barrington interview

Lee · 14 Oct 2014, 11:59 · from 2014-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee)
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 07:59:54 -0400
Subject: (urth) barrington interview
Message-ID: <BLU175-W44843BD9E1BA77E615CC19CFAD0 at phx.gbl>

 Sigh, okay, I'll bite the bait one more time.

>Robert Pirkola: 

>Math is universal in the same way that the physics of our universe (which is

>based in observations describable mathematically) is universal.  In other words, 

>math and physics apply in every corner of the universe just as they do in our 

>tiny corner.

Who told you this? To be a credible source for making such a statement wouldn't

this person have to have been to every corner of the universe to test the statement?

Why would observations made in this tiny corner be presumed to apply to all other 

corners?

>how it is that one part of the universe could be exempt from laws and principles that,
>I think we can all agree apply in great swathes of the universe, while not directly 

>influencing those areas at the immediate border between the regions.

How can we make statements regarding great swaths of the universe when we haven't

observed great swaths? Perhaps math and science represent minority exemptions from

the real laws which govern most of the universe. Is there a way to know? I don't see it.

Human thought and perception is undeniably a form of tunnel vision.  We used to think

colors ranged from red to violet. Now we know there are additional "colors" from radio

waves to gamma waves. We used to think there were three dimensions. Then four.

Current mathematical models of the universe suggest double that, far exceeding the 

boundaries of human comprehension.

Perhaps we could take these examples as hints. For all that math and science show us of

the universe, there is likely far more out there it doesn't and cannot show us.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net