Freedom of Science

I was reading the Scientific American Physics issue today referenced here. The article about LHC makes the claim on the sidebar1 that at full Moon the ground at LHC is lifted 25 centimeters and the circumference increases 1 mm and that physicists must allocate for this change in their reduction of data. This is another physics urban legend. The […]

Physics is very simple. There is a set of observations. Physicists fit a curve to observations. Then they associate a philosophical label to the fit. Then they float the label. Then they negotiate for years if the label should enter the physics code. Negotiations never fail to find a mathematical sophistry that will allow the […]

This quote from Scientific American proves that LHC is not a scientific experiment. 
The nearly 100 million channels of data streaming from each of the two largest detectors would fill 100,000 CDs every second, enough to produce a stack to the moon in six months. So instead of attempting to record it all, the experiments will have […]

Would teachers teach calculus if they had a choice? This is also an ethical question: Why do teachers teach calculus? There are two reasons. 1) To earn their living. 2) They have no choice.
I have never met a teacher of calculus who taught calculus because that was her purpose in life. Teachers have no choice. […]

Students who are judged by teachers to be unable to solve real life problems because they fail to grasp theoretical problems of calculus do pretty well in real life and solve truly complex problems such as relationships, finding a job, balancing check books, getting rich and even passing calculus exams. You don’t need calculus in […]

Some people who never wasted time learning calculus but did pretty well in life:

Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Edison
Bill Gates
Archimedes1
Euclid
Galileo

Some people who flanked life but were good at cramming calculus:

[Any examples?]

 The list is too long to list But the list of people who are forced to cram calculus and then forgot it all is infinite.

See this […]

Calculus is the greatest contributor of average human’s hatred of mathematics. Is this why teachers teach calculus? I sense a blame the victim attitude here.
Teachers victimize the students by enforcing them to memorize thousands and one way to compute tangents. There will be no occasion for the student ever in her life to compute tangents […]

Physicists think that physics is the tool they use to investigate nature. Both physics and nature are undefined. One cannot use physics to investigate nature. You can only investigate a representation or database or history. And to do this you only need a pattern recognition talent or faculty or tools.
I read here that Analogia means […]

In Galileo’s time Doctors of Philosophy controlled secret algorithm or database and claimed to possess a secret language to access their secret database and marketed their “knowledge” as absolute true knowledge. Galileo removed Doctors’ authority and transferred it to geometry. Eventually, Doctors corrupted geometry too and established their authority on the algorithm. Today physics is […]

Jimmy Wales wrote: “Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”
He was referring to his new search engine  that will use human editing like Wikipedia to fine-tune results as opposed to “algorithmic black box” used by […]