usenet weirdness

For your preferred and self-serving definition of sudden.

What stopped the Gulf Stream seems to have been a lot of fresh water draining into the North Atlantic, and that would have shown up as sea level rise. Losing an appreciable proportion of the Greenland ice sheet would have much the same effect. It would take a while to melt in place, but there's evidence on the ocean floor that stuff has slid off and melted (dropping boulders) as it drifted south.

If you have an imagination at all, it might pay you to use it.

There was certainly an element of that in some of the reports. Something certainly did happen, and it would have made life difficult for those living in the area while it was going on.

The people who wanted torrents of sea water pouring in from the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus don't seem to found any evidence for that, but the water level went up quite fast over a fairly short time.

Mach, like Lagrange, or Aristotle for that matter, tells two sides of a story, one for simpletons and the other for cognizants.

About Lagrange then mostly, on the one hand the potentialism as the inner product, on the other as the outer product, then talking about particles as after a point-wise point-like model of objects, is at least as old as substances and essences, or the good old microscale and macroscale.

So, the near field and far field, for more examples, or the metric and norm, or particles and waves, each make to reflect upon, well, reflection, about matters of perspective and projection in geometry as motion.

Then, to make a wider, fuller account of the Mach-ian, as what was made reduction, into "anti-reductionism" or "re-expansionism", is better than the usual compounded half-accounts and the "merely partial".

In, "electrical engineering", that's simple as as "the ideal and practical" or generally it's of accounts of the "theoretical and practical", which one though's the half-account varies.

Not everybody has time to learn matters of abstraction and deduction and mathematical proof, it's usually easier to just imitate and follow along.

Boltzmann constant is in the little leaflet in every book on thermodynamics.

Often it's the only "physical constant" given.

The SI units are much separated from the relevant empirical domains these days.

For example, "defining" the second as about the cesium atom its hyperfine transition, and "defining" the meter as that according to the "defined" speed of light, results all that's defined not derived, the System Internationale units that we all know and love simply don't say much about the objective reality of the quantities.

So, go ahead and "define" energy. That's funny, because it's "derived" from various relations of various energies and configuration of experiment, the "regimes of the running constants".

Otherwise you're about half-right, in deep space in a vacuum at a frozen instant in time.

Karl Popper doesn't actually say much, he just echoes scientism the good parts (observability, repeatability, then emphasizing falsifiability of the theory) then gets into "social" writing or matter of "human science", which are plainly oxymoronic.

Kant for scientism just echoes the ancient Greeks.

Don't get me wrong. When you first hear of Karl Popper and W. Van. O. Quine, and hear that for example "Popper demands falsifiability in science" and "Quine has ultimate proper classes and anti-foundational atoms", that seems great, then they get into empiricism and make un-scientific view the one and un-logical view the other, so what would have been a suspension of judgment instead results a less than generous reading.

The notions of Schoperhaauer, Compte, Boole, Russell, Whitehead, then the whole Carnap school, or "scientism" then "logicist positivism", those are pretty much Epicurean sophists and Occam nominalists.

If the "Renaissance" was reinvigorating and finding again the ideals, and the "Enlightenment" was the reinvigorating and finding again the analytical setting, it happens a lot and instead of that it just vacillates between "constructivism" and "intuitionism", is for an overall wider, fuller, dialectic.

The "technical" parts here are "the dialectic", since for example Parmenides after Heraclitus, not the messy, spongy "human" parts, or faux-Hegelians like Wittgentstein or Nietzsche or Heidegger or Marx. ("Anti-Plato's.") Hegel though is great, the Wissenschaft der Logik of Hegel, the "Science of Logic", is really quite rather great.

Some scientistic scat singing about stardust in the highest exalted way:

But Greek philosophy -was- what they had for science. (and for a lot of other things beside that)

Jan

Eh? There is no 'empirical domain' without measurement. There is no measurment without standards. There are no standards beyond the SI,

Jan

That is a theory. The problem wit it is that it was not accompanied by a pulse of sea level rise. For those pulses of sea level rise you might wish to consult

'a while' is the word.

Sure, the Black Sea rose when the Mediterrenean rose. Slower and later in fact, because of the large surface area and the narrow bottleneck formed by the Bosporus.

The southern shores of the Black Sea, where the catastrophe was supposed to have happened, are relatively steep. Even a crawling baby could easily have kept ahead of the rising sea. And there would have been high mountains in plain sight all the time.

Summary: It happened in the wrong place, at the wrong period in time, and the description doesn't fit.

For the rest all is fine, and it proves that the bible is always right,

Jan

That's part of being a competent experimenter.

In case of trouble you may remind those machinists that a measurement isn't a measurement unless it can be traced to a primary standard.

True, for Americans. It becomes a problem when you need more than slide rule accuracy,

Jan (still have an inherited one with a lots factors printed on the back)

Popper has repeatedy and loudly complained about the so-called 'irrationality' of scientists, because they (being competent scientist) ignored his prescriptions,

Jan

It's a problem already when you need more than first-order approximation.

There are at least five or six or more points of approximation or 'linearisation' in the standard derivations given in the standard linear curriculum, like Hooke's law and Arrhenius and Clausius and Planck and Fourier analysis at all and anything touching Differential Geometry, mass/energy equivalence the usual account given by SR-ians, without even getting into quantum indeterminacy, these premier theories come with a caveat as Einstein puts it "good to first-order".

I.e., "more than slide-rule accuracy".

Then various empirical domains specialize their measurements because the generic account _fails_.

Also you'll notice that Dark Energy and Dark Matter have falsified the usual premier theories anyways, besides that they can't compute torque or many other matters of the practical, that the many and myriad empirical settings have their own domains of units, _that being what defines empirical_, by definition.

Hypocrite.

There have been quite a few centuries worth of refinements since then. Peer reviewed international journals do a much better - if still imperfect - job of error correction and detection than public debates between the smartest rich guys in town. You had to be pretty well off to take the time out to do it.

Nothing that you have the wit to understand? The are a lot of steps between the optical spectrum of a cloud of cesium atoms and the frequency of an oscillator running slowly enough for you to be able to count transitions, but there is no question about the objective reality of every last one of them.

If you don't know how it's done, you can feel free to make fun of it. It makes you look at bit silly.

Deep space is a usually a pretty good vacuum, but the gear you need to calibrate isn't much used out there.

Let's agree to disagree about that.

Like Diogenes for example?

Jan

Eh, the basis for the SI is the defined value for a -microwave- frequency of the Cesium atom. From an engineering point of view a Cesium clock is nothing but a stabilised quartz clock.

Optical frequency standards do exist, such as Strontium lattce 'clocks' for example, but so far they are frequecy standards only, not yet clocks.

Jan

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There is no "us" here. You are alone in your special kind of crackpottery.

Fallacy: /Ipse dixit./

The non-scientist Poe's opinion about science (if even true), and even the physicists Einstein's and Schwinger's opinion about George Green (if true) are irrelevant with regard to experimental confirmation of the Brout--Englert--Higgs mechanism, for example, which has been done. “Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”

--History scholar Henry Thomas Buckle as quoted by Charles Stewart in the latter's 1901 autobiography (a shorter version is often ascribed to Socrates, and several other people, like Eleanor Roosevelt, without there being evidence of that:

You might wonder, where do the common values of physical constants, the fundamental physical constants represented by symbols in the stacks of derivations after definitions, you might wonder: where do these constants come from, that then get put in a museum in France and then called Systeme Internationale.

The values of these fundamental physical constants arrive from the NIST PDG CODATA.

Every few years, NIST PDG CODATA releases new values of these constants, the smallest or most precise values. Then, you might figure that each revision, they get _more precise_. They do, in a sense: also they get _smaller_, they actually _shrink_.

Similarly, every time astronomy gets a new telescope and looks upward, astronomy can estimate the size and age of the universe. Does it get more exact, one might wonder. What it does is it gets _larger_ and _older_ every time.

Eventually then the "particle" is _nothing_ in the middle of _nowhere_, or "deep space at a nonce".

So, this helps establish that "running constants" are real.

You are merely arguing from your own ignorance and incompetence.

Plain false. Unzicker, in this fallacy of false equivalence, is falsely equating the media hype about the discovery (including the media using the terms "God Particle") with what scientists actually did and do.

Instead, the idea that mass could be explained by symmetry breaking was formulated by several theoretical physicists (NOT just "theoreticians"): two teams, and Peter Higgs, who all worked independently:

In your crackpottish hystery, it has completely escaped your attention that I called it the "Brout--Englert--Higgs mechanism". This should already have been indication to you that something is deeply wrong with Unzicker's description.

Thank you so much for keeping Sloman amused.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics