Whatever works.

In my line of work we got exposed to a lot of people with Magic Space Propulsion ideas. Most of them had reams of paper with stuff on them that made Andrulis look like Dr. Seuss. We told them “come back with something that flies, even a model, and we’ll talk.”

The model is not far from SDAI-Tech’s vision, but far enough that he’d chide me for saying so. For that matter, it is not entirely unlike Leibnitz’s Monad’s, but he’d chide me as well, and for the same reason.

If one has any creativity at all, one wants to employ that creativity in understanding why things are the way they are. We all have our own allegories tuned to our perceptions.

Science happens when others use that model and find that it is effective in predicting discovery.

Having said that, I’m not sure what a “gyre” is or how this is able to explain virtually everything. I hope better minds than mine will devote some time to it and explain.

Some, like Freudian and Jungian psychology, actually get accepted as clinical procedure and legal precedent, they saturate our literature and our arts, dominate our popular culture. When a seductive idea is argued by a skilled communicator who has mastered the language, it can really take off. Look at Karl Marx and Ayn Rand. Then again, maybe they’re BOTH right.

In fact, most work in literary criticism, theology, philosophy, politics, economics, ethics, sociology, psychology and anthropology can be lumped in this category, as could most hard science prior to Galileo. The more I think about physics, and its illegitimate daughter, engineering, the more I realize that they are riddled with unwarranted assumptions, social conventions, historical accidents, and outright prejudices. Hard science is indeed on a sounder foundation than the soft sciences, but how much sounder is still an issue to be addressed.

The important thing to keep in mind is that gyremodeling is not necessarily totally “wrong”. There may be no theory of everything, but maybe there are a few useful insights in any work, and more in some than in others. It is only when it is extended to an all-encompassing theory of everything that it fails.

We must also recall that nature is constructed in such a way that sometimes totally contradictory theories can give acceptable results in certain limited cases. Classical vs Einsteinian mechanics and particle-wave duality are examples that really come to mind, and alternative theories for quantum electron spacing to explain the lines in the spectrum all gave excellent results with experiment until someone did the next experiment and demolished all the previous ones.

It is a fundamental assumption of physics, and indeed of all human thought, that nature is essentially knowable, that it makes sense, that it is simple and beautiful and true and intellectually accessible to reason. Well, at least it has been a fundamental assumption since the Ionian Greeks and the pre-Socratic philosophers, not all that long ago when you consider how long we’ve been on this planet. But it is still an assumption, one with traceable geographical and historical origins. It is, if we are to be honest, not self-evident. It took us thousands of years to get there. It is a prejudice, a faith; one I subscribe to, by the way, but it is still an assumption. We really don’t know it for sure because this is a METAphysical leap of faith which is not only not proven, but cannot be proven.

We have no guarantee that the universe is not, at its root, ad hoc, haphazard, random. Doesn’t quantum mechanics uneasily say that, in a way that we legitimize with lots of mathematics? The world really seems like magic, we are the ones who write the laws and rules, we make them up as we go along. Our theories have little historical legitimacy, they are all relatively recent, and we have been routinely overturning and rewriting them since the Renaissance. Oh sure, we can experimentally verify them, but you can navigate ships and predict eclipses with Ptolemy and epicycles, too.

“Oh, but that’s different.”, you may claim. But is that only because you’re afraid to give up the little scrap of certainty you’ve talked yourself into?

The universe is stranger than we CAN think, and maybe it is turtles, all the way down.

I saw the press release for the Gyromodel on ScienceDaily, which either doesn’t allow linking to specific pages; or, deleted the press release link due to the silliness.

However, there is ole P.J.Myers ripping on the paper on his godless blog:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/the_comparison_to_jabberwocky.php

Seems to involve vortexes.

Oh…

Nooooooooo….

I read it but it took some searching. The theory is along the lines of of the Gaia Hypothesis, the Earth as a living organism.

Sadly, the professor that was working on the Gyromodel was slowly loosing his mind. He went bonkers according to one of his closest friends. I don’t know if you saw the movie “A Beautiful Mind” but he reminded me of Russell Crow’s character looking for algorithms to explain pigeon behavior.

By the way:
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