"When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter. ... Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended ... thus the concept of particles cannot play a fundamental part, ... and can only appear as a limited region in space in which the field strength or energy density are particularly high."
(Albert Einstein, Metaphysics of Relativity, 1950)
"It is my firm belief that the last seven decades of the twentieth century will be characterized in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics. ... The quantum world is a world of waves, not particles."
(Carver Mead, Professor Emeritus at Caltech. Received $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize in 1999)
Note (Jan, 2008) This forum is currently locked. You are welcome to browse and read posts.
Forum will re-open in 2008 when work at our main
philosophy / physics site is completed. Thanks. Geoff Haselhurst
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William
Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Posts: 3
Location: God's waiting room
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 Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 5:05 pm Post subject: Technical discussion: How to do math on this forum? |
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Fellow WSM enthusiasts,
I would very much like to promote the facility of posting mathematical expressions to this Forum. WSM is a mathematical model and any serious discussion about its technical strengths and weaknesses requires this capability. As per Geoff’s request…
| Quote: | | Any chance of you playing around / finding out (I am in the middle of about ten things at the moment - suffering info overload - will be better in a month). |
I looked into this subject a little. Please note, I use math virtually every day but I know almost nothing about php, phpBB, or posting expressions to a forum, so please be gentle and correct any of my mistakes of ignorance. My starting point was to RTFM
http://www.phpbb.com/support/documentation/2.0/.
I don’t know if this is the most appropriate manual for the phpBB version being used here.
Some information to get us going
MathML
MathML is the de facto markup language for mathematical expressions. Its greatest strength, IMHO, is that it is “machine readable”. Users can copy it from a web site or word doc and paste it into any compliant program, such as Mathematica, to be plotted or edited. Most browsers can display MathML but the problem, IFAIK, is that the phpBB forum does not have a BBCode/Mod for including MathML markup code. This ability might exist out there but we need someone fluent in php and phpBB to evaluate/research this.
Methods using gif images
LaTeX
LaTeX is much older typesetting markup language that all mature equation editors can output. Web sites typically convert this code to gif images for page displays. This forum would need a Mod that adds a BBCode, such as [latex], to the forum editor. Here is a site that might be useful for obtaining this Mod.
Here is an example of a Forum that uses this capability.
Uploading Images
The equation editor I use is called MathType. Like most editors it can save the mathematical expression as a gif file. This forum editor has a BBCode “[img]” that can refer to such a file but, unless I’m mistaken, these gif files need to be on the server and the poster needs to know their full url. The problem is to get these images to the server?
Here is a phpBB Mod that can upload images.
Here is a LaTeX renderer that might be added to the Forum page so that posters could edit, preview and save their equations as gif images.
Please do look at this example Forum and post your thoughts on this endeavor.
I’m really not qualified to judge any of these tools or methods; nor were my internet searches exhaustive. My hope is that someone more qualified than I will outline exactly what our hard working site administrators will need to do to implement this wonderful capability.
William |
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haselhurst
Site Admin
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Posts: 728
Location: Planet Earth, Milky Way, Universe, Infinite Space. Status: Endangered Species. Cause: Ignorance
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| Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 11:10 pm Post subject: |
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Hi William,
Thanks for the precise details, and your time to be so thorough.
It is greatly appreciated.
It is important. So I will see what I can find out over next few days - see if we can get this working and move on and use it.
philosophers / scientists are meant to be smart at understanding how things work so that we can use them to our advantage. One reason why we study reality.
Will be in touch soon.
Geoff |
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haselhurst
Site Admin
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Posts: 728
Location: Planet Earth, Milky Way, Universe, Infinite Space. Status: Endangered Species. Cause: Ignorance
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| Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 11:17 am Post subject: |
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Hi All,
I have spent the last 8 hours reading / experimenting with mathML.
I can now create the mathML code and add it into an xml file.
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/mathematical-physics/XSL/maths-equations4.xml
But that only works on our website, not at this forum.
And you cannot just put mathML code in a html file - and you need to download latest fonts for firefox, and plugins for IE for it to work.
I installed both programs from this page.
http://www.integretechpub.com/techexplorer/download/
So it seems to me that it is still early days for mathML and it is not useful for this forum / general public.
That leaves images.
So in the short term I have added a mod to this forum that allows you to upload images (to www.avatarimage.net) while you are creating a post. (And you can create an account there and organise your images if you want - I didn't, just uploaded images, so it is convenient either way.)
The link is directly above the editing box (that I am typing this in).
Here is an example image.
(Please remember to remove URL part of code so image is not an active link - this is obvious once you upload image and generate code to add to post.)
This is not an ideal solution - but it will work. There is a phpBB mod that allows users to upload images / files to our actual website - but the mod is big, and I already have another mod on this forum and I am worried about them clashing.
Any thoughts? Is this OK in the short term?.
A frustrating day all in all. But i learnt a bit!
Geoff
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