| Topic: |
Science > Physics |
| User: |
"OsherD" |
| Date: |
25 Aug 2005 12:30:40 AM |
| Object: |
Lost Causes By King's College's Streater v.s. PI |
From Osher Doctorow
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Lost Causes By King's College's Streater v.s. PI
Copyright By Owner Osher Doctorow Ph.D.
First Published 2005
Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics R. F. Streater of King's
College London (who also was Professor of Applied Mathematics at
Bedford College, London before that for about 15 years - and then 17
years as Professor at King's College) has a fascinating site and paper.
His site is his Home Page of R. F. Streater,
http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/index.html, and his paper is "Lost
Causes in Theoretical Physics," accessible under that title or at
www.math.kcl.ac.uk with or without /~streater/lostcauses.html. The
paper is 41 pages long.
Streater wrote a volume with Wightman of Axiomatic QFT and appears to
be oriented toward the Axiomatic and Algebraic QFT schools (the latter
of Rudolf Haag).
Although Streater later refers readers to some more or less anti-crank
cites, he manages to avoid categorizing theorists or theories as crank
or crankpot himself and is quite humble, which is how most scientists
and mathematicians used to be before the internet and modern
non-internet fads of insulting people began.
Streater in fact qualifies his "lost cause" label as meaning "seem to
me not to be suitable for students....[sometimes] because the topic is
too difficult and sometimes because it has passed its do-by date. Some
of the topics, for one reason or another, have not made any convincing
progress." (This is paage 1 of his paper.)
I don't think that he meant "not to be suitable for students"
literally, since he was talking about college students, but rather that
he was giving the theorists a way "out" in the sense that they could
theoretically simplify their theories so that they became
comprehensible to most physics/mathematics college students as a sort
of minimal standard of coherent ideas and simplicity.
The most interesting Lost Causes that Streater lists from the viewpoint
of Probable Influence (PI) (with which he is not familiar) are Hidden
Variables, Nelson's Stochastic Mechanics, and Bohmian Mechanics, as
well as "Hilbert space as classical phase space". In addition, both
Hawking and Sir Roger Penrose get in for their share of criticism (lost
causes Euclidean Gravity and Converting R. Penrose to the Copenhagen
View respectively), not to mention Everett (The Many-Worlds
Interpretation of QM Lost Cause), Feynman (Rigorous Feynman Path
Integrals Lost Cause), parts of the Clifford-and-beyond crowd (Jordan
Algebras, octoians, p-adic, Quaternions Lost Cause) and the
Piron-Jauch-Bob Coecke-Sonja Smets Quantum Logic Lost Cause, Wolfram's
Physics as a Computer Programme Lost Cause, Mach's Principle Lost
Cause, Analytic S-Matrix Bootstrap Lost Cause, and even part of
Wightman's theory or extended theory (The Scalar Wightman Theory in 4
Space-TIme Dimensions Lost Cause). Paul Dirac gets heavily criticized
for his Dirac's Programme of Quantisation Lost Cause, as does the
eminent statistician Fisher for Physics From Fisher Information Lost
Cause.
Osher Doctorow
.
|
|
| User: "OsherD" |
|
| Title: Re: Lost Causes By King's College's Streater v.s. PI |
25 Aug 2005 12:38:31 AM |
|
|
From Osher Doctorow
Streater explains the reasons for his description of these theories as
Lost Causes one by one, which is another important feature of a
responsible critic, since merely labelling a theory by shades of
crankiness or crackpotness as some USA labellers do really loses sight
of both the positive and negative and causation itself.
Osher Doctorow
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
