Timeline for Review of Tim Maudlin's New Foundations for Physical Geometry [closed]
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
23 events
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| Jun 19, 2014 at 2:29 | history | closed |
Evan Jenkins Lucia Stefan Kohl♦ Felipe Voloch S. Carnahan♦ |
Opinion-based | |
| Jun 18, 2014 at 19:58 | history | edited | user53046 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 18, 2014 at 19:28 | history | edited | user53046 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 18, 2014 at 11:47 | comment | added | fedja | @Igor Khavkine Great. I just didn't try really hard when searching. I'll take a look then, but later. :-) | |
| Jun 18, 2014 at 8:13 | comment | added | Igor Khavkine | @fedja, it's not (too recent), actually. | |
| Jun 18, 2014 at 5:47 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jun 19, 2014 at 2:29 | |||||
| Jun 18, 2014 at 5:33 | comment | added | Evan Jenkins | I'm going to buck the trend here by casting the first close vote. It's sort of an anti-stone soup situation, in which the question was phrased legitimately as a reference request, but it's clearly attracting discussion-y answers. But while we're discussing it, I'll just say that I have no idea how this is supposed to be useful to physicists when it doesn't appear to discuss the treatment of infinitesimals at all (and given that it's based on bog-standard classical logic and set theory, I doubt it will have anything interesting to say). | |
| Jun 18, 2014 at 1:00 | answer | added | Scott Aaronson | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jun 18, 2014 at 0:32 | comment | added | fedja | From what I could see, my impression is that it is a wild concoction of some correct elementary mathematics (which I would even call rather ingenious in places, though I have no idea what particular problem the author is trying to solve with all this) and some philosophical gibberish about what something "really is" and what is "fundamental". Unfortunately, the chapters that I would really like to take a look at before passing any judgement are behind the paywall and the book is too recent to appear on ... (well, you know). | |
| Jun 18, 2014 at 0:17 | answer | added | Donu Arapura | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jun 17, 2014 at 7:46 | comment | added | Igor Khavkine | @CarloBeenakker, I would say instead that the vast majority of physicists have given the nature of space-time very little thought, beyond their course in special relativity, where it's introduced as $\mathbb{R}^4$. Those who actually hold your "prevalent" view, in my experience, have little to base it on besides shared aesthetics. One would expect the reason behind a statement like "physicists believe that" to be based on empirical evidence, but that is certainly not the case here. | |
| Jun 17, 2014 at 1:47 | comment | added | Nik Weaver | @Benjamin Dickman: Ouch! I didn't see that. Still, it seems consistent with my first impression. | |
| Jun 17, 2014 at 1:03 | comment | added | Benjamin Dickman | @NikWeaver I'm not a mathematical physicist, so I don't think my conclusions would serve much for the purpose of the OP. That said, the very first section gives an argument that $(0,1]$ is not open (in the sense of the standard topology on $\mathbb{R}$) with a foot-note attributing the argument to the Wikipedia page on Topology from 2005. That about summarizes my own personal feelings on the book preview... | |
| Jun 17, 2014 at 0:39 | comment | added | Nik Weaver | @Benjamin Dickman: what conclusions did you draw? I see a philosopher who seems to think he has a better way of formalizing physics, writing about math in about the way you would expect a philosopher to write. My best guess is that that his contribution is technically valid but not terribly interesting from a mathematical standpoint --- more or less undergraduate level stuff --- but that is just a guess based on the small part I read. | |
| Jun 16, 2014 at 23:16 | comment | added | Benjamin Dickman | You can read a fair amount of it on Google Books; probably enough to draw your own conclusions: books.google.com/books?id=10XbAgAAQBAJ | |
| Jun 16, 2014 at 21:51 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | the prevalent point of view among physicists is that space nor time are fundamental, but "emergent" (like the concept of a "temperature" is not fundamental); after reading the introduction to this book, it seems very much out of touch with how physicists would think about these issues. | |
| Jun 16, 2014 at 21:41 | comment | added | Michael Greinecker | @user53046 Apparently, the physics will only come in the second volume. | |
| Jun 16, 2014 at 21:37 | comment | added | user53046 | @JoelDavidHamkins Frankly, my reading of that one chapter did not inspire much confidence in the mathematical content of the book. I ask for the opinion of mathematical physicists simply because doing physics is the ultimate aim of the work and I know embarrasingly little about that subject. | |
| Jun 16, 2014 at 21:21 | comment | added | Michael Greinecker | Here are the slides of a talk by Maudlin on the topic. They seem to give a good overview of the basic idea. | |
| Jun 16, 2014 at 21:14 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | You ask for reviews by mathematical physicists, but perhaps many of us would be more interested in reviews specifically by mathematicians. | |
| Jun 16, 2014 at 20:37 | history | edited | user53046 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 16, 2014 at 20:19 | review | First posts | |||
| Jun 16, 2014 at 20:30 | |||||
| Jun 16, 2014 at 20:02 | history | asked | user53046 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |