Freedom of Science

John Baez writes: “For people who think they can do fundamental physics without much math, the correct answer is not “no!” so much as “I doubt it, but go ahead and try.”1
“You must use mathematics to do fundamental physics,” sounds like a good advice. It would have been even more helpful if it meant something.
John […]

After a slow start US/LHC bloggers are finally starting to write about physics rather than their weekend trips to Lake Leman. Here’s a post full of physics where Peter Steinberg asks if Branes Has A Flavor? The post is about a workshop called AdS Strings Intersect with Nuclear Beams at Columbia. 
Strings live in Anti de […]

Here’s the graphic related to yesterday’s post about Newtonian Mechanics:
   
The graphic illustrates the point that scholastic doctors are a constant of history and even though the name of the profession changes what doctors study and how they study it remains the same.
The graphic starts with something called nature. Nature is the label under which […]

Why is there a Newtonian Mechanics?1 Mechanics is an old science that existed since the dawn of history. What happened in the 18th century that a new discipline called Newtonian Mechanics had to be created?
An answer may be found in the titles of mechanics books.
Up to Newton’s time, every Peripatetic Doctor was required to write a treatise […]

In a paper just posted to the arxiv a well-known string theorist claims that String Theory has finally made a hard scientific prediction and that this prediction is now confirmed by experiments. This incredible claim is causing quite a buzz in the scientific community. The claim is that String Theory predicts two new solutions as […]

In a comment in A Quantum Diaries Survivor Carl Brannen mentioned this paper by David Hestenes.
In the Introduction Hestenes quotes Poincare:
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Now, Euclidean geometry is and will remain, the most convenient. . . .

How true.  It took humans 2000 years to recognize […]

Physicists dismiss my articles questioning force, Newtonism and mythological Newton as historical subtleties better left to historians. Concepts of physics are either legal or illegal; they don’t have history. You cannot do physics by arguments based on historical facts. Applied to physics history can only produce polemics. 
At the root of these objections there is the […]

Can there be effective formulas used in astronomy with force terms in them?
   
As far as I know, no effective formula used in astronomical calculations include a force term. In programming analogy “Force” is a string in a number field. No computations can be done with strings. Therefore, force terms are always written and then […]

I was wondering what kind of theory the Standard Model is. Assuming that theory and model are synonyms I drew this tree starting with Model:
   
According to this there are two species of models: rule based and simulation.
I thought there were three kinds of simulations: Axiomatic, algorithmic and trigonometric.
Then, I realized that axiom should be at the […]

The usefulness of Principia as a science book ended with the demise of Natural Philosophy practiced mostly by the British landed gentry. In the 19th century Newtonians changed their trade name to physicists in order to project a professional image and to increase the number of practitioners. Amateurs who studied nature for the love of […]