On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:15 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
Me: >> > >> Feynman predicted in 1948 that the magnetic moment of an electron can't >> be exactly 1 in Dirac units as had been thought because it is effected by >> an infinite (and I do mean infinite and not just astronomical) number of >> virtual particles. He brilliantly figured out a way to calculate this >> effect and do so in a finite amount of time, he calculated it must be >> 1.00115965246, while the best experimental value found much later is >> 1.00115965221. That's like measuring the distance between Los Angeles and >> New York to the thickness of a human hair, and Feynman got it right just by >> using his mind. That's too good to be a coincidence, Feynman must have been >> onto something good. >> > > > Feynman was a giant in physics. No doubt. I just said that he was bad in > philosophy. > Feynman showed that virtual particles must exist, particles that can violate the law of conservation of mass-energy, at least for a short time. Feynman showed that when a particle moves from point X to point Y it can do so by any path with various degrees of probability, and when you add up all the infinite (and not just very large) number of paths you get the path we observe the particle to be moving at, and he showed us how to add up these infinite number of things in a finite amount of time and get numbers out of them. These profound philosophical discoveries dwarf anything Popper found, assuming he found anything at all. And Feynman wasn't the only one, Darwin showed how multicellular life such as ourselves came to be, Godel found that some things are true but can't be proved, Turing showed that some things are deterministic but not predictable, Cantor proved that there are degrees of infinity, Hubble found that the universe was expanding, and Watson and Crick showed how heredity works at the most fundamental level. None of these huge philosophical discoveries were made by somebody who called himself a philosopher, and that's why I say that philosophers no longer do philosophy. John K Clark it would be hard to find ANY calculation in modern particle physics that doesn't involve some form of virtual particles. virtual particles > I am not a pal of Feyerabend, nor of many philosophers since 1500 years. > Feyerabend is too much relativist to be taken seriously when you study > machine's (logical) theology. > > Bruno > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
