On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 12:39:05PM -0400, phil henshaw wrote:
>
> I've been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein's enigmatic
> complaint. In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can't
> locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to
> accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of
> the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below). On
> the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it
> seems unlikely. "God doesn't roll dice", is about something else.
> One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was
> Niels Bohr's long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr
> 1949). Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the
> elimination of causality and continuity.
>
I think's Einstein's reaction is symptomatic of a belief that there is
a totally objective point of view. In "Complexity and Emergence" I
argue that this belief gets in the way of understanding the notions of
complexity and emergence. The Quantum story is telling us the same
thing - that there is no observer independent point of view - at best
we have overlapping subjective points of view, and physics is about
characterising the the overlapping parts (I also take this as the
message of Vic Stenger's new book Comprehensible Cosmos, although Vic
himself is a little too old school for this interpretation).
Cheers
--
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics 0425 253119 (")
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
