She says "there is no language in nature" which does not seem accurate. Even though she might mean something else or a particular form of language but even then, bees and birds still use sound and something similar to language.
Is it just me?
for e.g. the form of communication used by bees is very well known now, it involves not just spatial movements but also "buzzing" which is totally similar tot he sounds we make, they just lack vocal cords.
What makes you consider it a "discovery" instead of a creation of us humans?
I am more on the side of seeing maths as a precision language we utilize and extend as needed, especially because it can describe physically non-existent things e.g. perfect circles.
I rather think the discovered/invented thing is just semantics.
You can say that literally anything was "just discovered".
Thriller by Michael Jackson? Those particular ordering of sound waves always theoretically existed, MJ and various sound engineers just discovered them, they didn't create anything.
The cappucino? It's just a particular orderly collection of chemicals, such a collection always theoretically existed. Those baristas are explorers, discovering new latte art shapes, nothing creative there.
Cantor's diagonal argument? Yep, those numbers where just waiting to be discovered and written in that order.
And so on. The entire argument is meaningless, pointless philosophizing. Nobody wastes their time saying latte art was discovered rather than invented, but somehow when it comes to mathematics this is considered a deep and worthy discussion.
Not at all, you sparked thought in an area I find fascinating (philosophy of maths). Albeit I find this specific topic a bit too commonly discussed relative to how important it is, but I'm still happy to talk about it and share my thoughts.
To me, it doesn't sound like you did. The parent comment of yours just stated, albeit bluntly, that the "invention" and "discovery" are fundamentally the same. Whether we use one or the other depends on how big the size of the space of the possibilities feels to us. Math has a very rigid and easily enumerable space of possibilities (strings of symbols), so we call it "discovery", while cooking has an enormous space of possibilities (countless pieces of meat and vegetables, each unique in its configuration of atoms, etc.), so we call it "invention".
When you invent a way to make music, did you really invent it? Or did you simply discover a particular configuration of atoms that can produce sound when handled in a particular way, that was already there in some platonic universe of ideals? Either way, the end result is the same. Nothing really changes.
> Math has a very rigid and easily enumerable space of possibilities (strings of symbols), so we call it "discovery", while cooking has an enormous space of possibilities (countless pieces of meat and vegetables, each unique in its configuration of atoms, etc.), so we call it "invention".
I think you've made a good point here.
Although, to nitpick a bit:
Both spaces (cooking and maths) are infinite, and for most fields of math, uncountably infinite. The difference is in the numbers we are dealing with. For cooking, it's mixtures of trillions of molecules. For maths, it's usually in the order of thousands of symbols (although those ellipses do some infinitely heavy lifting!).
I like to think of axioms as "created" while the consequences (i.e. theorems) of said axioms are "discovered". You can't create logic consequences (conclusions) given a set of axioms, but you can certainly create the axioms (premises).
It's not clear to me why people think perfect geometries do not exist, they occur all the time in physics.
Of composite matter, sure, because it's composite in a certain sort of way, you do not get perfect circles. But the structure of macroscopic material does not exhaust the physically.
Even here, one could define some process (eg., gravitational) which drives matter towards being a perfect circle, because perfect circularity is a property of that process. This is, as a matter of fact, true of gravity -- if it weren't we'd observe violations of lorentz invariance, which we do not.
Perfect in a single-body universe, perhaps, but the gravity field of a particle is perturbed by other nearby particles - where "nearby" is relative to precision desired - and therefore never a perfect sphere.
Or, to put it another way, so-called "perfect circles" exist in a real, 4-D, wibbly-wobbly gravity-distorted space, and are no longer perfect Cartesian circles.
They still only exist theoretically; not in practice.
Circularity is still a property of the process. One requires perfect circles to describe it.
It is also easy enough to construct circular state spaces, and the like.
The idea that what's real is simply the geometry of macroscopic visible matter, or even of matter alone, is a nonesense.
The world is "immanently abstract", and possess primeness, circularity, etc. in itself -- not as something merely imagined. This is obvious from the physical description of its evolution.
Irregularity, of this kind, is derivative of a geometrical reality. The irregular doesn't govern the irregular, if it did, there would be no structure whatsoever.
When it was essential to perception. Its necessary to have a model of a circle (, elipse...) in order to correctly parse (at least,) visual perception -- because space is inherently geometrical.
Government labs, not so much. But universities and independent research institutions, sure. For example, the Perimeter Institute is considered to be one of the top theoretical physics institutions in the world, and it exists because Mike Lazaridis made a ton of money from Research in Motion (aka BlackBerry) and decided that Canada needed a top tier theoretical physics institute.
Generally its universities that are getting the money directly. Its mostly for big ticket items, especially buildings, and especially where they can attach their name to it. Like at Stanford its the "Gates Computer Science" building.
Other than that there are foundations that issue grants to individual researchers, e.g. Gates also has a foundation. There are others such as Burroughs-Wellcome, Clayton Foundation, etc.
The private foundations are generally very stingy with "Facilities and Administration" fees, which was in the news recently as the fight over NIH/NSF funding which can go in the 50-60% range. Private generally doesn't go over 15%, frequently its much less.
I was part of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. We had an annual collaboration meeting in Copenhagen, perhaps in 2012 or so. Poul Allen’s yacht was moored in the harbor, across from the venue. It as the high point of CERN hype, and we knew that he was a patron of the sciences. So a delegation (our spokesperson etc.) was sent with some ATLAS merchandise to greet him, and perhaps suggest a sponsorship of some student activities.
Allen was a uniquely generous person when it came to science, but historically, science is a gentleman activity for men og free time, so it surely happens.
Personally, the freedom to pursue my scientific curiosity is the only motivation to seek wealth.
If I by virtue of satisfying wealthy people’s interests in fundamental physics could sustain my life and research, I wouldn’t care about accumulating wealth for myself.
Jim Simons did in fact fund Brookhaven national lab directly at one point. His foundations and friends continue to fund a variety of scientific endeavors. But we don't have too many scholar-turned-philanthropists around, unfortunately.
What sort of access level / integration would you need to the businesses (repositories, CI systems, mobile app source repositories, Github admin) seeking to use Actory?
I have to admit, for brief moment i was optimistic when musk announced, he will fix social media (twitter). Long time ago.
This notion of censorship or filtering, but this time the right -- your way, is the same problem only with a different sign. If musk would realize that most people, no matter their political views, see it this way and will seek new platforms eventually, he might do something positive about it. Maybe.
