You will, I suspect, be pleased that I’m not going to be talking about OnlyFans here.
I’m talking about the lust for a different kind of model. It involves men only by dint of a historical ‘accident’ in which the stronger sex tended to view women as baby factories who stayed at home and made great sandwiches.
During that great time of history when, now dead, white men sat around and tried to figure out how to oppress people of colour (colloquially known as The Enwhite-enment) they came up with a way of modelling the world that changed things forever.
Great strides had been made in mathematics and the burgeoning science of what we now call physics, but it was really Isaac Newton who nailed his theses to the apple tree. It’s hard to overstate the impact that Newton had. There were great geniuses before Newton, Galileo for example, but Galileo took pages of beautiful and elegant prose to describe what Newton was able to write down with a single equation.
Newton’s transformative approach really unlocked things - and allowed us to properly start probing the secrets of the universe.
Newton built upon previous ideas, again from great thinkers like Galileo - which is the way science works. In the modern ‘woke’ jargon, this is known as “stealing” ideas. All ideas, as we know, originate in Wakanda, and they’ve just been stolen by whitey.
The fact that some Muslim guy (sort of) developed an early glider back in the 9th century is taken, by some, to mean that Muslims “invented” flight - and the idea was later stolen by stealy oppressive whitey.
It’s convenient for these accounts that the practice in China, which dates back as far as the 5th or 6th century BC, of strapping men to large kites to conduct aerial surveillance of enemy strongholds is blithely ignored.
The woke tendency to utterly confuse inspiration and stealing is, of course, deliberate because it props up a particular political narrative. But scientists giveth not a single nanogram of shit.
Yes, we take a respectful nod, even a bow, to those who came before us, the great thinkers of the past, but we’re interested in moving things forward.
Even if, as is seemingly claimed, people X (be they black or Muslim or whatever) are ultimately responsible for every idea in science, it has to be said that they (supposedly) had all these great “inventions” and then, with the possible exception of the Chinese, did bugger all with them for centuries.
There is nothing, in all history, quite like the astonishing outpouring of mathematical, scientific, and technological progress that began in Europe around the 15th century. It could have happened elsewhere, but the simple fact of the matter is that it didn’t.
Newton’s approach was transformative, I maintain, because it opened the pathway for us to mathematically model some of the phenomena we observe in nature. Newton himself used his ideas with a vengeance. His great masterpiece, known simply as The Principia, is a tour de force that I suspect maybe only 1 or 2 individuals in the world could replicate today without resorting to looking things up - even if they were allowed to use calculus and the (better) notation/formulation of Leibniz for calculus1.
So, let’s look at a bit of Newtonian Math Porn.
Such a Beautiful Model
When you hit a golf ball, or fire a cannonball, or just throw a stone, if you do it enough times you notice that the path the ‘thrown’ object (the projectile) takes always kind of looks the same. It follows an up then down curved path. It has always been a kind of magic for me that a single mathematical object, a parabola, can model the trajectory (the shape of that curved path) of these projectiles.
It’s quite an extraordinary thing if you think about it. Just a few squiggles on a bit of paper can capture that motion. But how do we get there?
We need Newton’s first 2 laws of motion - actually we only really need N2 here, but I’ve included N1 because I like it so much.
N1 : every body continues in a state of rest, or uniform motion, unless acted upon by a force
This is a really important one and it turns out to be a really fundamental idea. For one thing it tells us what a force does - it changes a state of motion. It also tells us that if something is already moving then it’s going to keep on moving, at the same speed, forever, unless a force kicks in to stop it, or change it.
There’s more to this idea - it’s the basis of what Einstein called an inertial frame in his work on relativity, but I’ll leave all that for another day perhaps.
N2 : the applied force is equal to the rate of change of momentum
Usually we encounter this as the law F = ma where F is the applied (net) force, m is the mass and a is the acceleration. This is correct when the mass is unchanging - as it is for a projectile. If you’ve got a situation where the mass changes (like fuel being used up) then you need to use the more general form.
N2 is actually a vector law - it should be written as F = ma. The bold type here indicates a vector. What this means is that when working things out we can look at the ‘bits’ of the overall force that act in the x-direction to work out the motion of the object in the x-direction, and similarly for the y and z directions. You can then combine the 3 to get the full motion in 3D.
For our projectile motion we’re going to need only 2 dimensions - an up/down and an along. The up/down we call the y-direction and the along we call the x-direction.
What forces are acting?
To start off we’re going to just assume that only gravity is acting. This force ‘pulls down’ any object we throw and it acts straight down. So it acts only in the y-direction2.
So we need to write down what Newton’s 2nd law looks like for the up/down motion and for the along motion. We get two equations.
In the along direction we get
This is what’s called a differential equation. It’s asking the question what is x going to be (as a function of time) if when we differentiate it twice we get zero?
Why zero? We’ve assumed there are no forces acting in the ‘along’ direction - there’s only gravity and it’s acting in the y-direction.
I’ll just write down the answer
where v sub x here is the velocity in the x-direction and it’s a constant, and x(0) is the initial position in x. Recall that N1 said that things keep on in a state of uniform motion unless acted upon by a force - this is what that means. In the x-direction we launch our object with this constant speed in that direction and it just keeps on going with that speed.
But the x-bit is not the whole story. When we throw something we’re also giving it a speed in the y-direction. Now gravity acts to change that motion in the y-direction, because it’s a force. N2 for the y-direction reads
where g is the acceleration due to gravity which (again using the close to earth’s surface approximation) is a constant - and it’s negative because we’re taking the ‘up’ direction as positive and gravity acts in the ‘down’ direction.
Another differential equation that’s asking the question, this time, what y(t) when we differentiate it twice gives us the answer of minus mg - a negative constant?
Again, I’ll just write out the answer
The v sub y bit here is the initial speed we throw the thing, in the y-direction and the y(0) is its initial position in y.
We can make things a bit easier by assuming everything kicks off at the origin, which means that the initial position is x = 0 and y = 0. If you’re OK with me ditching the subscripts on the speeds and using u for the x-direction and v for the initial speed in the y-direction we end up with the simpler equations
These are examples of what are known as parametric equations for x and y - the parameter being t, the time. To be able to write down the curve we need y = f(x) - that is we need to write y as a function of x - and then we can see what its graph looks like. To do this we can write from the x-equation that t = x/u and then put this value of t into the y-equation.
What you get, then, is y expressed in terms of x (a variable), u and v (constants).
I won’t bore you with the details because I think we’ve probably had enough math for today, but you end up with the mathematical equation for a parabola (an inverted one).
Well, isn’t that nice? (To be said in a slightly bored and sarcastic voice). Yes, it is. It’s bloody lovely. You see, what we can now do, after all this arsing about with the maths, is to do some experiments.
I’ve only focused on one thing - the shape of the trajectory - but we can use our equations to work out other things like time of flight, maximum height, the range (how far it goes before hitting the ground) - and these are all things we can check to see if they behave in the way the model predicts.
That’s an amazing thing, really. We’ve gone from some airy-fairy ideas on a bit of paper to thinking about how we can confirm or reject those ideas. This is such a powerful thing, and has driven our civilizations to comforts and capabilities beyond even Newton’s wildest dreams.
I am, of course, talking about one of mankind’s greatest ‘discoveries’; the scientific method.
The walking blobs of stupid known as the ‘woke’ will try to tell you that it’s just one “way of knowing”, and it’s grounded in colonialism and whiteness and racism. That’s just bollocks3. If you want to work out the best angle to throw a stone so that it goes the furthest, then there’s only one way to do it - use science that has been checked by the scientific method4.
What a Lovely Pair of Maxima You Have
This ability to model the physical properties of our world, to predict things, and to be able to check those predictions has led to extraordinary advances.
If you put a bunch of woke blobs on some island somewhere, they’d probably all freeze to death whilst arguing about the justice of lighting a fire and how much whiteness was involved.
If you do enough experiments on various projectiles you’ll discover that the predictions of this simple model above don’t always quite work. One thing we didn’t factor in was air resistance. As the stone (or whatever) flies through the air it’s banging into, well, erm, the air. This provides a frictional force that slows things down a bit. You can see the effect of air in this experiment where a bowling ball and feather are both released in a vacuum (clip is 28s). They fall at the same rate. Try that one in your local bowling alley where, one assumes, it does not operate in vacuum conditions.
Another thing that has been excluded is whether an object can spin as it travels. I’ve already mentioned curvature and the fact that gravity is a central force.
What you do is to refine the model - and check the predictions again.
With complex systems (like the climate) it will require an extremely complex model and you can’t be certain you’ve got everything right, or have included all the relevant factors. One thing, however, is certain. If you run these sophisticated models and their predictions do not match observation then you’ve got more work to do. Either you’ve done the maths wrong, or there are some really important factors you’re missing out on, or the science you’re using might not be quite right, yet. Or any combination of those things.
This is what really pisses me off about the whole ‘climate’ crap. The models don’t work (i.e. match observations) well enough to give us anything like the confidence that is often expressed about what’s happening with the climate, what’s going to happen, and what’s causing it.
We’re upending centuries of progress, heading towards energy poverty, and preventing billions of people from reaching the same level of wealth as we currently enjoy, based upon models that don’t even work very well.
This means that we have not understood what’s going on.
It’s madness - sheer, unadulterated, fucking gibbering madness. And it really pisses me off in a professional sense. This is not science - it’s political posturing.
There are a few TL;DR takeaways here.
First off, science, done properly, is a bloody wonderful thing. The scientific method is such a simple idea, yet one of such power. By which I mean predictive power and ‘utility’ power and explanatory power. Not ‘power’ in the wibbly-wobbly world of woke sense. The scientific method is the only way to properly understand what’s going on with our physical world.
Take your indigenous ‘ways of knowing’, when it comes to science, and shove ‘em right up where only the more lewd on OnlyFans dare to go.
And if that makes me some colonialist, infused with whiteness and with an oppressive bent, then I’m cool with that - I can live with it. Go and queer the Siberian tundra.
Secondly, the whole process of modelling, just being able to model the physical world in this way, is something quite magical. We often deride models - and we should when it comes to things like covid or the ‘climate’ - but they’re actually amazing things, when done properly and when checked properly.
Thirdly, the attempt to denigrate the achievements of the ‘west’ is a level of stupidity and emotional thinking, not to mention ungratefulness, that will, ultimately damage us. Woke at your peril. Undermining the whole scientific program - either by woke idiocy, or the misuse and abuse of science (eg covid and the ‘climate’) is a dangerous game to play - and we should always suspect the real motives of those who do so.
Sorry for the maths and elementary physics - I just fancied writing something with a bit more technical stuff in it today. I still couldn’t resist having a dig at the woke eejits and the climate control freaks, though.
Newton was a bit of an irritable paranoid oddball, for all his genius, and he wrote The Principia in rather obscure geometrical terms (and Latin) completely ignoring his own developments of calculus techniques. It is supposed he didn’t want his ideas to be criticized simply on the basis of his new methodology of calculus. The full title of Newton’s masterwork is Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
This is a good approximation at distances that are not too far off the earth’s surface. In reality gravity is a central force that points in the direction of the earth’s centre of mass. If you go too high, or too far, then you will need to take the earth’s curvature into effect. But close enough to the surface it all looks ‘flat’.
No more cogent argument is necessary. Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, as the saying goes. Whilst it’s usually good to actually address the substance of an opposing view, there are limits. Would the equations of physics look any different if we sprinkled a bit of ‘blackness’ in? How does one go about ‘de-colonizing’ the 2nd law of thermodynamics?
And to play fair, the first person I’m aware of to correctly state (and use) the scientific method was Ibn Al-Haytham - an Arab Muslim. I’m not sure what him being Muslim had to do with anything as far as his scientific output goes, but it seems to be important to some people.
Don't apologise for putting in some equations. It's a blessed relief to see some maths rear its head in between today's wokish nonsense.
"I still couldn’t resist having a dig at the woke eejits and the climate control freaks, though."
As the late great Oscar Wilde used to say, "I can resist everything but temptation" ... 😉🙂
But in keeping with your theme(s), you might have some interest in a post over at "The Transatlantic" -- not really a pun on transgenderism though the post takes a few well-deserved shots at the devotees of such:
"The Royal Society was founded in 1660 and stands as probably the most august academy of sciences in the West. Of course, by science we do not simply mean test tubes and geiger counters, but all manner of knowledge claims subject to rigorous interrogation and that hold our esteem as such.
Above the very doors of its Marble Hall in central London, etched into the stonework above the lintel, stands the bedrock statement of the scientific episteme – Nullius in Verba, On No One’s Word. This is the core of what we might call the scientific disposition and for centuries it has distinguished the broader scientific paradigm from the implosive circularity of mere faith, unbridled superstition, received knowledge, and obedience to authority.
Regardless of your take on Science with a capital S, and whatever might be your epistemological tastes, this ingrained skeptical disposition toward the word of others has been a keystone of modern reason for at least 364 years. ....
The dislocations experienced around gender identity ideology have revealed the great threat couched in abnegation of the scientific disposition. ...."
Links to article and my comment thereon:
https://thetransatlantic.substack.com/p/self-id-or-nullius-in-verba-between
https://thetransatlantic.substack.com/p/self-id-or-nullius-in-verba-between/comment/47238283
Though it is still the case that reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries STIPULATE that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless ... 😉🙂