On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 02:37:08PM +0000, Marla Vijaya kumar via groups.io wrote: > Many physicists might not care what dialectics is. But every > phenomenon that they talk about is overflowing with dialectics. > Quantum Vaccum Fluctuations to start with – opposite charged > particles popping in to existence and annihilating each other > in a primordial space-time foam. How does science explain that?
The ephemeral virtual particles created as fluctuations of the vacuum are of opposite charge because the net charge is zero. Thus no net charge is created or destroyed. They might equally be viewed as cooperating rather than as opposed particles. I don't think that oppositely charged particles, which are already part of a whole, are good candidates for any kind of dialectical synthesis. It would be like using dialectical materialism to analyze left versus right, or the six faces of a cubic die against one another. They're not opposite except by virtue of the symmetry of the whole. To observe a particle, one must interact with it. For example, to see something, light must be bounced off it. However, when the light hits the object, it changes the object's position and momentum. Therefore, there is a limit to the accuracy of any observation. There is always some uncertainty. This is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The virtual particles have such low energy, they cannot be observed directly. Classical physics didn't have this observational problem. It was assumed that anything could be measured to any arbitrary level of precision. Quantum mechanics blew this up. Now, when we take a measurement, we can only predict the value as a probability distribution function. It allows things which aren't possible in classical physics, such as the vacuum fluctuations or Hawking radiation. (The classical treatment of a black hole doesn't let anything escape, because the escape velocity exceeds that of light. Hawking realized that, since laws had become probabilistic, there was a small but non-zero chance that things could escape from black holes: thus, black holes can emit what is now called Hawking radiation. Who would have expected that black holes could evaporate?) The virtual particles from the vacuum fluctuations exist as possible measurements of a zero value, which is never exact. It is a probability distribution function with an average probability or likelihood of zero, but which -- like the particles at the surface of a black hole -- don't always do the average thing. On average, they do what's expected, but not in any specific instance. Einstein didn't like the idea of the randomness, he said that God didn't play dice with the Universe, but that appears to be what happens. There is a finite probability that things, impossible in the view of classical physics, happen anyway, albeit with low probability. The uncertainty principle implies that an observer is always part of the system which includes the observed object. This implies that there can be no objective, external reality. However, as I understand it (and I'm not too familiar with dialectical materialism), one of the important bases of dialectical (and other) materialisms is the existence of an objective, external reality. So it seems that dialectical materialism can't be used at the quantum level. The above conclusion looks like it might hold, even when the mind is seen as a result of physical activity. For instance, even if the mind were entirely the product of brain activity, it still must be part of a larger system including observed objects. So, even if reality is physical, it can't be external any longer, and every observer affects his or her observations. The textbook I found on dialectical materialism is Ira Gollobin's Dialectical Materialism: Its Laws, Categories, and Practice. (Out of print, but a well written and thorough coverage of the topic. I recommend it: it was the first treatment that made sense of a lot of things that were simply opaque to me before. It also explains a lot of the history of the topic.) However, even though the book is copyright 1986, it makes no mention of the challenges created by quantum mechanics (which really started in the 1920s). In fact, as far as I can tell from my reading there and elsewhere, there has been little or no development of dialectical materialism since the middle of the 20th century. (It has been employed since then, but the methodology and theory itself doesn't seem to have changed.) Most of what I've found since then is cricial more than approving. I do find it fascinating how dialectical materialism relates the class conditions to their philosophical perspectives, to how they relate to the rest of the world. But particles don't think much, nor do they seem to have any philosophy. Their minds are simple. If someone knows of an example of dialectical materialism used anywhere in the world of subatomic physics, then please let me know. All of this Marxist stuff is new to me, I very well could be missing something, but as things have shown themselves to me so far it doesn't look like it would work. In a way, the new "holistic" approach to physics, which incorporates the observer into the system, matches well the tendency of dialectical materialism to go ever-deeper into a system and to explain all of its parts. It has been used as a way to view, for example, ecological systems, where the inter-connectedness of the components is material. So maybe a modification toward some kind of "dialectical holism" is possible, just as Hegel's dialectical idealism served as a basis for Marx's dialectical materialism. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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