On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 3:10 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> Don't tell me that the number four is in the physical universe, like
> those four apples on your table, as this would be a confusion between a
> thing and a representation/incarnation of that thing
>
OK I won't talk about 4 apples, but what about 4 spheres or even one
sphere, is that part of the physical universe? If a dodecahedron, one of
the Platonic solids, is part of the physical universe, why isn't eleven,
one of the prime numbers?
> What is in the physical universe?
>
> The Mount Everest, plausibly in many close branches of the mulitiverse.
> This cup of coffee.
> The black Hole suspected at the center of the Milky Way galaxy,
> One of the enzymes beta-galactosidase in the 456,6789th, bacteria in my
> mouth (counting from the left).
> One of the Englert-Brout-Higgs boson detected recently.
> The moon, the sun.
>
> What is not in the physical universe?
>
>
>
The numbers.
> The beta-galactosidase enzyme
> The notion of atoms,
> The ideas,
> The models of first order logical theories
> The monster group,
> The real line,
> The digital machines, and their computations,
> The persons, Consciousness,
> the dreams of physical universes, ...the sharable persistent
> one, and the others.
>
Thank you for giving me specific examples but I'm having difficulty in
figuring out how you determine what elements to put in the Physical
Universe Set and what elements to put in the Not Physical Universe Set.
You say that the idea of the sun is not part of the physical universe but
the sun itself is, however the idea of the sun is the only thing we know
about for sure, we can say for certain that we have ideas about the idea of
the sun, but the sun itself not so much. What is behind the idea of the
sun, what exactly is the sun? I don't know but I do know that the sun is
not the heat on my face nor is it a image on my retina nor is it a idea in
my mind, it is something more fundamental than that and more abstract. So
if your assignment of elements into the Physical Universe Set and Not
Physical Universe Set is correct then the physical universe is more
fundamental and more abstract then the non-physical universe.
Incidentally are events in the distant future, even the infinitely distant
future, part of the physical universe? I ask this because you said a Black
Hole is part of the physical universe but technically it takes a infinite
amount of time for a black hole to form, time slows down to a stop at the
event horizon so from the outside you will never see anything cross the
event horizon although if you were to jump into one you could see it and be
transported into the infinite future. Yes I know mathematically this makes
no sense but there may be some reason to think that physicists may be
better at handling infinity than mathematicians.
Richard Feynman is considered a great genius because he figured out how to
get numbers out of quantum electromagnetic problems, he ended up with a
infinite term plus a finite term divided by a infinite term plus a
different finite term, he then just canceled out the 2 infinite terms and
divided the 2 finite terms and got a finite number that could be checked
against exparament. Any mathematician would tell you that you can't handle
infinite terms like that, even Feynman was very uncomfortable with it and
called the thing he got the Nobel Prize for a bit of a con job. And yet it
worked, Feynman used this method to predict that the magnetic moment of the
electron should not be exactly 1 as classical physics demands but
1.00115965246, today the best experimental value is found to be
1.00115965221. That is the equivalent of measuring the distance from Los
Angeles to New York, a distance of over 3,000 miles, to within the width of
a human hair, despite what mathematicians may say any theory with that
degree of precision can not in any meaningful sense be called wrong.
John K Clark
magnetic moment
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