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Questions related from Robert Shour
Galileo wrote Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due Nuove Scienze in Italian). It is presented as a three way discussion, among Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio....
09 August 2018 2,520 5 View
Typically in text books on a subject the presentation is by way of exposition. The reader in effect has an experience analogous to that of a person reading a story. There is the writer...
09 August 2018 9,386 5 View
Sometimes human beings anthropomorphize Nature. What did Nature have in mind? Or, how did Nature arrange that? Or, what trick does Nature have up her sleeve? As if Nature were animated by a vast...
08 August 2018 2,713 2 View
Physically Similar Systems: A History of the Concept is a chapter in the Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science by S. G. Sterrett. It is an interesting history. The principle behind similar...
05 August 2018 3,077 1 View
Lost in Math is a recently published book by Sabine Hossenfelder that argues that elegance, beauty and naturalness are vague gauges of the plausibility of theories in physics even though many...
06 July 2018 1,080 70 View
If networked people are faster solving problems than one, does the same apply to computers? Are there necessary constraints for this problem? Is there any benefit to knowing the answer to this...
31 May 2018 2,937 5 View
Analogies suggest that compression explains increasing average IQs. Collectively, software engineers improve the efficiency of data compression software. Language encodes (compresses) perceptions,...
04 May 2018 8,420 6 View
Energy the Subtle Concept by Jennifer Coopersmith was published around 2015. Her book shows that the question, what is energy, is not entirely settled. I don’t here mean E = mv^2. A question not...
26 April 2018 1,097 30 View
The great mathematician David Hilbert set out twenty-three important problems in mathematics in 1900. One of the famous outstanding ones is the Riemann zeta hypothesis. One might argue that once a...
17 April 2018 4,408 9 View
Homogeneity and isotropy are attributed to dark energy. Moreover, some authors suggest that dark energy is consistent over time. Those characteristics are consistent with the perfect cosmological...
27 December 2017 4,480 8 View
Andrey Kolmogorov famously wrote three terse papers in 1941 on turbulence. They were published in an English translation in 1991 by Royal Society Publishing. At p. 13 in the first paper and at p....
27 November 2017 2,158 3 View
A Different Approach to Cosmology by Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge and Jayant Narlikar (2000) reviews the ideas behind cosmological inflation. Do their points that are critical have merit? They...
08 November 2017 8,934 20 View
Ryden in her Introduction to Cosmology mentions acoustic oscillation at p. 167. From her account, it appears that the oscillation is, partly at least, an inference based on the use of the fluid...
07 November 2017 7,533 2 View
Tom Wolfe’s 2016 article in Harper’s, The Origins of Speech, mentions Chomsky's idea of a language organ as explaining the emergence of language. Are there arguments based on principle,...
17 October 2017 9,267 12 View
If time’s dimensionality is similar to or the same as the dimensionality of a direction in 3 dimensional space, then what is the underlying nature of time? Minkowski’s space time concept implies...
17 September 2017 2,252 25 View
This question is raised by my friend BP. On the one hand lockdowns inhibit disease spread. On the other hand, pending world-wide vaccination, lockdowns might allow the virus more time to mutate....
01 January 1970 5,700 5 View
A question related to our cultural indebtedness to our mathematical forbears.
01 January 1970 5,813 18 View
COVID-19 has been found in mammals in the wild, and in domesticated mammals. What about birds?
01 January 1970 3,474 15 View
In kinetic theory, physics does not try to map all the paths of a molecule. Instead kinetic theory uses a statistical analysis of possibly available energy distributions. So why in networks do...
01 January 1970 4,596 3 View
Globe and Mail, Toronto. December 30, 2020 Page 3, from the article: Fears of a “twindemic” have not materialized this year, with hardly any cases of flu in Canada this season, while COVID-19...
01 January 1970 756 11 View
The Declaration is found at https://gbdeclaration.org/, The website has a helpful FAQ. The John Snow Memorandum, published in The Lancet takes a somewhat contrary position. What's right and what's...
01 January 1970 6,860 22 View
If there are, are they easily available to governments, health authorities and members of the public? Commercial software sold in stores in the 1980s on floppy discs included how to manuals....
01 January 1970 5,755 3 View
Or is the concept inapplicable? If it were applicable, could statistical mechanical methods apply? Does entropy?
01 January 1970 7,203 6 View
The March 5 2020 issue of The Economist magazine has an article, Coping with the pandemic involves all of government, not just the health system, that mentions COVID-19 doubling every 5 or 6...
01 January 1970 772 6 View
Networking brains via language enables civilization, which increases human survivability. If singleton brains are insufficient to create civilization, then language is necessary for humans to...
01 January 1970 3,816 3 View
On the website https://foglets.com/ , a website about computers and computation, in an article Computation Power: Human Brain vs Supercomputer, there is this statement: "The brain is both hardware...
01 January 1970 1,636 8 View
Parallelism is said to be an important difference between digital and human brain computation? If brains can use dimensional capacity to obtain computational advantages (if they do) then can...
01 January 1970 9,462 2 View
If pandemics occur regularly in society, should children be educated about them as part of the core curriculum and should they be taught how to respond, behave and cope during a pandemic?
01 January 1970 1,480 27 View
The provenance of this question is from page 152 of Entropy - God's Dice Game by Kafri: “How can links be optimally distributed between nodes?” For a static network, energy efficiency might be...
01 January 1970 3,334 1 View
Instances of the 4th dimension include: Time in Minkowski’s space-time (Raum und Zeit). As flow or motion in various 4/3 laws. But: In a space-time distance, time squared is preceded by a sign...
01 January 1970 8,761 7 View
Is time a measure of the counting of some other, more fundamental, feature of the universe, perhaps entropy as it relates to energy in the universe?
01 January 1970 8,564 8 View
Bruce M. Boghosian in the November 2019 issue of Scientific American (p. 73) writes about wealth distribution. Using math and physics, it seems that a slight perturbation to a symmetric or...
01 January 1970 2,707 2 View
Theoretical physics is often distinguished from experimental physics. Is the philosophy of physics written by philosophers, and theoretical physics something physicists do? What are the...
01 January 1970 1,949 44 View
Or not. Harry Jerison in his 1991 book Brain Size and the Evolution of Mind, at p. 89 has: Mind is a necessary brain adaptation that organizes otherwise unmanageable amounts of neural...
01 January 1970 1,187 3 View
This question does not relate to philosophical romanticism applied to science that had some currency in the 1800s. Roughly it seems that scientific romanticism differed from enlightenment by...
01 January 1970 9,615 28 View
Sometimes, perhaps, the largest impediment to solving a problem, in general and in physics, is the framing of the question in the context of widely accepted implicit, or unstated or assumed...
01 January 1970 2,731 9 View
In Nature in 1971, volume 233, page 357, W. H. Brock reviewed a book by Robert Fox, The Caloric Theory of Gases from Lavoisier to Regnault, published by Oxford U. The reviewer begins with this...
01 January 1970 8,182 3 View
Is a physical basis that necessarily requires constancy of the speed of light a logical impossibility, or is the constancy of the speed of light the result of ideas not yet found or applied? Does...
01 January 1970 7,041 8 View
The is a followup to the preceding question: Are expanding (or the accelerating expansion of) space (dark energy) and the big bang connected?
01 January 1970 7,767 15 View
Sometimes I have found an inconsistency gives a helpful clue of how to improve a theoretical investigation. Early on I viewed mistakes as hurdles. I still think they are hurdles but have many...
01 January 1970 7,617 25 View
Is a theoretical physicist, believing a hypothesis true, ethically obliged to advocate for it? Is there an obligation running from physicist to theory? Is it a desire to repay in some measure...
01 January 1970 7,307 24 View
Some excerpts from the article Comparing methods for comparing networks Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 17557 (2019) By Mattia Tantardini, Francesca Ieva, Lucia Tajoli & Carlo...
01 January 1970 1,910 2 View
Is that right? (From an article, Using graph theory to analyze biological networks.) Things flow in biological systems: energy, nutrients, blood, air, as examples. A graph is a set of points with...
01 January 1970 7,758 5 View
See for example, Statistical mechanics of networks, Physical Review E 70, 066117 (2004). The architecture and topology of networks seem analogous to graphs. Perhaps though the significant aspect...
01 January 1970 4,524 3 View
Economic growth increases if the educated population increases and knowledge increases? There is an argument that an equation for economic growth should be based on thermodynamics: more energy...
01 January 1970 6,484 7 View
This question is prompted by the books review in the September 2020 Physics Today of The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene, by Jürgen Renn. I suspect that there is...
01 January 1970 916 1 View
Likely it is too early to say. There must have been some aspects of caloric theory that gave it an aura of plausibility. Unfortunately, a 1971 book by Robert Fox, The Caloric Theory of Gases from...
01 January 1970 2,080 3 View
Lazare Carnot, the father of Sadi Carnot who laid the foundations of thermodynamics with his 1824 monograph on the motive power of heat, authored the 1786 Essai sur les machines en général. Since...
01 January 1970 4,881 2 View
Canada for example, has a population of about 35 million people. Suppose there are 10 million cell phones (probably there are more) at an average cost of about $1,000 (probably the average price...
01 January 1970 4,895 2 View
As to chaos theory and disease spread see for example: Chaos theory applied to the outbreak of COVID-19: an ancillary approach to decision making in pandemic context Epidemiol Infect. 2020; 148:...
01 January 1970 303 12 View
There is a concept of viral load. Viral load has been considered in connection with HIV (Impact of viral load and the duration of primary infection on HIV transmission: systematic review and...
01 January 1970 6,183 8 View
Is Taiwan proof of that? Philip Johnston in The Telegraph April 21, 2020 wrote under the headline, The Government had a plan to fight this pandemic – but it lost its nerve. He says the...
01 January 1970 4,545 7 View
This question is without regard to engineering, chemical and biological questions included in it. A universal testing device, small, light, portable and inexpensive to make, plugs into cell...
01 January 1970 7,554 5 View
Have there been any studies?
01 January 1970 1,761 65 View
This question relates to the question, Is it possible to catch COVID-19 twice? Acquired immunity might slow the spread of COVID-19 or provide some protection from re-infection for those who...
01 January 1970 6,172 20 View
Will more people die of causes other than COVID-19 because hospital treatment capacities are overwhelmed by COVID-19? The concern here is with the COVID-19 mortality rate, which is not determined....
01 January 1970 417 7 View
One reason for posting this question is to hope that by following this question it is possible to keep up on developments pertaining to this question. An article in a health magazine, Stat, by...
01 January 1970 433 49 View
This question has medical and social aspects. It kind of relates to my interest in network distribution of information and the thermodynamics of networks, since the spread of disease is among...
01 January 1970 3,109 36 View
Carroll and Ostlie in An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, second edition at page 1099 remark: “Cosmological redshifts are caused by the expansion of the space through which the light travels,...
01 January 1970 6,070 4 View
The article Quantum Leap in Scientific American August 2020 issue, by Spiridos Michalakis, page 50, following the title, reads in part: How can a quantum phenomenon become macroscopic? Amend the...
01 January 1970 7,182 2 View
Suppose there is a static 3 dim space and a dynamic changing 4 dim space. Without that supposition, lots of problems in physics remain puzzles. With it, lots of puzzles are easily resolved. Energy...
01 January 1970 7,929 2 View
An article I posted March 5, 2020 is called The Theory of constant cosmic expansion. The idea is that there is a general and universal law of dimensional capacity. In particular the ratio of...
01 January 1970 5,778 2 View
In big bang cosmology, Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric is considered, it seems, a generic property of the universe only on large scales. But if the metric applies over all time, then it...
01 January 1970 6,571 4 View
A body thrown up, stalling and falling back in Earth’s gravitational field accelerates towards Earth. No new energy is created, it is potential energy converted into kinetic energy. Space...
01 January 1970 10,036 16 View
The universe expands. Entropy increases. In an article on the arrow of time, Thomas Gold suggested the two are related (p. 86, 1958 Solvay Institute, The structure and evolution of the universe)....
01 January 1970 5,425 8 View
Why did Galileo build his analysis of the strength of animal bone for an animal of increased weight from a scaling standpoint and not a dimensional standpoint? The scaling he used is induced by...
01 January 1970 7,103 9 View
The FLRW metric assumes homogeneity and isotropy of the cosmos. Homogeneity and isotropy of the cosmos is only valid to about one part in 100,000. If dark energy is homogeneous and isotropic at...
01 January 1970 481 2 View
SN1A are measured at different distances depending on whether redshift or luminosity is used. Might the situation instead be that the universe has two reference frames, so the same object is...
01 January 1970 6,954 7 View
That is a question implicit in the article Size, scaling, and invariant ratios: Size, scaling, and invariant ratios In effect, if inferences in the article applied, the cosmological constant...
01 January 1970 5,920 1 View
Even implicitly? My recollection is that in the Euclidean approach lines could not be added to squares because different geometric objects can't be added. Which makes sense when the conceptual...
01 January 1970 6,889 9 View
So far, say at the end of February 2019, no one seems to have explained how the current laws of physics explain what is called the accelerating expansion of the universe, or dark energy....
01 January 1970 879 5 View
Dimension is fundamental. Was it present at creation of the universe? Did it play a role in creation of the universe?
01 January 1970 8,912 10 View
Can one suppose that cosmogenesis must occur in an optimally energy efficient way? As if there is a cosmological principle of least action? Analogous to isoperimetric problems, does the universe...
01 January 1970 3,550 3 View
The ergodic hypothesis supposes that for an ensemble all possible states can occur over a sufficiently long period of time (which can be very long). Everett’s many worlds hypothesis supposes that...
01 January 1970 8,606 3 View
Why Q1/T1 = Q2/T2? Clausius in his 1867 text on the mechanical theory of heat writes (p. 120, Fourth Memoir): “This compression is continued until K_2 [heat sink] has received the same quantity of...
01 January 1970 9,065 3 View
Do you have an anecdote from your experience or about another physicist that you can share? A story about how a physics idea can happen? Are there books or articles that collect such stories?
01 January 1970 6,427 5 View
As applied to physics, the source is a mathematically described process and the target is one without a mathematically described process or without a mathematically described process known to the...
01 January 1970 7,692 3 View
Thank you to KG for bringing this to my attention this evening. Colby Cosh In the National Post March 21, 2020: “If you take drugs for high blood pressure, you might have noticed some nervous...
01 January 1970 2,451 5 View
This might be considered a worst case scenario. Repeated strikes by such a virus would scythe defenseless new victims each time, leaving fewer and fewer survivors. For the species to survive,...
01 January 1970 5,934 3 View
Here are examples of problems involving dimension. (1) Galileo observed that weight in 3 dimensions puts pressure on the 2 dimensions of cross-sectional area of bone. He examines the issue from a...
01 January 1970 7,080 33 View
Does the completeness of knowledge recede from view the more we learn? As new fields of study open, whole new arrays of problems present themselves. For example, the development of electronic...
01 January 1970 10,014 4 View
Matt Ridley wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010 about humanity’s material and intellectual progress. Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now was published in 2018 with some similar observations. Does...
01 January 1970 2,099 1 View
The principle of dimensional capacity can be characterized two ways. (1) A given amount of energy divides equally among available dimensions for homologous differently dimensioned systems. (2) If...
01 January 1970 4,399 3 View
In the question, Why is entropy a concept difficult to understand? (November 2019) Franklin Uriel Parás Hernández commences his reply as follows: "The first thing we have to understand is that...
01 January 1970 7,840 7 View
A good introduction to the fluid equation is in Introduction to Cosmology by Barbara Ryden (references here to 1st edition). The idea is that the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of...
01 January 1970 3,845 1 View
For example, suppose a person has been exposed to COVID-19 but is asymptomatic. If the person on the same piece of exercise equipment produces less calories for a fixed amount of time than...
01 January 1970 2,841 12 View
Thomas Kuhn in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions writes (p. 89, Second Edition): "crisis simultaneously loosens the stereotypes and provides the incremental data necessary for a fundamental...
01 January 1970 3,063 14 View
This remark appears, for example, in a book Hiding in the Mirror by Lawrence Krauss, page 231. A number of questions arise in regards to this remark. If the mechanism that leads to dark energy, so...
01 January 1970 2,288 3 View
Is it sometimes worthwhile to try to unpack the mathematics? By that, I mean to say, to look at what the mathematics is doing symbolically and try to relate it to what is physically happening to...
01 January 1970 3,594 63 View
Is it possible that the assumption of the FLRW metric is creating a hurdle to the analysis of dark energy?
01 January 1970 9,581 7 View
H is the Hubble constant. Suppose that there is a 3 dim reference frame and a 4 dim reference frame. The 4 dim reference frame consists of 3 dim space + 1 dim motion (light motion). The ratio of...
01 January 1970 5,371 3 View
This is a speculation I mentioned in a 2012 article on isotropy on arxiv, and in an allometry article also on arxiv (v17) in 2015 and in some earlier versions. Though as yet there is no theory of...
01 January 1970 2,013 10 View
Physical insight can suggest a principle which in turn leads to mathematical modeling. Example might include Newton extending the falling of an apple to towards Earth’s center, to the Moon falling...
01 January 1970 3,040 1 View
Conversely, what attributes of the physical universe do attributes of the natural logarithm model? For example, the exponential function based on the natural logarithm has itself as its...
01 January 1970 1,163 3 View
See for example and for comparison. Gabora, L., & Russon, A. (2011). The evolution of human intelligence. In R. Sternberg & S. Kaufman (Eds.),The Cambridge handbook of intelligence (pp....
01 January 1970 4,244 4 View
Can you give examples? A comment in a related discussion prompted this question. In the discussion, https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_it_worthwhile_reading_old_and_really_old_science_articles,...
01 January 1970 4,769 22 View
About June 2007 I found that the mean path length in steps could scale lexical growth. It was impossible not to notice a curious aspect of the log formula, C log (n) (network entropy) that used...
01 January 1970 601 3 View
The problem of self-interaction effects and errors arises in studies of, for example, anions, electrons, atoms and molecules. It also arises in developing a theory of network effects in connection...
01 January 1970 1,120 3 View
Bolisani, E. & Bratianu, C. The Elusive Definition of Knowledge Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning, 2018, 1-22, explores various definitions of knowledge. If knowledge is acquired...
01 January 1970 6,737 13 View
Is the answer known? Is it safe to read delivered and purchased newspapers and magazines?
01 January 1970 1,216 13 View
This is a followup question to: Is innovation in decline because of inadequate incentives? The Economist February 27, 20120 issue in the Free Exchange column alludes to an article, Are Ideas...
01 January 1970 8,409 7 View
The Economist February 27, 20120 issue in the Free Exchange column which appears in the magazine’s Finance and Economics section, has an article: How to get more innovation bang for the research...
01 January 1970 7,542 3 View
Can a larger computer slow down processing compared to a smaller computer to reduce production of heat? If the question itself makes sense.
01 January 1970 4,829 1 View
Recent research suggests human brains have about 86 billion neurons (the previous estimate was about 100 billion). Suppose a social insect has 1 million neurons. A community of 86,000 such insects...
01 January 1970 3,685 4 View
Which would be inverse to the way metabolism scales according to Kleiber’s Law, that is, inverse to the way metabolism scales as mass to a 3/4 exponent? Which would be inverse to the way...
01 January 1970 6,746 7 View
My friend BP points out that much of government disease mitigation was directed to avoid overwhelming of health services. Assume he is correct. Countries around the world responded with different...
01 January 1970 411 6 View
In anthropomorphic terms, is lethality a tactical feint obscuring an even greater danger? As of June 29, 2020 over 10 million people are confirmed as infected. Over 500 thousand people have died....
01 January 1970 8,004 12 View
The question arises in the following way: In response to the question on RG posed earlier, "Can animals in the wild catch COVID-19?" R. T. Corlett replied in part: “This shows that wild-caught...
01 January 1970 7,406 6 View
In Table 1 of an article, Persistence of coronaviruses on inanimate surfaces and their inactivation with biocidal agents, by G. Kampf, D. Todt, S. Pfaender, E. Steinmann that appeared online...
01 January 1970 1,868 4 View
Since government competency is doubtful, should citizens insist on the ability to appraise governance? Should there be contract transparency, to inhibit and eventually eliminate procurement abuse...
01 January 1970 8,431 2 View
Are there any studies?
01 January 1970 7,440 5 View
Some recent articles and health experts (an article in the Daily Mail may have reported on this) have states that it is pointless to restrict travel. Is that an accurate statement? For example,...
01 January 1970 5,651 4 View
COVID-19 having spread so widely around the world, what practical good arises from a WHO declaration of pandemic? Is coordinated containment more useful than declarations? Is there international...
01 January 1970 2,509 2 View
Or not? In The Great Influenza by John Barry at p. 340, about government controlling fear, writes: "They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies." At page 460, he...
01 January 1970 9,383 33 View
For example, switching to the Earth revolving around the Sun from the Sun revolving around the Earth improved modeling of the solar system. Switching from assuming differences in the speed of...
01 January 1970 4,991 2 View
The quote is: It is unbelievable How simple and straightforward Each Result appears Once it has been found And how difficult, As long as the way which leads to it is unknown. The quote appears in...
01 January 1970 5,689 6 View
This question requires explanation. Discussion on the second day of Galileo’s Two Chief World Systems raises the point. Simplicio, taking the position of those opposed to Copernicus, doubts the...
01 January 1970 6,983 1 View
From the 1998 book Seeing Red by Halton Arp, at page 274. Is that consistent with nullius in verba? Do you agree with Halton Arp?
01 January 1970 6,198 13 View
Or book if that is the case?
01 January 1970 5,114 3 View
In The Great Influenza by John Barry at p. 340, about government controlling fear he writes: "They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies." In the third week of...
01 January 1970 5,369 0 View
Similarly, are there books and articles on examples of generalization in physics?
01 January 1970 7,819 8 View
Edward A. Rundquist was first, in 1936, to report increases in average IQs, in the journal School and Society. In his article he refers to a Master’s Thesis at the University of Minnesota by Fred...
01 January 1970 8,780 2 View
And can you reference articles or texts giving answers to this question? This is briefly considered in https://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1924 which is on RG as...
01 January 1970 3,791 3 View
Related articles are: Inverting conceptual reference frames From Galileo’s simple case to universal 4/3 scaling
01 January 1970 6,637 2 View
Scientific American January 2023 Issue has an article by H. Pontzer, New Human Metabolism Research Upends Conventional Wisdom about How We Burn Calories. The Sci Am article asserts the statement...
01 January 1970 725 1 View
My suggestion is: trying to solve it in a conceptual reference frame that is not optimal. Here is my example. Kleiber’s Law is Max Klieber’s empirical inference that metabolism scales by a 3/4...
01 January 1970 8,926 1 View
This question arises out of proceeding question: Are information exchange and collective appraisal of ideas necessary for the emergence of collective consciousness? If networked computers acquired...
01 January 1970 4,882 3 View
Combining space and time into four dimensions demonstrates invariance under Lorentz transformation. Space-time being so fundamental an attribute of our universe, there must be numerous analogues....
01 January 1970 2,118 2 View
In Flynn, J. R. (2011). Secular changes in intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg & S. B. Kaufman (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of intelligence (pp. 647–665). Cambridge University Press the author...
01 January 1970 5,002 4 View
This question is aimed at gathering data to estimate the number of generations COVID-19 goes through in a single human host. And there have been and likely are at this time early June 2020...
01 January 1970 3,836 0 View
John M. Barry in his 2004 book, The Great Influenza about the 1918 flu pandemic, in chapters 14 and 15 describes how the influenza virus increased in virulence after the initial 5 or 6 months as a...
01 January 1970 811 0 View
In Two New Sciences, 1638, Galileo applies his analysis of the strength of a beam to an animal’s weight bearing bone. For a larger animal, weight scales by 3 when cross sectional area of bone...
01 January 1970 3,842 1 View
