Posted on 01/10/2002 10:56:06 AM PST by buaya
1. Not a marvelous new invention that would change the course of human events
2. Not a breakthrough that would result in me garnering acclaim and fortune beyond my wildest dreams
I have given up the idea of becoming a scientist.
This was quite a shock for me, finding this out at the tender young age of 30.
PARIS (AFP) Jan 09, 2002 The theory that meteorites carrying bacteria kickstarted life on Earth has been strengthened by a German experiment that placed bugs in orbit to see if they survived the brutal environment of space.
The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed the theory in 1903, contending that billions of years ago, bacteria drifting through the cosmos landed in the fertile soil of Earth, where they flourished and evolved into higher forms of life.
. . .
CI score 80 due to lack of math in the theory.
Oh, I meant to say this at the bottom of my first post, but I forgot.
Another thing which gets over-looked in this smile fest about crackpots is that now and then (I actually stopped myself from saying "frequently") very buttoned-down people get labeled "crackpot" even though they score very very low (or zero) on this index! (And I'm not even talking about Fred Hoyle!) That's just not fair!
For instance:
The primary goals of the Julian Jaynes Society are to foster discussion and a better understanding of the life, work, and theories of Julian Jaynes (1920–1997), the implications of his bicameral mind theory of consciousness, and the topic of consciousness in general.
Born in West Newton, Massachusetts, Julian Jaynes did his undergraduate work at Harvard and McGill and received both his master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from Yale. Julian Jaynes was a popular teacher, and he lectured in the Psychology Department at Princeton University from 1966 to 1990. In addition, he had numerous positions as Visiting Lecturer or Scholar in Residence in departments of philosophy, English, and archeology and in numerous medical schools. Julian Jaynes was an associate editor of the internationally renowned journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and on the editorial board of the Journal of Mind and Behavior.
Julian Jaynes published widely, his earlier work focusing on the study of animal behavior and ethology, which eventually led him to the study of human consciousness. His more recent work culminated in 1976 in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a nominee for the National Book Award in 1978. Criticized by some and acclaimed by others as one of the most important books of the 20th century, it remains as controversial today as when it was first published. Expanding on this book are several more recent articles published in a variety of journals such as Canadian Psychology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The History of Ideas, and Art World.
"It all began in the mid-1980s, when a camera aboard a NASA spacecraft called Dynamics Explorer presented me with data that many scientists would have ignored or overlooked. [okay, that's a few points... mw] Curious black spots appeared in the images of Earth's aurora, one of the phenomena I have devoted my career to studying as an experimental physicist. I came to realize that the black spots in the images were not caused by "instrument noise," as many scientists believed, but were evidence of a remarkable geophysical phenomenon occurring unnoticed right above our heads.
"In the spring of 1986, I published my explanation of the black spots in a scientific journal: The Earth's atmosphere was being bombarded by house-sized, water-bearing objects traveling at 25,000 mph, one every three seconds or so. That's 20 a minute, 1,200 an hour, 28,800 a day, 864,000 a month and more than 10 million a year. Spelled out in this way, the numbers truly boggle the mind. These objects, which I call "small comets," disintegrate high above the Earth and deposit huge clouds of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. Over the history of this planet, the small comets may have dumped enough water to fill the oceans and may have even provided the organic ingredients necessary for life on Earth." Louis A. Frank
Mark W.
Physicist(#39) I think that's a mischaracterization of the Copenhagen Interpretation. It would be more correct to say that (according to the CI) a particle's properties don't exist before they're measured. .
Quantum mechanics tells us what we can know about a particle. To say that it does not exist before it is measured is saying that we can make no meaningful statement about its properties. Doing a sum over the history of a particle does not mean that the particle took all possible paths from point A to point B, it means that it is not possible to say which way it went. In this sense, the particle took all possible paths, but that is not physically possible. So one can say that it had no meaningful existence between points A and B.
Either way, we are limited in what we can know, not necessarily what is “real”.
Another example, outside of QM:
If other universes exist, by definition, they cannot communicate with our universe. It what sense can these universes be said to exist if it is impossible to detect them?
But I can make meaningful statements about other properties of the particle! The currents are still conserved: I can prepare the state so that it is in a well-defined energy and momentum, or in a well-defined polarization state. In any case, the particle's total spin, charge and isospin are in no way indeterminate; I can state with confidence that the particle maintains these properties throughout, no matter how indeterminate some of the other properties might be.
Doing a sum over the history of a particle does not mean that the particle took all possible paths from point A to point B, it means that it is not possible to say which way it went.
You are implying here that it may have taken a specific path, and that we simply don't know which path, but that is not the case. The experiment can be arranged so that it is possible to prove that it didn't take any specific classical path.
In this sense, the particle took all possible paths, but that is not physically possible.
It's not classically possible, but it is physically possible. Particles propagate as waves, and waves don't take specific trajectories.
In thinking about QM, we are the victims of our own prejudices. We think of things in terms of classical objects interacting each other, and seek to explain quantum phenomena in those terms. But it can't be done. A bouncing billiard ball seems simple to our minds, but in reality it's not: when a billiard ball strikes something and bounces off, it is the result of a horribly complicated tangle of a gigantically large number of quantum wavefunctions, all interacting and interfering with each other. The ball and its bounce are composed of quantum wavefunctions. So when we seek to interpret quantum phenomena in terms of classical phenomena, we are attempting to describe the more fundamental in terms of the less fundamental. This is a philosophical impossibility. We should only seek to explain classical physics in terms of quantum physics. Quantum physics is what it is.
So one can say that it had no meaningful existence between points A and B.
"Meaningful" is an awfully pregnant word in that sentence. Meaningful to us? I suppose you can say that, but that's more a reflection of our language than of reality. We're stuck visualizing things in classical terms, where particles exist at specific places at specific times with specific momenta and energies. Nature is not so limited as our understanding. As far as nature is concerned, quantum indeterminacy, at the most fundamental level, is what constitutes existence.
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