is above

and that which is above is like that which is below

to do the miracle of one only thing

For Newton the following is also true:

That which is beyond is like that which is within

that which is within is like that which is beyond

For Newton that which is natural is that which is supernatural

For Newton, natural (within) and supernatural (beyond) is the same thing.

This is why Newton does not hesitate to explain natural phenomena with a supernatural cause like his God.

This is why Newton has no scruples explaining natural phenomena like orbits with a supernatural cause he calls "force".

Explaining natural phenomena with supernatural causes is not an exception in Newton, on the contrary, this is Newton's main method. Newton should never be compared to rational and true scientists such as Huygens and Leibniz but to John Dee. Newton is an occultist like John Dee. The only difference is that Newton is a better mathematician than Dee.

- "As above, so below"

A new definition of subset

 1. I don't think it is necessary to have two words to indicate parts of a set, namely, subset and proper subset.

2. Let's drop "proper subset" and define "subset" to be the current definition of "proper subset". This is what mathematicians do in practice anyway. They use "subset" when they mean "proper subset". 

The above screenshot is a Mathematica function that lists all "subsets" of a set. But except the last one (equality) they are all "proper subsets". This means that mathematicians do not respect their own definitions of "subset" and "proper subset".

A new definition of subset   

1. Given two sets A and B, we say that B is a subset of A if every element of B is an element of A but A has at least one more element.

2. In other words, given that $\mathbf{A} \neq \mathbf{B}$, $\mathbf{B}$ is a subset of $\mathbf{A}$ if all the elements of $\mathbf{B}$ are elements of $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{A}$ has at least one more element.

3. This definition covers all possible situations a set can be partitioned except when $\mathbf{A}=\mathbf{B}$.

4. If $\mathbf{A}=\mathbf{B}$ it is silly to say that $\mathbf{A}$ includes $\mathbf{B}$ or that $\mathbf{B}$ includes $\mathbf{A}$. Since they are equal neither is a part of the other. No Cantorian rhetorical sophistry can change this fact. It's funny that mathematicians accept easily and never question rhetorical sophistry if it comes from a dead mathematician with fame and authority.

5. There are various ways to draw equal sets as subsets with Venn diagrams.

6. If $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ are equal we call them equal. There is no reason to define the word "subset" as a synonym to the word "equal". There is no subset relation between sets that are equal.

7. The "subset" and "proper subset" jargon is invented in order to claim that equal sets are subsets of each other, that is, one is a part of the other. But if $\mathbf{A}=\mathbf{B}$ neither is a part of the other.

8. Mathematicians corrupted the words "whole" and "part" by denying Euclid's Common Notion 5: The whole is greater than the part.

9. In this case we have two wholes: $\mathbf{A}=\{1,2,3\}$ and $\mathbf{B}=\{1,2,3\}$

10. $\mathbf{A}=\mathbf{A}$ must be different than $\mathbf{A}=\mathbf{B}$.

11. To say $\mathbf{A}=\mathbf{A}$ you need to clone $\mathbf{A}$ and create a new set. We must name this new set with a name other than $\mathbf{A}$, e.g., $\mathbf{A'}$ and then we say $\mathbf{A}=\mathbf{A'}$

12. $\mathbf{A}=\mathbf{A}$ doesn't make sense because a whole is not a part of itself.

13. No one is saying that equality implies whole/part relationship but when mathematicians say that every set is a subset of itself they are implying that the whole is part of itself.

14. To say that "a set is a subset of itself" is rhetorical sophistry and play on words "whole" and "part".

15. I respect Euclid's Common Notion 5 and I don't see any reason to deny that the whole is greater than the part. This means simply that the big is greater than the small. Only paradox loving set theoristas deny this Common Notion to save their beloved set theory.

16. If we accept and respect Euclid's Common Notion 5 that the whole is greater than the part, a set cannot be a subset of itself because the whole (the set) cannot be a part (subset) of itself. Equals will not contain one another except in the absurd world of the set theory.

17. The part cannot be equal to the whole. To say that the whole = the part is sophistry because the definitions of "whole" and "part" are being redefined on the fly and on the sly.

18. What justifications do mathematicians have to deny Euclid's Common Notion 5?

Does infinity belong to mathematics

 Bertrand Russell in the Preface to his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy writes:

Much of what is set forth in the following chapters is not properly to be called "philosophy," though matters concerned were included in philosophy so long as no satisfactory science of them existed. The nature of infinity and continuity, for example, belonged in former days to philosophy, but belongs now to mathematics.

Russell must be the right person to make such a statement, he was both a philosopher and mathematician.

But how does he justify the claim that philosophical infinity is now mathematical infinity. 

I don't think these two can be reconciled. Philosophical infinity is something else and mathematical infinity is something else.

I'm still looking to find a satisfactory definition of the word infinite in mathematics.

Unordered or ordered

1. I'm commenting from this article by James D. Fearon of Stanford University

2. I'm curious to know how we can define a set as an unordered collection then we can talk about "ordered sets." If a set is defined as unordered there cannot be ordered sets.

3. I know that, I'm sure that, there is an explanation, in fact I suspect that there exists a "Zermalo's axiom" that lets us write ordered sets even though we defined sets as unordered. Or we may say "ordered sets are not really ordered in the sense of the original definition so there is no contradiction."

4. So I'd like to know how mathematicians rationalize ordered sets even though an ordered collection in mathematics is called a sequence.

5. Let's look at an explicit example.

6. On page 1, Fearon writes:

The order of elements in the set does not matter.

7. So the set $\mathbf{A} = \{\; 0, 1, 2, 3\;\}$ and $\mathbf{A} = \{\; 1, 2, 0, 3\;\}$ are the same set.

8. A set is defined as an unordered collection of elements.

9. So far so good. A set is unordered. Order of elements does not matter. But now let's look at the next page where he explains infinite sets.

10. He first gives an example with the set construction notation:

$$\mathbf{S}= \{\; s : 0 < s < 1\; \}$$

11.  So, $\mathbf{S}$ is a set containing elements $s_n$ between $0$ and $1$.

12. Fearon explains:

In this method a set is defined by specifying the property or properties that characterizes or is true of all elements of the set.

13. This is standard mathematics too.

14. Then, he gives another example:

Occasionally, you will also see notation like the following for an infinite set:

$$\mathbf{T} = \{\; 0, 1, 2, 3\; \ldots \;\}$$

where it is understood that the ellipsis means that the set proceeds as indicated.

15. But $\mathbf{T}$ is an ordered collection, so it cannot be a set. To call $\mathbf{T}$ a set contradicts the standard definition of a set.

16. $\mathbf{T}$ is not a set because it is ordered. Ordered collections are called "sequences". So why are mathematicians calling a sequence a set?

17. If $\mathbf{T}$ were to be a set I could write it like

$$\mathbf{T} = \{\; 3, 0, 2, 1\; \ldots \;\}$$

18. But now ellipsis makes no sense. We cannot say "the ellipsis means that the set proceeds as indicated."

19. $\mathbf{T} = \{\; 3, 0, 2, 1\; \ldots \;\}$ has no order so we cannot know how to continue this set. Ellipsis implies and assumes order, when there is no order ellipsis makes no sense.

20. So, which one of Zermalo's famous axioms allows us to write ordered sets even though we defined a set to be an unordered collection?

21. I can almost hear the answer. "An ordered set is not really ordered, it is Zermalo-ordered, or Dedekind-ordered or Cantor-ordered which is according to $N$'th order logic is not really order at all. Where is this nasty odor of scholastic sophistry is coming from?