[extropy-chat] Nothingness and that Infinite Chain of Causesthingy.

[steven mckenzie]

nonsense in science, oh forbid
remember rocks do not fall from the sky, and
continents don't move and till 1924 the milkyway was
the universe


--- gts <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 23:48:13 -0400, Jef Allbright
> <jef at jefallbright.net>
> wrote:
> 
> > Welcome back, Gordon
> 
> Thanks Jef.
> 
> > As to the second part of your statement, I would
> suggest that you  
> > certainly should *not* ignore that which appears
> to make no sense
> 
> You're right; my comment was a bit tongue in in
> cheek. :) I was thinking,  
> for example,
> of Popper's criticism of Bohr's complementarity
> principle as an example of
> paradoxical nonsense in science, nonsense we should
> not accept as doctrine.
> 
> Popper writes on page 135 of _Conjectures and
> Refutations_:
> 
> "[The principle of complementarity] was used in a
> defensive mood - to  
> rescue the
> existing theory; and the principle of
> complementarity has (I believe for
> this reason) remained completely sterile within
> physics. In twenty-seven
> years it has produced nothing except some
> philosophical discussions, and
> some arguments for confounding the critics
> (especially Einstein). I do
> not believe that physicists would have accepted such
> an ad hoc principle
> had they understood it was ad hoc."
> 
> In another book (one I have not yet read) Popper
> argues for a philosophy
> of objective probability to make sense of quantum
> weirdness, one which
> presumably does away with subjectivist
> interpretations and the
> contradiction that is the complementarity principle.
> He argues, I believe,
> for the existence of *real objective propensities*
> to explain the apparent
> statistical randomness of quantum phenomena. (Not
> sure,  but as I recall
> Heisenberg had a similar idea of objective
> propensities, which he called
> "potentia". I've looked for a Heisenberg quote to
> confirm this memory of
> mine but couldn't find one.)
> 
> -gts
> 
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> 


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