From: Osher Doctorow [EMAIL PROTECTED], Sunday Nov. 10, 2002 5PM Thanks to Tim May for the site reference. I read the story, and it's quite interesting. It's the first time I've looked at this in detail, although I heard a rumor about it. I have a few comments that I'd like to make now.
1. The acceptance of nonsense for publishing or Ph.D.s or M.A.s or M.S.s is obviously wrong. 2. The cause of the acceptance needs to be investigated by scientists and philosophers and others. 3. History tells us a few things about nonsense if we study it carefully, especially the history of Creative Geniuses like Beethoven, Shakespeare, Paul Dirac, Einstein, Schrodinger, Socrates, Plato, Mozart, etc. I will itemize these below beginning with 4, but I'll just mention that they fall under Mediocrity, Ingenious Imitation, and Creative Genius. 4. Mediocre scientific people in my definition don't even have the ability to imitate (see below). 5. Ingenious Imitators in science (and similarly for music, literature, etc.) imitate other scientists but only go 0 or 1 step ahead of whomever they are imitating. 6. Creative Geniuses go more than 1 step ahead of anybody else working on the same or similar problem or anybody else in the field or subfield. 7. Having spent most of my 63 years of life in Academia, both as a student and as a teacher/researcher in mathematics including statistics and mathematical physics, it is my opinion that more than 99% of mathematicians and physicists are Ingenious Imitators, and I have a stong suspicion that this is the case in most other academic fields. 8. Peer review is the usual way of determining which papers are published in scientific journals, and it follows from 7 if I am correct that most peer reviewers are Ingenious Imitators, and therefore that what gets published in most journals is at most one step ahead of the previous person (and possibly 0 steps ahead). 9. The solution to the problem of 8 and similar difficulties with Ph.D. and Masters Degrees is in my opinion a positive one rather than a negative one, namely, to foster more Creative Geniuses in Mathematics and Physics (and other fields). 10. In my opinion, Ingenious Imitators can become Creative Geniuses with sufficient education, tolerance, practice in accepting and thinking up new ideas, learning tranquility rather than anger or fear, and guidance from other Creative Geniuses or Creative Problem Solvers (a sort of borderline type between Creative Genius and Igenious Imitators, which I'll explain another time hopefully). Giving up Materialism, including Money-Related Materialism, Power Materialism, and Sensation Materialism, which includes giving up bureaucracy or the interest in becoming part of it, is key in this. Osher Doctorow, Ph.D. One or more of California State Universities and Community Colleges (Mathematics, Statistics) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim May" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2002 12:44 PM Subject: Good summary of Bogdanov controversy > > A good summary of the Bogdanov controversy is in the New York Times > today. URL is > > http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/arts/09PHYS.html > > Some of the folks we like to quote here are quoted in the article, > including Lee Smolin, John Baez, Carlo Rovelli, etc. > > Also, the latest "Wired" print issue has a fairly good survey article > by Kevin Kelly about theories of the universe as a cellular automaton. > Konrad Zuse gets prominent mention, along with Ed Fredkin. I didn't > read the article closely, so I didn't notice if either Tegmark or > Schmidhuber were mentioned. The usual stuff about CA rules, Wolfram's > book, etc. > > Things have been quiet here on the Everything list. I haven't been > commenting on my own reading, which is from books such "Physics Meets > Philosophy at the Planck Scale" and "Entanglement." Isham's collection > of essays on QM should arrive momentarily at my house. My interest > continues to be in topos theory, modal logic, and quantum logic. > > > > --Tim May > (.sig for Everything list background) > Corralitos, CA. Born in 1951. Retired from Intel in 1986. > Current main interest: category and topos theory, math, quantum > reality, cosmology. > Background: physics, Intel, crypto, Cypherpunks >
