darrenyeats wrote: > FWIW I don't identify with any religion but I do identify as a theist. > For me this is philosophical. We go back looking for a first cause until > eventually we must accept a "brute fact" as some call it: something that > we accept just exists because it does. I'd like my brute fact to be > something transcendent - flying spaghetti monster doesn't cut it, big > bang doesn't cut it. Maths itself arguably could be called transcendent, > but I don't like that either. > > Of course, the above is hardly a bastion of logic, but it's how I feel. > Can we talk about feelings here?! Ha-ha.
I'm more than happy to respect other people's views on this subject, so long as they can accept mine. There are plenty of good scientists with deep religious convictions - there isn't really a conflict when you think about it. I agree that the Big Bang Theory feels uncomfortable, and a prominent group of scientists argued strongly against it, led by Sir Fred Hoyle at Cambridge who had done some great work in devising a good theory about the life cycle of stars. Unfortunately, the accidental discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation convinced most of the previous supporters for his alternative Steady State Theory to change sides. As far as I know Sir Fred himself continued to reject the Big Bang Theory right up until his death. Quantum Mechanics is another area of modern physics which has caused immense controversy because it is so counter-intuitive that is actually shocking when you really dig into it. Einstein who was in a real sense a "classical" physicist refused to accept that there was not some deeper process at work, and had a protracted correspondence with Niels Bohr on the subject which I think again continued until his death in 1955. An ingenious experiment precisely conducted by a team led by Alain Aspect in Paris in 1962 confirmed the quantum entanglement concept by confirming instantaneous (i.e. faster than the speed of light, something which Einstein intuitively held to be impossible) "action at a distance" which can only be explained by the quantum mechanical hypothesis of the behaviour of sub-atomic particles, at least so far. A proposition that the universe splits in two each time an observer intervenes in the quantum world was put forward by John Wheeler in 1948 (in one Schrodinger's cat would be alive when the box was opened, in the other it would be dead: which one you encounter is still down to a 50:50 chance) and was so roundly pooh-poohed by his fellow physicists that he ceased his work. This view, now termed the "multiverse", has nonetheless been building a significant number of supporters in recent years. The history of science is littered with false starts and personal animosities (Newton detested Robert Hook) and radical ideas usually take some time to be considered seriously. The "quantum cookbook" which can be used without any particular take on what causes the universe to behave so weirdly at the tiniest scale does however underpin a vast amount of our modern technology. When I was endeavouring to prepare for the Oxford Entrance Examination, thankfully with two other students who also got entrance awards, we had exhausted our teachers' capacity to move us on, so we indulged in "Teach Yourself Maths" for the best part of a term after already having taken our A and S levels. We obtained a stack of past entrance exam papers and endeavoured to work through them. One physics question has remained with me: it simply said "Estimate the probability that your current breath in contains an atom of Julius Caesar's dying breath out". Wow! That required a fairly good knowledge of the size and average density of the atmosphere, some assumption about dispersal - 2000 odd years seemed long enough for that to be pretty much uniform, and the capacity of your lungs, and finally the number of atoms in a given volume of air. Quite a big ask under exam conditions, I doubt that many candidates took it on - there were lots of questions, you just tackled as many as you could in the allotted time. The point however is the answer when you plug the correct facts in - it comes out, almost unbelievably, at around 50%! It surprised us at the time. That is how small atoms really are, so it is obviously no surprise that there should be no trace of "quantum weirdness" detectable at our "common sense" real world scale, it's been eliminated by statistical regression to the mean many times over. It sure is a strange world/universe. And as Jim Morrison succinctly observed "People Are Strange" too... But so be it! Dave :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Golden Earring's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=66646 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106914 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
