On 2/28/2014 7:25 PM, LizR wrote:
On 1 March 2014 15:48, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 2/28/2014 5:09 PM, LizR wrote:On 1 March 2014 11:58, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 2/28/2014 2:32 PM, LizR wrote: "If it's all math, then where does math come from?" Strange to say, elementary maths just appears to be a fact. That is, it is a fact that 1+1=2. Or it comes from our conceptualizing the world as consisting of distinct objects and counting them, c.f. William S. Cooper "The Origin of Reason" and Lakoff and Nunez "Where Mathematics Comes From". It isn't just us. Subatomic physics indicates that the world consists of distinct objects, and keeps track of the number of them.Of course that's *our theory of subatomic physics*. Naturally we explain the world in terms we understand. But in fact the objects, e.g. the quarks in a nucleus are not really that distinct. And remember how states Boltzmann counted as distinct turned out to need Bose-Einstein counting.Well obviously it could be wrong, like any theory, but it looks to me as though it contains distinct objects, and does some form of accounting on them. For example colliding an electron and positron creates a gamma ray of a specific wavelength, which could be turned back into the particles again under some circumstances. (Also, you are slightly begging the question. /Why/ do we understand the world in those terms?)
We're big macroscopic things and the stuff important for our survival and reproduction is big macroscopic stuff. And big macroscopic stuff tends to keep it's identity over the time scales of our reproduction.
If you draw the Feynman diagrams for that electron/positron annihilation you find that there are infinitely many of them with all kinds of loops with all kinds of particles which are improbable but not impossible; and what our theory really says is that all those things happen at once and we're just summing them all up to get the Green's function.
Brent -- 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.
