A Disservice to Mathematics and Science For Over 100 Years and Counting…
“Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ” -Nikola Tesla
… and that isn’t the only area of ‘damage’!
I’ve been tracking Characteristica Unversalis, Philosophia Universalis, Mathesis Universalis, Logica Universalis and Scientia Universalis all of my working life (for a time not even knowing what these concepts were!).
These concepts are so vitally important and it is a wonder that they have been all but forgotten in our ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ era.
The people who are changing our education, science, mathematics and philosophy are most comfortable in an environment of fear and control. That’s why they teach us to frame ideas in terms like uncertainty, chaos, random, coincidence, normativity … all of these are artificial creations.
This is going to change! It must!
We need to be aware of the subtle changes being made to our science, mathematics, philosophy and logic over time and then bring them back to their intended purposes!
I believe we all have an edge (sometimes many) – even if it takes time or circumstance to find it.
That’s just one of the reasons why normativity is only of very limited use and its importance should be put back in its place, for just one example. Any group of humanity large enough to be considered a distribution (anything else for that matter) will exhibit shared traits and exceptions to them.
It is part of the structure of the universe that it is so! It is a natural constant
We are called upon to judge wisely what these traits are which we choose to measure, lest we miss those which are just as valid as any other, and yet remain unrecognized!
We haven’t even really begun seriously to investigate these wonderful differences in each of us that make each of us special ( #OI Organic Intelligence). Using the most frequently populated area of any particular group is a ‘measuring rod’ won’t get us there either!
Heurist.me (Carey G. Butler) 
Yes, Carey! Unfettered capitalism has instrumentalized fear and control and has immunized us against awareness of the natural constants. Plato threw us off the trail the Ancients followed. They knew that a small set of symbols could throw out code sufficient to unspool the world. They had a sense of the scope of time that we only started to re-discover with Hutton and Darwin.
This allowed them to have faith that geometry’s forms were fundamental…that they naturally arose from the unique characteristics of our galaxy/region of the universe. (Recall the Atomists.) There is an organic intelligence, an archetype of order based on geometry. It is powerful because it arises (nearly) seamlessly from the unfolding universe.
Sir Michael Atiyah said that we sacrificed the soul of geometry to gain algebra’s power. He (like Pierce, Einstein, RB Fuller, Niels Bohr, Arthur M Young, and Hawking) felt that geometrical form enables us to use our intuition, our most powerful tool. http://www.math.tamu.edu/~rojas/atiyah20thcentury.pdf …
See also: Concise overview of Tobias Dantzig’s ”Number: The Language of Science,” referencing the “soul” of #geometry. http://www.math.harvard.edu/~mazur/papers/dantzig.pdf …
Finally: Promise of Hyperbolic Geometry for re-gaining geometry as our “governor”: http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20121002-getting-into-shapes-from-hyperbolic-geometry-to-cube-complexes-and-back/
Geometry and the associated elegant systems such as Characteristica Unversalis organize small sets of variables (especially sets of 3-, 4-, 5- and their multiples, especially 12), providing a powerful tool (and precious opportunity) for world citizens to join together and effectively deny, refute, and silence the destructive capitalistic myths. In the end, capital will succumb to the massive flows of currency powered by people acting conjointly along geometric lines.
Thanks for fanning the flames!
Oct 10, 2014 at 9:24 pm