REB writes:

[BaalChatzaf]

From another thread REB writes:

Unfortunately, people manage to do it all the time and get by just fine, more or less. As Corvini notes, each advance in mathematics was done with a lot of protest, but ultimately adopted not because it was properly understood conceptually, but because it ~worked~. We have a lot of wonderful things in our lives because mathematicians, scientists, and technicians found things that worked, even while not properly grasping the foundation in reality for the discoveries they made and applied. As long as they don't blow us up, that's OK--but in principle, I don't like the brandishing of the Holy Cross of conventional wisdom when people like us try to reduce abstractions to their base in the real world. no.gif

I respond.

Yup. People like you (and Thom) claim to reduce abstractions to their base in the real world and get the wrong answers. How is that? I remember a piece of advice from a novelist with a thick Russian accent. She advised that when one's conclusions do not match the facts one should check premises. You really might want to follow that advice.

Are we to conclude that the mathematics on which our physics, engineering and technology is based is all wrong? If so, how do you explain the results?

By the way, the atomic bomb which is based on what you claim is wrong mathematics blew up over 100,000 Japanese people. If the math is wrong, why did the bomb work?

Einstein invariably got zero when he multiplied by zero. Each and every time. Why does the theory of general relativity work? Why does the GPS (based on the theory of general relativity) work? Why does any of Newton's physics work. Force = mass * acceleration. When the acceleration is 0 (in a fiduciary inertial frame) why is the the force 0? Why does Newton's First and Second Law of Motion work?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

I have a feeling multiple meanings are being used in this discussion and people are talking past each other.

If math had no correspondence to reality, making the bomb was a happy (or unhappy) accident.

I don't think it works that way.

Rand's idea of treating identity as if it were a measurement for symbols, then using measurement omission, makes the reality connection. In other words, a symbol stands for an existent (whether the existent is an idea or a thing is not pertinent—it just has to exist to meet this criterion). All existents have identity. But when the symbol does not stipulate that identity, Rand's rule works beautifully: the not-stipulated existent must have identity as a main characteristic, but it can have any identity.

Michael