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Re: progress in understanding

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Posted by OsherDoctorow on September 01, 2003 at 16:17:35:

In Reply to: progress in understanding posted by pelastration on September 01, 2003 at 04:56:50:

From Osher Doctorow

Pelastration (Dirk),

I think that you're on the right track. I explained on Stardrive1 just recently why Uncertainty is a poor tool for most of physics and engineering or roughly that, and you hit it on the nose. There are two meaning of Uncertainty, (1) error, like x2 - x1 or dx, and (2) standard deviation or its square variance which is the only technically correct definition used by mathematical probability and statistics people. Error itself is replaced by standard deviation precisely because it is so fluctuating (negatively and positively) that it often cancels itself out or else overexaggerates in random directions, but standard deviation isn't a major tool for engineering or for that matter for physical laws because most physical laws relate VARIABLES (even RANDOM VARIABLES) rather than their statistical population standard deviations or population means. Einstein, Schrodinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, all made the mistake of not understanding that. The people who followed them include some Creative Geniuses, but mostly ones who haven't thought about the whole question and don't know mathematical probability or mathematical statistics any better than they did.

There is a "legitimate" Stochastic school in both classical and quantum mechanics and it even gets into general relativity sometimes, but in most of its history it's simply accepted the old ideas and painted them over with probability-statistics language. It's like painting a car with a new color to disguise it. Mostly the Stochastic school is super-intolerant and uses Mainstream Probability-Statistics methods, especially Bayesian y/x instead of 1 + y - x. So they get anomalies for Rare Events (x = 0 and x near 0), while Rare Events are perfectly reflected in Rare Event Theory (using 1 + y - x for probable influence; the quantity y/x for x not 0 is called "conditional probability" and isn't even defined at x = 0 since it leads to contradictions.

Of course, it might be worth trying to have a Stochastic Quantum Theory forum, but there never has been such a thing precisely because its adherents in the Mainstream are of the mostly intolerant type not interested in translating their ideas for anybody except their collaborators or very close rivals. Those people aren't just in favor of publish-and-perish - being essentially imitators for the most part, the only place where they could survive is in print reviewed by Fellow Peers of Their Own Kind.

I'll try to read more on your theory as soon as I get some time.

Osher Doctorow

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