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Are you an atheist? I am, and so should you.; (be one that is)
Topic Started: Jul 15 2009, 07:59 PM (4,783 Views)
Moonbat
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I have no idea what you mean by "magical thinking" other than some parlour tricks, unless you are referring to some Gebserian model or other model of consciousness. But neither of those have any pertinence so I assume it is just your dismissive meme for metaphysics in general. So, really, I have no idea what it is you are trying to say other than that.


Magic ceases to be magic as soon as it is understood. What I had in mind by "magical thinking" was the belief that a particular phenomena cannot to be understood in terms of other phenomena. What I think is ultimately happening is that one's ignorance is being rebranded as if it is an answer. (The answer is "it's magic"/"it's not a physical essence" etc.) that whole approach is vacuous nonsense because nothing is actually being said about the phenomena all that is happening is that the search for real answers is being inhibited because the magic is masquerading as one.

However, none of that is relevent to the point i was making which was not that superessentiality is a vacuous waste of time, but that I can atleast grasp some idea of what is intended by it in contrast to the statements i had issue with where i fail to grasp what is intended.

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You are wrong in your assumptions, since materiality obviously includes space and time and energy and other measurable things other than "solid" things. We've discussed this in the past, so I don't understand why you keep reverting to previous tread ground.


Obviously a billiard-ball esque picture of reality implicitly includes space and energy. (How could it not?) So I guess my assumption was correct then?

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And to show the limitations of your materialistic mindset, that demands simplification of complexity for understanding, it should suffice to point out that "idea" itself is simple and has no parts, is not measureable, has no energy, is not bound by space or time, is without limits, and is not contingent on any human thinking "idea". Yet "idea" exists as idea even if no mind thinks it. (The same cannot be said of your cartoonish FSM which is a complex of contingent ideas.)


Minds have ideas (at certain places and times) and communicate them to other minds. Ultimately you're talking about neural patterns that are inducing certain muscle movements that inturn induce equivalent neural patterns in other brains and alter how those brains process inputs. It does involve energy (perhaps that's why you get knackered if you try and learn new things) and is ultimately measureable since the state of the brain is ultimately measureable (and there is no independence between mind state and brain state hence measuing brain state also measures mind state)

I mean when you say "idea exist as idea even if no mind thinks it" what do you mean?

If your statement assumes dualism and hence that my above paragraph is false (which is obviously wrong by the way) then we are assuming that ideas are part of this "unmaterialistic" label and so this "theologically simple" notion is already included in the "superessential" claim.

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You seem hopelessly bound to material explanations. I understand why, but that limits the ability to communicate about nonmateriality. To say God is simple/God has no parts is a logical extension form that God is not matter/materiality/measureable/contingent/temporal/finite/caused etc. A contingent being is contingent on its parts -- Moonbat does not exist except for his parts. A being with parts is necessarily caused -- since *something* has caused parts that are not united to be united. A thing with parts can be described in terms of its parts that do not speak of the whole, and no part can be said to speak for the whole. You as a scientist can keep chasing things back to get to the source of all parts and you never will, for you will only wind up with a vast number of separate things, which is not the same as simplicity, let alone unity.


So what is a "part" then? Presumably you just mean some physical bit of stuff, but as i say above with the superessential thing you've already stated that there is no physical stuff so i guess the "simple" thing is redundant.

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You have to do better than just say its, well, wrong. You claim to have some notion of atemporality and immutability, but you have no scientific knowledge of anything that is not temporal or mutable. Show me something that is atemporal and/or immutable, otherwise I have to assume that your incomprehension remains quite apart from my usage, and your claim that its wrong to ascribe them to God as the Christians understand that term is unsubstantiated.


The laws of physics meet the critereia yet it is clearly false to say we have no knowledge of them.

But that's irrelevent, even if they weren't it wouldn't make a difference. I explained why it was wrong before - it's inconsistent with claims that God acts at certain times and with descriptions of God in terms experiences and thoughts and mental phenomena. If you want to claim God is atemporal/immutable then you are forbidden from ever describing him in terms of time or space. Yet you think God had a son at X date, you think God can perform miracles at X place and X time. You think God can hear prayers uttered at specific times. In short you think God performs and reacts to (or atleast is capable of performing and reacting) actions at specific places and times. Thus by definition he isn't atemporal/immutable.
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Klaus
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Moonbat
Jul 22 2009, 04:39 AM
In short you think God performs and reacts to (or atleast is capable of performing and reacting) actions at specific places and times. Thus by definition he isn't atemporal/immutable.
The mathematician and programmer in me must object to this :lol2:

An entity can be atemporal and immutable while at the same time being able to perform and react to actions. In category theory, there is a whole theory around this called monads. Immutability and statefullness go together in the form of the state monad, whereas immutability and "actions in the real world" are being dealt with in the I/O monad.

Hence I propose that god is an immutable atemporal functional program which is stateful and performs actions via monads :rimshot:

IT and you can thank me later for reconciling your superficially conflicting requirements on god. ;)
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Renauda
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Earlier it postulated whether God has evolved a big toe.

Now it is suggested that he has grown monads?
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Moonbat
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The mathematician and programmer in me must object to this :lol2:

An entity can be atemporal and immutable while at the same time being able to perform and react to actions. In category theory, there is a whole theory around this called monads. Immutability and statefullness go together in the form of the state monad, whereas immutability and "actions in the real world" are being dealt with in the I/O monad.

Hence I propose that god is an immutable atemporal functional program which is stateful and performs actions via monads :rimshot:

IT and you can thank me later for reconciling your superficially conflicting requirements on god. ;)


Ok from that wiki there is this quote "given any value, the corresponding value in the state transformer monad is a function that accepts a state, then outputs another state along with a value" so then I think you're saying this god character is a set of rules which associates every configuration of the world with an action or with no action (i.e. with another configuration of the world - not sure what the value would be though). These set of rules are independent of time/space and so in that sense God is atemporal/immutable.

Yeah alright i accept that does work. But the flip side is that it works by turning God into the laws of physics.

Did you have any further thoughts about the whole information conservation thing and perfect murders and the like? Ax quite liked the connection between perfect 'murders' and the double slit experient - what did you make of it?
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John D'Oh
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I suspect that this thread is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since no loving and intelligent Creator would let it live. In addition, Crashtest and at least two other contributers would at this point be nothing but a pair of gently smoking boots.
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
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Klaus
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Ok from that wiki there is this quote "given any value, the corresponding value in the state transformer monad is a function that accepts a state, then outputs another state along with a value" so then I think you're saying this god character is a set of rules which associates every configuration of the world with an action or with no action (i.e. with another configuration of the world - not sure what the value would be though). These set of rules are independent of time/space and so in that sense God is atemporal/immutable.

Yeah alright i accept that does work. But the flip side is that it works by turning God into the laws of physics.

Did you have any further thoughts about the whole information conservation thing and perfect murders and the like? Ax quite liked the connection between perfect 'murders' and the double slit experient - what did you make of it?

My previous post was not entirely serious, of course, but I think I have at least one semi-serious point, namely that one can have an immutable, eternal, atemporal mathematical (not physical) object, which can still observe and have effects on the real world. I'd hence say that I don't turn god into the laws of physics but of mathematics ;) It's a little like the mind-body dualism.

I'm not taking a stance in this discussion as to whether god exists - as a scientific anti-realist this question is meaningless to me anyway. I'm only trying to extract an axiomatization of god from your discussion and check whether it is consistent or not :whistle:

Regarding the "perfect murder" idea - I found the discussion quite interesting, but I have lost track now. I must have missed the "double slit experiment" stuff - do you have a pointer to the thread where this was in?
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Moonbat
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My previous post was not entirely serious, of course, but I think I have at least one semi-serious point, namely that one can have an immutable, eternal, atemporal mathematical (not physical) object, which can still observe and have effects on the real world. I'd hence say that I don't turn god into the laws of physics but of mathematics


I think that definition is effectively the definition of the laws of physics. I.e. a set of rules which take in the state of the universe as an input and as an output give you another state of the universe. Such laws are indeed mathematical (not physical) "objects", i think that's quite an odd way of putting it but it's clearly true that the laws are not physical things that you can pick up, rather they are simply a specification of how various variables that we see in the world around us relate to one another.

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Regarding the "perfect murder" idea - I found the discussion quite interesting, but I have lost track now. I must have missed the "double slit experiment" stuff - do you have a pointer to the thread where this was in?

http://s10.zetaboards.com/The_New_Coffee_Room/single/?p=8297348&t=7156703
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Moonbat
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I suspect that this thread is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since no loving and intelligent Creator would let it live. In addition, Crashtest and at least two other contributers would at this point be nothing but a pair of gently smoking boots.


I'll grant you that usually when i talk to Ivory i'm just saying the bleeding obvious again and again but occasionally i think there is an interesting idea - does that not justify my existence to a D'ohvian creator?
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Klaus
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Moonbat
Jul 22 2009, 06:13 AM
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My previous post was not entirely serious, of course, but I think I have at least one semi-serious point, namely that one can have an immutable, eternal, atemporal mathematical (not physical) object, which can still observe and have effects on the real world. I'd hence say that I don't turn god into the laws of physics but of mathematics


I think that definition is effectively the definition of the laws of physics. I.e. a set of rules which take in the state of the universe as an input and as an output give you another state of the universe. Such laws are indeed mathematical (not physical) "objects", i think that's quite an odd way of putting it but it's clearly true that the laws are not physical things that you can pick up, rather they are specification of how various variables that we see in the world around us relate to one another.
OK, just for fun let's take my silly analogy a bit further.

Let's say god is a program, and the world is the execution of the program - i.e., the world changes all the times according to the rules of the program, yet the rules themselves are immutable and eternal. The laws of physics would in this model just be a set of invariants that hold at all points during the execution of the program. But who wrote the god program? It must have been god itself, so god must be a Quine. Yes... it all makes sense now! Now I only wonder which programming language god used...
Posted Image

(so much for today's contribution to surrealist humour)
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kenny
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I think a moderator should connect the end to the beginning of this thread so we can just go around and around and around.

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Klaus
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That would not be fair, Kenny. We are making tremendous progress here, hence it is not a circular discussion at all! And it's lot of fun, too :lol2:
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Moonbat
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K, just for fun let's take my silly analogy a bit further.

Let's say god is a program, and the world is the execution of the program - i.e., the world changes all the times according to the rules of the program, yet the rules themselves are immutable and eternal. The laws of physics would in this model just be a set of invariants that hold at all points during the execution of the program.


I would have thought conserved quantities would be a set of invariants that hold at all points during the execution of the program. But surely the laws of motion would be the rules of the program - the laws of motion do exactly what your program does - if you give them the state at some point in time they will give you the state at all other points in time.

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as a scientific anti-realist this question is meaningless to me anyway


Hold on a minute, earlier you didn't like my suggestion that the question "what caused the big bang" might be meaningless - how does that jive with your anti-realist perspective here hmmm? :tsktsk:
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Mikhailoh
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Loved the perl cartoon. :lol:
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Klaus
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Your perfect murder is like a giant double slit experiment, if it is truly impossible to distinguish between the various scenarios that could have resulted in the death then it means those scenarios will have interfered with one another and we are forbidden from claiming that any one of them actually occured. In situations where it means something to claim some event actually occured then in principle the event is distinguishable so if you specify that some or other scenario did occur then it means it left a footprint in the world around us.


But if you believe in a single universe and reality, then there must have been only one way how a certain situation has occured, even if it is no longer possible to determine which one it was. I still don't get why you equate "to mean something" with "can be observed/traced".

Anyway, maybe you can enlighten my limited understand of quantum physics and the like with this example:

Let's say we have one of these coin donation funnels/spirals, and you find a coin at the bottom of the spiral. Let's say we have idealized scientific conditions, i.e., vacuum and what not. How can you now find out the position and/or speed/angle at which the coin was inserted into the funnel? How is this memorized in the current state?
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Klaus
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Moonbat
Jul 22 2009, 06:40 AM
Hold on a minute, earlier you didn't like my suggestion that the question "what caused the big bang" might be meaningless - how does that jive with your anti-realist perspective here hmmm? :tsktsk:
Oh, I only deny an objective reality. I view all truths to be relative to the realities in which they hold. But I am still interested in these relative truths. E.g., all conceivable causes of the big bang in all realities where it occured. For god, it's boringly simple: In some realities he exists, in others he doesn't. :tomato:
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Klaus
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Mikhailoh
Jul 22 2009, 06:50 AM
Loved the perl cartoon. :lol:
When I saw the cartoon the first time, I giggled at least one hour only about the "My god, it's full of 'car's" part.
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Renauda
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Moonbat
Jul 22 2009, 06:19 AM
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I suspect that this thread is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since no loving and intelligent Creator would let it live. In addition, Crashtest and at least two other contributers would at this point be nothing but a pair of gently smoking boots.


I'll grant you that usually when i talk to Ivory i'm just saying the bleeding obvious again and again but occasionally i think there is an interesting idea - does that not justify my existence to a D'ohvian creator?
Theodicy or how many angels can dance on the head of a monad.
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Moonbat
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Oh, I only deny an objective reality. I view all truths to be relative to the realities in which they hold. But I am still interested in these relative truths. E.g., all conceivable causes of the big bang in all realities where it occured. For god, it's boringly simple: In some realities he exists, in others he doesn't.


So you believe in the largest possible multiverse one that incorporates all logically consistent statements but then if that's what you think why do you say things like:

Quote:
 

But if you believe in a single universe and reality, then there must have been only one way how a certain situation has occured, even if it is no longer possible to determine which one it was. I still don't get why you equate "to mean something" with "can be observed/traced".


Which along with your previous statement suggest you believe in a single universe which has a definite past?

In any case in terms of answering your question on the link between "to mean something" and "can be observed/traced" take a look at Feynman's quote again:

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What we must say (to avoid making wrong predictions) is the following: If one looks at the holes or, more accurately, if one has a piece of apparatus which is capable of determining whether the electrons go through hole 1 or hole 2, then one can say that it goes either through hole 1 or hole 2. But, when one does not try to tell which way the electron goes, when there is nothing in the experiment to disturb the electrons, the one may not say that an electron goes either through hole 1 or hole 2. If one does that, and starts to make any deductions from the statement, he will make errors in the analysis. This is the logical tightrope on which we must walk if we wish to describe nature successfully.


Nature cares whether or not particles and trajectories are distinguishable. It behaves differently depending on whether they are or not and the way it behaves if they are not is inconsistent with the idea of that one or other of the trajectories is definitively taken.

There are various things to be said about this seeming impossible behaviour, the orthodox answer is to explain that that the way we are talking about particles and "trajectories" involves imagining that the particles are tiny solids that have definite positions and momentas at all points in time in a Euclidean (or possibly Minkovian) space. This idea is wrong, that is not what particles are. Another equally wrong way of imagining particles is as waves, it makes perfect sense that the wave travels by all possible trajectories because that's what all waves do, but then your stuck with the fact that particles come in discrete lumps, which is just as impossible for a wave to do as it is for a lump of rock to travel by two different paths at the same time. In fact particles are neither little rocks nor waves, reality at the smallest scales it not something who's behaviour we can imagine. The defense for this seeming shocking answer is to blame us for being stupid. The mental aparratus that we use to sketch a picture of the universe is simply a model that is appropriate for predicting reality at certain orders of magtnitude but fails when one moves to the very small. i.e. we evolved to deal with boulders and spears and antelope and the like and are hard wired to analyse reality in terms of that kind of behaviour hence we fail when we deal with reality at a much more fundamental level that doesn't act like boulders and spears and antelope. I find that answer vaguely convincing but it gnaws at me that it's too easy to invoke fundamental conceptual limitations whenever you hit something that you don't understand. Further if a picture of reality can be sketched (and some of the realist approaches appear to do so) how can one use such a justification?

The most common realist approach is either to claim that the mathematical constructions used in quantum theory are of exactly the same nature as those used in classic physics i.e. are description of reality (this gives you a multiverse picture) or else it's to appeal to the idea that quantum mechanics is incomplete and that some deeper hidden variable theory is the true theory. The latter is attractive and what Einstein was gunning for however there is a result known as Bell's inequality which shows that any hidden variable theory that can reproduce the results of quantum theory has to be non local, so our naieve picture of reality is doomed one way or another.

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Anyway, maybe you can enlighten my limited understand of quantum physics and the like with this example:

Let's say we have one of these coin donation funnels/spirals, and you find a coin at the bottom of the spiral. Let's say we have idealized scientific conditions, i.e., vacuum and what not. How can you now find out the position and/or speed/angle at which the coin was inserted into the funnel? How is this memorized in the current state?


Depends on the nature of these idealised conditions are. If you simply had a scientist use a robotic arm to flick a coin into a spiral in a vaccum at room temperature then there would be many many many ways of determining the the position/speed/angle of the coin as it was inserted. There would be light at various different wavelengths that would have hit the coin and be scattered by it, the coin would also be emitting infrared light which could also be used, the motorised arm could be used because it's motion would be affected by the motion of the coin. The funnel would also contain the information because the coin would have pushed on specific atoms moving them a bit as it went past.

One could consider a more idealised experiment where a great deal of care was taken such that there was truly no way of determining the coin's initial angle and position and trajectory outside a certain range. If that were the case then you would have setup another double-slit style experiment and you would get interference between the trajectories associated with all the possible position/speed/angles. If the experiment were done repeatedly in this fashion and you looked at where the coins ended up at the bottom of the spiral you would find a distribution that made no sense if you tried to assume that coins behave the way you think they do.
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Klaus
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Moonbat
Jul 22 2009, 10:02 AM
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That's a short and to-the-point answer for a change! :tongue:
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I think the answer was to the point, perhaps not short... well actually i think it's pretty concise considering the subject matter!
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Klaus
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Moonbat
Jul 22 2009, 10:02 AM
So you believe in the largest possible multiverse one that incorporates all logically consistent statements but then if that's what you think why do you say things like:

Quote:
 

But if you believe in a single universe and reality, then there must have been only one way how a certain situation has occured, even if it is no longer possible to determine which one it was. I still don't get why you equate "to mean something" with "can be observed/traced".


Which along with your previous statement suggest you believe in a single universe which has a definite past?
Oh, I believe in a single universe only in this reality; in other realities I believe in multiverses :tongue:

Moonbat, you take these discussions (and in particular my contributions to it) too seriously! :wave:

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One could consider a more idealised experiment where a great deal of care was taken such that there was truly no way of determining the coin's initial angle and position and trajectory outside a certain range. If that were the case then you would have setup another double-slit style experiment and you would get interference between the trajectories associated with all the possible position/speed/angles. If the experiment were done repeatedly in this fashion and you looked at where the coins ended up at the bottom of the spiral you would find a distribution that made no sense if you tried to assume that coins behave the way you think they do.


OK, I (kind of) get what you are saying about quantum physics, but I wonder whether quantum physics is still applicable at a coarser level such as coins or (even coarser) planets or galaxies. These quantum effects can only be observed on a subatomar level, no? I.e., we could not expect to make an experiment with coins or planets that would yield the same strange results as the typical quantum physics experiments with single electrons. If the answer is "no" (i.e. quantum effects are not visible at this granularity), does your statement above still make sense?
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Moonbat
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Oh, I believe in a single universe only in this reality; in other realities I believe in multiverses :tongue:

Moonbat, you take these discussions (and in particular my contributions to it) too seriously! :wave:


I guess. It's just that it's interesting - i like ideas and I want to know what the world is all about. (You should think about this realist question because from what I can tell you're not half as anti-realist as you think you are)

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OK, I (kind of) get what you are saying about quantum physics, but I wonder whether quantum physics is still applicable at a coarser level such as coins or (even coarser) planets or galaxies. These quantum effects can only be observed on a subatomar level, no? If the answer is "no" (i.e. quantum effects are not visible at this granularity), does your statement above still make sense?


As you deal with larger and larger numbers of particles the practical difficulties associated with setting up an experiment where no information about the trajectories leak out becomes more and more significant. Having said about 6 years ago we were up to diffracting buckyballs which have a mass orders of magnitude larger than single electrons. THere is a big push for the technology to do this because of the draw of a quantum computer (which like the diffraction experiments needs to avoid information leaking out). Ultimately the theory says that if you have a setup where the trajectories of some collection of particles don't leave footprints about their trajectories then that means those trajectories will interfere. In the case of coins and planets or murderers in setups you normally find them information about their macroscopic properties is constantly streaming off them so you don't expect to see diffraction effects (and that's why murders are never perfect).

I should add that whilst you can't do diffraction experiments for tennis balls there are other consequences of quantum theory that do have testable macroscopic effects - an example is Bose-Einstein condensates which can be seen at the scale of metres.
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Klaus
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Moonbat
Jul 22 2009, 01:30 PM
I guess. It's just that it's interesting - i like ideas and I want to know what the world is all about. (You should think about this realist question because from what I can tell you're not half as anti-realist as you think you are)
Well, when it comes to pragmatic aspects of life I am certainly a realist. I "believe", say, in generalizing from examples and experiments to the degree that this kind of methodology has proved to be reliable in the past. I believe in a single past, because everything else makes life more complicated.

I'm an anti-realist and formalist when it comes to absolute and metaphysical statements about science and mathematics, e.g., as to whether scientific models are "true" or whether mathematical objects "exist". In this regard, I strongly believe in the logic method of creating theories based on a set of axioms, and then the theory hold in every reality in which the axioms hold. I've never quite understood why natural scientists haven't picked up Hilbert's suggestion of axiomatizing physics, as formulated as problem #6 in his famous list of problems. The idea itself is (arguably) much older - Euclid already recognized the value of the axiomatic method more than 2000 years ago when he wrote "Elements". High time for scientists to pick it up!
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