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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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BTW, when you totally lost me was when you pulled "Hilbert Space" out of your ass, in an attempt to frustrate Ed.
What amazes me about various wankers on this thread is one, the overt dishonestly involved sometimes, and two that fact that if someone offers empirical evidence that does not square with their version of reality, that person (me) is pulling a fast, is trying to trick people, is pulling something out of their ass is an sloppy effort to refute the plain truth with woo.
In fact, I was never the person who proclaimed that a photon was never a thing, I merely passed that knowledge on. My sources are no less than professors at one of the finest scientific institutions on earth, and they in turn pass on quotes and bits and pieces from other known experts in the field. If BASE wants to present himself as an avatar of science, and he refutes the very leaders in his self-proclaimed field, we need at the very least to wonder about his credibility. Or better, we must insist that he answer the simple question that he has been dodging all along: IF you insist that a photon is itself a thing, above and beyond the effect that photos trigger in the environment, then WHAT, exactly, IS a photon? What did the last quote (from a physics prof at MIT) mean - when he said the old notions of a photon were not part of reality? Again, leave off saying this is me, and how little I know, and just answer the question.
The use of Hilbert Space was used to underscore the human capacity to uses fabricated systems and modes of inquiry in order to frame reality in certain terms. Discursive reasoning could be seen in this light. It is not strictly speaking a perfect map of what is "out there," but it allows us to manipulate physical reality at a certain meta level.
I could also probably say all of this in the language of the experiential adventures, but too few have the background for it to be understood well enough to be useful here. Not when something like "no-mind" (which is a very basic awareness space encountered early on in any meditation schooling) can actually be argued to exist, or get conflated with zombie states or a practice that will hasten senility.
JL
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Base: Just because the photon has a zero rest mass and is dimensionless, something is very clearly there. If you don't believe me, go stare at the sun for 8 hours and see what happens. Although they have zero rest mass, the do have energy, which varies by frequency.
What is the “what” behind zero mass and a lack of dimensionality? How can you say that “something is clearly there?” If it’s clear to you, then make it clear to me. Arguing metaphysics from effects implies a chain of causality. You should state that for us. If not, then it sounds like “woo” to me.
(Is this a trick question? Am I missing something?)
P.S. I like Ed and tried to tell him so often; but he distrusted me even when we agreed over principles of science. Ed is dogmatic, and I believe it’s the principles that you are honoring, not Ed.
I don’t think it is possible that you can suspend your beliefs. That makes you as dogmatic as most born-again Christians. It’s only the beliefs that are different. In the main, you and Ed are prejudiced and narrow-minded.
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ladyscarlett
Trad climber
SF Bay Area, California
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What amazes me about various wankers on this thread is one, the overt dishonestly involved sometimes, and two that fact that if someone offers empirical evidence that does not square with their version of reality, that person (me) is pulling a fast, is trying to trick people, is pulling something out of their ass is an sloppy effort to refute the plain truth with woo.
Dishonest wankers? WANKERS????
Ho Manh! Did you wank that with a cheap cell phone shot?
Now please, lecture me about credibility...
DMT
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WBraun
climber
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Now please, lecture me about credibility...
Dingus
You're using "ladyscarlett's" login ..... :-)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Mike said:
What is the “what” behind zero mass and a lack of dimensionality? How can you say that “something is clearly there?” If it’s clear to you, then make it clear to me. Arguing metaphysics from effects implies a chain of causality. You should state that for us. If not, then it sounds like “woo” to me.
It is a totally basic question that no one has even tried to answer. Instead we've been accused of "fooling around" by asking it. Or said how little we know. Or that we are digging out guff to support a preconceived idea that is patently false. It apparently never occurred to people that we've simply heard that photons are things, have read that they have no mass or dimension, and wondered: WHAT, exactly IS a photon, in and of itself, above and beyond its effects? Like- what is a dog beyond its bark? What's more, the fact that the experiential adventures disclose that every last "thing" is also impermanent, seems also lost on this discussion.
The obvious ducking of the question - along with other diversionary tactics - are what seems dishonest to me per some people's replies. Materialism rests on every person, place, thing and phenomenon in reality to be sourced by antecedent physical processes (stuff). If you are insisting that a photon ITSELF is a thing, is stuff, and that the thingness is clear to you, then as Mike has requested, kindly make it "clear to us" what that thing is - without defaulting into describing an effect.
You will likely end up with the answer: Photons ( or all radiation) are packets of energy. Because we can usually measure how much "work" an energy source - or packet of energy - has, at least potentially, people often use "the capacity to do work" as a default per what energy IS. And quite naturally our discursive minds ascribe a "thingness" to "the capacity to do work," whereby energy is a thing that can DO and DOES work. But people working in this field say, No, this is not correct.
What is energy?
Dig it:
Most of us have an intuitive concept of energy, that it's the stuff we need to accomplish physical actions such as walking, lifting a glass, heating some water, or powering a television set. Although this definition is correct, its a bit indirect because it only conveys what energy is used for, not what energy IS, or even how it behaves (for example, what happens to it after you use it?). A curious person might still ask questions like: Is energy a thing? Or is it a property or a condition of a thing? How do we really define it? How was it discovered?
Energy is not a thing per se. Rather, energy refers to a condition or state of a thing OTHER THAN ENERGY ITSELF.
But people speak of energy as if its a thing. Why, because energy can be stored, bought and sold, and transported. The reason that energy has all these aspects is, unlike many "conditions" that objects may be subject to, energy is conserved; the CONDITION of having energy is always passed from one object to another, never created anew or destroyed. In this way, energy is unique among conditions.
A good example of how energy is passed along from object to object is a water wave. A water wave gives the impression that there is an object (a "thing called a wave" moving across the water because the shape of the water doesn't change very much. But no such thing is there at all or is moving - rather, the movement itself of the water molecules is passed from each collection of water molecules to the next through the forces between the water molecules.
Similarly, people are familiar with heat flowing from one object to another. For a long time, because molecules are far too small to see, people thought that heat might be a kind of fluid-like substance, which some called "caloric fluid" that flowed from one thing to another. Nowadays, we know that heat energy is the microscopic MOTION OF MOLECULES, and that this STATE OF MOTION, not the molecules themselves, nor yet a "thing" called energy, is what "flows" from hot objects to cold objects.
Enough on that. Forever...
It's a fair question to ask: Why is Largo going on and on with this? To simply pull the rug from beneath the materialsit's feet? While there is some recreation there, the real reasons is that, at least on the face of it, the very science that most materialists insist PROVES materialism seems to strongly suggest that there is no such stuff at the bottom of any thing, that that is no material bottom driving or sourcing our lives and that we are simply discrete and evanescent moments in time during which energy shape shifts from this to that in an every morphing game of death and rebirth. This impermanence has been the hallmark of all experiential adventures for many centuries. All that we gasp onto from "I" to the holy feelings to the "10" girl to the (fill in the blank) only exists in relative terms. Nothing dies because it was never a thing to begin with. Of course we cannot live like this, as though we are not there, so the question becomes, how does this insight effect our lives in a positive way? Why is insight worth anything at all? What is the actual value or the experiential adventures?
JL
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WBraun
climber
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Dishonest wanker
I'll tell you who's dishonest wankers is those stoopid gross materialists who claim life comes from matter.
They say that life arose from matter in the past and that they will create life this way in the future.
But they can't even prove that life arises from matter in the present.
Yet these dishonest wankers , just plain guess and make up sh!t that's how it happened in the past originally.
They have no clue to the origins of life itself.
All the chemicals are still there in the dead body ya wanker.
Mix the chemicals back together and make em alive again.
Just wanker bullsh!t spewed out by these poseurs claiming to be scientists ....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I think of JL as the creator of vivid funny tales of climbing, not as the dissembler he presents as here.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Elan Musk just unveiled a battery to power homes. He also has some other good products. He's a very good scientist! But Hollywood wants to grant him titles like"Creative Visionary" propping him to the likes of Thomas Edison. Pleeaasse! Élan hasn't done anything inventive or new. He's merely made things better, adding algorithm to algorithm.
The science world needs some creative, innovative minds like Paul's to take a left turn in the middle of an algorithm and still make it work.
Now if I could plug my iPad into a tree to power it up, that would be innovative!
Can minds be both scientific and creative/innovative?
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jstan
climber
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My experience in the public domain, though limited, indicated to me it is seldom productive to advocate specific answers to problems. Specific propositions only cause conflict. The best one can do is to work on rounding off corners on propositions to make them better. This puts one in the position of being a supporter and not a prophet.
When a particular discussion seems bereft of any chance of being productive, it is best simply to be somewhere else.
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Right John.....nobody wants answers or propositions, they are quite content with confirmation of their closely held beliefs.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Jammer, I'm not a scientist so 11 dimension Plank talk is mostly lost on me. But as many have shown, yourself included, the closer we look, the more likely that apparently solid-stuff turns into dust. Not surprisingly, such a concept is either vehemently denied or bores people who do not appreciate its implications. But old Gods die hard.
Another fascinating concept I have been getting bombed on lately is the zero-energy universe, where energetic and gravitational forces, when summed, apparently equal zero.
Lastly, and this is one I hear hotly debated, is the concept of quantum fluctuations. People are loath to say that energy is sourced by nothing, so they speak of potential energy. The debate concerns how that energy is stored or how it "exists" in latent form. Or is this the wrong way to look at it altogther. If you cannot create energy, then it is not sourced by anything since it has always existed. But "always" is another fated term in science so the debate goes on, at least in amongst my friends.
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Reeotch
climber
4 Corners Area
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Well, Einstein held that matter and energy are one and the same; one can be converted into the other. Another "zero sum" concept.
Does there have to be a "source"?
What about a "flux" or flow, as in a cyclical sort of thing?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Reoooch, you'd need to ask a proper scientist for a proper answer to that question. My understanding of the conversation is that by "source," they are not refering to what made or created energy - which science tells us is impossible (along with losing energy) - rather that when energy changes forms, the forms are the objects through which the energy is passed. Again, a common description in physics is that "energy is a property of objects which can be transferred to other objects or converted into different forms, but cannot be created or destroyed."
The conversation gets especially interesting when there are no objects, and eneergy just arises out of the void? Sounds like woo to me...
JL
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Largo, the seemingly woo-like qualities of the universe have been known for much of the last century. Any 3-semester college physics curriculum will introduce students to concepts like how light can act like a field or a packet of particles, depending on how you "measure it"; how most of matter is actually space; how time slows down, relatively, when speeds close to the speed of light are achieved; that random quantum fluctuations give rise to real particles; that you can only identify the position of electrons as probability distributions. It goes on and on. Even though I threw in a relativistic example, quantum mechanics changed the game.
At first, it looks like woo. Then you find out that the Standard Model of particle physics, which has lots of falsifiable tenets, has proved absolutely correct in every experiment ever performed. (Woo, I would think, is, by definition, un-falsifiable). So, the fact that you, Largo, are arguing from a philosophical standpoint that this stuff doesn't "make sense" does not impress the college physics crowd around here, I'm guessing.
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Psilocyborg
climber
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Atheism is totally hip right now. Soon, being a mormon will be edgy and cool. And so the sheep follow....
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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When I took calculus, my mind was blown at the fact that everything that exists can be understood as a rate of change . . . John, do the folks you hang with (including yourself) think that reality is an eleven dimensional field of plank spheres (think spheres with a diameter equal to the smallest wave length of light), existent as a three dimensional projection (which gets to change with time), with which we only interact with the two dimensional surfaces, self similar at the universal and plank scales? A field of values, continuous only in the sense that it is all the same "thing"? A holographic hologram? Anyone?
Wow, that's a lot to digest. I too am curious what the carpool crowd thinks. I'm not sure everything can be understood as a rate of change: memorable literature?
Two dimensional surfaces? Deep thoughts.
Had not heard of Planck spheres. What's inside them? Strange stuff.
Fields are as mysterious as particles, and the two seem to be interchangeable at times. I diddle with complex vector fields, but these are mathematical abstractions for the most part, although useful in fluid dynamics. But in fluid dynamics there is an underlying substance through which flow patterns like streamlines and pathlines emerge. It was once thought the aether provided such a medium in physics, but alas that idea faded (I persist in supporting the aether, which puts me at odds with everyone else on the planet except perhaps religious fundamentalists)
JL likes fields also (open awareness field) and it may be that this is where the aether coalesces. I wonder if pathlines exist in this field?
Questions unending . . .
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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JL likes fields also
I'm a huge Fields fan as well.
"" You can't cheat an honest man, never give a sucker an even break, and never smarten up a chump"
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jstan
climber
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Very nice contribution eeyonkee, I think. Is the word "woo" being used without adequate definition?
How about:
Woo - any concept or proposition whose proponents are not searching for falsification.
As best I know there is yet no falsification for String theory but the efforts to achieve falsification are manifest. Randall has a somewhat different approach to unification but there too everyone is hoping the LHC will find data at the TEV scale.
In several presentations Witten discusses the fact String Theory keeps forcing us to do things we don't want to do and in each case has led to new and unexpected understandings. The whole experience seems eerie.
If we wanted to define something as Woo2, that may be a candidate. Once we know more, of course, that Woo will also become mundane just like Einstein's work.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Seems to me "woo" is being used here as a substitute for magic or miraculous or something occurring outside physical laws. But I don't think anybody is arguing that such a thing is even possible... what's being argued by some is that the certainties of science are not final and conclusive and the universe continues to be a remarkable mystery which we may eventually discover to be stranger/weirder than either the wooers or the scienteers could have possibly imagined.
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