While examining samples of moon-dust, scientists discovered the stuff is a bit unusual, even by the standards of those who study ethereal stuff and relationships on a regular basis. Moon-dust, seemingly macroscopic stuff, shows quantum properties of the sort usually found only in such entities as individual atoms or subatomic particles. It seems that some … [Read more…]
This article, One Thing Is Certain: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Is Not Dead, gives an interesting summary of one important aspect of what is called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. [T]he uncertainty principle comes in two superficially similar formulations that even many practicing physicists tend to confuse. Werner Heisenberg’s own version is that in observing the world, we … [Read more…]
I’ve advocated the view that our imaginations can encompass what God has created, what the Almighty has manifested in this Creation, but we need examples and stimuli — in a manner of speaking. We need to be courageous and open-minded in our responses to Creation if we are to learn from God, who has a … [Read more…]
In a recent short post, Not Probabilistic Smudges but Relationships, I jumped the gun and said: In James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, he refers to an early theory developed by Feynman and John Wheeler as “a classical theory, not a quantum one. It treated objects as objects, not as probabilistic smudges.” Mr. Gleick … [Read more…]
In James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, he refers to an early theory developed by Feynman and John Wheeler as “a classical theory, not a quantum one. It treated objects as objects, not as probabilistic smudges.” Mr. Gleick is speaking in terms of concepts of mainstream thinkers in physics and I’m not criticizing him, … [Read more…]
As matters currently stand in theories about physical reality and in philosophical analyses of those theories, there are no signs of homogeneity in the nature of spacetime at various scales of time and space though some assume and others hope. In general, created being at the quantum level (think of ‘subatomic’ levels of energy changes … [Read more…]
I’ve finished reading Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but I continue to think about the issues he raised. Some of his attempts to make sense of these “scientific revolutions” involve efforts to make sense of the language used by various groups of scientists. When talking about the need to use a assumption-loaded … [Read more…]
I’m currently reading The Principles of Quantum Mechanics by P.A.M. Dirac, though I’m missing more than I’m getting. With a weak educational background and a lack of the toughness to dig in and learn how to learn on my own, I’d abandoned my physics major in college more than 30 years ago. I made up … [Read more…]
Alastair Rae adds a wrinkle to a famous comment by Einstein: When Einstein said that ‘God does not play dice’, Bohr is said to have replied, ‘Don’t tell God what to do!’ [Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality, Alastair Rae, Cambridge University Press, Canto Edition, 1994, page 22] He notes that there’s some doubt as to … [Read more…]
After discussing a use of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to understand the results of experiments in the fairly straightforward case of the polarization of light-waves and of individual photons, Alastair Rae speculates: [If] we understood properly what the concepts of position and momentum mean on an atomic scale we might find it…illogical to possess definite values … [Read more…]