RE: determinism versus indeterminism
January 9, 2009 at 4:36 pm
(This post was last modified: January 9, 2009 at 4:36 pm by DD_8630.)
(January 9, 2009 at 1:00 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: You put it as if indeterminism is a consequence of a physical law.Ah, no. It's not that quantum mechanics places practical limits on how accurate we can measure position, momentum, energy, etc, but rather that it a quantum particle truly does not have an exact position, momentum, etc. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (ΔxΔp ≥ ħ/2, EΔt ≥ ħ/2, etc) is merely the mathematical representation of this quantum fuzzing of physical variables.
I consider that more correctly is to say that the uncertainity principle is an expression of indeterminism, and even only a partial one.
In fact the difference between the Newtonian possibility of knowing the exact position of an object, knowing it's momentum and speed and the quantum mechanical possibility regarding a subatomical particle is only a statistical one.
That means that the position of the particle is not totally random but
predictable within some limits as expressed in the mathematical relation.
So it is not determinate insofar as you cannot determine what variable A is now, nor can you know what it will be. Indeed, because of these fuzzy positions, momenta, energy, etc, the particle's future position (such that it is) is random: its associated wavefunction assigns it future possible positions, but nothing determines where it will be.
(January 9, 2009 at 1:00 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: In other words the uncertainity principle is an expression of a dual form a physical laws including determinism as well as indeterminism.I disagree. At a stretch, you could say that quantum indeterminism approximates to classical determinism (as per the Bohr correspondence principle), but ultimately quantum mechanics does not incorporate determinism.
(January 9, 2009 at 1:00 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: About the Casimir effect as a creation "ex nihilo" I still have my reserves because it is not only "counterintuitive" as Purple Rabbit put it in such a fine English expression but it is straight "antiintuitive" ,which may be the same but a little bit stronger as I see in your "ex nihilo creation".But is that really a criticism? Yes, it would be nice it the world worked intuitively, but our brains evolved to scream at and have sex with those monkeys in the other tree. The subtleties of subatomic mechanics never affected our brains' evolution.
As Dawkins so finely put it, we live in 'middle world': too big to feel quantum effects, too small to feel complex gravitational effects, and too slow to feel relativistic effects. Classical mechanics is so appealing to us because that's all our brains had to cope with: to us, things might as well be purely classical.
Sadly, they're not .
(January 9, 2009 at 1:00 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: I would not dare to contradict scientist who affirm the ex nihilo effect would we have more large knowledge about the antimatter,which we don't.It obeys the same laws as normal matter. Antimatter is just matter with the opposite electric charge: electrons (matter) and positrons (antimatter) are exactly the same, except their electric charges are opposite (-e and [/i]e[/i], respectively).
Physics is now blundering about the dark matter and I have not heard about any physicist of a high stature as Hawking,Penrose or others to have found the basic laws which govern antimatter.
It's not mysterious. It's just hard to contain: it annihilates upon contact with normal matter.
(January 9, 2009 at 1:00 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: So I would be more carefully by saying that the Casimir effect is "apparently " ex nihilo at the level of our knowledge about antimatter but that do not exclude the possibility to find in the future a still undisclosed causal phenomenon to it.I exclude no possibility. Indeed, I have always thought that quantum mechanics would be superseded by something more refined, in much the same way that classical mechanics is superseded by quantum.
(January 9, 2009 at 1:00 pm)josef rosenkranz Wrote: As an anecdote ,we know from history that the kings of the German dynasty of the Hohenzollern ,who ruled for a long time in Europe had this slogan written on their royal emblem "Nihil sine Deo" .I bow to your impeccable logic, sir.
Putting together "Creation ex nihilo" with "Nihil sine Deo" we get
"Creation=Deo" q.e.d.
"I am a scientist... when I find evidence that my theories are wrong, it is as exciting as if the evidence proved them right." - Stargate: SG1
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, -- a mere heart of stone. - Charles Darwin
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, -- a mere heart of stone. - Charles Darwin