Post 6666

I am not superstitious. Nevertheless it gives me the willies to get my friend's paper on scale and conformal invariance when I write this 6666 post.

 I am waiting for my Mathematica license as I write this. Some issues with names on accounts and such, have prevented me  to get this license so far. Grinstein et al., made extensive calculations to publish their paper, but it is concepts, that I want to address here.

Scale invariance is crucial in my view of the Universe. At the beginning there was no sense of what now we consider big or small, all sizes were equally important. If you read the paper you find out that scale invariance is not identical to conformal invariance; I like that. Mathematics sometimes represents our intuitions, sometimes not. In my current view of reality it is important to separate, things as they are, and our abstractions. The latter are made up, the former were there even before we developed concepts. Even the concept of self. My present view is that we do not have to know what really is out there, for a successful phenomenolgy. I am agnostic, through and through. Agnostic about Intelligent Design, and agnostic as to the reality of the Universe. I do believe the Universe is out there, but all I really feel the need to, is to get the best fit with the least number of assumptions.

How does Fortin et al., contribution fit?

What we expect is not what it is. Scale invariance is not conformal invariance.