Tag Archives: INTP

Within the Edge of …

October 27, 1992

His voice was bubbly and full of enthusiasm: “You know it’s tantalizing.  — I feel I’m on the edge of something.”

That was last thing he said to his wife.

“In considering the relationship between the finite and the infinite, we are led to observe that the whole field of the finite is inherently limited, in that it has no independent existence. It has the appearance of  independent existence, but that appearance is merely the result of an abstraction of our thought.  We can see this dependent nature of the finite from the fact that every finite thing is transient…”

He had developed his own interpretation — a non-local hidden variable deterministic theory, the predictions of which agree perfectly with the nondeterministic quantum theory. His work and the EPR argument became the major factor motivating John Bell‘s inequality, the consequences of which are still being investigated. [Wikipedia, revised]

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No Hero, just an engineer.

It was seconds to running out of fuel.

But, he had an outward calm about him.

Yes, the Eagle has landed.

No doubt, the Crafter Artisan, Chuck Yeager, another test pilot, the first to break sound barrier, might have been impressed, although Yeager being very competitive in nature, he might not have openly expressed it.  Why give that “engineer,” any credit?
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The Functional

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac

It worked.  It served it’s function.

Actually, to be technical about it, it was a functional, not a function. Big distinction. Never mind why.  It’s works.————  ?

Dirac’s Equation

But Why?

What did it imply?  Well, something very profound.  They didn’t want to believe it at first.

“Where is my Dirac?” — Albert Einstein

 

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The Gift

He said softly, “I don’t see the point of us meeting.”

The conversation had essentially ended at that point.  It was a complex point. An awkward social moment in time.

Very likely he wouldn’t accept a gift of million dollars.

The Riemann Zeta Function.

It was a clopen topic to him; you see, it hadn’t anything to do with Mathematics proper.

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American Temperament

“There are strong minds in every walk of life that will rise superior to the disadvantages of situation, and will command the tribute due to their merit, not only from the classes to which they particularly belong, but from the society in general.”

So wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper #36, one the founding articles of the United States of America.

If this is not one of the best arguments for the importance of Temperament in the Human Wealth of Nations, then I don’t know what would be.

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On the Shoulder of a Giant

If I have seen a little further,
it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Isaac Newton

We all know the quote. But often we don’t know the name of those Giants.

And she was not concerned that we know the true story, for in science, the shoulders are many and the results are what matter.

Newton’s giants were many: Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Kepler, Wallis, … But others were nameless.

Her giants included Newton, Haley, but also Annie Cannon.

And she was a giant, but who few know her name, for her almost contribution, or rather, her until recently uncredited contribution. For a man took that credit by publishing four years later essentially the same idea she had told him about — and that she deserved the real credit, for she was the first person to observe it and understand it.  Moreover, she had the imagination not blinded by “conventional wisdom:” the scientific heterodoxy, which wasn’t really science at the time, anyway. Consensus science is never a science.

But she didn’t know that…

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Pi Day and oh, That Icon

Nerds, mathematicians, lovers of all things circular today celebrate Pi Day, the day that honors π, one of the world’s most mysterious inspiring infinite mathematical constants. Pi Day is celebrated on March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m., the date and time which corresponds to the first eight digits of π, or 3.1415926. π . It, March 14th is, also, the birth day of a German physicist.  Those nerds like to think that they might figure out some of those mysteries, like that guy who’s birthday is March 14th, 1879.

By the way, if you don’t remember π  can be approximated, but never represented by anything finite, by:

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609…

For it’s a transcendental number.

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That Relational Thing

What is life?

That was the question he posed to himself.

No, he wasn’t asking the simple, vague, ill-posed, question: what those fuzzy, sloppy thinking Philosophers often try to talk about in volumes of words.

He was, in his mind, asking a precise question.  A scientific question. For to answer this question, he had to ask the immediately deductible question: What is life, Not?  Both questions are difficult to answer — precisely.

But he wanted to answer, What is life?, precisely, and he did give an answer: in his last book before he died.

But, there were critics of his work, although the vast majority are ignorant of his work.

An unnamed critic remarked: “The trouble with you, Rosen, is you’re always trying to answer questions that nobody wants to ASK!

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Me!? Arrogant..

Although most people do not take glee in being perceived as being “arrogant,”  however, many male Rationals will admit they are not particularly bothered as being perceived as arrogant – well, because they are arrogant. No sense in denying the facts. Female Rationals sometimes get a moniker (deserved or undeserved – depending on your political religion) such as the Iron Lady, because of this perceived arrogance. With that arrogance, I suspect political religion was why Hollywood did such a hatchet job on Margaret Thatcher in the now playing biographical movie.

Rationals are wont to think of themselves as the prime movers who must pit their utilitarian ways and means against custom and tradition, in an endless struggle to bring efficiency and goal-directness to enterprise, an attitude regarded by many as arrogant” [Please Understand Me II, page 169]

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