[Amps] "Conventional" current flow

[Larry Dighera]

Jim,

With all due respect, it would appear that you may be unaware of the vital role
mathematics plays in discovery of our physical universe.  There is a remarkably
insightful explanation in the Nova episode "The Great Math Mystery" aired March
30, 2016 on PBS:

    Is math invented by humans, or is it the language of the universe?	
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/great-math-mystery.html
    Video: https://youtu.be/JOtAFiI39_I
    Program Description:

    Revisit "The Great Math Mystery," fresh from the archives and just
    nominated for an Emmy Award.
    
    Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour—a provocative exploration of
    math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature
    in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral
    in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the
    first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the
    Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars. Astrophysicist
    and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians,
    physicists, and engineers, follow math from Pythagoras to Einstein and
    beyond. It all leads to the ultimate riddle: Is math a human invention or
    the discovery of the language of the universe?

    "When scientists seek to understand the patterns of our world, they often
    turn to a powerful tool: mathematics. They quantify their observations and
    use mathematical techniques to examine them, hoping to discover the
    underlying causes of nature's rhythms and regularities.
    
    And it's worked, revealing the secrets behind the elliptical orbits of the
    planets to the electromagnetic waves that connect our cell phones.
    Mathematics has even guided the way, leading us right down to the
    sub-atomic building blocks of matter, which raises the question, “Why does
    it work at all? Is there an inherent mathematical nature to reality? Or is
    mathematics all in our heads?”
   
Religious practitioners have a vested interest in protecting their dogma; take
the Catholic church's behavior toward mathematician Galileo's 15th century
discovery of Jupiter's moons, and how mathematics revealed the Earth revolved
around the Sun, not the other way around, as the church had contended for
centuries.  The religious leaders nearly executed Galileo for publishing what
mathematics had revealed.  It took four hundred years for the church to finally
admit its error.

Likewise, "Intelligent Design" and creationism run country to the empirical
proofs grounded in mathematics.  I wonder how long it will take before they
admit their bias ...

Best regards,
Larry


-- 
Irrational acts are ultimately founded on irrational beliefs.
    -- Larry Dighera, LDighera at att.net







On Sat, 19 Nov 2016 19:26:27 +0000, Bill Turner <dezrat at outlook.com> wrote:

>------------ ORIGINAL MESSAGE ------------(may be snipped)
>
>On Wed, 16 Nov 2016 22:16:50 -0700, you wrote:
>
>>So the bottom line is that we shouldn't be troubled by abstract ideas like electric current. Most everything we know about the world is an abstraction of some sort. Instead, we should be grateful that the universe, despite its enormous complexity and subtlety, allows us to simplify its rules into stripped down descriptions that our small brains can understand and that let us do useful things, like build vacuum tubes. 
>>
>>73,
>>
>>Jim W8ZR
>
>REPLY:
>
>My main objection to "modern" physics is in the quote above.
>Physicists have a bad habit of using mathematics to describe the real
>world. They build a mathematical model of it and after a while they
>come to think the model is the real thing. It isn't, any more than a
>marble statue is a real human being. They get fixated on the math and
>lose sight of what is real. Einstein's description of gravity as a
>"distorting of space" is typical. Gravity is simply a force which is
>poorly understood, not a distortion of anything. 
>
>Another classic example is the Big Bang Theory. When it was first
>proposed the word "Theory" was always included. After a number of
>years, "Theory" was dropped and it became just the "Big Bang", as if
>it had been proven. It has not, except as a mathematical model but
>that doesn't stop a lot of people as accepting it as proven fact. 
>
>One of the great failings of the human race is the willingness to
>accept a plausible explanation for something that may or man not be
>true and can not be proven. 
>
>Mathematics is useful, but it is only a model, not the real thing. 
>
>73, Bill W6WRT
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