[ExI] Weird new way to do physics.

[john clark]

 On Thu, 11/3/11, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
"Whilest pondering the uselessness of dimensionless Planck units, I hit upon an idea that makes them far less cumbersome to work with. In the process, I realized that my technique should make physics accessible to computers in a way they never were before. Yes, computers have been used to do physics calculations before but what I am trying to do is get my humble PC to discover novel laws of nature. In other words, as I write this, my computer is running a brute-force search algorithm in Python to discover novel mathematical relationships between length, time, mass, charge, and temperature i.e. the fundamental dimensions of physics within certain boundaries. So using my technique, computers can be used not just to model physics but to perform abstract dimensional analysis as well. I will let you all know what my algorithm comes up with."
It's worth a try, after all there is a precedent for that sort of thing being useful. In 1885 a High School mathematics teacher named Johann Balmer by pure trial and error found a formula (later generalized by Rydberg) for predicting the lines in the hydrogen spectrum. 35 years later this formula gave Niels Bohr the hint he needed to develop his model of the hydrogen atom and he was able to derive Balmer's formula from first principles. It would be interesting if by manipulating Planck's constant, the speed of light, and other basic physical constants, and some dimensionless numbers like PI and e and the Fine Structure Constant, you could come up with a number close to the gravitational constant big G.    

John K Clark



 
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