A: It's indeterminate.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> This article from NYTimes.com
> has been sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[snip]
> How Does a Photon Decide Where to Go? That's the Quantum Mystery
>
> April 20, 2002
>
>
>
> In Peter Parnell's play "QED," Alan Alda plays the Nobel
> Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.
[snip]
> If all of scientific knowledge were destroyed and we had
> only one sentence that we could pass on to the next
> generation, what do you think that sentence would be?
>
> I believe it is the simple fact that all things are made of
> atoms.
My proposal: I believe it is the simple fact that
some human beings abstracted from living experience
so far as to conceive that "all things are made of
atoms" -- and, of course, tomorrow we may decide that
it is not the case that all things are made of atoms,
but, if we do, we are likely to replace that human
invention by an even more implausible invention.
I've never seen an atom
and I'm not much interested whether I ever will.*
But I can tell you anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one.
--
* The "tunnelling electron microscope" which won
a couple IBMers a Nobel prize about 15 years ago
does enable us to "see" atoms, in the same
theory- and instrument- laden and mediated way
that telescopes let us see galaxies and
money lets us see value, etc.
[snip]
> But the world of the very small - the tiny particles
> inside the nucleus - that world we lack a complete
> understanding of. Will we ever understand it?
>
> We don't know. But not knowing is much more interesting
> than believing an answer which might be wrong.
I have adopted a certain position, not as a final
conviction, but only as a temporary resting place
along a path. What remains in thinking is the
path itself [the process of thinking ever further
beyond whatever we happen to find ourselves
believing at the moment]. (--Martin Heidegger)
The way is everything; the end is nothing. (--Willa Cather)
Questioning is the piety of thinking [Nur das Fragen
ist die Frommigheit des Denkens(sp?)]. (--Martin Heidegger)
>
> We're lucky to live in an age in which we are still making
> discoveries. It's like discovering a new country - like
> trying to get to a strange, foreign place - a country
> almost beyond our imagining.
[snip]
Apparently even so brilliant and creative a "scientific" thinker
as Dr. Feynman did not "make the transcendental turn" (assimilate
the insights of Kant and his "followers", esp. Husserl).
Apoparently even Dr. Feynman was not a "man without qualities"
[ref. Robert Musil's _The Man Without Qualities_]....
What *was* Kurt Godel studying in Husserl in his
last days at The Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton)?
Will we cross the road?
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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