Posted on 06/15/2003 10:36:08 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
In the discussion of Platonism over Aristotelian 'realism' it seemed to me that the Platonist side was left a bit weak. For example, our senses only see points of light, particular sound frequencies, etc. Is this reality? Does this tell us anything useful? It certainly is some sort of information, however it seems to me that unordered information is not useful. A single frequency of sound has little meaning, however when ordered in a time wise fashion, it will have meaning. Same for sight, a single bit of light has little meaning but when ordered by the concept of space, it gains meaning. Thus these 'concepts' seem to be what give order to reality and give us the ability to function within it.
Which is just playing with words. A "particle" that can travel in the "form of a wave" is not, after all, a particle. It is something else entirely.
I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, open your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirmed instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refuse to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still "un-analyzed" and crying aloud for treatment.
The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which "verified" the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasize by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation — which revealed the class bias of the paper — and especially of course what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their "clinical observations." …
These considerations led me in the winter of 1919-20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.")
One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
That's not exactly correct. The sad fact is that what we can know about subatomic particles is very dependant on the questions we are asking. When we look for wavelike behavior (wavelength, interference patterns), we will see it. When we look for particle behaviors (photons, particle interactions), we will see it. There is NO good definition of a subatomic particle like the one you posted, because what it is changes depending on the questions we ask.
Take an electron, for example. If you fire an electron or other negatively charged particle at a hydrogen atom, it will bounce away from a spot we might say is where the electron in the atom is orbiting. But why is the electron orbiting there instead of lower/closer to the nucleus? Because its wavelength is such that it cannot fit perfectly within a circle of smaller radius (ie. it can't orbit any closer). So is it a particle or a wave?
Not in mathematics. "Absence of evidence" is only "absence of evidence." In forensics, the quoted statement is true.
Not necessarily true. As the uncertainty principle is a consequence of Fourier analysis, most electrical engineers would have seen the same thing in non-QM settings (as would mathematicians working in Fourier analysis.)
Concerning wave/particle duality, I thought you might find this tidbit interesting :
The formation of an interference pattern when a beam of particles passes through a double slit is the classic signature of the wave-particle duality of quantum particles. Wave-particle duality has been observed with electrons, atoms and small molecules. Now Markus Arndt, Anton Zeilinger and co-workers at the University of Vienna in Austria have observed wave-like behaviour in a beam of carbon-60 molecules - which are an order of magnitude larger than any other particles for which quantum interference effects have been observed…
One of the deepest mysteries of quantum mechanics is that an interference pattern is formed even if there is only one particle in the experimental set-up at any given time. The Vienna team write that "all these observations support the view that each carbon-60 molecule interferes with itself only." They also confirmed that the interactions of the molecules with their environment - such as the spontaneous emission of photons by the thermally excited molecules - could not reveal which slit they had passed through. Even the mere possibility of being able to know which slit the particle passes through would be enough to wipe out the interference pattern.
The cry of the anti-science crowd was ever thus.
Indeed, many of us are anxiously awaiting the Higgs boson/field. What I find most surprising is that the scientists were surprised that they didn't find it in the previous test. And they aren't terribly confident it'll be found at Fermilab. Sigh...
IMHO, like astronomy, in quantum physics - the information is accumulating at an accelerated rate and is highly statistical. With all that is going on, I can't help but wonder what radical theories may be coming down the road.
Very true, but that doesn't mean that when you are presented with two falsifiable theories, one of them must therefore be true, which is essentially what was claimed by the original sentence I quoted:
According to Sir Karl Popper, when given two theories an experiment will decide one true and one false.
But, of course, both theories could be false, at the very least. Consider two theories about where babies come from - A) the stork brings them, or; B) from the cabbage patch. Since both of these are essentially falsifiable, and given the reasoning above, we should be able to conceive of an experiment that will prove one of these theories to be true ;)
A 1000 cycle square wave will always sound like an Apple II computer. Anyone who has ever used an Apple II will recognize it. Of course, you could argue that a square wave is the antithesis of a single frequence but this thread being what it is, it is best to keep the physics simple.
The link on the curse of dimensionality skirts the issue with regard to geometry. For instance, if our eyes could see in a higher spatial dimension - parts of our body might appear here and there, etc.
Here's a link with an animation to visualize a (mere) 4 dimensional spacetime continuum:
Postulates of Special Relativity
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