The Truth about Chinese ""Science""

6 posts

perkunos
I'm not sure where you'd put Grothendeik in all this. He was a mischling anyway; perhaps a source of strength in the hybrid fields he worked in, though most of it looks pretty abstract to me. I'd take issue with your example of Einstein; his insights were mostly geometric; even his views into quantum mechanics. David Bohm was another one who was a highly visual thinker; he couldn't comprehend of a quantum mechanics which wasn't actually mechanical.
There is probably something to the idea that Jewish people favor abstract symbol manipulation over concrete inventions and geometric ideas. One can imagine the evolutionary selection for Talmudic scholars and merchants would select for a people who are good at this sort of thing, as well as legalistic and written word argumentation, possibly to the exclusion of other forms of intelligence, such as visuo-spatial skill as expressed in pleasing artistic works, or the invention of the cyclotron. Or perhaps the long semitic ban on visual arts took its toll somehow.
One of my observations about modern physics: string theory, despite the name, is extremely abstract and non-geometric in nature and is an extremely Jewish enterprise; sort of a talmudic looking into the mind of god thing. Sadly, a complete waste of time. The mystery which surrounds quantum mechanics is also sort of along these lines, though obviously a much more fruitful theory of nature, well aligned with experiment. Had Jewish thinkers not been so prominent in the 20s and 30s, one wonders if quantum mechanics would have emerged with a clear Bohm/De Broglie underpinning rather than the Copenhagen/Wigner mystification which seems to dominate today.
One of the things which northern man seems to excel in; tinkering with things. Cyclotron, for example: classic tinkering gizmo; a 20th century steam engine for electrons. Same thing with the cloud chamber (invented by a scottish guy). Linear accelerator: Norwegian. Much, maybe all of the classic experimental apparatus of the glory days of physics was invented by Celto-Germans.
On the other hand, nuclear power: very much a kosher undertaking. Szilard/Fermi pretty much invented it. Is it visuo-spatial? Looks like it to my goyim eyes, but perhaps it was all algebraic cross section calculations.
Thoughts
The controversy about visual-spatial vs. formal is actually a pretty long-running one in the history of mathematics. For example, Isaac Newton would dismiss most of our current mathematics (which is the descendent of Descartes and Leibniz) as just formal wankery, and would say that an "intrinsic" geometric solution should be preferred in every case. Vladimir Arnold is only half-Jewish but he rails against non-visual (and non-physical) thinking here , and here . He attacks "French"-style thinking, but Jewish would be more accurate. There are of course anti-visual Germanic thinkers, like Leibniz or Frank Ramsey , but those are firmly in the minority.

On the other hand, the mental retardation of native Chinese science and mathematics is partly explained by the fact that they seem to lack linguistic and abstract ideas in mathematics. (This is a bit complicated to elaborate here.) Chinese actually don't lack purely visual ingenuity and invention: look at Needham's history. The Ancient Greeks however were well-balanced; they could assimilate all kinds of thinking to their own.

I have a low-brow view of math as just about solid things written down, or that can be translated into instructions done by computers (the word "computer" originally referred to human computers). Pure "abstract" math like representation theory is just about solid symbols on a piece of paper, and potentially translated into machine language. It's not about "the mind of God" or other such stuff. In fact, this is the wrong way to think about math because the human brain isn't good at "math" in the first place. I try to view all math as just another piece of technology, even the best of it primitive and defective in places. (For example, "algebraic geometry" for all its pretentious machinery still can't solve simple problems about real algebraic curves.)

Of course, how humans psychologically "summarize" and view mathematics might be quite "fancy" and pretty, like how there's a layer of algebraic duality that interacts with more concrete calculations (like in representation theory). I think analysis of this is important for cognitive science, as we make machines that think, mathematics (yes, even math research) is something to be done by future machines. "Pure math" is important because it contains lots of techniques for summarizing vast amounts of visual information (so again, my interest in pure math is "technological"). MacLane's category theory is primarily a technique for picturing arrows and ignoring other kinds of visual objects, picturing groups and other structures as just dots: "." Of course, the "purer" stuff may sometimes be useful in more applied regions, like the Gelfand theory of communitative Banach algebras --> Fourier analysis, or V.I. Arnold's proof of KAM theory that uses much of global analysis and topology.

I think you're right about Einstein, on second thought, though I had more in mind his work later in life. It makes sense, because "visual" thinkers usually don't do that well in school: the math educational system conspires to get rid of them, because there was a coup of 2d thinkers against 3d thinkers: 2d thinkers are "quicker" and win contests and get to places like Berzerkeley and Harvard, but then they realize that original ideas are mostly beyond them.

Maybe "interesting" is a better word than "impressive", in that I find Jewish "high end" non-visual thinkers interesting, mainly because it is "unnatural" and yet (sometimes) works far better than one expects it to. I still find it an amazing fact that Laurent Schwartz (a very interesting life , well worth reading) was able to even mentally function (let alone contribute to geometry and "local" analysis and topology), given his severe visual retardation. I also have this suspicion (well-founded or not) that non-visual math will be applicable in the future in linguistics and analysis of meaning and phenomena like anaphora, since those mathematical ideas originate partly in "grammatical" constructions.
perkunos
The first of those Arnold essays are among my favorites. Math as a branch of physics. If he had lived longer, he'd have found abstract "french" math has basically eaten physics. Looking forward to reading the other one by Arnold; he's one of my favorite mathematical essayists.

Obviously the Chinese are capable of some brilliance, considering their long history and highly developed social organizations and history of technical excellence. It's quite possible that they simply haven't hit their stride as technical and mathematical thinkers in the present era. A few expats have done good work, but as I pointed out above, they were really people of Chinese extraction living outside of Chinese culture. Perhaps China needs to develop new and more Chinese ways of thinking about math and technology. Similarly, Jews contributed virtually nothing of value to any civilization for 1000 years, until the shtetl was opened up and they developed new ways of thinking about the world. Or maybe they're actually dumb yellow ant men whose cultural pinnacles were all copied from the long dead red headed skythian mummies in their mountains.

I'm going to thumb through the life of Schwartz later; thanks for this.
All of my mathematics has been of a tool using nature. I can't stand reading proofs, and I know that most math people themselves don't really think that way. I'm not even sure strict correctness is useful for most practical instances. For example, complexity theory fags like Scott Aaronson gabble on endlessly about NP-hard problems, as if solving such things in polynomial time is some kind of philosopher's stone. I have no idea what they are talking about. I solve these kinds of problems in polynomial time (or even sublinear time) all the time. Airline scheduling exists because such problems are solvable. They are not provably optimal solutions, but that, practically speaking, doesn't matter any more than an exact encoding of a real number matters.

One of my firmest precepts is that engineers and experimenters discover most important things. Systemization and generalization almost always comes later. They didn't create steam engines after inventing thermodynamics. Thermodynamics came after the practical issues. A more recent example: signal processing guys had been using wavelets for years before Mallet and the other math nerds generalized the ideas into the concept we now know as "wavelets." Computer science came long after computers were invented, and information theory developed a long time after cryptography and broadcasting existed. Not that the systemizations were not terribly important; it's just they were not first. It is exceedingly rare for theoretical ideas to be invented of thin air and turn into something useful. Yet most of modern science and mathematics is inventing formalisms and pulling theory out of thin air, hoping to drive practical life forward. I've certainly noticed that it's not driving practical life forward; I don't know if anyone else really has.

Back to the Jews and their style of doing science; one of the things I have noticed is how social and verbal their science doing is. Not everyone is like this. Nobody could talk to Dirac, for example. I am not sure all Jewish scientists are like this, but a whole heck of a lot of them are. Many of the great northern European descended scientists I have known might as well have been mutes; they work alone and in silence. Spatial reasoning, or perhaps just non-verbal.

Incidentally, if you have some suggestions or additions to the Zoviet science thread, that was one of the things that landed me on planet salo in the first place. Anything in the realm of Soviet neural net research, control systems theory or signal processing innovations would be of particular interest.
Thoughts
perkunos Broseph The Chakravartin

Apart from Galushkin, see this , and this : The first link contains original papers, and the second was by a pioneer in the field who anticipated major Western advances.

Also, from p. 12 of this book :
I also find essential two classic survey texts of Soviet non-linear programming and optimization, including some information on Glushkov and the Soviet DISPLAN (not OGAS), which was used in the military industry and space program. Glushkov was someone who molded much of my own views on mathematics, "cybernetics" etc., and I hope to talk about him more later.

Of course, it is very often necessary to have an unrigorous, even incorrect, heuristic calculus (like what Euler, Feynman, Heaviside did) before assembling a rigorous system. (Even an ex-member of Bourbaki, Pierre Cartier, admits this in a highly-recommended article.) In fact, most actual mathematicians think like that: e.g. in probability theory, results are written up in measure theory but this is usually unrelated to how they are actually discovered (usually by converting probability in information-theoretic terms, or some other language like game theory, which is more illuminating). Formal proofs are viewed by most mathematicians as the "first level" of intuition: much insight is gained by carefully overanalyzing a proof and looking at why certain proof ideas do not work. There are higher and higher levels of intuition and visualization, even if that first level ("rigor") is both useful and necessary for sociological reasons (preventing disputes from flaring up). A non-mathematician can easily "glean" what is of value in a proof by just glancing at the kind of ways in which an object is decomposed and re-assembled, and this is mostly insightful while sometimes however (e.g., proofs by induction) opaque.

On the other hand, there are also lots of cases in which it was necessary to first assemble an inventory of rigorous mathematics before applying it: the development of spectral theory and quaternions far before its use in QM, the development of conic sections by Apollonious before its use by Kepler, etc. In many cases those systems were "failed" attempts at a physical theory, e.g. Riemann surfaces, but they found uses afterwards. Again, some criterion (like how spatial these ideas are) is useful; for that reason, Kelvin's knot theory is something to keep an eye on.

Whether rigor is needed or not in principle depends on the nature of the field. In many fields, "tinkering" and computer simulations are simply not possible or too expensive: such as in financial engineering (very high volatility) and the models that quants use, in economics, in civil engineering, and see below for an example in the space program. Explicit expanders are another example; only possible given a rigorous theory in place. And in many other cases in which you are supposed to establish the superiority of a certain procedure or algorithm over the others, it is necessary to prove its optimality. Of course, in many other cases, nonlinearities (and intractibility to mathematical analysis) + the possibility of tinkering implies that tinkering will always go first, and there are lots of examples where pure engineering lept beyond physics, say in aviation . (Ironically, one of the reasons why Soviet rocket design was so much better was because they depended far more on pure tinkering, and less on models and computing simulations, than NASA did.)

The fact that "most" ideas in the past can be traced back to a non-mathematical source actually has at least as much to do with cultural reasons as physical ones. If we look at examples like rocketry, aerodynamics, etc., in Russia the rigorous theory (e.g., by Tsiolkovsky or Zhukovskii, or A.M. Lyapunov) really *did* come far before the tinkering did. Someone like Sergei Lebedev (who worked in automatic control theory and invented the first Soviet computing architecture independently of Zuse, Aiken) did plenty of both, although he still did the "theory" first. Mathematicians *should* have come up with the idea of entropy by themselves, or relativity theory, or any number of other things -- but most of them happened to lack knowledge of matters outside of mathematics. Partly, I blame Bourbaki (which happens to be primarily Jewish, and secondarily protestant). Schwartz admits in his book that Bourbaki (for reasons far too silly to go into here) rejected propability theory and the notion of a "Wiener space" as not rigorous enough, and consequently nuked the entire development of applied mathematics in France after WWII.

Some other random examples of how fruitful theoretical mathematics can be, by unifying different structures: A.M. Vinogradov's use of Grothendieck-like algebraic ideas to solve problems in PDE. My own views were influenced by S.P. Novikov (another Soviet, and Fields Medalist), especially in this article which is worth reading in full, and just as useful as Vladimir Arnold's essays. Novikov was someone who worked in rigorous algebraic topology until he got the Fields Medal, but then applied it very well to theoretical physics afterwards. This is also a helpful post about special topics of applying mathematics, of interest to me in the past.

Incidentally: by far the most "spatial" and geometric mathematicians of the 20th century were almost all Soviet or German (with one Frenchman, Leray). There was A.D. Alexandrov (the best in intrinsic geometry, after Gauss), Pontryagin (both in control theory, and in topology before the combinatorial topology was drowned in exact sequences and commutative diagrams), Petrovskii, Kolmogorov (probably the best mathematician of the 20th century, if one counts the utility of results outside of mathematics -- "KAM theory" is even used to find trajectories that minimize fuel consumption in spacecraft ), Vladimir Arnold, S.P. Novikov, and others. Many of them worked in the Soviet defense industry and their papers were only declassified in the 1950s.

Ironically, part of mathematics itself is partly "tinkering", which is fiddling around with heuristic tricks and coming up with more and more complicated ones, which tend to be more complicated in mathematics than elsewhere, and which also do apply elsewhere. Some of these have been examined in George Polya's books on heuristics, and of course the publication of Ramanujan's Notebooks has been extremely fruitful for how mathematics is conducted (since Ramanujan thought by extremely involuted analogies, based on special classes of functions and how they decompose in a specific, visual way). This (just like mnemonic techniques that are testable) has been of interest in cognitive science and cognitive psychology (and there should be another more specific field prior to these, of the art of building up heuristic and mnemonic tricks useful to humans, just as the art of building steam engines precedes thermodynamics).
Longface

One thing about the Chinese is that I think they know they are faking their pretences to innovations and achievements but they like to act very seriously about this stuff just to get everyone else to believe in it. I think the whole race is making up a sort of an ugly joke...they know that they steal everything from the west and resell it cheaper for profit, that they are really worthless devilish creatures who are only capable of creating filth and spreading it, and that they have no culture or any sort of beauty. They just like to pretend they do as a sort of a very mean wicked joke on the world...when people talk about how "smart" they are, they laugh mockingly in the inside. I am not sure how to explain this, but this is similar to the smile I saw on the Chinese man's face when he pointed proudly to the 7000 years old artifact in the museum...he knows it's fake. If you go to China you should always look down on people, even make ugly grimaces, they understand this as a sign of superiority and they will be more ready to be respectful. Most of them are natural slaves and are very suited to serve a man who wants to live a life of leisure. Great at cleaning houses, massage, menial works, "nerd/computer" work....etc They are very subservient and obedient. I used to order my Chinese ''girlfriend'' to kiss my foot.

Welund

The Chinese are much like the Jews and Americans. Interested in business primarily.