On 11/18/2014 9:34 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Maybe Schrodinger's Wave Equation doesn't interfere either, only
other worlds
do,
> ?
!
>> and maybe the wave equation is just a way, and certainly not the
only way, humans have of
describing that interference between worlds.
> Indeed,
Then why the "?" ?
> You know positivist physicians still alive? Who?
Every physicist alive uses both Heisenberg's Matrices and Schrodinger's Wave; none use
Positivism or any other school of philosophy because no philosophical franchise is of
the slightest help in doing what scientists want to do, figure out how the world works.
> In math and physics, it is frequent that two apparantly different
theories are
equivalent,
Yes, just like Heisenberg's Matrices and Schrodinger's Wave, they both tell a story with
a identical plot they just use different symbols in the vocabulary of mathematics to do
so, just as 2 books about World War 2 tell the same story but use different symbols in
the vocabulary of the English language to do it; however neither book about World War 2,
no matter how good, is World War 2. I said it before but it's worth repeating, maybe we
should take seriously and think through the implications of what mathematicians have
been saying for years, mathematics is a language.
> but that does not make the thing described into a convention or language.
True. A electron is not a convention or a language, but what about a description of the
electron written in a particular dialect of the language of mathematics, like the
Schrodinger Wave Equation? Yes Schrodinger's Equation does a good job describing the
behavior of a electron, but Dirac's Equation does better, and Feynman's sum over
histories even better. And some equations do a terrible job describing the electron even
though the are grammatically correct sentences in the language of mathematics, that is
to say they are logically self consistent. So maybe you can not only write true
descriptions of the electron in the language of mathematics maybe you can also write the
equivalent of a Harry Potter novel in the language of mathematics. Maybe Cantor's
infinities and the Real Numbers are mathematical Harry Potter novels. Actually I kinda
doubt it but maybe.
In choosing examples, John, you need to keep in mind that many on this list think the
Harry Potter novels are non-fiction - somewhere. :-)
> On the contrary, it points on something real beyond the language.
But that's exactly what I was getting at, maybe it points to something real beyond the
mathematics. I don't insist that is true, maybe mathematics is more than just a
language, but maybe not, I believe it's worth thinking about. Unlike philosophers who
are always certain but seldom correct I just don't know.
Physics has become so abstract and mathematical that it tempts philosophers to conclude
that mathematics is all there is. An interesting question is whether a complete
mathematical description constitutes the thing described? If you had a complete, precise
description of a world and how it works, would it add anything to also say, "It exists"?
Brent
"For the past four centuries, “start with the shadow” has been a spectacularly fruitful
approach to unravelling the mysteries of the universe: one that’s succeeded where greedy
attempts to go behind the shadow have failed."
--- Scott Aaronson
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