Allen, Wudka and Ruffini

Allen, Wudka, and Ruffini, inspire this note.

I know José Wudka; he works at UCRiverside, I met him at MIT, and several times in Mexico. In the link above you can read his proposal for a Randall-Sundrum model. These models are popular now, because they can be tested at CERN, in the next few years. So far nothing, but one can see how to go about it.

Remo Ruffini is going to be seventy next year. He knew and worked with John Archibald Wheeler, and thus, is a pioneer of exotic astronomical object studies; objects like Black Holes, and Neutron Stars. He wrote a beautiful article connecting all branches of modern physics to understand these mysterious objects, through Gamma Ray Bursts, and other new windows astronomers have opened recently; link above.

Finally closer to my heart, Allen proposes a new method to understand physical reality.  Basically a sophisticated Statistical Description of experimental, and observational data.

Here I write my own proposal inspired by these three gentlemen.

I have suffered, and I believe, some colleagues also suffer, from a reification problem. Because we are capable of abstract thought, sometimes we do not distinguish between the thought, and that, that helped the thought to be born. The first in the line of theoretical physicists was Johannes Kepler. His mother was an astrologer, and thus, he believed Euclidean Geometry described Tycho Brahe astronomical observations. The result was so successful that all the reificators of the world, myself included, got this Platonic idea, that ideas existed in an ideal universe, but our senses were imperfect, and thus, only gave us partial realities,   not the Real thing.

That may be so, but I pose, that that ideal universe, if it exists, is beyond the scientific method. Therefore I AM NOT INTERESTED.

Now what?

I am interested in the successes of this reification disease.

I propose, with Allen, that we have a very successful mathematical method, that starts with Carl Friedrich Gauss, it is the  method of least squares.

Theoretical physicists then, have to be masters of this method, and get good fits between observations and mathematical, and philosophical ideas, thrown in, in what we call Fundamental Science.

Ruffini's piece is a jewel in this regard. Instead of getting into the beautiful mathematics of Einstein Equations' exact solutions, he masterfully uses them to fit data.

This is in the best tradition of that Italian genius, Galileo Galilei.

We have had over thirty years of String Theory without the benefit of corroborated experimental predictions.

In this regard, the three authors that inspired this note, are real physicists.

The Statistical View then, states that the purpose of Physics, is to get the most economical mathematical description of reality, in a never ending asymptotic approach to the truth, whatever the truth is.