Skeptic Inquiry is Fun

Hi Redtread,
My undergraduate degree is in engineering so I can definitely relate.

Redtread wrote:

Analytical geometry is essential for measuring forces and stresses in machine parts, the kinematics of machinery, including thermodynamic forces as they move through mechanical systems.

You must remember that for engineers who deal with tolerances, things have to be good enough, not perfect. The mathematics you use is very precise and exacting and at the narrow levels between the very large and the very small this is just fine. It works well enough. But you must be aware that the finite is never perfect. Entropy comes into play because space is expanding. So we compensate and fiddle and push the equations towards the data.

In graduate school I studies biomedical engineering. Suddenly, the "machines" were made of flesh and blood. Modelling the mechanics of a femur was not as easy and modeling a stainless steel rod. You have cortical and trabecular bone in irregular shapes with varying boundary conditions. This presents a very big problem and you can throw analytics out the window. Bone has turnover with continual osteoblastic and osteoclastic activity. And they are all connected to a brain that thinks and adapts. There is growth and decay at rates unimaginable in a steel machine. Computers are what we relied on and finite methods called finite element stress/strain analysis. We relied on irregular grids of points that had to be assigned data and that data was computed. And that was 35 years ago and still we have many problems to solves when designing an artificial hip with biocompatible material alloys. Just ask the lawyers.

Redtread wrote:

My problem when talking with most of the anti-Cartesians is that I see
1) No awareness of the positive changes that the cartesian system has brought - even though they are manifold.
2) Rejection of the cartesian system without proposing an alternative theory that actually works.

I hope that you are aware that AG and the calculus could never hope to sent an orbital into space. It was not till computers became sufficiently powerful that a satellite could be launched to effect an orbit about the Earth. And still, these orbits decay and we send more up, hoping to keep them up long enough to be useful.

Imagine if the moon had the same problem. Still, the moon's orbit is expanding because we are in an imperfect finite realm. Still, Astrophysicist cannot tell you the forces that involved in maintaining an orbit. Astounding! Take your elliptical equation from AG. It describes the ellipse perfectly at every point but what of the forces. With current gravitational theory, it is a spherical field and we are still stuck with the inverse square law from the time of Newton. If you recall, the elliptical orbit of the Earth has a ghost foci. The other foci is the Sun. How can an empty foci exert a force?

In a spherical gravitational field gravitational forces must vary with every point on that ellipse in order to pull back the Earth from its extreme distance from the Sun and ease the force when the Earth is at its closest. The inverse square law and a constant force of gravity would release the orbital at the furthest extreme and crash the Earth into the Sum at its closest. Has anybody questioned that fact in 400 years!?

TUB clues us to the fact that Linear Gravity is not a spherical field but a toroidal field. The axial tilts to the planets and the Sun makes it such that at every point in the ellipse a different gravitational pull is experienced by the bodies involved, depending on the plane angle perpendicular to the axis of the rotating spheres. Only this fact explains the elliptical orbits. I would refer you to the "Pioneer Anomaly" and the "Saturn Anomaly" where the astronomers and astrophysicist are dumbstruck at the fact that these orbiting object are not exactly where predicted. Oops!

Redtread wrote:

As a machinist I design parts to within 0.0001" inches and sometimes smaller, and no surprise, when we do it right, we can consistently make parts that are exactly the size we need over and over again, sometimes for thousands of parts. The mechanical accuracy achievable is astonishing, mindal or not.

Please do not be impressed with these tolerances when the tolerances of an atom are astonishingly smaller. And this distance becomes untold light years in the macrocosmos. Even in the nano tech world 0.0001" is totally unacceptable.

Your AG is fine for the machine shop and there is "good enough" for a jet engine, but it won't fly for quantum physics and it won't fly for astrophysics.

At least with computing we can get ever greater approximations with increasing computing power. But mind is infinite. Without mind, even the atoms of the steel of your machines fall apart. You cannot predict my freewill mind and I cannot predict yours.

Redtread wrote:

You say reality is mindal, not mechanistic. That's fine. Mechanism is a theory, and may be technically wrong on a number of counts. One count where it is not wrong is that certain universe forces (especially in our everyday, middling experience of undistinguished reality) things behave in a predictable fashion so much so that one might refer to them as mechanistic, and such a reference would not be innacurate.

The Ultimatons are as predictable as persons. Motion is undefined and underived and existential. The Havona Spheres of the Central Universe have alway moved around Paradise.

42:7.10 The first twenty-seven atoms, those containing from one to twenty-seven orbital electrons, are more easy of comprehension than the rest. From twenty-eight upward we encounter more and more of the unpredictability of the supposed presence of the Unqualified Absolute. But some of this electronic unpredictability is due to differential ultimatonic axial revolutionary velocities and to the unexplained “huddling” proclivity of ultimatons. Other influences—physical, electrical, magnetic, and gravitational—also operate to produce variable electronic behavior. Atoms therefore are similar to persons as to predictability. Statisticians may announce laws governing a large number of either atoms or persons but not for a single individual atom or person.

Urantia Book Forum

Who is online