Just, wow!
The more we know the more we know that we don’t know
Or
Science does not have all the answers and in some cases doesn’t know how to look for them
But a really interesting read none the less
Niels Bohr replied to Albert Einstein after one of these comments; "Einstein, stop telling God what to do."
Still a very good exposition about the last century's evolution from the modified Newtonian physics to the mind-wracking concepts of Quantum Mechanics and the derivatives from it.
ping for later
Oh dear, I’ve gone cross-eyed. Gimme a minute, my brain is re-booting.
CC
“But here’s the twist. Unlike the mathematical theory of probability, this quantum recipe requires us to make different possible stories cancel each other out, or fully or partially reinforce each other.”
This shouldn’t be a “twist”. Really, it’s just a verification of deBroglie’s ideas that everything essentially has a wave nature. Any time you have interacting waves, you have to take into account wave harmonics, and wave harmonics describe exactly the kinds of situations that they are talking about here.
Waves that interact, having the same frequency and amplitude, while “in phase” with each other will form one wave with twice the amplitude. Waves that are out of phase cancel each other out. If one wave has half the frequency of the other, they can partially reinforce (every other wave peak is doubled) or partially cancel (every other peak canceled).
So, a lot of these seemingly strange consequences of quantum physics are easily resolved conceptually if you just remember that we are dealing with waves, and not little pinballs whizzing around. In QM, this is tacitly acknowledged by describing everything by its “wave equation” or “probability wave”, but conceptually, I think people still don’t really accept all the implications of it.
God does not play dice ....Einstein.
You don’t bring me flowers anymore...Streisand.
Seriously...I am a lay person, but I enjoyed the article. LOL.
Got kind of long.
I will read it all later.
Began drifting in to the 60’s/70’s triply dippy acid head thing.
Tao of Physics, Dancing Wu Li Masters etc...
I appreciate the post.
Bump to read later when my brain isn’t so tired....
Somewhere out there is an alternate universe in which I fully absorbed and understood every word of this article. However, I happen to be living in the alternative universe in which I quit reading halfway through and then get up off the couch to grab a beer.
Great article, and thanks for posting. My brain hurts but I think I sort of get it, at least a little. What the author terms collapse theory has actually been around for quite awhile. In lay terms (if I understand it correctly) it is, in fact, observation that collapses the wave function, but then how do we account for an identical result from two independent observations? The answer is that they aren’t independent, that they are linked by the datum being observed. This is mathematically robust but logically it is entirely circular and hence unsatisfying. But that’s what I got out of buying a lot of beer for some really smart people.
What I find most interesting about Quantum, is that it has implications of resolving religious debates that have been going on since the formation of the bible.
Specifically, I am speaking about the concept of determinism in the spiritual context. I.E. can a creation (Man) every truly have free will? Can the Creator know something is going to happen in the future, that he does not directly cause to happen?
In our deterministic, cause and effect universe, the answer is no. But it turns out that the universe is not *exactly* cause and effect. It seems we change the very nature (state) of the universe *simply* by being there and observing.
Does God have a sense of humor or what?
The carrot is attached to a stick attached to the Donkey. This approach can not bring us nearer, except to continue to teach us that the approach is in itself an error.
It is not that that knowledge is bad, or that the universe is 'unknowable'. It's that knowledge is an attribute, and the 'reality' has no attributes.
Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form.
The reason 2 + 2 always is 4, is because math is a property of the mind, not of the external universe.
The reason particles behave as waves and waves as particles is that they are neither. There is no 'they' there. They are attributes of the mind.
It is not that nothing is real. It is that it's nature is created by the mind alone. In itself, reality has no attributes.
I could go on with this forever. There is no such thing as time - only circumstantial evidence. There is no such thing as distance, or space. There are no things.
You can't even say there are 'no things' because there are no things for there to be none. There is no space in which they don't exist. No time for them to span.
No things are lacking. No space is lacking. No time is lacking.
The realization that things only appear when they are observed ... this is why when you observie the bridge, it can be observed that it is made of two halves. Only then does it have 2 halves. Only when two halves make a whole, do they make the whole.
Reality is itself a tautology.
A Zen master one put it this way 'it is only, it is.'
As soon as you assign it an attribute, you have already lost it.
As soon as it appears, all you can know is that 'that' isn't it.
No change, but no stillness not changing.
Even that there is mind making all this is a lie.
In the end, if there were such a thing, at the basis of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism - the original intention of the teachings - which have been battered a million times by a million crude thoughts and men, even in their purest form - recognized these things. They recognized that all words are lies, but that to find your way out of a field of dung, you can only stack dung to mark a path out.
Christianity spoke of 'The World' as the illusion. Another realm as the more 'real' reality. I've yet to meet a Christian who knows that this other realm has no attributes.
The Buddha spoke of no arising, sustaining, perishing. Even no arising of illusion. No Buddha nature even. No Enlightenment, nothing to attain, yet no attainment lacking, no lack of Enlightenment.
The space between and amongst the reality we believe we 'know' (I believe Jesus said Heaven is already within us, around us, amongst us, I know the Buddha often spoke of '... you are already enlightened.' Hindus, if you say 'I finally realized - I am God!' will say 'you fool - you only now just understood that?' ... )
Knowledge of the world, like knowledge of how to properly hit a baseball, is not even in the same universe as hitting a baseball. That of course is merely an analogy. There is no bat with which to hit, no baseball to hit, no time in which to hit, no space for the ball to travel, never was a home run hit, ever, now, or will be in the future - no past, no present for them to occur.
In the meantime, the study of the attributes of the mind, which is what Newton and Einstein and the Quantum Physicists were actually engaged in, are great fun, entirely useful and beneficial, but in a universe that has no uses, bestows no benefits, with no one to benefit. What they do teach ultimately is that the world is unknowable by the mind.
But it is knowable. That Heaven is already amongst us. That we are already enlightened, That you are and always were God ... all this hypnosis that the objects we observe are external phenomena (or internal phenomena), it is a wonderful dream ... but it is only a dream. Physics occurs within this dream of an 'extern' and 'internal' universe.
Reality is real, as reality, but "it" has no attributes. Sometimes we make it a wave, sometimes a particle. It only appears when observed. What is ever there at all, before you looked? Between when you looked, and next looked?
Is 'there' even a 'there'? There is not 'there' for 'there' to take place.
It's a lie to say 'it's not' ... because there is no 'not there' there either.
So you have to stop thinking that 2 + 2 is 4. No 2, no plus, so no 4. No beginning, no ending, no attainment, nothing to attain.
In the meantime, I love this stuff, the reality behind it is totally amazing. I don't think I'm smarter than them, I am merely less complex. I am just firmly confident that the carrot is attached to the donkey. Reality, as we call it, is a tautology, and a tautology can never be caught up with (dangling participle.) But even the Tautology can teach us the nature of the real 'reality' which is of course defined only by it's complete lack of attributes, even as it is lacking in nothing., has no attributes not to have.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Bookmark.
Give all this information to Barack Obama and he'll figure it out in 30 minutes. Of course then he'll spend the next 6 months trying to decide whether to tell anyone what the solution is.
There is an anecdote where Einstein was with colleagues and one expressed a theory about how “God” arranged the universe. Einstein spoke up and shot the theory down. His colleague said but Einstein that is exactly the theory you put forward in a recent paper. And Einstein answered, how can I insist that the Good Lord conform to my papers?
I think it was Bohr who then muttered “yes yes, for Einstein anything is allowed”.
Marker for coffee in the AM