I do not question the necessity of instrumentation - please don't get me wrong. What I am pointing out is that whenever we must rely, however, on instrumentation, formulas, etc., we introduce one more variable into the equation of perception. The instrumentation may be perfect, the formulas proven, etc., but they are there and serve to help us interpolate our observations. We should be aware of them. It is not that we must distrust them, but as we understand from the Uncertainty Principle, many of the items we want to study at the subatomic level can't be measured without affecting them in some way. Thus at best we get an incomplete view of that object.

For many tasks, we don't need a perfectly accurate description of the subject of study. It is not necessary to know how many atoms comprise the automobile coming at us on the other side of the road, but it is pretty important to be able to fairly accurately gauge its speed and path to avoid collision. Maybe with quantum physics, we need more detail than we can presently obtain to resolve its idiosyncrasies because at present the very instrumentation we are relying on introduces the very problems we struggle with.

Thanks. I have a pretty good idea of who it is.

Thanks.

And I agree that philosophy affects how we go about solving problems. I just think we have to be careful about approaching problems from an inherently philosophical standpoint rather than a scientific one. That's the same approach used by the Global Warming fanatics and the criticisms of their strategy are about how their ideology causes them to justify their results. I don't want us to get trapped into the same fallacy.

Excellent conversations. This is a pretty esoteric complex topic and I was telling K that I thought the conversation was very high level (even MM). Thanks

Relationships presuppose (or are logically dependent upon) entities that relate, just as consciousness presupposes existence. The existence of entities presupposes the existence of the space and time which they inhabit. Entities (at least as we know them) cannot exist without space and time. Relationships cannot exist without entities. Therefore space and time cannot be relationships. The logical order of priority is (space and time), then entities, then relationships.

Unusually, it was not me

Again, you took a hit; back to +1 now. I am not sure how a different philosophy would work in the design of experiments. In other words, did Heisenberg, Bohr, and the others actually work in an objective way because that is demanded by the goals, even though they claimed some other non-objective explanation of what was in their heads at the moment?

People compartmentalize their thinking. See ewv's comment about the honors math student who was not sure that 2+2=4. (https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post.... Obviously, he must have accepted that as being true or he could not have gotten to class in the first place. (Is this a door? How do I know? It might be an alligator..._)

Objectivist professor and movie advisor Dr. David Kelley once pointed out in a lecture that people who claim that there is no such thing as reality drive their cars as if there is.

As for the problem of transduction - instruments versus "natural" senses - I am wearing reading glasses right now. I have a telescope, three binoculars, a slew of hand lenses, and two microscopes. And when you stop and think about it, my FM tuner is another instrument.

Asking if we "truly" perceive the subatomic or transgalactic has a lot of problems. First, it supposes that a "true" reality exists different from the one we perceive. If so, what is it? And how do you know? Second, it assumes that after billions of years of evolution - 4.5 here on Earth, 13.5 in the known universe at large - we have not yet adapted sufficient sensory abilities. Moreover, not you but other people seem to accept that the birds and bees and fishes in the seas actually do perceive reality, but we are specially cursed. Furthermore, we are able to chip flint into arrowheads and that works all right, but when we build radio telescopes or electron microscopes none of that reality applies -- even though it seems to work well enough for automobiles and jet aircraft, FM radios and digital television.

I understand - I assert that we all do - that different people perceive things differently. It is the "thing" that is independent of all of us observers. Saturday Night Live had a skit with John Goodman playing a football referee answering questions from fans. "Is it hard to see the game with your head in that position? ... Do you have a little TV where you watch a different game than the one we are seeing?..."

I don't know who voted you down, but I put you back to 1. Your questions are honest and deserve sincere replies.

See my comments above about the fundamentalist who taught biology. (https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...) He taught correctly, according to mainstream science. He just made a point of inserting a religious statement about Creation into the beginning of every semester. And it came out it other conversations outside of his classroom. The contradictions were his own to deal with. The instructor's literalist creationism did not prevent him from teaching science. It did prevent him from doing science. Objectivism says that if you have the right philosophy, you get farther than if you do not.

I have a long review and criticism of David Harriman's book, The Logical Leap on my blog. He commits more than a few errors. However, it remains an important work because of the application of Objectivist epistemology to the practice of science. I recommend that you read his book for yourself.

See my reply above on "quantum quackery."

https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

At Lansing Community College, in the 70s and 80s, we had a biology instructor (Ph.D.) who was a Christian fundamentalist. It got to the point where someone challenged someone else to an open debate and the science instructors went at it. I was a bit disappointed in the realists. Nothing informs like Objectivism.

I saw a "Pascal's Triangle" pachinko display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in 1975.

In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum (Prometheus Books, 1995), University of Colorado physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck’s constant (h). “If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically.” -- http://www.michaelshermer.com/2005/01...

I just spent a couple of hours reading about "quantum quackery." Much of the source can be attributed to Bohr, Heisenberg, and others in the 1920s. However, even then, Einstein was not alone among the realists. What launched the nonsense in our time was a chance statement by Murray Gell-Mann about the "eight-fold path."

It was about the same as Oppenheimer's allusion to Shiva on watching the first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer did not intend that physics blend with Hindu religion. Neither did Gell-Mann expect The Tao of Physics and the Dancing Wu-Li Masters and Deepak Chopra's "quantum healing."

If you want quotable quotes pro and con, googling will provide them. Some physics professors embrace the nonsense. Others keep to realism.

Of course, "realism" in its formal sense is also erroneous, just not egregiously so. Feynman is an example. He had no patience with nonsense. He taught (preached) being more demanding of your own ideas because you are the person most likely to fool yourself. But he also accepted induction as meaning that we can never be 100% certain because something new might come along. For Feynman, though, that was only a warning, not a way of life.

Writing about physics for my blog ("Is Physics a Science?"), I actually went to the physics library at the University of Texas and really looked at the indexes of eight different textbooks. My investigation was prompted by a journal article ("What Counts as an Experiment?: A Transdisciplinary Analysis of Textbooks, 1930-1970," Andrew S. Winston and Daniel J. Blais. The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 109, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 599-616). I actually did the research. Harriman just set up a strawman.

You could do the same thing for neurosurgery.

N: You might have a clot in your brain.
P: Might?
N: We are not sure because reality is uncertain.
P: Don't you have PET scans or CAT scans or something?
N: Well, those are quantum based and the indeterminancy principle rules out certainty.
P: So this is exploratory surgery?
N: All surgery is exploratory, even after it is completed.
P: Huh?
N: We can never be sure of the results.

So, who is N?

Heisenberg Schmeisenberg: he was just one guy. Feynman, Szilard, Einstein, von Neumann, they all wrote about the work of physics. If they have some common errors in their epistemologies, then address those.

It would also be required to show how their fallacious ideas caused them to not discover some truth in physics that you, as an Objectivist, did discover because of your better philosophy.

Space and time are not containers. Space is a relationship between entities, not a thing. Time is a relationship as things change, as measured by some regular motion.

Look across the room. You don't see a "space" thing holding it, you see entities with size as one of their attributes. You see through the air, which is a gas also with a volume and shape around its edges. The space is a relation between them, not a component. Now focus on something changing. Time is the measure of change of existence, measured by a regular event like a pendulum or by the clock on the mantle. The temporal relation is between what something was and what it has become as its identity changes, a relationship between changing identities. Space and time are in the universe; the universe is not in space and time.

This doesn't mean that space and time are fantasies or subjective as created by the mind as in Augustine or Kant -- they are facts of existence which we grasp through abstraction of characteristics of entities and their change. Conscious awareness is required to objectively grasp spacial and temporal relationships just as any aspects of the universe.

There is no succession of multiple universes each with a separate existence metaphysically flagged with a time that flows as a thing. There is only one universe and it simply exists. Part of its nature is to change, from which we abstract the concept of time. From those conceptions you can understand other relationships as you think conceptually in terms of where things are relative to you, and what they are, were or might be as things change. Only with those concepts can you think in terms of something in space and time and measure it for physics. This has nothing to do with what is "necessary for humans to exist and function"; the facts of the universe come first. If many aspects of the universe were factually different we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

The historical Newtonian philosophical idea of an absolute space as a container and a flow of time which would exist without entities was false. There is a large body of writing explaining the evolving history and problems with it. Newton's philosophical notions of absolute space and time were non-empirical, theological ideas. See for example Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science: The Scientific, Galileo, Newton and their Contemporaries, and Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics. There have been a variety of theories of concepts of space and time through history.

General relativity is not a 4 dimensional Absolute Space-Time extension of Newton's notion with curvature added. There is no 4 dimensional space-time giant 'thing' that is curved. The equations of general relativity are abstract equations pertaining to real entities in the universe like any other equations of physics.

The article is about the relation of philosophy to physics as fundamental, not a description of the the specific nature of physical phenomena. If you want something else you want a different article. It is very basic and elementary, but necessary as a foundation.

Neither quantum phenomena nor anything else requires mysticism but mystical and other subjectivist rationalizations are packaged with the theory and claimed to be confirmed by the physics, which isn't true. That is what the article is about. It contrasts that with a general rational approach of reality-based science.

The problem of nonsensical philosophy and meaning of the theory is not just a matter of a lay crowd reviewing it too casually, it is openly promoted that way. Most actual technical physics doesn't discuss it at all, but it is in courses, however briefly, in response to the expected demands for explanation. We have all been through that. The stock pseudo-answers are based on speculations concocted by earlier physicists, such as the Copengagen interpretation and Positivism, largely adopted by consensus and passed on, however informally. It can be read in text books and histories. Moreover, philosophy is at least implicit in any science as the fundamental view of what science is for and what epistemology is required, and bad philosophy is at least implicit in much of the rationalistic assumptions of modern theoretical physics as it drifts under bad influences. Many physicists don't work in such realms and have at least implicitly a more rational approach in their own specialty, but for anyone who thinks about these subjects in search of understanding of the meaning of the theory there are big problems. Some physicists do grapple with it explicitly. See for example, Greenstein and Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge.

Space and time are relations? Relations between what? Any relationship requires two or more entities that relate in some manner. Relationships occur within space and time, but that does not mean that space and time themselves are relationships. I call them “components,” in the sense that space and time are irreducible aspects of the known universe that are necessary for humans to exist and function.

I got to see the Pieta there. It was an amazing sculpture.
IBM had all sorts of displays around because the lines for the show were huge. The main attraction wasn't a continuous feed dark ride (examples: Ford's pavilion, Bell Telephone, and GM's Futurama). Rather it had a giant set of bleacher seats that ascended at an angle up into a giant white oblate spheroid where you watched an entertaining and informative movie. Standing still in line for long periods was more trying than slow walking for the continuous entry attractions.
My favorite small company attraction, the Traveler's Insurance pavilion, was a hybrid of brief fits and starts. It contained a dark winding hallway with 13 large dioramas, each of which lit gradually and supplied several minutes of narration to depict The Triumph of Man. It started with the dawn of man, then fire, agriculture, cities, Rome, and so on up to the most recent 50 years and their amazing progress. At the end, you could fill out a form and they'd send you a free phonograph record and picture sheet of the exhibit. I still have it and listen to it occasionally.

OK. I get that. Thanks. +1.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary; and those that do not.

I was at that Fair and do not remember that demonstration. My goal that day was to see Michaelangelo's Pieta.

My activities at the research lab were not an argument linking quantum mechanics to mysticism in the Harriman article.
The article simply failed to present (to me) a satisfying description of the nature of physical phenomena, starting with its self-contradictory title. Quantum physics and other portions of modern physics do not require mysticism, which is quite the opposite of science. They merely suggest a mystical interpretation when reviewed too casually by a lay crowd.

He seems to have accepted Heisenberg's epistemology. Theoretical concepts of entities and phenomena not directly perceivable require a very clear, systematic understanding of the epistemology of theory formation and of the hierarchy of high level abstractions based on abstractions to refer to inferred entities.

Before IOE there was no idea of how to do that, and all kinds of otherwise valid abstractions -- from atomic particles to EM waves to irrational numbers to 'infinity' and Hilbert's Formalism -- have foundered on ad hoc, anti-conceptual concoctions undermining the kind of understanding most scientists would like to have.

It requires more than the technical details. I get the impression that someone tried to do that with LibertyBelle without explaining and emphasizing the conceptual hierarchical dependency, as if it were logically in parallel with the arithmetic everyone knows. Before you can develop a clock arithmetic that amounts to ordinary arithmetic with "starting over" every 12 hours you first have to know arithmetic. Too often we see people running around as intellectual nihilists trying to befuddle others, as if "science" says "2+2 is not 4" is just as good, and that seems to be what happened to her either directly or through someone else's equivalent ingrained bad epistemology. No wonder she revolted.

Quick Newtonian answer: NO!
Longer quantum answer, yes with an Avogadro number of marbles and detection at sub-nuclear dimensions. The amount of diffraction is related to the wavelength. Large wavelengths such as with sound (inches to feet) and light (microns) are easy to diffract. The wavelength for marbles would be utterly infinitesimal, which is why you don't see large solids diffract. The diffraction sizes degenerate into classical Newtonian behavior—no observable diffraction.
Similarly, cars traveling at half the speed of light would show huge relativistic effects. While passing at highway speeds (ten millionths of c) they still undergo relativistic Lorentz contraction, but the effect is so incredibly tiny that it is immeasurable compared to much larger effects, such as micro-compression from wind resistance and tiny thermal distortions from many sources. Think in terms of numbers like 1 over 10 to the 30th or worse. I've heard a suitable description while traveling in Tennessee as: "It don't make no ne'er mind."

However, if you drop a large number of marbles through sets of suitably spaced pegs, you'll get a Pascal's Triangle distribution from the pseudo-random chaos. I saw a nice example of this with balls dropping through a grid at the IBM pavilion at the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair. A beautiful example of binomial coefficients. If you get a chance and a space-time machine, go see it.