User talk:CSTAR

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Mathematical validity

You reversed my edit at non-standard analysis with the justification that the content of the section is contained in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. The sentence you are referring to mentions vaguely that there is no argument about the mathematical validity of non-standard analysis. I don't think this is sufficiently precise. Namely, even a system containing additional axioms could also be mathematically valid, so long as nobody has found an internal contradiction in such a system. The specific point that non-standard analysis is "conservative" in the sense that it does not go beyond ZFC deserves to be mentioned explicitly. If you disagree please raise the issue at WP math rather than using deletions. For the time being I will revert my edits. Katzmik (talk) 08:11, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Please respond to my comments at the talk page of non-standard analysis. Katzmik (talk) 13:24, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

non-standard calculus

There is a dispute regarding the proof of the intermediate value theorem, please comment. Katzmik (talk) 12:27, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Please respond to my comment at talk:transfer principle. Katzmik (talk) 12:43, 10 September 2008 (UTC) and again Katzmik (talk) 14:19, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment at talk:transfer principle. I added a couple of paragraphs to the lead at transfer principle. Please give it a professional edit. I still feel that the thrust of this material goes contrary to the remarks in the first section, as I tried to explain at the talk page. Katzmik (talk) 12:23, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

your comment

Hi, You made the following comment at talk:transfer principle:

Reply to comment of User talk:Katzmik) posted 14:14, 9 September 2008 (UTC). Sorry to take so long to respond. You are correct that quantification over sets is required, but this doesn't make it a higher order theory. For example, there are no type distinctions between sets of integers and integers. In ZFC all variables range over the entire set-theoretic universe. If one had a weaker no-standarad analysis, with limits on the range of quantification, the resulting theory would be less interesting. In fact, you can make the transcendental extension 'R[t] into an ordered field in which the indeterminate t is infinite and 1/t is a non-zero infinitesimal. But this is pretty much useless for a development of calculus. I don't know if I've addressed any of your concerns.--CSTAR (talk) 14:48, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

I have thought about your comment for a while and I do not understand it fully, surely this is due to my lack of training in logic. At any rate, I am not sure what you mean when you say "there are no type distinctions between sets of integers and integers"; why aren't there? Also, I understand the assertion "In ZFC all variables range over the entire set-theoretic universe" but I am not sure I understand what you are driving at when you say this. Certainly in NAS one needs to interpret statements as referring to internal sets only; I see this not as a weakness of the theory but rather the main tool in the realisation of Robinson's goal. When you say "you can make the transcendental extension 'R[t] into an ordered field in which the indeterminate t is infinite and 1/t is a non-zero infinitesimal. But this is pretty much useless for a development of calculus", are you referring to the absence of a transfer principle in such a naive approach to NAS? Katzmik (talk) 09:05, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Abstract nonsense

An article that you have been involved in editing, Abstract nonsense, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abstract nonsense. Thank you. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? Topology Expert (talk) 11:59, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Intelligent design

Intelligent design has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 21:30, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Interpretations of quantum mechanics

Up till now I have restricted my dealings with this subject on Wikipedia to small edits, although I certainly have quite a bit of experience on this matter, having worked professionally on it for over 30 years by now (see my web site to which a link is provided at User:WMdeMuynck). However, as you can see there, my views on this subject are not shared by everyone, to say the least. Because there is a Wikipedia policy not to engage in scientific controversies I have up till now not tried to deal with this subject on Wikidepia. I am still updating my own web site, and it does not seem fruitful to me to duplicate this in Wikipedia since my web site is open to everyone interested.WMdeMuynck (talk) 14:50, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

No I certainly didn't want to suggest you insert your views into the article. Basically I am unhappy with the introductory paragraph which is supposed to explain what an interpretation of quantum mechanics is. I am aware of your interest in this area and I thought that you could thinks of a suitable formulation based on some independent source. This should be less controversial than adopting one or another interpretation as the "right one".--CSTAR (talk) 15:49, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

My first problem is that in physical discourse the notion of `interpretation' is different from the one used in philosophical discourse. In physics most of the time by an `interpretation' is meant a `mapping from the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics' into reality. In philosophy, if I remember well, the mapping is often thought to be from reality into the theoretical terms of the theory (like the term `electron'). I restrict myself to the physical notion.

Disregarding the instrumentalist interpretation (because it is too vague and, moreover, is confusing) I distinguish two possibilities: either the mapping is into the reality of microscopic objects, or it is into the macroscopic reality of phenomena (the first is the interpretation which has become fashionable after logical positivism has become obsolete, the last one might be in agreement with logical positivism although the situation is actually more involved). I refer to these interpretations as realist and empiricst, respectively.

In the empiricist interpretation a measurement result refers to a property of the macroscopic measuring instrument (a pointer position), rather than to a property of the microscopic object. Bohr and Heisenberg (the Copenhagen interpretation) did not entertain an empiricist interpretation (notwithstanding Heisenberg's empiricist utterings), since they assumed a (measurement) phenomenon to be a property of the microscopic object (e.g. a particle `being within the confines of the detector' when position is measured). What is essential to the Copenhagen interpretation, is that the measurement is a fundamental issue, the measurement arrangement playing an essential role (this is often seen as a weakness, but I consider it its strenght).

The Copenhagen interpretation can best be viewed upon as a contextualistic-realist interpretation, as opposed to Einstein's objectivistic-realist one.

There is still another dichotomy, viz. in the interpretation the wave function may refer to an individual object (the Copenhagen interpretation) or to an ensemble (Einstein). Although the first one is most popular both among physicists as well as philosophers, I think nowadays we have experimental evidence that the wave function does not describe an individual object but an ensemble. The emiricist interpretation allows only an `ensemble' version, the realist interpretations allow both versions.

Personally I prefer the empiricist interpretation because i) it is in agreement with what physicists do experimentally, ii) since it is the weaker interpretation (although stronger than the instrumentalist one) it can evade all paradoxes of the realist interpretations (although a realist ensemble interpretation also solves most of these, but not all!), iii) it gives rise to a generalization of standard quantum mechanics which is necessary to encompass all experiments which nowadays are performed in the quantum domain.

My problem is that I do not see how this can be cast in a brief and simple formulation that is illuminating rather than confusing.

Reply:

Re:In philosophy, if I remember well, the mapping is often thought to be from reality into the theoretical terms of the theory (like the term `electron'). I restrict myself to the physical notion.

I am surprised to hear you say this. Philosophers are generally pretty clear on interpretation as semantics, e.g., a mapping from linguistic structures to some kind of semantic domain. My question here is, what is the semantic domain for quantum mechanics.--CSTAR (talk) 23:12, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Please let me know what you think.WMdeMuynck (talk) 12:48, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to have missed your question. Unfortunately, your talk page was not on my watch list. It is impossible to generalize on this issue because different philosophers do it differently. The problem is: "what is the semantic domain?" and "what is a linguistic structure?" If by `semantic domain' is meant `a part of physical reality' and by `linguistic structure' the `mathematical formalism of a theory' then you have the notion of `interpretation' as is usual in physical discourse. But often in philosophical literature the mathematical formalism is treated as nonexistent. Instead there are terms like `electron', wave, measurement, etc. which terms are elements of an `ontology'. An interpretation of the word `electron' (referring to an object of that name) is then something like an implementation of that term into the language of a theory (the `linguistic structure'). In classical mechanics an electron is quite different from what it is in quantum mechanics, thus entailing quite different interpretations of the ontological notion of an electron. Incidentally, note that in the socalled `semantic approach' the word `semantic' is used because, due to the theory-ladenness of observation statements, reference to theory is necessary (next to reference to observation) in order to characterize the meaning of a theoretical term.WMdeMuynck (talk) 16:33, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

limits

Hi, Please comment at the talk page of limit of a function if you get a chance. Katzmik (talk) 09:06, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure I can contribute much to that dispute. My own view is that there is a lot to be said for duplication: I see no reason to avoid separate articles on limit of sequence, limit of a function, limit of a net, limit of a filter etc.. so long as the reader is clearly told of the surrounding landscape, that is generalizations, specializations and distinctions.--CSTAR (talk) 16:26, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

It might be worth making a comment to that effect. There is quite a lively discussion going on, incidentally. Katzmik (talk) 08:49, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

P.S. A couple of ignoramuses (that is, even more ignorant of non-standard analysis than I am) are giving me a hard time at uniform continuity, please comment. Katzmik (talk) 09:44, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

CSTAR

ah-ha! C*-algebra Godspeed John Glenn! Will 23:43, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Criticism of nonstandard analysis

Hi, would it be possible to comment at the AfD? Katzmik (talk) 17:10, 17 December 2008 (UTC) Please expand the economics section of Influence of non-standard analysis if you get a chance. Katzmik (talk) 16:00, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Please see my comments at the talk pages of Criticism of non-standard analysis and of non-standard analysis concerning the conclusion of AfD. Katzmik (talk) 09:17, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

United States Invasion of Panama

I wanted to notify you that there is a votation on the talk page of the previously mentioned article (US Invasion of Panama). 201.218.86.201 (talk) 16:53, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Spectral triples, etc.

Hi. In 2004 you added some content to Nonstandard analysis about Alain Connes. The article describes Connes as a "noted critic of NSA", with the quote and editorializing justifications given as evidence. However, in print on his blog, Connes makes it clear that he is not a critic of NSA: in fact he says that as a student he fell in love with it. The point of his remark in the quoted paper is to give prototypes of unexpected ways of understanding the integral. Connes' theory of spectral triples is not an attempt to rewrite calculus; it is not an alternative to Robinson's infinitesimals as the article suggests. Rather it is a way of understanding the abstract notion of what a noncommutative manifold should be. As Skandalis told me, Connes' latest course of lectures at the College de France was devoted to showing that an unbounded spectral triple with a commutative algebra corresponds exactly to a Riemannian spin manifold with a Dirac operator. The Dixmier trace appears much later in the theory as a way of rewriting Hochschild cocycles. In mathematics it was introduced as a tool by Connes to give a uniform explanation of the pseudodifferential residue of Guillemin and Wodjicki. What is written in the article is quite misleading - in no way would Robinson's methods have been applicable to the sort of index theorems that Connes has spent the last 30 years proving. I think the section on Connes' critique cannot remain in its original form. The comparison with Robinson is completely misleading. Connes' theory is about Dirac operators on spin manifolds and their noncommutative generalisations (eg to foliations or discrete groups) - it is not an alternative approach to high school calculus. I wonder whether it might be possible to modify this content so that it no longer is a BLP violation and so that it is in addition accurate about Connes' own theory, if that theory needs to be mentioned at all. In many parts of Connes' theory the Dixmier trace is not needed, e.g. for usual Toeplitz operators on the circle; however, already for the two-torus, commutators arise that are in the noncommutative L^1+ε space for every ε > 0 and to which the Dixmier trace can be applied. Cheers, Mathsci (talk) 23:22, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Well I'm certainly eager not to misrepresent anybody's views. If you believe my edits innacurately portrayed Connes' thinking, please feel free to remove whatever it is that I wrote. I'm sure if any Wikipedia editor subsequently claims to have a more accurate and verifiable account of Connes' views than either of us, that editor will modify the article accordingly. That give and take usually works pretty well. --CSTAR (talk) 06:04, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, that's extremely helpful. The main point is not to quote Connes out of context. With the benefit of interviews and his own writing that have appeared since 2004, it has become clear that his statements about nonstandard analysis have always been about his personal development and experience. He has explained why he initially was working in this subject and why he discovered "there was a catch". I have already started giving a more balanced account at one place where this material occurs. I'm not sure why you wrote that the Dixmier trace plays a central role in the subject: I don't have time at the moment to rewrite the noncommutative geometry article as I'm quite busy preparing an RL article of my own on operator algebras, but part of the problem lies in the exposition there (what there is of it). Most of the theory of Fredholm modules and spectral triples does not rely on the Dixmier trace; the role of an infinitesimal is played by a commutator, which lies in a certain Schatten class or more sophisticated trace ideal, etc. The Dixmier trace was introduced at a much later stage - Connes did use it as a central tool in his explanation of the standard model. Cheers, Mathsci (talk) 08:10, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, I provided some context on the talk page of Criticism of non-standard analysis. Please comment. Katzmik (talk) 14:12, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

About poinsettia

Dear CSTAR: I did find your comment to be amusing (I will now have to struggle not to address that person in this way). On the other hand, the issue of the interpretation of WP:OUTING remains. Would you care to comment on it? Happy holidays...Plclark (talk) 00:41, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me to be a stretch to regard your action as an instance of outing. I'm not too familiar with the Wikipedia legalities, but in my view outing is publicly asserting a link between the properties of a wikipedia editor with properties of some other non-wikipedia person. If indeed it was a case of asserting the identity of two online identities on wikipedia (e.g identifying sockpuppets), why do it at all, unless there is some mischief being caused by one or the other sockpuppet?

In any case the whole thing seems way out of proportion. I would just forget it. --CSTAR (talk) 17:06, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree with CSTAR's replies for what it is worth. The flowery accusations of outing were a stretch, but I think trying to make someone act like an upright, honest, or even reasonable person should only be done gently. Basically, you have to wait until integrity blossoms, and no amount of exhortation will speed up the process. On the other hand, your new section has made it much easier to add material to an article that desperately needed weeding. I'm not sure how this silly situation a-rose, but I think it is not worth staying upset about. If someone wants to keep on garden a secret, then it is polite to let them know if it is public knowledge, but if they persist, we might as well play along. Mum's the word, I always say. JackSchmidt (talk) 17:57, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Wishing you the very best for the season. Guettarda (talk) 06:47, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello

I was the one that resurrected it a year ago too, and the misfortune of that episode is on my mind. I think it will be OK this time, because there is no reason for any part of that unique episode to repeat.Likebox (talk) 20:52, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Michael Nielsen (quantum information theorist)

Hi, I have looked into this individual's contributions more closely (Worldcat, Web of Science) and he indeed passes the bar without any doubt. Perhaps some of this should be mentioned in the articvle, because all that the article says is that he authored a book and a blog, neither of which automatically makes one notable. In any case, my notability tag was an error: I should have performed this check before placing the tag. I apologize. However, I also gingerly suggest that in your future edit summaries, you keep WP:CIVIL in mind, unless you are someone who never ever makes a mistake. --Crusio (talk) 16:23, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

PS: A notability tag does not necessarily mean that a subject is not notable, it calls upon editors to edit the article to establish notability unequivocally. The current article does not even come close. --Crusio (talk) 16:25, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Please note that my comment was about the tag.--CSTAR (talk) 17:03, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

File:IMG binding.jpg listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, File:IMG binding.jpg, has been listed at Wikipedia:Files for deletion. Please see the discussion to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. Skier Dude (talk) 23:48, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

File:QMBlochSphere.jpg listed for deletion

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Faith Popcorn

Been some recent edits there. Take a look and let me know what you think. Mattnad (talk) 20:18, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

File:A-CPMPortfolio.jpg missing description details

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Your old user talk page edits

Would you mind undeleting the edits to your talk page from before November 2005? How about the old archives? User talk pages are generally not deleted on Wikipedia these days, and current policy says that if you if you come back after vanishing, your user talk page should be undeleted. Thanks, Graham87 06:26, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Done.--CSTAR (talk) 20:45, 21 November 2009 (UTC)