You're right. How can I expect you to have common sense about the real world when you live in a mathematical world.
Newton, Dirac, Maxwell, Stokes, all of those world famous physicists did maths degrees. Hell, I went to the same university college as Newton and Maxwell (and Dirac went next door), doing the same degree.
Classical dynamics, Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetism, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, principles of quantum mechanics, applications of quantum mechanics, statistical physics, statistical field theory, special relativity, general relativity, general relativity II, black holes, quantum field theory, advanced quantum field theory, Standard Model, supersymmetry, string theory. All courses I did during my
maths degree and masters, all of them about physical models.
The whole "Oh you just do maths, you don't understand physics" thing only ever gets wheeled out by people who know neither. If you know one you know the relative position of the other when it comes to science. Hilbert, possibly the greatest mathematician ever, worked with Einstein on general relativity, he helped formalise the mathematics of it and once said "Physics is to important to be left to physicists". Without mathematics there is no formal language to describe the structure we observe in reality. There's a reason physics degrees require maths qualifications from high school and then have significant numbers of maths modules.
But you wouldn't know, as you haven't got any actual experience with either maths or physics at any real educational level. Instead you have just enough superficial grasp to think you understand a lot. It's the standard thing, the more people learn the more they realise how little they know. I've spent the last decade doing university level maths and physics and I don't know even 0.1% of what is known in those areas. I will
never know 0.1%. And yet there are people here who say I think I know everything. No, just enough to run circles around chumps like you.
You want to go head to head on some university level physics? I'll even be nice and not consider university level courses I've been involved in the teaching of.
I will let you off the hook because you are not capable of understanding that mathematics is a description of the real world,
I just explained that mathematics, in the context of physics, is a logical construct within which we attempt to emulate the structures we see in nature. If you're doing to misrepresent someone don't do it to their face. It makes you look both stupid and dishonest.
but it's not a substitute of common sense, ingentuity, or even basic relationships between objects.
Speaking as someone with actual experience doing physics I can categorically state common sense is
NOT a good guide in all things. Firstly, different people have different notions of common sense. Motor Daddy thinks common sense shows relativity is wrong. Others would disagree. Delayed quantum eraser experiments are highly counter intuitive.
Common sense and intuition work in every day life because they have developed to deal with everyday life. Humans are O(1) metre in size, always moving at speeds much much less than 1% the speed of light (relative to the Sun), unable to manipulate giga-ton or pico-gram objects easily. As such we do not have experience of things moving at 99% the speed of light on scales of pico-metres at temperatures of trillions of Kelvin. Using common sense is saying "I expect this new system to behave like previous ones I've seen". That's obviously a
stupid way to work because not all systems behave in similar ways. We understood electromagnetism before we understood quantum mechanics. The results of quantum mechanics went so against the 'common sense' developed looking at electromagnetism even the Father of Quantum Mechanics, Max Planck, thought he was wrong in his conclusions about quantisation, that there must be some other explanation.
Guiding yourself by common sense is a flawed approach. People can disagree about what is or isn't common sense (it isn't very common) but two people cannot disagree with logical deductions given axioms/postulates. Hence why mathematics is so powerful, it isn't a matter of opinion whether 2+2 is 3, 4 or 5.
By refusing to consider you might need to leave your common sense at the door you're effectively closing off your mind to new concepts, since they will clash with your common sense. I always find it funny when hacks do this, given you're always accusing others of not being open minded enough. If someone can provide compelling evidence for something I don't have a choice in accepting it, it's a matter of rational conclusions. As such despite being an ardent agnostic atheist (they are different things, agnostic means I don't know god exists and atheist means I don't believe god exists) with a decade of mainstream science between his ears I'm willing to put
any part of my religious or scientific views in the bin
provided a justified, reasonable, logical case can be presented (physical evidence not necessary but preferred, scenario dependent). This is a view a great many scientists have, it is something which stems from rational scepticism. So the question becomes; have you made your case? No.
The other question is whether you have a similar world view, that you'll change your mind on something if sufficient reason and evidence is provided. Again, the answer is a no. As you have demonstrated in this thread (and others), you'll ignore counter examples to your claims and demonstrations your views are sometimes logically inconsistent, never mind unjustified.
If you're unwilling to consider that your common sense might not always be valid then you're committing precisely the mistake you accuse scientists of making. You complain we might miss out on some massive break through if we don't do a particular experiment.
I can tell an engineer what I've told you, and ....:
Looks like you not only don't hold mathematicians or physicists in a high regard but you also have a pretty low view of engineers. If you think what you've presented would convince engineers you're poorly mistaken. Engineers want physical evidence and justification even more than theoretical physicists. There are engineers on this forum, perhaps we should ask them?
and they grasp that the laws of physics are a physical system that might act like mathematics
And again you show how you don't understand, despite me having explained it.
Physics doesn't 'act like mathematics'. We observe reality and see structures, patterns, connections and inter-dependencies. We wish to be able to describe these structures so that we can use physical phenomena to our advantage (ie technology). The role of mathematics in physics (not vice versa) is to allow us to develop abstract constructs with said structures or at least a good approximation. Once we have built the abstract construct we assign labels to the components of the construct, labels which are also for structures we see in reality (mass of an object, it's speed, etc). We then investigate the mathematical construction, seeing what new structures follow from the old (solve equations of motion, organise dependency networks etc). These new structures can then be associated to things in reality and which we can now go out and look for.
Since I'm in little doubt that abstract overview is beyond your capability to grasp I'll give an example. We observe things thrown into the air fall in a rather consistent manner. We therefore can infer there is some kind of relationship between an objects mass, the initial velocity, the height it gets to, the time it takes to come back down etc. We can collect data about how these are related by throwing a ball into the air and measuring the behaviour. Once the data is collected we can start trying to construct an abstract system which has similar behaviour between it's internal components. If we associate the internal components with the physically measurable quantities then by analysing the abstract construct we can try to say things about the motion of the ball we haven't done an experiment on yet.
This is different from your comment "the laws of physics are a physical system that might act like mathematics". Physical phenomena appear to behave in consistent manners. These consistent manners can be (approximately) formalised using mathematics but physics isn't behaving like mathematics any more than Nature behaves a bit like English. English can describe, approximately, parts of Nature, just like maths can describe parts of Nature via the association of abstract concepts (ie words or equations) to observable phenomena.
This might seem like I'm beating a dead horse, going over very basic things, but you aren't showing you understand how physics and maths relate to one another.
I never said the equations had mistakes in them. I asked how does nature continually meet those "perfect standards"?
......
The technology that we use isn't perfect, so errors creep in. How does nature overcome imperfections that might creep in?
......
but it's still a physical system that has to keep errors out and has to make gravity work across light years.
This whole "has to keep errors out" thing is very poor understanding on your part. Saying "This is an error" means there's some 'true' value/result and that hasn't been obtained.
With respect to the earth maintaining an elliptical orbit. With respect to acting like your space-time continuum model says it should.
Wow, you really don't understand, do you? The model is an approximation to the underlying truth, reality. Whatever nature does is the truth and all models have their accuracy measured with respect to that. If Nature does something not in line with the model then the model is broken. There's no errors from Nature's point of view.
If gravity suddenly changed right now and went from $$9.8m/s^{2}$$ to say $$98 m/s^{2}$$ would that be an 'error'? Reality is what reality is so it wouldn't be an error. If our physical models weren't updated to reflect this
then we'd have an error.
WE would have an error in our attempt to describe something else. How would you spot when Nature makes an error? You cannot since the truth is whatever Nature does.
What you actually should be saying is 'consistent', seems physical Nature is
consistent. As a result we built logical structures which have such consistency via mathematics and use them as our description of Nature. A physicist building a model is trying to find a mathematical system which emulates Nature, not the other way around.
We could have gravity propulsion generators by now if the physics community would treat the laws of physics as a physical system with a medium,
Baseless assertion. Simply repeating something already addressed doesn't help your case, it makes you look fanatical about deluding yourself.
and secondarily as a math system.
I've already told you, some of us actually do maths and physics day in, day out as a job so your continued misrepresentation of what
we do is flat out lying. You clearly do not know what the scientific method is, what physicists and mathematicians do, how they relate to one another or how they build and use models.
The medium of the quantum vacuum is really very simple. In the x-direction, the medium supports electromagnetic radiation propagation, which looks like this.
Except the quantum vacuum is not an aether. You have already been told this. If all you're going to do is lift results from non-aether models and claim an aether model required to produce them then you're again being dishonest.
Quantum electrodynamics is the most accurate model ever devised by Man. It doesn't involve an aether. Thus it is proof that an aether is not a necessary requirement to accurately model light related phenomena.
Since there is a whole frequency spectrum, then you need one available wave for each frequency.
Except the spectrum is continuous. There are
infinitely many different frequencies. Just another example of a very basic gap in your knowledge, one which undermines all the attempts at mathematics you've done so far.
Since the vacuum of space has a medium, a support system for light, with all of the frequencies of the bandwidth (10^27 of them)
How did you arrive at $$10^{27}$$? A photon can have
any frequency in principle, if you have the right amount of energy and an appropriate photon generator.
You should have thought of this!
Thought of what? A series of unjustified, error riddled misconceptions which deliberately ignore experimental evidence, logic and rationality? Sorry, I'm required to actually produce results when I do my thinking about mathematics and physics, I don't have the luxury of being able to delude myself and avoid presenting reason and evidence. That would get me fired.
That is where your ability to conceptualize falls apart. Why should Pluto, 6 trillion km away, have an elliptical orbit? Why should Pluto be influenced by the sun at all? If there is no medium, they why should the gravity of the sun have any way at all of influencing the orbit of Pluto? No medium means no long range forces like gravity.
Argument from incredulity/ignorance again. You can't think of any other way therefore you must be right. General relativity has no problem modelling Pluto's orbit yet it has no aether. To answer your question yourself you just need to learn some science. Quantum field theory and GR both lack an aether yet both give
working and accurate models of things you claim an aether is needed to describe.
Oh and Pluto's orbit isn't elliptical, no orbit is. Due to perturbations from other planets and secondary effects such as frame dragging (as GR would say) planetary orbits precess. Mercury doesn't follow an ellipse and it's excessively large precession was precisely one of the motivations for developing a replacement for Newtonian gravity (which could only explain part of the precession). Does the fact Mercury doesn't go in an exactly elliptical orbit mean Nature is wrong? No. A mismatch between reality and model means the model is flawed or in the measurements, not in reality.
All of this is an attempt to dodge the issue.
No, it isn't. Does it look like I'm dodging issues given the size of this post? The god question is relevant as you've asserted that since you view "All things which exist has a cause" is common sense and I'm giving you an example of how your own views are self contradictory. I'm showing how your common sense is wrong.
There is no reason to believe that universal constants like G, c, h, permitivity of free space, permeability of free space just exist for no reason. There is no reason why the speed of light should be the same for all observers; but you can't quite grasp that nature is doing something odd.
Questions like "Why are the universal constants constant at the values they have?" come up all the time in physics. You aren't putting forth something I nor anyone else have failed to consider. But no matter what answer can be provided it's always possible to say "But why?".
And asking "What is the cause of the universe being as it is?" is a long way from making assertions about what it is and how it works. You're doing the latter and it isn't science.
You can't grasp that nature is an organized physical system.
How in the hell did you reach that conclusion? Of course Nature is an organised physical system. That's almost a tautology. Like I said before, it's pretty damn stupid to misrepresent someone to their face.
If there were no organized system that stretched across the whole universe, there would be chaos and none of your equations would predict anything. Instead, we observe order. But all you can see is empty space filled with nothing.
I'm wondering if you're really serious. Do you believe what you just said? Or are you just saying it in the hopes you'll convince yourself it's okay to ignore my criticisms and corrections before all I see is 'empty space filled with nothing'?
I view space-time as an extremely interesting and complicated system and that's before you even start putting quantum fields in it. My PhD work was on types of structures extra dimensions of space might take in string theory. I also looked at how the structure of space can encode quantum field theories directly into itself.
In one of his books Feynman recalls how one day he and an artist friend of his were outside and the artist points at a flower and says "I see all the beauty of the flower, the colours of the petals, the aroma of its pollen but to you its just a collection of atoms jittering about". Feynman replied that yes, he could view the flower in terms of component particles but he could also see the colours and smell the aroma. He could see it on more levels than the artist, not less. A similar thing is happening here. You have at your disposal no tool or information which makes your position unique or justified. All of your musings about space are just things you made up or failed to grasp from other people's explanations. I can imagine things about space too. I have listened to other people's ideas. But unlike you I've also come up with working, viable, precise ideas about space which other people have evaluated and found useful and interesting.
In the context of my PhD I would view space not as 'empty space filled with nothing' but an extremely intricate arena within which a flurry of activity in terms of sub-atomic particles occurs, space affecting particles and particles affecting space in an unbelievable elaborate dance of mutual feedback. And the fact I have helped science to understand that in some small way is thanks to both my mathematical capabilities and my imagination. Some of the work even involved consider 'spaces' where the very notions of distance, angles and position are meaningless! How can a string have dynamics in a 'space' devoid of locations? An extremely counter intuitive concept but one which is extremely interesting and explored thanks to mathematical formalisms.
I think your comment says more about you than it does me. Hacks often try to paint their detractors as unimaginative, it's a defence mechanism to convince yourself that it's okay you suck at the details and are functionally innumerate, you're got more imagination. As your inability to think beyond your 'common sense' shows, the one with the least imaginative and most restricted imagination is you.