by rawe 19 Replies latest jw friends
Hi Everyone,
This new topic narrows a discussion in another thread: Musings about different types of atheist!
In the next post I'll pick up the discussion where it left off in regards to QM/QP (Quantum Mechanics / Quantum Physics) and how it relates to philosophy and belief or lack thereof in God.
Cheers,
-Randy
So you start a thread and tell us that you're eventually going to post something in relation to the thread title, but don't?!?
Why not wait to start the thread when you actually have something to say?
Hi Seraphim23,
I guess I am wondering about the true nature of randomness because it seems like a paradox in logic. Digital verses randomness type of thing. To me this is key to why the universe makes sense. True, the implications of QM bothered Einstein and others who felt giving up complete predictability was basically a defeat. However, things like evolution depend on randomness to an extent, yet it still works out to be a predicable process. For example as per the theory of evolution any sufficiently advanced species that goes extinct will never again appear. By "never" I mean extremely improbable, since the accumulation of random events expressed in the species will never happen again. "I agree with you that the universe is not digital in this sense of non-computability but the nature of what is really going with randomness seems as far away as understanding what infinity is as with Pi. The measurement problem seems to have relevance here as well." Okay, my comment here is probably just nonsense... but after reading your comment I got thinking about infinity and how it is connected to zero and how that relates to "nothing." What exactly are we unable to divide by zero? I have sometimes asked my daughters math teachers that. The reason of course is as you divide by a smaller and smaller value you get a larger and large quotient. But one is not allowed to divide by zero to obtain an infinite quotient. You've raised some other good points I would like to comment on as well, alas, I will need to get back to this. Cheers, -Randy ps. Yes, I am an atheist, although I would say I don't feel it is possible to prove the non-existence of something.
Hi Oubliette,
I wanted to start the new thread right away, out of respect for the request. Alas, I am not that fast with my thoughts and it will take me some time to parse through Seraphim23's post to respond in a way that make sense.
Cheers,
-Randy
Rawe, I'm eagerly awaiting the parsing of your thoughts!
Oubliette calm down buddy, they were mid conversation in another thread, way off the thread title so came here to carry on.
i think however the previous thread was a ploy to bash atheists, hence they will have little interest picking holes in science in a thread dedicated to QM or QP..... They were playing a game me thinks Rawe. I think they were attempting to waist your time and energy in all truth, something latinthunder (sabatious) and seraphim consider a "hobby." I also spent several hours/days talking with them, for them to just get aggressive, argumentative then throw god into the mix and move on to conversations such as yours.
Maybe they will prove me wrong intentionally now and come here, but I do believe they just want to argue about science under the guise of muddying atheism. LET's see how dedicated they really are to debate it .....in this seperate thread.
all the best, snare x
Crazy thought of the day. Quantum mechanics shows that particles can be interlinked even though they are 100+ miles apart. it is the spooky weirdness that Einstein mentioned. If you split an electron and keep one here and send the other to the moon hypothetically the two are still linked. We don't understand how but we know it works.
If energy can equal matter times the speed of light squared, and "God" is made of energy, and as qm has shown particles can be interlinked across space and time, is it possible that each of us have a literal piece of "God" in our physical selves? We are made in Gods image right?
please tear the theory apart. It was the product of a daydream a couple of months ago. Again, not a scientist by any stretch.
Skinnedsheep
Hi Everyone,
(sorry, this is a bit of long read...)
It is not uncommon for the publications of Jehovah's Witnesses to reprint pictures of stars and galaxies. The marvels of life and the universe are often highlighted to inspire awe and wonder. The implied conclusion is such things point to the existence of God.
Chapter two of Is There A Creator Who Cares for You?, opens with... "ASTRONAUTS thrill to photograph the earth as it looms large through the window of a spacecraft."
Does the city of London in the UK exist? I personally know that it does, because I have been there. Such a question is really not that mysterious. Does Jehovah God exist? When asked believers will propose many things, such as fulfilled prophesy, the existence of life implying a creator, answered prayers, etc. But direct testable and repeatable confirmation always seems just a bit of reach. But God has other special problems. He needs to exist before the universe, he also needs to be outside of it, hear prayers of the faithful in thousands of languages, even from deep inside mine shafts.
Thus there seems to be a desire to make a connection between the mysterious the comes up in scientific exploration and the mystery of God's existence. As if the two mysteries are a kindred spirit, perhaps even connected. While I can appreciate why such connections are made I think doing so is a mistake.
While I will argue for that position, I want to make it clear, these are merely my personal views. What I have found make sense to me. Many of my good friends hold different views and I sincerely like to engage the banter on these subjects, because inevitably as I babble along trying to explain myself and understand the view of others I find myself learning a great deal. The only view I caution against is the belief that someone has special access to knowledge no one else has, and they in turn demand unquestioned loyalty and obedience to their words. That is unhealthy and life-robbing!
The three keys to my argument are:
(1) Believe in what can be measured.
(2) Accept that some things resist measurement, creating a knowledge gap.
(3) Do not make big jumps where knowledge gaps exist.
Watch what the Creator book does...
Can experts now explain the origin of the universe? Many scientists, uncomfortable with the idea that the universe was created by a higher intelligence, speculate that by some mechanism it created itself out of nothing.
then in the next paragraph...
If experts cannot really explain either the origin or the early development of our universe, should we not look elsewhere for an explanation?
the book then goes on to argue on the basis of the anthropic principal. But make no mistake about it. Because experts admit to a knowledge gap, you should accept all the teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses as if they a channeling special knowledge from God. The idea the universe had a beginning is an implication of observational evidence -- namely red shift. How much observational evidence exists for the supernatural? Exactly zero! No one iota! That to me is significant, even if it is basically true that "absence of evidence is not evidence for absence" as they say.
Anyone who claims irrefutable evidence for the supernatural can have their claims tested by the James Randi Educational Foundation. JREF will pay $1 million dollars to anyone who can pass a controlled test.
What about the connection between Quantum Physics and evidence for God?
Almost everyone knows about E = mc^2. Even before Albert Einstein discovered equation that is known as "mass-energy equivalence", the equation that related to kinetic energy looks almost the same: E = 1/2mv^2
The "c" of course is the speed of light and "v" in the second equation is just plain old velocity. Nonetheless you can bet I've lectured my daughters many a time as they learn to drive, about the law of squaring energy as velocity increases. That a car traveling at 60 miles per hour is much more dangerous beast than if it was going just 30 miles per hour.
There is nonetheless a few things to notice about this simple equation. One is that it is smooth. Increase the mass by a bit and it will multiply by c and square that. But why ^2? We live in a universe with 3D volume. To cover some rectangular bit of the earth one will multiple length x width. The physics of the real world seem to demand such squaring will come up.
However, as explained in Quantum Physics for Dummies, measuring "black-body radiation spectrum" seems to have kill off our nice smooth equations. As I understand the text, heating a perfectly black object (i.e. one that absorbs all frequencies of light) would generate a spectrum of light. The object would start from black and then glow. The problem was coming up with an equation that explained the effect. Max Planck solved this problem by breaking away from a smooth effect towards the idea of discrete non-continuous packets of energy. As the book puts it...
E = nhv, where n = 0, 1, 2,...
Yuck! Who wants to deal with such integer sequences? Yet it worked! But look at this, the Raleigh-Jean's equation that was smooth and almost worked, had this bit in it: 8 x pi x v^2 and guess what.. even though Max Plank put his integer sequence in there, his equation also has 8 x pi x v^2. The existence of pi (ratio of circumference to diameter) is 3.14159... going on and on.
As I mentioned in another post, the success of Quantum Physics and an article on Loop Quantum Gravity convinced me that very small integers probably defined the universe. Indeed Plank's equation had 'h' as a constant of 6.626 x 10^-34 Joule seconds. That ^-34 makes h a very small value. Maybe this is the integer we are looking for? However, I am now convinced small integer digital universe is not the correct view. The existence of pi in these equations plus the limits of computer models for QM has for the moment convinced me that while QM works there is probably something deeper that is infinitely variable.
There is indeed a magical thing that seems to happen here. Max Plank is really just trying to solve a physics puzzle and when he does, what next? Who could imagine that plugging in these integer vectors would wind up having so many weird implications. I argue, that unless we are writing for Star Trek episode, we should be very careful to making unwarranted philosophical jumps based on these odd things. Yet, I do think it keeps tell us one important thing -- don't walk away from the math that works, even if it implies highly unintuitive things. Contrast that with how the Creator book attempts to dismiss "universe from nothing"...
Does that sound reasonable to you?
it asks. This is an appeal to hubris! As if somehow a person unschooled in cosmology should be able to discard such origin of the universe ideas because they don't "sound" reasonable! What is interesting is when a person actually takes the time to listen to why those who study such things use the word "nothing" the answer becomes an easy, "yes, it does sound reasonable!"
Under most circumstances we should reject the unreasonable. But should we in all cases? The challenge of quantum physics seems to orbit around our confidence in what the math implies. Consider the first crazy idea...
Quantum Superposition.
As per Wikipedia this principal holds that an electron exists in all its possible states at the same time! Yet, this is not the observation. When measured the electron gives the results of only one state.
Yuck! This seems to undermine the very first principal of my belief system -- believe only what you can measure. QSP seems to ask us to set that aside and instead believe in this truly unreasonable weirdness.
At this point, let me make a side trip into The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Catholicism. On page 184 they talk about Imagination and Prayer. Under the section "Air as Holy Spirit" it says...
"The very intake of breath is call inspiration -- or intake of Spirit. To be alive is to breathe, to be filled with God's presence in the Spirit. Today's quantum physics has added a new dimension to the understanding of air, and the presence of God or the Holy Spirit. Scientists have found that there is no such thing as a void. When they attempt to create one in the laboratory, it immediately fills with molecules that appear to bubble up out of nowhere and fill the space."
This is followed by more talk about God's Holy Spirit being everywhere, etc. Is such connections justified? I would argue it is not. Even though, QSP asks us to believe something that resists measurement. The reason is the equations behind QSP demand the reality of QSP be there. How so?
Wikipedia answers: Mathematically, it refers to a property of solutions to the Schrödinger equation; since the Schrödinger equation is linear, any linear combination of solutions to a particular equation will also be a solution of it.
At this point, I think one is justified in suggesting this may be true of the equation, but does not dictate a physical reality. But there it sits. Einstein suggested that an unstable pile of gunpowder could then be in a superposition of both sitting there and exploded -- how absurd! Schrödinger, then comes up with his alive/dead cat example. But the math doesn't budge. And guess what? Down the road we do get to observe this very thing. Clever experiments have put real life photons, beryllium ions and buckyballs into superpositions.
So at this point I will add this to my list:
(4) Believe what math equations suggest must be true, however hold such beliefs as tentative until experiments show them to be true.
The demands of the equations keep going, with perhaps the most spooky of all being:
Quantum Entanglement
I find it interesting the Einstein and his friends suggested QE as a reason why quantum mechanics was incomplete. A fundamental law of physics is nothing moves faster than light. Yet, the equations of Quantum Physics suggested that if two quantum systems were related in that they interacted with each other, information about both would be known by measuring just one system. This would occur no matter how far apart the systems happen to be. Is it really true that if you knew the "spin" of two entangled particles was opposite, you could measure one here on earth as "up" and know instantly the other one on the moon was "down"?
Indeed that appears to be true. Does that mean that God is everywhere? Or that the brains of ants on hills 100 miles apart are linked and communicating?
I think the best way to look at this is again, from what the equations demand and leave it at that. The equations don't speak to God or ants, just how information from QM flows in a counter-intuitive way. If I did have to build some intuition from this, I would probably go in a couple directions. First from what I know about programming.
In the normal course programs are made up of functions (also called procedures, subroutines or methods). The information passed from one function to another is usually done through a parameter list. It takes time to setup the list and discard it when the function is done. However a system can also have what are known as "global variables" wherein information can be transmitted between functions in nearly instantaneously. This happens because each function, no matter how far apart it is from another, is literally looking at the same area of computer memory, and either setting it to a value or reading the value.
On the other hand, we can be fairly certain the universe has spread out from a single point. Thus all the information in the universe was at one location at one time. Did the universe retain some background mesh that allows information to flow faster than light? Maybe. However, none of this needs to imply that a super being exists and is concerned about whether or not human males have retained or removed their foreskin.
Cheers,
-Randy
Rawe do you think I should repost my last post to you to provide some context or even a few posts back, otherwise people might have to flick back and forth between threads to get the context? Then we can continue as before? I’m not sure it was a good idea to start a new thread like this mid-way into a subset of a discussion.
