Pete wrote:
> I think you want to be using the word "scientism". It is a very useful
> word.
Yeah, I know that word. Only nobody would ever admit to being an
adherent of scientism; they'd think, if I asked, that I was accusing
them of belonging to a weird cult. And the popular dogmata of
scientism are so heterogeneous as to belie the specious unity of a
single name, anyhow. The Church of Universal Schismatic Scientism,
Heterodox.
> Scientism is to science as truthiness is to truth.
Yes. Very good. I like that.
> I do like your explanation of the mechanism of the scanning
> tunneling microscope, it works for me. I'd only edit that the
> electrons are detected by simply measuring the electric current
> which flows from the probe tip to the subject surface.
Ah, well, that obscures the whole point, which was that the
theory-conformant and experimentally demonstrable operation of the
STEM so dramatically violates good sense that, like the rube gazing up
at his first giraffe, one is inclined to say, "They ain't no such
animal."
See, if you have a specimen teenager, on Saturday afternoon you might
well say something like, "He's probably at his girlfriend's house or
else at the beach." You imply that there are two canonical "places"
and that there is a probability distribution for the teenager between
GF's house and beach. But in fact, at all times the teenager is
*somewhere*. [1] He may, in fact be in neither of the two allowed
places but in that case we know -- believe with unshakable conviction
-- then he is continuously present at a sequence of points in between.
That's why we call it "the continuum, after all.
But those electrons, well, they weren't, with certainty, on the pointy
thing anyway. They were just probably there and extremely improbably
on the other thing. At some point, some electrons that probably were
on the pointy thing become more probably on the other thing, where
they are then observed. If you lose all the "probably"s from that
semantic mare's nest, then electrons that were on one side of the gap
instantaneously stop being there and start being on the other side of
the gap. They're never in continuous transit in the intevening space.
And I have a hard time thinking of that as a flow of current, even if
you *can* measure it. It's as if a million teenagers were at the A&W
drive-in in town and then, when the surf came up, a few thousand
vanished and instantaneously re-appeared at the beach. How could you
then measure the traffic between A&W the beach?
Sorry. I'm dragging us all even further off-topic. There is this: it
seems that it's easier to talk convincingly about the arcana of
science that I admittedly don't understand than it is to contribute
constructivly to a dialog about the societal problems that this list
aspires to address in some useful way.
I have ripe tomatoes to pick....
- Mike
---
PS:
PV>
http://t2k-canada.nd280.org/Conferences/cap2010/wilking_cap2010.pdf/at_download/file
7 Meg, too big a gulp for my feeble dial-up connection. Too bad.
My only affair with neutrinos has been speculative and purely
aesthetic.
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/gallery/tuns-gates.html
Is the smooth/lumpy distribution of neutrinos in the universe
still an open question, Pete?
For that matter (going even further astray) if the Higgs is what
gives other things mass, do neutrinos just have fewer Higgses
than, say, protons? Or what? Inquiring minds want to know, even
when they don't expect to understand the answer.
[1] "Everybody gotta be *somewhere*" as the wino said when rousted
from the park bench. Not true, apparently, for electrons.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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