RE: Are Particles 'Physical Things' or 'Abstract Ideas'?
April 14, 2015 at 12:57 am
(This post was last modified: April 14, 2015 at 1:03 am by Anomalocaris.)
(April 13, 2015 at 10:19 pm)Nestor Wrote:(April 13, 2015 at 9:58 pm)bobkolker Wrote: How many people were killed by radiation a Fukishima or Chernobyl?: More than 1. All done to death by those "unreal" particles.That's a good point. I feel like an idiot for not having thought of that, tbh.
Bob Kolker
That kind of settles the question about fields, no?
No. That particular argument settles only that something from Fukushima is somehow correlated with damage and death. It doesn't settle whether there are real particles there in the something or somehow, or are the particles merely an unreal idea mistakenly assigned responsibility that rightly belong to a real something else.
(April 12, 2015 at 5:57 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: As long as we describe them in the language of mathematics, they will be unreal.
What would it mean to say that a particle is real? How would you describe its realityness?
The first statement would seem to me to be unsupportable for vast majority of plausible answers to the two following questions.
