Blake Ostler in Interpreter: "the Maxwell Institute is a pale reflection of its predecessor."

[Physics Guy]

I'm talking about physics. Many of the cool parts of modern physics that people like to discuss are hard for human brains to conceptualise. They're just not the kind of stuff that the neurons evolved to handle. Nobody can picture curved spacetime in four dimensions, or trillion-dimensional Hilbert spaces.

Quantum mechanics in particular is just weird, not really at all in a Whoa-cool-man way but in a That's-idiotic way. And yet most of the weird stuff is mathematically simple. In my course last semester I described QM as being like an alien children's game, with simple rules that simply make no sense to humans. I made little PowerPoint cartoons of alien children with wide eyes on stalks, indignantly telling a critical human astronaut that they liked their game and didn't care what he thought of it.

So it's hard to translate quantum mechanics into vernacular language, perhaps somewhat in the way that a poem can be hard to translate from one human language to another. The original expresses something that most people will never previously have thought, and yet it expresses that novel thought simply and clearly, by exploiting features of its original language. If you translate that unfamiliar meaning into another language accurately, you have to use so many work-arounds that you lose the neat clarity and give the impression that this unfamiliar concept is vague and uninteresting, when in the original it was vivid and sharp. That's arguably a greater betrayal than concocting a comparably neat little poem, in your target language, that doesn't actually say the same thing.

The effort involved in understanding quantum mechanics accurately without learning a little bit of linear algebra would be greater than the trouble of learning the algebra. It's not clear to me, though, that learning the algebra lets us grasp this superhuman reality. It only prevents us from getting some things wrong, like the Athanasian Creed. It may well not be telling us everything that could be told, if we had better brains.

Perhaps the merit of the math is not so much in what it says with miraculous clarity as in what it does not say, because it's perhaps the major feature of mathematical language that it is highly elliptical: one is allowed to say nothing, in math, in places where normal languages force one to say something. I can't tell anyone what an electron actually is. We have no theories at all about that. All we say is that whatever an electron is, it can have a position in space; then all our equations only refer to this position. That's hard to translate because it's like a story with a plot but no characters.

[Tom]

A slight irony arises here in a paragraph about education and training when the writer condescends to the reader by defining the German word but misspelling it: it should be Weltanschauung, not Weltanshauung (but points for Teutonic capitalization).

As I recall, Herr Doktor Professor Peterson was a missionary in a German-speaking country, so he would know this. Doesn't he even read these things before they are "published"?

I doubt it. Herr Wyatt and Herr Doktor Lindsay are likely the final reviewers.

[Kishkumen]

A slight irony arises here in a paragraph about education and training when the writer condescends to the reader by defining the German word but misspelling it: it should be Weltanschauung, not Weltanshauung (but points for Teutonic capitalization).

Ouch. Yeah, that's a problem.

[Rick Grunder]

Years ago, I noticed that in 1828, freethought writer Benjamin F. Powell promoted some of the same arguments which Korihor would offer in the Book of Mormon dictation the following year. In that spirit, I enjoyed the two following comments in this thread:

On May 15, Dr Moore wrote:

On topic of the paper itself: man, apologists have sure found creative ways of seeing impressive things that aren’t all that impressive. Alma reads like a sermon on faith. I bet that’s because Joseph heard just such a sermon on faith, somewhere.

And on May 17, Alphus and Omegus wrote:

The irony that was lost by Ostler is that perhaps one reason why the rhetorical context of the debate is not provided by Wrathall is that it would certainly point to the Alma-Korihor battle as one of far-too-many 19th century frontier American sectarian debates that were of interest to Joseph Smith. . . .
. . . . .
Beyond the tale's obvious contradictions to the Biblical narratives, the "arguments" put forward by Korihor are downright pitiful by any sort of atheist metric. They read more like the portrayals of godless professors in contemporary evangelical flicks. ("God's Not Dead" being my personal favorite.) Korihor and the nefarious academicians are all utter contrivances which evince an utter lack of understanding of the opposition. The character of Korihor, in other words, is exactly the sort of plot device that you would expect an autodidactic farmboy and his frontier school-teacher friend to construct.

For related arguments in Powell’s Bible of Reason (New York, 1828), see pages 1291-93 of the following entry extracted from my Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source . . .

http://www.rickgrunder.com/parallels/mp335.pdf

[Symmachus]

I appreciate that eloquent clarification, Physics Guy. I am in agreement. I hope you can understand a little bit why I bristle from the lofty "only real Scripture" statement (even capitalized!).

[Tom]

A slight irony arises here in a paragraph about education and training when the writer condescends to the reader by defining the German word but misspelling it: it should be Weltanschauung, not Weltanshauung (but points for Teutonic capitalization).

Ouch. Yeah, that's a problem.

I am pleased to report that the error has been corrected and that Symmachus is credited in a new footnote (I made up the second part).

[Symmachus]

I am pleased to report that the error has been corrected and that Symmachus is credited in a new footnote (I made up the second part).

Good to see. Error in the world is reduced. Here's another:

So we have the Nietzschean argument that the herd mentality of the weak is a false morality and the ubermensch will conquer. There is no sin and thus there is no need for an atonement.

Should be "Übermensch" with an umlaut over the "u." For consistency's and accuracy's sake, it should also be capitalized.

[Physics Guy]

He needs more Übung.

[Philo Sofee]

He needs more Übung.

[Kishkumen]

I am thanking myself for not reading this pretentious linguistic catastrophe!