Dragar said:
Okay. It may take some time for me to put it together, since it's very new in my mind. But I'll see what I can do (if I have time between exams - eep!).
No problem at all. By the way, you're just taking exams now? I guess yall do things differently in England.
Dragar said:
It's completely fascinating, I agree. Considering how I'm rapidly discovering my thinking really is baseless (we don't reason our way to desires, morality, nor are the laws of logic grounded in anything, etc. (and no, God doesn't help
It just pushes the question further back!)).
That's right. Simply defining god as "the thing that doesn't need to be created" or "the thing that is absolute" and then going from there, whether to affirm its existence or whatever, is poor logic. Looking at something like math-logic speculatively, and eventually arriving at the point where you realize it must be the thing that doesn't need to be created, and it must be absolute, is a better approach. I think there's a real difference between those two ways of thinking, and I think it's similar to the differences between the scientific method and the method of Creationists.
Dragar said:
This reminds me of something Feynman said.
Mathematics is not just another language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning. It is in fact a big collection of the results of some person's careful thought and reasoning. By mathematics it is possible to connect one statment to another. From "Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman.
I've never seen that quote before-- it's a cool one. I agree 100%. I think if you can prove something mathematically, it's proven. Dissenting opinion is ill-founded and that's all there is to it. That's why I think the Uncertainty Principle outright disproves omniscience as a possibility or characteristic. The only question left is if matter-energy behaves as waves, and it does. So, all the thesists can throw out the concept of omniscience, and I applaud those like Lucaspa who actually do it.
Dragar said:
Bingo. It's important to note we can't ever question these things without using these things. We can't even comprehend a situation these things did not apply. It becomes nonsense without them being true.
It's more than nonsense, really. It's divine nonsense. I don't think the word nonsense does the calamity justice.
Dragar said:
I can only 'hope' that reality isn't cruel enough to have played a nasty trick upon us. (One which I cannot even consider the logical possibility of!
) But we seem to be doing well enough so far.
Reality is a meaningless term if logic falls apart. I mean, it'd be
crazy. You think QM is crazy, you ain't seen nothing.
Dragar said:
It adds a certain level of completeness, I admit.
That revelation combines with my new understanding that the problem of infinite regression vs. first cause only applies if time is something beyond the universe, to give me a whole new outlook on philosophy and science. But time isn't beyond the universe! I subscribe to a variation of the No-Boundary proposal, so the universe just is, and has always been, and it needs no act of creation, because time is in the universe just as space is.
The problem is now, though, to piece that understanding with the possible existence of the multiverse. This obviously would require another dimension of time, or for time to
not be contained within the unvierse.
Dragar said:
The problem - and this makes a great many physicists uncomfortable - is that quantum mechanics gives us a mathematical picture without a physical picture. And it may even be a physical picture is impossible to create. I have one, but I'm unsure if it gets contradicted by experiment - I'll have to wait and see over the next year and a bit.
As an example...you're familiar with the double slit experiment, I assume? If asked you 'which slit did the electron pass through?' there are a number of answers possible. 'Top', 'bottom', 'both', 'neither' or 'not a sensible question'.
QM doesn't really tell us which of these is the correct response to the question. It certainly tells us we can never know if it was the top or the bottom. I'm currently in the 'not a sensible question' camp, because I'm unsure that what we percieve as particles are actually particles, and are rather the interactions of the wave function with...well, the measuring equipment. But I have no idea if that is correct or not; it just makes it easier for me to get some basic expectations behind how things work without it making my head hurt.
UP can be viewed the same way. When we say 'where is the particle?' are we even asking a sensible question? Or what? That's what I mean be 'mean'.
I'm in an "all of the above" camp. It may be top, bottom, both and/or an unsensible question. QM is crazy, man! I'm not sure that that physical picture does exist. When you really think about that long enough, that's kind of a Copenhagen Interpretation, semi-solipsist way of lookig at the problem, but it really may not. Anyway, if ever you have time, I'd love to hear about your interpretation; I'm sure it's interesting.
Dragar said:
Oh, and Funyun...tell me you're going to study physics as further education! To most people, this is terribly dry and boring stuff. People who enjoy thinking about it are a rarity, and (in my opinion) a valuable asset to the scientific community.
Well, I've thought long and hard on that. I'm extremely interested in particle physics, and I think quantum chromodynamics is fascinating. The last 5 or 6 books I've read have been about physics (in fact, the one I'm reading now,
Understanding the Universe by Don Lincoln is
brand new, very good, and I recommend it highly), and the more I learn, the more I want to know.
The problem is, I'm just I'm just not the math type. In terms of academics, I've always been the english/history type. I do well enough to get by in trig, but I don't exactly find it interesting (except early on in the year, when we learned about how everything just fits together neatly in a triangle..I'm sure you know what I mean). But nothing to me interesting about digits. On the flip-side, I think chemistry is just fascinating, even as all my friends fall asleep in it, and I don't mind at all doing a little simple algebra in that class in order to learn something which, I think, is cool.
So I suppose I approach physics from a more philosophical viewpoint, and I'm not sure that that's the best way to go into it. To be honest though, I think some major things are going to happen in my lifetime, and I don't want to miss out (Higgs boson, supersymmetry, graviton-- so many new things that may be out there still).