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To: betty boop; Alamo-Girl
I'm not sure you've grasped what Bohr meant WRT his theory of complementarity: "Even though the wave and the particle behavior of an object are mutually exclusive, we need both to completely understand its properties"

I understand what is being said, my contention is that we are using mathematical (man-made) boxes through which we can not "completely understand" the way Creation truly is no matter how many complementary "elements" (observational platforms) we create.

13,845 posted on 05/02/2007 9:07:33 PM PDT by kosta50 (Eastern Orthodoxy is pure Christianity)
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To: kosta50; betty boop; hosepipe
I understand what is being said, my contention is that we are using mathematical (man-made) boxes through which we can not "completely understand" the way Creation truly is no matter how many complementary "elements" (observational platforms) we create.

Einstein once said that reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. He was speaking of local realism - but the same notion has been applied broadly by others. Recently, a noted biologist, Lanza, proposed that the act of observation itself causes reality.

Because the Higgs field/boson (ordinary mass) has neither yet been observed nor made at Fermilab or CERN, many physicists are suggesting that particles may indeed be massless, their apparent masses correspondending to higher dimensional momentum components which cannot be detected. And P.S. Wesson suggests that the 1080 particles of our perceptible universe may actually be a single particle in a fifth time-like dimension multiply-imaged.

I find all this quite interesting and strongly agree that there is much we cannot understand about the physical creation much less "all that there is."

But the universe is intelligible precisely because it is structured, i.e. it is mathematical at the root. (Wigner's Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - further discussed by Cumrun Vafa here)

Therefore I very strongly disagree that mathematics is a creation of man. That is the Aristotlean paradigm.

Instead, I assert that God created an intelligible, structured universe which is mathematical at the root and thus we are able to discover physical laws, physical constants, mathematical structures and geometries - universals - which enable us to "have dominion."

IOW, I hold to the mathematical Platonist paradigm which says that the mathematics (and geometry) exists and the mathematician comes along and discovers it. Man didn't create pi, circles, Mandelbrot sets and so on - he discovered them.

Reimmanian geometry is also an example. It was described long before there was any use for it and yet when Einstein needed a means to describe general relativity, he was able to pull it off the shelf.

13,848 posted on 05/02/2007 10:43:41 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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