Re: Reminder


"John Griffin" <thathillbilly@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns96D7D77904F13thathillbillyyahooco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
|
| What you guys need to discover first is some reason to believe
| there's something to discover.


If you're looking for a physical explanation underpinning lottery
prediction, such as the equivalent of your suggested 'lotto boson', then you
are in danger of putting the cart before the horse. Historically, science
has proceeded by empirical observation and experimentation, with theoretical
explanation ususally coming later. If we waited for the whys and wherefores
before making any investigation, we might be waiting a long time with little
to show for it.

Kepler postulated his three laws of planetary motion nearly a full century
before Newton published his theory of universal gravitation, upon which they
are predicated. And Newton, for his part, was happy to give the world his
inverse square law without attempting an explanation of its underlying
basis; remember the oft-quoted "I frame no hypotheses" passage from his
'Principia Mathematica'?

"But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties
of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not
deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis, and hypotheses,
whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical,
have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular
propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered
general by induction. Thus it was that the ... laws of motion and of
gravitation, were discovered. And it is enough that gravity does really
exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly
serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies..."

Here we have one of the three greatest mathmaticians of the known world, in
his opus magnum, saying in effect, 'I haven't got a clue what gravity is,
and I'm not even going to attempt an explanation'. If it was good enough
for Sir Isaac, it's good enough for us!

Even today, 300+ years later, we still don't know exactly what gravity is,
yet we can predict the Moon's position 5,000 years from now.

We are humble lottery enthusiasts here, not theoretical physicists. It is
enough for us to find nuggets of predictability in a random process. Others
will come after, and perhaps see a little further standing on our shoulders.





.

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