usenet weirdness

Do you really believe in that pseudo-science?

Jan (just curious)

Arguably. The real inventor was Oliver Heavidise. (who loved to pester mathematicians with it)

Dirac just gave it another, more elegant name. [1] ( \delta(x) versus D H(x) or 1/2 D \signum(x) )

And that 'most of' will depend on how wide you want to draw the circle.

Nothing but notation. You can do without just as well. Mathematicians object to it, because the notation assumes without proof that adjoints exist. (which often needs to be shown, by their standards)

Yes. But imho his most important contribution was getting quantum field theory started,

Jan

Yet, ....

Funny, when I got the PCR test they said I didn't have it, ..., yet, I felt it the first time the grocery checker sneezed, and feel lucky to have survived the heart attacks and the respiratory syncytia and the brain fog and the tendonitis and the dispepsia and the diverticulitis and all the other associated issues with fibrosis and defibrosis of a sincerely involved and thorough immune reaction. Then later all the cancer and remission, ....

Well, discussion about COVID is off-topic, yet much like talking about common language, and common literature, is how it falls to the common experience.

That said then, I'm curious about the "Theory of Everything".

By definition it would be singular, ..., then that it's a real theory of everything including reason and logic and mathematics, and physics and probability and science, and the accounts of language and inter-subjectivity, here there is one and it's a realist's.

There were not many students to begin with. Most of them had parents who could afford to pay for their studies. Some poor and obviously very talented boys got scholarships. Some were adopted by a maecenas who sponsored them. Women were usually out of luck.

For numbers: I have seen estimates that in the year 1900 there were about a thousand physicists of all kinds in the whole world, most of them in Europe.

A Good Thing. But I guess that there are more Australian who want to go to Europe than the other way round, even nowadays,

Jan

PS, You arrived here to late to see the best anti-Einstein nutter of all. (an Australian citizen whose name shall not be mentioned)

I wouldn't bet on it. One of my late wife's colleague professors is from South America (though we'd got to know her in the Netherlands) and another is from South Korea). Australia is well off and politically stable - more so than the US is now.

The local branch of the IEEE had an Italian professor active on the executive committee (when I was its treasurer), but she's now gone back to IMEC in Belgium.

Anti-Einstein nutters are a tedious bunch. Sci.electronics.design has Jan Panteltje who is Dutch. He also fancies the Le Sage theory of gravity.

Don't try to walk before you can crawl.

When the standard model doesn't cover gravity, it's a bit early to start talking about a theory of everything.

Chomsky upset linguistic theory with his remarkably powerful approach to language, even though he doesn't seem to have any idea how the human language processing system might have evolved.

Slightly incoherent theories that work within their specialised areas are perfectly fine.

Einstein wasted a lot of his life trying to get a bit closer to a theory everything. If he'd been less ambitious, he might have been more useful.

IQ tests test something real, but trying to reduce a multifacetted skill set to a single number is nuts.

The great virtue of IQ tests is that they are quick and cheap. Their defect is that they discourage people from doing the slower and more expensive fine grained tests that might direct kids to get educated in specific areas that might match their actual skills.

"Quantum field theory" is just words to me.

Perhaps. He did his first degree at Bristol in 1921, and went on to do a separate degree in math in 1923. Heaviside was a controversial figure, and might not have been much cited at Bristol back then.

Looking at Heaviside's wikipedia page, I note that he was the first to use the impulse function (now known as the Dirac function). If Dirac had known much about Heaviside's work, he probably would have called it the Heaviside function when he first used it.

Verlinde?

Oh, I thought Verlinde was an Australian.

Don't know any "Australian anti-Einstein nutters".

Not much for Verlinde's time-violation, though.

There are some interesting ideas in it.

Einstein doesn't say much except "relativity of, ..., motion", and "mass/energy equivalence" and "cosmological constant". He does though make an account of the "spacial" and "spatial" in "Out of My Later Years", his last word on the matter.

Finlay-Freundlich, or just plain Freundlich if he dropped his matronymic after he wasn't using it to shield himself from anti-German sentiment in Scotland, wrote a pretty good paper on gravity in Einstein's Relativity that's accessible to all from the Gutenberg project.

When I'm interested in linguistics as natural language understanding, I look to the ACL Anthology

The multi-pass parser and Tesniere grammars and otherwise the structural account of grammar, since for example Panini was the father of grammar, is considered a much greater account of linguistics for grammar's sake, and thoroughly the textual, not for phonemes the ape and bird sounds.

Whatmough has a great account of language, and Huppe and Kaminsky have a good little book on logic and language.

You are a naive positivist, I see. Not unsuprising, for an engineer,

Jan

It would be kind of insane to believe that there can be sixth regular polyhedron. Plato did have a point there.

Certainly. But the laws of Nature don't need to be discussed to apply.

Jan

MOND is going to start looking like Bode's law.

And "anti-DeSitter space" is just "limitless epicycles".

For some, mathematics is the universal language, for others, it's love.

Ah, love, ....

Conway has some really interesting accounts of both non-Archimdean fields and Platonic solids, also that cellular automata is a toy of sorts. Should I care that we have a common name? It's sometimes troubling that the "Conways of Arkansas" were on the "wrong" side, as it were, yet at least we can always lionize Lincoln.

That is just too bad. All of physics is quantum field theory these days, at least in principle.

Being controversial leads to being well-know. And Heaviside solved a number of fundamental problems in electromagnetism, so any electrical engineer must know about his work.

Even Maxwell's equations are only known nowadays in the form Heaviside gave them. Some people even call them the Maxwell-Heaviside equations.

'Heaviside function' is already in use for the unit step function, (don't know about when that name originated, guess well before Dirac)

Jan

Actually it's usually said that physics is a "gauge" theory, (a field theory), not necessarily a "quantum field" theory.

Retro-finitists of the grainy sort who think that reality is digital and non-deterministic don't say much, then, do they?

Except "close enough". Which fails, beyond variously the first or second order, that mathematicians know, and "physicists" shut up and compute.

When I put "physicists" in quotes like that it means "technicians".

Not that there's anything wrong with those, ..., just not that they're philosophers of physics about the truth of the matters, nor that they're "doing science".

Suppose you mean Erik Verlinde. Another Spinoza prize recepient, PhD with 't Hooft, and a full time Professor of theoretical physics in Amsterdam, working in string theories and theories of gravity.

Or you might mean his identical twin brother, Herman Verlinde also PhD with 't Hooft, also in string theory, nowadays at Princeton.

Be happy, you missed nothing worthwhile.

I suppose you mean Dirk Jan Struik. (note the spelling)

Dutch, but he spent most of his working life at MIT. Mathematician turned historian of mathematics, with a Marxist bent.

He pioneered the aproach of looking at the development of mathematics in its societal context, rather than as some kind of lofty pure thought that just happens without reasons.

Jan

You don't hang around with psycholinguists.

Whatever that might be. It sounds as if it was invented by people who didn't like Spinoza's single substance philosophy and wanted to invent a way of getting around it.

And doesn't seem to see much point in getting to know him better.

My wife didn't cite Chomsky once in her psycholinguistic textbook, nor Tesniere, Panini, Whatmough nor Kaminsky either. Tecumseh Fitch doesn't make it either, though we both enjoyed his company.

Psycholinguistics is about what goes on in your brain when you hear, understand an produce language.

Brain imaging doesn't seem to helped much so far, though people do like the idea that it might.

Linguistic is the rather more sterile task of documenting language as it exists, and - to some extent - working out how today's language evolved from earlier (but probably not more primitive) precusors.