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To: betty boop
She has already been criticized around here as incompetent to undertake such a work, because she's "only a journalist." (This from persons who haven't read her book no less, and who have stated it is unnecessary to do so -- because she's "only a journalist.")

That's unfair. You posted a snippet of..., we let me be kind, and say it didn't connect very well with any physics I know. How much of such stuff do I have to read to decide this person is not going to fuse the quantum and classical world, whatever that actually means?

It is true, however, that I doubt that anyone is going to make fundamental progress in physics these days without some considerable training in physics. You can't relate quantum physics and relativity in the same way, say, you might relate Islam and the slave trade in the 15th century.

For as Wolfhart Pannenberg points out, quantum mechanics "does not abstract from time" -- that is to say, the category time per se is not relevant for it.

You better explain this a little. Soem of the most fundamental principles of quantum mechanics - e.g. the Heisenberg principle, the Schrödinger equation - explicitly include first derivatives with respect to time.

Animal behavior, Pannenberg notes, is pointed torward the future of the organism, but in a manner that is not necessarily self-aware. Human consciousness is self-aware; and human life is consciously directed toward a future, supported by the free actions (free will) of human beings. Animals have to settle for basic drives, instincts -- the information set specifying the individual organism -- which basically direct them toward their future in time and that of their species without the necessity of self-aware consciousness.

First of all, not all human behavior which contributes to the future of the species is self-aware. In recent history, there have been tribes unaware of the connection between copulation and reproduction. Even in our own society, people mostly do da wild thing because it gives them pleasure, not for the sake of the future of the species.

But second, and more importantly, attributing a 'goal' to animal behavior in this very crude sense does not exclude computer viruses, cellular automata or chain letters. In what fundamental sense is the tendency of a chain letter to propagate different from the tendency of an amoeba to propagate? Why does the amoeba have a 'goal' in any sense the chain letter does not?

To repeat what Panneberg wrote, "But there is still another aspect of [a living organism's] living beyond itself: by turning its environment into the place and means of its life, the organism relates itself at the same time to its own future and, more precisely, to a future of its own transformation.

Computer viruses do exactly this. They transform the rest of the system - by modifying system files, Outlook, etc., to allow their own reproduction, sometimes to hide themselves, or for malicious reasons. For that matter, chain letters alter human behavior in order to assure their own reproduction.

949 posted on 12/11/2003 12:26:21 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
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To: Right Wing Professor; Alamo-Girl; Phaedrus; js1138; marron
Some of the most fundamental principles of quantum mechanics - e.g. the Heisenberg principle, the Schrödinger equation - explicitly include first derivatives with respect to time.

Quantum events are perfectly indifferent to time, and they do not depend on the future in the sense I describe: They depend on the observer. It is the observer -- Heisenberg, Schroedinger, the experimental scientist -- who "interjects" any kind of time sense into such events. And generally, this is limited to noting the time duration of the observed quantum event.

But the concept of future I am trying to describe to you involves a teleological consideration -- a purpose, a goal. Do you suppose that quantum particles exchanging energy among themselves or a vacuum field have such any goal or purpose in view?

973 posted on 12/11/2003 1:53:02 PM PST by betty boop (God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world. -- Paul Dirac)
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