Conference hydra::dejavu

    >... It is a synchronistic posting ....
    
    Hmm. Synchronosity strikes again! :-)
    
    Maybe there's saomething to it...
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

	    Tomorrow's physics can be expected to be a superset of
	today's physics, not a rebuttal.  To use the "bleen and grue"
	illustration, tommorrow's science won't say "the sky is grue,"
	it will say "the sky used to be bleen, but now it's grue."
	(Or I could use Newton's laws, which work fine until you get
	near the speed of light.)
			<_Jym_>

    I think what some folk are afraid of it that "the heart of the lotus
    is in the smell was true yesterday, but now it's in the petals."
     That is, some people are a bit leery of a relatavistic or metastable
    sort of mysticism.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

    "Mystical" and "mysticism" have at least as many definitions as
    "psychic," so I'm not sure what that book means when it says modern
    physics offers no support to a mystical world view.
    
    One thing modern physics DOES do is knock the stuffings out of the
    rigid, clockwork materialism that held sway for about three centuries.
    This envisioned a universe that consisted simply and solely of ideally
    rigid particles moving through Euclidean space over "Euclidean"
    time, propelled by central force fields.  It's very elegant, very
    tidy, very commonplace (once you've got use to it), very imaginable.
    And wrong.
    
    It was relativity and quantum mechanics that spawned the scientific
    bon mots, "The universe is stranger than we can imagine" and "We
    are not sure if your theory is crazy enough to be true."  They made
    it clear that the world may be understandable, but it is not really
    imaginable.  That's at least tinged with one meaning of "mystical."
    It certainly bothered the hell out of the anti-mystical temperaments
    of late 19th-century science and philosophy.
    
    Quantum goes even further.  According to the Copenhagen Interpretation
    of quantum mechanics, advocated by Niels Bohr and opposed by Einstein,
    mind is an essential and irreducible part of everyday physical process.
    This is because, according to quantum theory, physical systems cna
    easily and frequently get into "mixed states" and states in which
    physical measures like position, time, momentum, and energy are
    uncertain.  According to Bohr, these systems really have no certain
    physical state until the are observed.  The act of observation,
    the touch of a mind, makes the physical system collapse to a particular
    state.
    
    Now, Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation is not the only one available.
    But it is the best-publicized and most widely accepted (though I
    know most physicists don't think much about their acceptance).  And it 
    certainly has a mystical ring to it.  More precisely, it sounds like
    close kin to Platonic or Hegelian idealism.
                          
    So I can see how some people might use it as bolstering evidence
    for a mystical world view.  They may or may not go too far, of course.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    
    Bohr did NOT say "touch of the mind" or any such, as far as I'm
    aware.  He was talking about "observation", not in the sense of
    there being an intellectual observor, but more in the sense of
    the interaction of "particles" (as much as such things exist).
    
    It is not true that modern physics requires a mind to be anything
    more than a complex set of molecules, which is what your note about
    "minds" implies.
    
    /Bevin

    	There must be a truth in it all and hopefully this will win
    out over opinion, no matter how persuasive that opinion is.  As
    Jack Webb says, "just the facts, mam.  Just the facts."....Jorge'

    Re .5
    
    Unfortunately, mere physical interaction does not remove the
    uncertainties of quantum events.  Eugene Wigner pointed this out
    in a thought-experiment now called "Wigner's Friend."  It's a sequel
    to the better-known thought-experiment of Schoedinger's Cat.
    
    The two of them go like this:
    
    Take a cat and put it in an "infernal device."  The device is a
    box containing a capsule of poison gas.  The capsule will be opened
    automatically if the mechanism it tripped by a radioactive decay
    particle.  We also put in a sample of radioactive material.  It
    is spitting out particles slowly and completely randomly; according
    to quantum mechanical analysis, there is a 50% chance that the sample
    will emit a particle in the next ten minutes and thus trip the
    mechanism, release the poison, and kill the cat.
    
    Then we wait ten minutes.  At the end of ten minutes, according
    to the theory, the most complete possible physical description of
    the cat is a "mixed state" of 50% dead, 50% alive.
    
    This is bizarre enough, but everyone knows you could just lift the
    lid and take a look at the cat.  You wouldn't see a "mixed cat,"
    but a live one or a dead one.  This is where the next thought
    experiment starts.
    
    Suppose a friend goes in to look for you.  He opens the lid and
    looks.  Now consider a complete physical description of the friend.
    He too goes into a mixed state.  50% chance he sees a dead cat,
    50% chance he sees a live cat.  Then he comes out and tells you.
    YOU, theoretically, go into a mixed state.
    
    There is nothing in quanutm mechanics that can unmix the state.
    Yet no one has ever seen a mixed state.  Perhaps Bohr did not conclude
    that it took the touch of a mind to unmix the states, but that is
    what Wigner concluded.  Einstein concluded that quantum mechanics
    was incomplete. (I suspect he was right.)
    
    Earl Wajenberg