is this what prompts the 'ugh'? the fact that he's trying to jump the initiation process, trying to shortcut something that doesn't admit this kind of reduction?
or don't you like the website for some reason?
you've been threatening/promising to write that diary for yonks, these questions, long on hope and intellectual aspiration, but missing an essential key as you say, have elicited some very interesting elucidations from you.
i can see that from where you stand, this might seem as futile as throwing a one metre rope across a mile-wide canyon, but that's relativity for ya!
/snark
i admire brodix for trying to get there from here, and i think you did a great job of helping him, without bastardising your knowledge, or sneering at his 'just enough knowledge to think you can shortcut' misapprehensions.
it must be frustrating, i would feel the same way if someone wanted to learn guitar without putting in the hours, just through asking some semi-perceptive questions doesn't advance him a jot.
some initiations are not bypassable, with all the good will in the world, yet it's human nature to try and find loopholes, or should i say 'wormholes'?
:)
i hope you have better luck registering at the agonist than i did, the software just doesn't want to play nice.
i wish i understood a fraction of all this, yet something 'moves' inside my brain as i try to entertain the vastness and minusculeness of the universe, and the realisations f great minds who saw deeply into the reality that i swim in, unaware of the forces that surround me, other than through vague intuition.
i know here at ET there are some heavy hitting mathematicians, statisticians, economists and energy specialists, and yet physics is not discussed here very often, why should it be?
over at sean-paul's there was this coonversation, see, and i wondered if such could ever appear on ET, and how well it might draw you out into trying to help us curious uninitiated make a few tiny steps towards understanding.
thanks very much for trying to do what apparently may be impossible, i hope it didn't cause you any untoward stress! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
More likely the visceral dislike of seeing a description of some advanced physics that is Not Even Wrong. It evokes the same kind of aesthetic displeasure as seeing a big, ugly Land Rover driving around in the historical centre of a pretty city.
It's just... ugly. And it's frustrating, because the guy in the Land Rover most likely can't understand why people think it's ugly.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
We don't discuss a whole lot of hard science of any kind on ET - not much biology or geology or astronomy: facts get reported but not much is gained from discussion. What we will discuss is the acquisition and interpretation of the data (as, for instance, in the field of Climate Science). We discuss engineering and public policy and social science. That's partly because, despite appearances, ET is not a place for idle speculative discussion. It may be more debat- than action-oriented but the debate is eminently practical in intent. We discuss ideas, some quite fanciful, for how to organize power plants or transportation networks, but we don't discuss proposals for the next space-based telescope. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
