On Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 1:35:14 PM UTC-5, agrays...@gmail.com wrote: > > > > On Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 4:29:08 PM UTC, Tomas Pales wrote: >> >> >> >> On Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 5:41:22 PM UTC+2, agrays...@gmail.com >> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> On Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 3:20:23 PM UTC, John Clark wrote: >>>> >>>> On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 5:40 PM <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> *> the concept of a plane wave, one of the solutions of Maxwell's >>>>> equations. It certainly doesn't exist in THIS universe* >>>> >>>> >>>> I agree with the general point you're trying to make, just because >>>> something can be consistently described mathematically doesn't prove it >>>> must exist physically. However if you're interested in the waves that >>>> enter >>>> your radio telescope and consider them to be plane waves the error in >>>> doing >>>> so can be made arbitrarily small by increasing the distance from the point >>>> source or by decreasing the size of the antenna. As a practical matter >>>> because the things astronomers study are so distant and their antennas are >>>> so small they can treat the waves they're interested in as plane waves and >>>> produce no measurable error by doing so. But a designer of optical >>>> microscopes would not have that luxury because the lens of a microscope is >>>> large compared to the distance from the sample, so he could not treat them >>>> as plane waves. >>>> >>>> John K Clark >>>> >>> >>> *A spherical wave asymptotically approaches a plane wave as it >>> progresses in space and time, but it never becomes a plane wave. This where >>> the rubber hits the road for the MUH; we have a mathematical construct that >>> doesn't exist in physical reality. Moreover, since the amplitude along the >>> wave front is a plane, the wave changes instantaneously in every direction >>> along the plane for every increment of time however small, which I refer to >>> as "instantaneous with a vengeance". So, as far as I am concerned the MUH >>> is easily falsified, and why it continues to interest people is baffling. >>> AG* >>> >>>> >>>> >>> >> What is baffling is why you think that your example falsifies MUH. If a >> plane wave is logically impossible then it doesn't exist - MUH is intact. >> If a plane wave is logically possible then exists, in a universe with >> instantaneous action at a distance if necessary - MUH is intact. >> > > *This is like the myth of the monster, the Hydra? -- you cut off one head > and two new ones emerge, and so forth. In THIS universe, to the best of our > understanding and belief, instantaneous action at a distance does NOT > exist. Yet in THIS universe, plane wave solutions to Maxwell's equations DO > exist. So in THIS universe, the MUH is falsified. Now if you want to claim > that OTHER universes exist where the MUH is true, it seems to me you're > grasping at straws. AG* >
Since mathematics is a form of fiction, like all fiction, there are "objects" in it that just don't "exist in the world", like vampires, werewolves, and live mummies 3000 years old in literary fiction. Happy Halloween! - pt -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
