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To: Alamo-Girl
Truly, I suspect if there exists a way to bridge classical physics to quantum mechanics to relativity - it will be found in geometric physics.

Indeed, dear A-G, I believe that was Einstein's expectation, who longed to "transmute the base wood" of material reality into the "pure marble of geometry." [My own thinking just seems naturally to gravitate towards Einstein's direction here....]

To which his friend Bohr timely replied: Science is about observation and articulation of what has been observed, period; it is not about explanation.

[That must hit the scientific community squarely between the eyes. But then, nobody else that I can think of stands to gain anything immediately from seeing the world in this way.]

If that is not a permanently standing "complementariety," I don't know what could be.

The paradox is: Somehow or other, both of these men have to be "right." The problem consists in "squaring" the two accounts.

Which raises the issue of how competent science is (methodological naturalism) to give a full account of the total reality that we humans all experience together. And if there is "incompetence" in any way, what is to supply the deficit in reliable knowledge?

Or so the problem seems to me, at the present state of my humble researches into "the observer problem."

140 posted on 05/29/2007 3:32:20 PM PDT by betty boop ("Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." -- A. Einstein.)
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To: betty boop
Excellent analysis! Thank you so much, my dearest sister in Christ!

Which raises the issue of how competent science is (methodological naturalism) to give a full account of the total reality that we humans all experience together. And if there is "incompetence" in any way, what is to supply the deficit in reliable knowledge?

Precisely so.

Seems to me that some scientists today take the "observation and articulation of what has been observed" (to quote Bohr) under methodological naturalism - and then promptly turn around and present it as "explanation".

That would be like removing the leg of man, subjecting it to rigorous research and then turning around and declaring that the observations made on the leg explain the whole man.

Nature is but a part of "all that there is."

141 posted on 05/29/2007 10:55:54 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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