The title refers to the previous post, "Follow This."
Dialogue from "Night at the Museum 3"—
"He's not in charge, we're just following him."
"That's what being in charge means ."
See also Smoke and Mirrors and Angels & Demons.
From Lie Groups for Holy Week :
Stellan Skarsgaard as the head of Vatican Security —
Or: Night of Lunacy
From 9 PM Monday —
Note that the last line, together with the page number, forms
a sort of key—
The rest of the story—
For one reinterpretation of the page number 304, see a link—
Sermon— from Tuesday's post Diamond Speech.
The linked-to sermon itself has a link, based on a rereading
of 304 as 3/04, to a post of March 4, 2004, with…
WW and ZZ
as rendered by figures from the Kaleidoscope Puzzle—
.
Yesterday morning the same letter-combinations occurred
in a presentation at CERN of a newly discovered particle—
(Click for context.)
Since the particle under discussion may turn out to be the
God particle, it seems fitting to interpret WW and ZZ as part
of an imagined requiem High Mass.
Ron Howard, director of a film about CERN and the God particle,
may regard this imaginary Mass as performed for the late
Andy Griffith, who played Howard's father in a television series.
Others may prefer to regard the imaginary Mass as performed
for the late John E. Brooks, S. J., who served as president of
The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., for 24 years.
Griffith died Tuesday. Brooks died Monday.
For some background on the Holy Cross, see posts of
Sept. 14 (Holy Cross Day) and Sept. 15, 2010—
For more lunacy, see…
Continue a search for thirty-three and three
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
From Margaret Wertheim's "Outsider Physicists and the Oh-My-God Particle," New Scientist , Dec. 24, 2011—
For the past 18 years I have been collecting the works of what I have come to call "outsider physicists". I now have more than 100 such theories on my shelves. Most of them are single papers, but a number are fully fledged books, often filled with equations and technical diagrams (though I do have one that is couched as a series of poems and another that is written as a fairy tale)….
The mainstream science world has a way of dealing with people like this— dismiss them as cranks and dump their letters in the bin. While I do not believe any outsider I have encountered has done any work that challenges mainstream physics, I have come to believe that they should not be so summarily ignored.
Consider the sheer numbers. Outsider physicists have their own organisation, the Natural Philosophy Alliance, whose database lists more than 2100 theorists, 5800 papers and over 1300 books worldwide. They have annual conferences, with this year's proceedings running to 735 pages. In the time I have been observing the organisation, the NPA has grown from a tiny seed whose founder photocopied his newsletter onto pastel-coloured paper to a thriving international association with video-streamed events.
The NPA's website tells us that the group is devoted "to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels, of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas".
Very little unites this disparate group of amateurs— there are as many theories as members— except for a common belief that "something is drastically wrong in contemporary physics and cosmology, and that a new spirit of open-mindedness is desperately needed". They are unanimous in the view that mainstream physics has been hijacked by a kind of priestly caste who speak a secret language— in other words, mathematics— that is incomprehensible to most human beings. They claim that the natural world speaks a language which all of us can, or should be able to, understand.
"…a secret language— in other words, mathematics— that is incomprehensible…."
For instance, the "secret language" of Dr. Garret Sobczyk?
See a brief paper by Sobczyk in the NPA Proceedings described above.
See also Sobczyk in the February 2012 Notices of the American Mathematical Society —
"Conformal Mappings in Geometric Algebra"—
This AMS article, together with Sobczyk's list of previous publications,
indicates that, despite his appearance in the NPA Proceedings , he is definitely not a crank.
Unfortunately, publication in the Notices does not by itself guarantee respectability.
For an example, see the Mathematics and Narrative post of Dec. 13, 2011.
Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics, by Bruce A. Schumm, Johns Hopkins University Press, hardcover, Oct. 20, 2004, pp. 94-95–
"In the early 1960s, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology by the name of Murray Gell-Mann interpreted the patterns observed in the emerging array of elementary particles as being due to a symmetry….
Gell-Mann's eightfold way was perhaps the first conscious application of the results of the pure mathematical field of group theory and, in particular, the theory of 'Lie groups,' to a problem in physics."
From the preface–
"I didn't come up with the title for this book. For that, I can thank the people at the Johns Hopkins University Press…. my only reservation about the title is that… it implies a degree of literacy to which I can't lay claim."
Amen.
Remedial reading for those who might have fallen for Schumm's damned nonsense–
"Quantum Mechanics and Group Theory I," by Dallas C. Kennedy
Meanwhile, back at the AMS–
Ready for His Closeup
Closeup–
"You're talking about…
the moment of creation!"
See also
Rebecca Goldstein
and the Number 36
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