Francesco D'Isa <francesco.d...@gmail.com> wrote in: https://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/DIsa_Nothing_is_fundamental.pdf
> > Nagarjuna’s thought is based on the idea that nothing exists > intrinsically. Everything exists only relationship to something else; Well, if there were only one object in the universe it would be meaningless to say that object had properties, and absolute relativism could not exist because there would be nothing to relate to it. > > Absolute relativism, however, as we have said at the beginning, presents > us with some serious problems. Very true. Einstein certainly did not believe that everything was relative, he insisted that the speed of light (aka the speed of causality) was fundamental and never changed, in fact before deciding on the word "relativity" he considered calling his idea "the theory of invariance". > > The concept of causality can be misleading, because it always brings us to > consider only a small portion of the causal network in order to obtain a > prediction. And it also assumes that every event have a cause, but there is no logical reason why that must always be true, and indeed modern physics tells us it is not always true. > > Does this ballerina spin right or left? That is a interesting example because, although Einstein didn't know it when he came up with his theory, it turns out that the speed of light isn't the only thing that is absolute; there is a absolute and fundamental difference between spinning lest and spinning right. In 1956 Chien-Shiung Wu cooled radioactive cobalt-60 atoms to near absolute zero and placed them in a strong magnetic field so that all the cobalt atoms were spinning in the same direction. She found that about 60% of the gamma rays the cobalt produced were emitted in one direction and 40% in the opposite direction. This lack of symmetry surprised almost everyone except for Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang who predicted it and got the Nobel Prize for doing so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment#The_experiment John K Clark -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
