Not Even Wrong? - String Theory (Warning - A GUT Thread)

[dr_mabeuse]

There was an article in a recent New Yorker about the apparent failure of String Theory to provide a final, Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of the Universe after 30 years of trying.

A GUT is a single theory that explains all subatomic particles and the four known forces of nature as manifestations of a single, simpler priciple. It's the big HOW of the universe, the Holy Grail physicists have been looking for for about 80 years now, ever since Einstein, who dedicated his life to finding it and failed.

String Theory developed in the 70's when some physicists discovered that subatomic particles could be thought of as "super strings" vibrating in different dimensions, kind of like a guitar string vibrates in our 4 dimensions. In the simplest string theory universe, 9 dimensions are required, to describe all the different particles, 5 of which we can't perceive.

I say "simplest", because there are now hundreds of ways to create string theory universes, and no one knows which ones may be right or wrong. The reason for this is, there are no ways to test these theories. There are no expriments you can do, and no predictions that they make than can be verified or disproved. So string theory as it exists after 30 years of work is a bunch of elegant mathematics that do a fine job of describing things as they are, but lead us nowhere. As one of its detractors now says, it's "not even wrong". It's beyond right or wrong. According to the late philospher of science Karl Popper, that means it's not even science.

I mention all this because in string theory and the hunt for the Grand Unified Theory of the Universe, science may have run up against its limit, and this is probably very much like what the limit looks like - a theory that can neither be proven nor disproven; beyond experimental verification. We've learned all these is to know about this subject.

That's not to say that there still isn't a lot of science to be done and a lot of things to be discovered, but this is the first time as far as I know where science might have taken us as far as its possible for science to go. It's kind of interesting to think about - whether there is an ultimate limit to how much we can know, and what we do once we know it all.

 

[NoJo]

Yep, String theory is up against the ropes.

As Kurt VonneGUT said,

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle!"

Mind you, lots of other whacky ideas are waiting in the wings for their share of grant money.

Edit: I tried to post a link, but I couldn't, so I have to cut and paste:
Lee Smolin asks "Do the laws of nature last forever?"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In science we aim for a picture of nature as it really is, unencumbered by any philosophical or theological prejudice. Some see the search for scientific truth as a search for an unchanging reality behind the ever-changing spectacle we observe with our senses. The ultimate prize in that search would be to grasp a law of nature - a part of a transcendent reality that governs all change, but itself never changes.

The idea of eternally true laws of nature is a beautiful vision, but is it really an escape from philosophy and theology? For, as philosophers have argued, we can test the predictions of a law of nature and see if they are verified or contradicted, but we can never prove a law must always be true. So if we believe a law of nature is eternally true, we are believing in something that logic and evidence cannot establish.

Of course, laws of nature are very useful, and we have in fact been able to discover good candidates for them. But to believe a law is useful and reliable is not the same thing as to believe it is eternally true. We could just as easily believe there is nothing but an infinite succession of approximate laws. Or that laws are generalisations about nature that are not unchanging, but change so slowly that until now we have imagined them as eternal.

These are disturbing thoughts for a theoretical physicist like myself. I chose to go into science because the search for eternal, transcendent laws of nature seemed a lofty goal. However, the possibility that laws evolve in time is one that recent developments in theoretical and experimental physics have forced me, and others, to consider.

The biggest reason to consider that the laws of nature might evolve is the discovery that the universe itself is evolving. When we believed that the universe was eternal it made more sense to believe that the laws that governed it were also eternal. But the evidence we have now is that the universe - or at least the part of it we observe - has been around for only a few billion years.

We know that the universe has been expanding for about 14 billion years and that as we go back in time it gets hotter and denser. We have good evidence that there was a moment when the cosmos was as hot as the centre of a star. If we use the laws that we know apply to space-time and matter today, we can deduce that a few minutes earlier the universe must have been infinitely dense and hot. Many cosmologists take this moment as the birth of the universe and indeed as the birth of space and time. Before this big bang there was nothing, not even time.

Why these laws?
So what could it mean to say that a universe only 14 billion years old is governed by laws that are eternally true? What were the laws doing before time and space? How did the universe know, at that moment of beginning, what laws to follow?

“What were the laws of nature doing before time and space?”Perhaps the solution to this is that the big bang was not the first instant of time. However, this raises a new question, which has been championed by the great theoretical physicist John Wheeler. Even if we believe the universe evolved from something that existed before the big bang, we have no reason to believe the laws of that previous universe were the same as those we observe in our universe. Might the laws have changed when our universe, or region of the universe, was created?

This question came to the fore in 1973, when physicists first developed a theory of elementary particle physics called the standard model. This theory has successfully accounted for every experiment in particle physics before and since that time, apart from those that involve gravity. It only required a small modification to incorporate the later discovery that neutrinos have mass. As for gravity, all experiments support the general theory of relativity, which Einstein published in 1915. There may be further laws to discover, to do with the unification of gravity with quantum theory and with the other forces of nature. But in a certain sense, we have for the first time in history a set of laws sufficient to explain the result of every experiment that has ever been done.

“For the first time in history we can explain every experiment”As a result, in the past three decades the attention of physicists has shifted from seeking to know the laws of nature to a new question: why these laws? Why do these laws, and not others, hold in our universe?

Confronting this question while working on string theory in the 1980s, a few of us began to wonder whether the laws might have changed at the big bang, just as Wheeler had suggested. It was obvious that we could make a connection to biology. I wondered whether there might be an evolutionary mechanism that would allow us to answer the question of "why these laws?" in the same way that biology answers questions like "why these species?". Perhaps the mechanism that makes laws evolve also picks out certain laws and makes them more probable than others. I found such a mechanism, modelled on natural selection, which I called cosmological natural selection.

This is possible because string theory is actually a collection of theories: it has a vast number of distinct versions, each of which gives rise to different collections of elementary particles and forces. We can think of the different versions of string theory as analogous to the different phases of water - ice, liquid and steam. When the universe is squeezed down to such tremendous densities and temperatures that the quantum properties of space-time become important, a phase transition can take place - like water turning to steam - leading from one version of the theory to another.

The many different phases of string theory can also be seen as analogous to a variety of species governed by different DNA sequences. They can be imagined as making up a vast space, which I called the "landscape", to bring out the analogy to a "fitness landscape" in biology that represents all possible ways genes can be arranged.

Cosmological natural selection makes a few predictions that could easily be falsified, and while it is too soon to claim strong evidence for it, those predictions have held up (New Scientist, 24 May 1997, p 38). At the very least, it opened my eyes to the possibility that a theory in which the laws changed in time could still make testable predictions.

It turns out that I had been beaten to the punch: some philosophers had confronted these issues over a century ago. In 1891 the philosopher Charles Pierce wrote that it was hardly justifiable to suppose that universal laws of nature have no reason for their special form. "The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution," he added.

Pierce went much further than I have done, asserting that the question "Why these laws?" has to be answered by a cosmological scenario analogous to evolution. But was he right?

Let us start with an obvious objection: if laws evolve, what governs how they evolve? Does there not have to be some deeper law that guides the evolution of the laws? For example, when water turns into ice, more general laws continue to hold and govern how this phase transition happens - the laws of atomic physics. So perhaps, even if a law turns out to evolve in time, there is always a deeper, unchanging law behind that evolution.

Shapes of things to come
Another example concerns the geometry of space. We used to think that space always followed the perfectly flat Euclidean geometry that we all learn in high school. This was considered one of the laws of nature, but Einstein's general theory of relativity asserts that this is wrong. The geometry of space can be anything it wants to be: any of an infinite number of curved geometries is possible. So what picks out the geometry we see?

General relativity asserts that the geometry of space evolves in the course of time according to some deeper law. Today's geometry is what it is because it evolved from a different geometry in the past, following that definite law.

However, there is a big problem with this kind of explanation, which has to do with the fact that the laws that govern the evolution of geometry are deterministic. They share this feature with most laws studied in physics, including Newton's laws and quantum mechanics. Consider Newton's law of motion for an object. If we know where the object is now and how it is moving, and we know the laws that govern the forces it encounters, we can predict where it will be and has been for all time, past as well as future. General relativity is the same. If we know the geometry of space at a particular time, and how it is changing, we can predict the whole history of space-time. To apply these deterministic laws, however, we have to give a description of the system at one point in time. This is called the initial condition. If we do not specify an initial condition, the laws cannot describe anything.

This is why Einstein's equations do not fully explain why the geometry of space is what it is. They require an initial condition -the geometry at an earlier time. This brings us back to the dilemma about the big bang. Either the universe had no beginning, in which case the chain of causes goes further into the past, before the big bang; or the big bang was the beginning, and we require some explanation as to why it started and with what geometry.

So we have arrived at a conundrum. It appears that if laws evolve, other laws are required to guide their evolution. But then, the evolution of a law is just like the evolution of any other system under a deterministic law. We cannot explain why something is true in the present without knowing its initial state. Applied to laws, this means we cannot explain what the laws are now if we do not specify what the laws were in the past. So the idea of laws evolving by following a deeper rule does not seem to lead to an explanation of "why these laws?".

To avoid this we need an evolutionary mechanism that will allow us to deduce features of the present without having to know the past in detail. This is where Pierce's statement, which appears to invoke biological evolution, comes into its own.

In biology, many features of living organisms can be explained by natural selection, even if one doesn't know details about the past. As the process is partly random, we cannot predict exactly what mix of species will evolve in a given ecosystem, but we can predict that the species that survive will be fitter than those that don't. This is, I believe, why Pierce insisted that any explanation of "why these laws?" involves evolution. And using this kind of logic, cosmological natural selection makes some predictions without detailed information about previous stages of the universe.

But even this is unsatisfactory: it doesn't address the question of how a law that guides the evolution of matter in time could also change in time. For that, we have to examine the way we think about time.

There are big problems with time, even before we start thinking about the evolution of laws of nature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of quantum gravity, which attempts to pull quantum theory and general relativity together into one consistent framework. This is because the two theories each use a different notion of time. In quantum theory, time is defined by a clock sitting outside the system being modelled. In general relativity, time is measured by a clock that is part of the universe that the theory describes. Many of the successes and failures of different approaches to quantum gravity rest on how they reconcile this conflict between time as an external parameter versus time as a physical property of the universe.

However these questions are eventually resolved, there are still deeper issues with time. These arise in any theory in which the laws are taken as being eternal. To illustrate this, we can take a simple example, such as Newton's description of a system of particles. To formulate the theory we invent a mathematical space, consisting of all the positions that all the particles might have. Each point in the space is a possible configuration of the system of particles, so the whole space is called the configuration space. As the system evolves over time, it traces out a curve in configuration space called a history. The laws of physics then pick out which histories are possible and which are not.

The problem with this description is that time has disappeared. The system is represented not by its state at a moment of time but by a history taking it through all time. This description of reality seems timeless. What has disappeared from it is any sense of the present moment, which divides our experience of the flow of time into past, present and future. This problem became particularly acute when it emerged in Einstein's theory of general relativity. Solving the theory gives a four-dimensional space-time history and no indication of "now".

Some, looking at this picture, have been tempted to say that reality is the whole timeless history and that any sense we have of a present moment is some kind of illusion. Even if we don't believe this, the fact that one could believe it means that there is nothing in this description of nature that corresponds to our common-sense experience of past, present and future. This is called the problem of transience. The sense of the universe unfolding or becoming in time, of "now", has no representation in general relativity. But in truth the problem was always there in Newton's physics and it is there in any theory in which some part of nature is described by a state that evolves deterministically in time, governed by a law that dictates change, but never changes.

The illusion of now
The philosopher Roberto Unger of Harvard University calls this the "poisoned gift of mathematics to physics". Many believe that mathematics represents truth in terms of timeless relationships, based on logic. It allows us to formulate physical laws precisely: this is the gift. By doing so, however, mathematics represents paths in configuration space unfolding in time by logic, and this logic exists outside of time. The poison in the gift is the disappearance of any notion of the present or of becoming.

Physicists and their predecessors have been eliminating time like this since the days of Descartes and Galileo at least. But is it the wrong thing to do? Is there a way to represent change through time in a way that represents our sense of becoming, or of time unfolding?

I don't know the answer, but I suspect this question is connected to that of whether laws can evolve in time. One can only draw the curve representing a history in time by assuming that the laws which govern how the history evolves never change. Without a fixed, unchanging law, one could not draw the curve.

Here is the question that keeps me awake these days: is there a way to represent the laws of physics mathematically that retains the notions of the present moment and the continual unfolding of time? And would this allow us - or even require us - to formulate laws that also evolve in time?

Again, I don't know the answer, but I know of a few hints. One comes from theoretical biology. The configuration space for an evolutionary theorist is vast, consisting of all the possible sequences of DNA. At present, there is a particular collection representing all the species that exist. Evolution will produce new ones, while others will disappear. The interesting thing is that natural selection operates in such a way that biologists have little use for the entire configuration space. Instead, they need study only a much smaller space, which is those collections of genes that could be reached from the present one by a few evolutionary steps. The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, calls this the "adjacent possible".

This scheme allows laws to change. Consider the laws that govern sexual selection. They do not make sense for any old biosphere, as they only come into play when there are creatures with two sexes. So in evolutionary theory there is no need for eternal laws, and it makes sense to speak of a law coming into existence at some time to govern possibilities that did not exist before. Furthermore, there is such a vast array of possible mechanisms of natural selection that it would not make any sense to list them all and treat them as timeless. Better to think of laws coming into existence as the new creatures that evolve in each step require.

Of course, one might reply that natural selection itself never changes. But natural selection is a fact of logic, not a contingent law of nature. Every real law in biology depends on some aspect of the creatures that exist at a given time, which means the laws are also time-bound.

It is not impossible to achieve time-bound laws in physics. There are logicians who have proposed alternative systems of logic that incorporate a notion of time unfolding. In these logics, what is true and false is assigned for a particular moment, not for all time. For a given moment some propositions are true, others false, but there remains an infinite list of propositions that are yet to become either true or false. Once a proposition is true or false, it remains so, but at each moment new propositions become decided. These are called intuitionalist logics and they underlie a branch of mathematics called topos theory.

Some of my colleagues have studied these logics as a model for physics. Fotini Markopoulou of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, has shown that aspects of space-time geometry can be described in terms of these logics. Chris Isham of Imperial College London and others propose to reformulate physics completely in terms of them.

It is interesting that some physicists now propose that the universe is some kind of computer, because similar questions are being asked in computer science. In the standard architecture all computers now use, invented by the mathematician John von Neumann, the operating system never changes. It governs the flow of information through a computer just as an eternal law of nature is thought to guide physics. But some visionary computer scientists such as Jaron Lanier wonder whether there could be other kinds of architectures and operating systems that themselves evolve in time.

Looking at biology, it seems there are advantages to what are, essentially, time-bound laws. Evolving laws might make computer systems similarly robust and less likely to do what the laws of natural selection, it seems, never do: crash. The universe, too, seems to function rather well, operating without glitches and fatal errors. Perhaps that's because natural selection is hard at work in the laws of nature.

 

[MagicaPractica]

I have personally always looked at what we know in science as a "working theory." Our theories keep changing and may always do so. Perhaps it's a test of faith. I know that I can't wrap my mind around the concept of infinity. I understand it logically but when I try to contemplate it, my mind eventually times out. It's like trying to contemplate God. In our limited capacities, we have a working theory of what that means but I don't think we are really capable of understanding the concept of God. We have a working theory on it but that may be as good as it gets. God and science have always seemed inextricably intertwined to me. Just my little thoughts on the matter.

 

[3113]

The problem with string theory is that it just can't be proven. Strings vibrating in the 11th dimension? The math all adds up but that doesn't do anyone any good but the mathematicians.

There's just too much to prove that can't be proven...like eight other dimensions.

 

[rockersex]

Think about it this way: a hundred years ago every top scientist in the world said that man cannot fly. Every top mathemetician and physicist said that it was impossible to create a flying machine.

Look at us now. We have massive jets that fly all over the world, carrying hundreds of people.

Think about electricity. How magical is that? Whoever thought you can harness electricity to run lights, engines, computers, phones, or televisions? To scientists in another century, that's completely rediculous.

Charles H. Duell, Office of Patents, 1899:
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Albert Einstein, 1932:
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will."

Popular Mechanics, 1949
"Computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."

In every time in every civilization people have thought they reached the limit of science, only to be proven wrong in the near future. How is today any different?

 

[amicus]

dr_mabeuse]There was an article in a recent New Yorker about the apparent failure of String Theory to provide a final, Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of the Universe after 30 years of trying.

A GUT is a single theory that explains all subatomic particles and the four known forces of nature as manifestations of a single, simpler priciple. It's the big HOW of the universe, the Holy Grail physicists have been looking for for about 80 years now, ever since Einstein, who dedicated his life to finding it and failed.

String Theory developed in the 70's when some physicists discovered that subatomic particles could be thought of as "super strings" vibrating in different dimensions, kind of like a guitar string vibrates in our 4 dimensions. In the simplest string theory universe, 9 dimensions are required, to describe all the different particles, 5 of which we can't perceive.

I say "simplest", because there are now hundreds of ways to create string theory universes, and no one knows which ones may be right or wrong. The reason for this is, there are no ways to test these theories. There are no expriments you can do, and no predictions that they make than can be verified or disproved. So string theory as it exists after 30 years of work is a bunch of elegant mathematics that do a fine job of describing things as they are, but lead us nowhere. As one of its detractors now says, it's "not even wrong". It's beyond right or wrong. According to the late philospher of science Karl Popper, that means it's not even science.

I mention all this because in string theory and the hunt for the Grand Unified Theory of the Universe, science may have run up against its limit, and this is probably very much like what the limit looks like - a theory that can neither be proven nor disproven; beyond experimental verification. We've learned all these is to know about this subject.

That's not to say that there still isn't a lot of science to be done and a lot of things to be discovered, but this is the first time as far as I know where science might have taken us as far as its possible for science to go. It's kind of interesting to think about - whether there is an ultimate limit to how much we can know, and what we do once we know it all.

[/I]

~~~~~~

Dr. Mabuese has a fine and inquistive mind. Since Amicus stated that, it must be true as Amicus only makes statements of absolute truth, Pure nothwithstanding...

If you read all the way through what Mab wrote and the other extremely long paste and realize that not a single soul on this forum is capable of understanding the mathematics involved (and thas all it is , math formula's) and ask yourself, what is the real point (other than grant money) of this research and of what value is it to mankind?

Mab is far too sophisticated to accede to a religious explanation of infinity or the existence of the universe and is looking for the absolute outside the mind of man to guide him; which is, in essence, and as I have tried to point out before, a contradiction in terms. You can't get there from here.

I think it was Mab, in another thread who stated he resented those who told him how to live and not live...I have the same problem with science, in a way.

I have been reading science fiction since I was nine years old, and not much later began questioning the absoluteness of K, the speed of light. StarTrek kinda assuaged that with warp drive...but still, theoretically, the speed of light cannot be exceeded according to those tech weenies who know about such things.

I know enough electronics to build my own radio transmitter and receiver and antenna system, I know the math and the formulas to cut an antenna to proper length and understand radio frequency propogation well enough for my little rig to talk around the world on less power than a refrigerator light bulb consumes.

lI did good, I thought...to learn all that, since by nature, I am not a tech weenie.

But...a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing and as time went by...

See if you can follow my thinking here...Radio waves travel through space at about the same speed as light waves, the speed of light.

I can create a 'radio wave' of a particular frequency and it will travel away from my transmitter at the speed of light, or thereabouts...

Now....every time I create a radio wave of X cycles per second, I also create, simultaneously a sub harmonic and a harmonic radio wave at X/2, XSquared, both below and beyond the original frequency.

Now...that may seem gibberish to you and may well be...but the implication, if light is propogated, as are radio waves (really all one and the same) and if I can create a harmonic of a radio wave, why then can I not create a 'harmonic' of the speed of light?

None of that was the point...just an aside, because being able to exceed the speed of light in future space exploration would be of great benefit to mankind, but as it now stands, it remains, like the Sound Barrier before Chuck Yeager, an absolute limit on the aspirations of man...which we don't like.

Back to 'String Theory" and Einstein and an Universal Field Theory, which is what it used to be called, I think.

I watched a program the other evening about scientists creating new elements in the laboratory; they were trying to create the element with the atomic number of 114 and having a helluva time in doing so.

I saw a program just tonight called "Ice Age Americans", I think, which challenged the entire field by theorizing that the first 'Americans' came from Europe, several tthousand years before the land bridge in the Beriing straights or the possible Polynesian discovery in South America.

Just recently, "Pluto" was judged a planet no more, alas, all the school children since the late 1930's who were taught there were nine planets...now there be but eight.

I thought perhaps to offer a foundation upon which to draw an irrefragable(look it up) conclusion and place it gently in Mab's lap, but I think I will not do that.

Science is not a belief. It is simply a method, using reason and logic, by which to ask questions. The questions of science may not even apply to the human condition which is where most find difficulty, as they seek to apply 'science' to humanity.

It is the reason and logic, the non contradictory acquisition of knowledge that are ttools one can apply to understanding the human condition, the tools of science; not the science itself, for it may well be unproductive.

amicus...

 

[elsol]

A little knowledge isn't dangerous.

What is dangerous is that as soon as someone gains a little knowledge... they think they've got a lot of knowledge.

 

[NastyPierre]

a humle thought

[/I]

~~~~~~

Dr. Mabuese has a fine and inquistive mind. Since Amicus stated that, it must be true as Amicus only makes statements of absolute truth, Pure nothwithstanding...

If you read all the way through what Mab wrote and the other extremely long paste and realize that not a single soul on this forum is capable of understanding the mathematics involved (and thas all it is , math formula's) and ask yourself, what is the real point (other than grant money) of this research and of what value is it to mankind?

Mab is far too sophisticated to accede to a religious explanation of infinity or the existence of the universe and is looking for the absolute outside the mind of man to guide him; which is, in essence, and as I have tried to point out before, a contradiction in terms. You can't get there from here.

I think it was Mab, in another thread who stated he resented those who told him how to live and not live...I have the same problem with science, in a way.

I have been reading science fiction since I was nine years old, and not much later began questioning the absoluteness of K, the speed of light. StarTrek kinda assuaged that with warp drive...but still, theoretically, the speed of light cannot be exceeded according to those tech weenies who know about such things.

I know enough electronics to build my own radio transmitter and receiver and antenna system, I know the math and the formulas to cut an antenna to proper length and understand radio frequency propogation well enough for my little rig to talk around the world on less power than a refrigerator light bulb consumes.

lI did good, I thought...to learn all that, since by nature, I am not a tech weenie.

But...a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing and as time went by...

See if you can follow my thinking here...Radio waves travel through space at about the same speed as light waves, the speed of light.

I can create a 'radio wave' of a particular frequency and it will travel away from my transmitter at the speed of light, or thereabouts...

Now....every time I create a radio wave of X cycles per second, I also create, simultaneously a sub harmonic and a harmonic radio wave at X/2, XSquared, both below and beyond the original frequency.

Now...that may seem gibberish to you and may well be...but the implication, if light is propogated, as are radio waves (really all one and the same) and if I can create a harmonic of a radio wave, why then can I not create a 'harmonic' of the speed of light?

None of that was the point...just an aside, because being able to exceed the speed of light in future space exploration would be of great benefit to mankind, but as it now stands, it remains, like the Sound Barrier before Chuck Yeager, an absolute limit on the aspirations of man...which we don't like.

Back to 'String Theory" and Einstein and an Universal Field Theory, which is what it used to be called, I think.

I watched a program the other evening about scientists creating new elements in the laboratory; they were trying to create the element with the atomic number of 114 and having a helluva time in doing so.

I saw a program just tonight called "Ice Age Americans", I think, which challenged the entire field by theorizing that the first 'Americans' came from Europe, several tthousand years before the land bridge in the Beriing straights or the possible Polynesian discovery in South America.

Just recently, "Pluto" was judged a planet no more, alas, all the school children since the late 1930's who were taught there were nine planets...now there be but eight.

I thought perhaps to offer a foundation upon which to draw an irrefragable(look it up) conclusion and place it gently in Mab's lap, but I think I will not do that.

Science is not a belief. It is simply a method, using reason and logic, by which to ask questions. The questions of science may not even apply to the human condition which is where most find difficulty, as they seek to apply 'science' to humanity.

It is the reason and logic, the non contradictory acquisition of knowledge that are ttools one can apply to understanding the human condition, the tools of science; not the science itself, for it may well be unproductive.

amicus...

Amicus,
i am no scientist, but i do more than have thoughts in my head. Science all too often becomes a ‘dogma’ like religion, and then it becomes dangerous. A true scientific mind holds to no prejudice.
Since you may be doing such 'thinking' for the purpose of writing, allow me to suggest 'notions': On the quantum level, it is suggested not only that there exists ‘energy’ faster (whatever that means) then light, but there exists ‘action at a distance’; Too, the 'photon' is only a theory and so is the 'idea' of a 'beam of light'. i have read material by Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm (Quantum physicists)and they agree that 'matter' is only a 'potential' dependent on 'consciousness' which, though classical physicists hate it, can no longer be taken out of any equation. i guess i am trying to say, that, this line of 'reasoning' opens a universe of possibilities for a writer. Poor Einstein, the grandfather of quantum physics, could not escape the confines of classical physics, saying that God does not play dice with the universe, Pauli returned with, it is not for us to say what game God plays, but to understand it. i am also a reader of Carl Jung and Analytical Psychology, a passion of Pauli's. Here's hoping my humble words may stimulate some small idea awaiting a spark, that will result in some fantastic adventure story.
NP

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

I don't know where you people are going with this but String Theory is a a Mathamatical Theory based on Quantum Mechanics, which is another Mathamatical Theory. The problem is, Quantum Mechanics cannot be proved by imperical evidence there for remains a Theory. Since QM cannot be proven then neither can String Theory. But it doesn't matter.

String Theory is simply a perspective for looking at the subatomic world. It seems to work for some things and give tantalizing suggestions for other things that were not previously suspected. Do I understand the Math involved? No. Probably fewer than 100 people on earth understand both the Math and Theory well enough to even speak intellegently about it. Even those people have a problem expressing in words what the Math says since it is a purely Mathamatical concept (Perspective).

Do I care that certain subatomic particals act weirdly if Professor X at the University of Y substitues a clause in one of the formulas? Not really. My world is not going to change. In my world I am not going to discover some new and previously unsuspected partical. Professor X at the University of Y might, but I really don't care.

Theorys are only ways of explaining the oddities found in nature. String Theory seems, although unproven, to demonstrate why that oddity occurs. As a side issue it also seems to indicate other oddities exist that we didn't know about (particals can leap from dimension to dimension from time to time, that dimensions exist very closely side by side, and some other things that really doesn't affect whether I will have toast or a Danish for breakfast) that seem to be important to the very few people who understand the Theory.

Einstein spent 50 years trying to make his Unified Field Theory work and couldn't. Over the past 50 years others have taken up where he left off and haven't made it work either. String Theory is one branch of intellectual research on that long term project. I suspect someday someone will finally solve the Unified Field Theory. Will it involve String Theory? I have no idea.

 

[NastyPierre]

i may be confused

I don't know where you people are going with this but String Theory is a a Mathamatical Theory based on Quantum Mechanics, which is another Mathamatical Theory. The problem is, Quantum Mechanics cannot be proved by imperical evidence there for remains a Theory. Since QM cannot be proven then neither can String Theory. But it doesn't matter.

String Theory is simply a perspective for looking at the subatomic world. It seems to work for some things and give tantalizing suggestions for other things that were not previously suspected. Do I understand the Math involved? No. Probably fewer than 100 people on earth understand both the Math and Theory well enough to even speak intellegently about it. Even those people have a problem expressing in words what the Math says since it is a purely Mathamatical concept (Perspective).

Do I care that certain subatomic particals act weirdly if Professor X at the University of Y substitues a clause in one of the formulas? Not really. My world is not going to change. In my world I am not going to discover some new and previously unsuspected partical. Professor X at the University of Y might, but I really don't care.

Theorys are only ways of explaining the oddities found in nature. String Theory seems, although unproven, to demonstrate why that oddity occurs. As a side issue it also seems to indicate other oddities exist that we didn't know about (particals can leap from dimension to dimension from time to time, that dimensions exist very closely side by side, and some other things that really doesn't affect whether I will have toast or a Danish for breakfast) that seem to be important to the very few people who understand the Theory.

Einstein spent 50 years trying to make his Unified Field Theory work and couldn't. Over the past 50 years others have taken up where he left off and haven't made it work either. String Theory is one branch of intellectual research on that long term project. I suspect someday someone will finally solve the Unified Field Theory. Will it involve String Theory? I have no idea.

Since i am guessing, or hoping, these threads are ultimately written to stimulate those who write, may i be so bold as to say we can go anywhere we want with it. If this is all simply for pure scientific reasons, then there are many sites to visit. i thought this site was more for those who want to write the next great science fiction story, or frustrate themselves trying. Am i mistaken? If not then: Science is one of the ways human thinking and feeling, the rational functions of consciousness, along with their tools, intellect, reason, and understanding, expresses themselves, and delves into the questions of ‘existence’; but it is not the only way. Limits are continually being reached when approached in this way, and when reached, the irrational functions of consciousness kick in: sensation and intuition. To imagine that human consciousness will find a god element, or come to understand where we came from, or why we exist, is metaphysical and outside the domain of science, but not science fiction literature. To realize that nature never does anything as a ‘joke’ but with a ‘reason’ often outside the ability of human reason to grasp, is to realize science will never find a limit, only temporary perimeters through which it will eventually penetrate, the beginnings of science fiction writing. i for one sense that the more human consciousness is understood in its relationship to existence the more we will come to realize what science has always been, and will always be- us looking at us, as potentials. We will evolve, that cannot be stopped, only postponed (a potential story). Light and Energy, matter and energy; light and matter; light, matter, energy, and consciousness- are all one and the same. Chase me away if i’m wrong about this being more for writers than pure scientists, because i enjoy writing and the more far-out the better.
NP

 

[NoJo]

Hey, I know it's a long and difficult article I posted above, but it's Lee Smolin talking, just last week, about these topics. That article is hot science, by one of the world's finest living physicists. When you read stuff in the press like "string theory is a failure", you're likely reading a chinese-whispered account of Smolin's own words.

 

[R. Richard]

Each time that science answers a question, it is only to create other questions that also need to be answered.

Some of the questions may not be answerable. [See Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.]

Some of the questions may lead to clues that may help us to better understand the universe. [If you think that the speed of light is a limiting factor, Google up "tunnel diode."]

Is string theory "the answer?" Probably not. However, it is a step in the discovery process. I personally doubt that it is a final step or that there really is a final step. However, who knows?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Having the knowledge of the Universe is not a bad thing. Knowing everything is not bad, what you do with the knowledge is what will determine whether it is bad or good.

 

[amicus]

NastyPierre from Illinois...welcome to the forum and thank you for becoming part of discussion...such as it is...

Personally, for me, the discussion is not aimed at providing meat for sci fi stories but rather of a more mundane purpose although I can speak for no one else of course.

As you state familiarity with Dr. Jung and probably Adler and probably the entire gamut of modern psychology I suspect you will recognize a very tenuous thread that merges into the epistemology of the human mind and be well aware of the continuing professional conflict between branches of psychology and philosophy.

While most of the information gleaned by these studies, and for purposes of this discussion, add theoretical mathematics, remains esoterically abstract and dribbles down to the lay public, there are some assumptions made at very high levels and passed on through Journals and Universities, that carry a great deal of weight in common everyday life.

Being a little subjective, just for clarity, I enjoy reading science fiction, not so much fantasy, but write very little of it, and when I do, it is merely as a vehicle for that which I consider more important, the human aspect.

A deer, under protective cover, may stand quietly and watch three hunters with fire sticks creep into the woods. The deer will not count, 1, 2, 3, and wait for all three to emerge again as the deer cannot conceptualize or abstract the numbers, only man, as far as we know can look at multiple objects and assign an abstract concept such as numbers to them.

Since the abstract concept, 'two' does not exist in the physical world, then we call it a 'meta' physical, beyond physics kinda thing.

My ongoing conflict on this forum and almost in every thread is my contention that the 'abstract' does exist in a real and proveable sense and becomes, 'absolute' knowledge.

No doubt you will quickly see where this can lead, if one abstraction can be viewed as absolute, then why not others, such as 'ethics' 'morality', even the concepts/abstractions of 'good' and 'evil', love and hate.

These concepts, not having material physical form, cannot be laid hands upon and examined in the cold light of reason and logic, according to the vast majority who claim that all abstract theoretical knowledge is subjective or relative to the individual and holds no importance beyond that individual.

Some very smart people on this forum and elsewhere of course, go to great lengths to assert that all of human life and human action is secular, subjective and exists only in relation to other such thoughts and actions.

They bring up, time and time again, esoteric mathematical theories of uncertainty, chaos and incompletedness to destroy any attempts others may make to logicalize human thoughts and actions.

To me it is but a holdover from 19th century existentialism and nihilism and maybe even back to the Greeks and those who lived for pleasure only (fits fine on an erotic lit site, eh?)

And we have had some very intelligent people give us long winded rants about Kant and Hegel and utilitarianism and a host of offshoot philosophies, all emphasizing that the human mind can neither know or perceive reality and in fact, that reality itself does not exist except as a figment of the mind.

Then of course there is that offcast bastard, the political aspect, which fuels nearly half of all discussions here between those who insist that individual man has no innate right to exist and does so only at the pleasure of the collective in charge at the moment.

We also, of course, dip into that other modern buzz, human sexuality, all aspects, and whether there exists any 'rational' logical explanation or if it is but all subjective and caters to individual preferences.

I paraphrase a scenario the late Ayn Rand used in one of her essays long ago. When confronted by one of the peacenik love children of the 60's who screamed, "BUT HOW CAN YOU CLAIM TO KNOW ANYTHING? WE CANNOT KNOW FOR CERTAIN!" Ayn Rand answered: "But how can you claim NOT to know the source and reason for your thoughts and actions..."

I choose a 'buzz' topic for exemplification: I think a young woman, pregnant, faced with the question of to abort or not, should have a logical, rational foundation to turn to in order to answer the question in an absolute sense, using reason, rationality, truth and non contradictory knowledge.

When one rejects reason as a base of knowledge and turns elsewhere for answers, it troubles me to no end and thus I putter on from thread to thread inflaming the masses as I go...

such is life...


amicus...

 

[3113]

Think about it this way: a hundred years ago every top scientist in the world said that man cannot fly. Every top mathemetician and physicist said that it was impossible to create a flying machine.

This isn't an apt comparison, however. If the scientists had said, "There will never be a unified field theory" then you'd be right. But what they said was that they didn't think String Theory was that UFT.

There are a lot of theories out there that are proposed that DON'T work. Like say, oh, the sun revolves around the earth. So what you've got here isn't the argument that "man can't fly" but rather, "This is how man will fly..." The scientists are arguing that this person is wrong. May may fly, but not like that.

A more apt comparison to the one you offered would be Continental drift which, when it was proposed, was thought to be ridiculous. It was later proven to be correct.

The difference, however, is that Continental drift was proposed with empirical evidence and every year after it was proposed more and more solid evidence came forward to support it's viablity until it finally couldn't be denied.

I won't say that it's impossible to gather evidence that string theory is correct, but it's going to be pretty unlikely. Scientists seem to be saying that they believe there is a UFT out there that will work and can be proven, rather than just a imaginary "what if" that can't be proven or disproven.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

I won't say that it's impossible to gather evidence that string theory is correct, but it's going to be pretty unlikely. Scientists seem to be saying that they believe there is a UFT out there that will work and can be proven, rather than just a imaginary "what if" that can't be proven or disproven.

As I understand the UFT it's not a matter of it can't be proven with imperiacal evidence, but that the Math behind the Theory as it currently stands and it's Corrolaries work most of the time but not for every case. The more they work on it, the more cases they find where it doesn't work. In order to prove the theory the math must work in every case.

Will it be solved? Probably, but not in my lifetime.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Hey, I know it's a long and difficult article I posted above, but it's Lee Smolin talking, just last week, about these topics. That article is hot science, by one of the world's finest living physicists. When you read stuff in the press like "string theory is a failure", you're likely reading a chinese-whispered account of Smolin's own words.

I'm not sure that I get Smolin's point. On the one hand, if some of the constants of nature are changing as a function of time, that would eventually be detectable, and in fact I think there's some discussion of that now with the discovery that the rate of the expansion of the universe seems to be is incrasing. I heard something about the possibility that the speed of light might be changing too, but I forget the details.

If all of the constants of nature are changing - for instance, space and time and mass and the speed of light- then it would make no difference and there'd be no operational way of detecting it.

Similarly, it really doesn't matter is there are an infinite number of universes out there "somewhere" unless we have some way of interacting with them. We may as well say that we're all surrounded by invisible angels who we can never see or detect. There's no way to demnstrate it, so science can't say anything about it. By definition, such a theory is unscientific.

It sounds to me like Smolin's getting very close to the Anthropic Principle, which says that the universe is the way it is because this is the universe that supports Us.

Maybe I'll read him again though. I didn't understand more than I understood, I think.

=========
Jenny--

I don't know why you say quantum mechanics hasn't been proven. The ability of quantum to correctly predict all sorts of physicial phenomenon has been well established for around 80 years now. The main problem with the practical use of quantum theory in chemistry is that doing the calculations is usually more difficult than doing the actual experiment, which is an example of another kind of limit in science. Our math isn't sophisticated enough.

And the problem I was trying to point out in string theory is that if it actually predicted anything, then it could be tested by seeing if those predictions are true or false. But as far as I know, ST is a model that describes but doesn't predict, and that's why physicists are so frustrated with it and why that one guy described it as "not even wrong".

I know that it's a pretty esoteric subject and doesn't affect us much one way or the other, but if ST turned out to be both true and predictive (heuristic, as they say, meaning it led to more knowledge), if we had the key to all matter and knew how all the forces in nature were related, that could be some pretty heavy and useful knowledge indeed.

But also, ST raises the question of just when does science reach its limits? As we try to find out what the universe is made of, will we just keep on finding particles made of particles made of particles going on forever? Or will we finally bang up against an absolute that says, this is it? And if so, what will that absolute look like? I think the limit will look something like this - a theory that can't be tested any further.

When I was first in school, we had your basic electron, proton, neutron, positron, maybe a neutrino or two, and thought that was pretty much it.

Then came some anti-particles, and mesons, pions, and then a whole explosion of some other ugly sons of bitches, all sorts of weights and charges and spins and half-lives, like some one had opened the asylum doors. I pretty much lost interest.

Then they got down to the nest level: quarks, and we really thought this was it - the ultimate. Quarks made some sense out of the whole mess and I really kind of hoped that was it. It was enough already.

And now we're down to the next level: string theory. Are we finally there? Or are we going to keep going? Does anyone still care?

Next level I'm sure is going to be Angels on Pinheads.


==============

The problem with string theory is that it just can't be proven. Strings vibrating in the 11th dimension? The math all adds up but that doesn't do anyone any good but the mathematicians.

There's just too much to prove that can't be proven...like eight other dimensions.

Well, they wouldn't even have to prove all that stuff. All they'd have to do would be to say, "According to my String theory, we should observe such-and-such an effect when so-and-so happens" and predict something that hadn't been observed before. That would at least give them some credibility and some reason to believe in their 11 dimensions.

===========

i have read material by Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm (Quantum physicists)and they agree that 'matter' is only a 'potential' dependent on 'consciousness' which, though classical physicists hate it, can no longer be taken out of any equation. i guess i am trying to say, that, this line of 'reasoning' opens a universe of possibilities for a writer.

No offense, and I'm not exactly sure of the context that Pauli and Pohm were speaking in, because mass and energy can be treated alike on the quantum level and it just depends onhow you want to think of them, but this gets close to a common myth about quantum mechanics and consciousness: that at the quantum level, events are somehow determined by the observers consciousness and expectations, and that's a grave misunderstanding of quantum, still being perpetuated even by some PhD physicists who should know better.

The misunderstanding arose from the early days of quantum in the 20's when it was observed that the electron could behave both as a wave or a particle, depending on the experiment one subjected it to. If you treated it like a wave it acted like a wave. If you treated it like a particle, it acted like a particle. To the thinking of the day, it could not be both, and it drove physicists crazy. It seemed to know what the experimenter wanted to see and acted accordingly. There was talk of an "observer effect".

It was discovered that the electron (all moving matter in fact, only it's most noticeable with the smallest particles) has a wave associated with it, so it's neither a particle or a wave but both and neither. Treat it like a wave, it acts like a wave. Treat it like a particle, it acts like a particle. No observer effect. The electron knows what it is, even if the observer doesn't. The electron (and the universe) still exists even when the physicist goes to sleep. It's not all in our heads. The universe and the electron really exist.

By the way, it's this wave nature of particles that's responsible for Heisenberg's Indeterminacy Principle (populaerly known as the Uncertainty principle) which says that you can't know both a particle's position and momentum at the same time. Its wave nature makes it impossible to pinpoint.

But there's still plenty of room for a writer in the universe, thank God.

 

[NoJo]

Doc, I think what Smolin is getting at, and the reason I posted it as an apropos to the first post, is that he's confronting a big problem that anyone has when trying to get to some kind of grand unifying cosmic law. The perfectly natural, and scientific question poses itself, as soon as anyone comes up with a candidate: "Did that always[/i[] hold? Will it be true in future?"

It comes up inevitably with GUTs because these theories are supposed to be "super-theories", theories of Everything, and Always. So Smolin is looking for a sort of "adaptive" GUT, that changes temporaly. Kind of a slippery tactic, if you want to look at it that way.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

And now we're down to the next level: string theory. Are we finally there? Or are we going to keep going? Does anyone still care?

Next level I'm sure is going to be Angels on Pinheads.

Dr M,
I really don't think that String Theory is going to be the end result of the search for A Unified Field Theory. As I recall an Oriental Grad Student at MIT "Solved" the UFT several years ago for about a month, then it was discovered it didn't always work. That's the problem. We can't see quarks and pisons and all the other subatomic particles so the Math has to work in every case imaginable.

Will it be solved? Maybe. Do I really care? Not really. Even if it is solved it's not going to change me world in the least. This is more a game for the mathmaticians and Physics people than for me.

 

[NoJo]

It might change it the way the Copernican theory changed it. It might alter people's perception of nature, and our place in it.

 

[gauchecritic]

I've read something recently that touched upon this (could have been a thread here) that says something along the lines of; whatever the thing impinges upon makes that a part of the whole.

The observer of the experiment, because they observe, become a part of the whole thing. The theory that you're working on, to be complete, should include the fact that you're working on it. (Emergent phenomena?)

So as far as I can tell (which isn't even broadly) the UFT, if it's being called or viewed as evolutionary can't even have a 'base state' (or whatever the term is) because the path that it would take is about as predictable as amoeba to man.

And if all this is true (which is pure speculation on my part) then any descriptive theory (not even admitting of a predictive theory) must also include itself.

Which comes around (and describes very nearly) the reasoning that 'two' is a concept rather than a concrete reality.

How many people are there or how many other people are there?

 

[Seattle Zack]

When I was in college, it was all about chaos theory, fractals, Koch curves ... fun stuff. UC Santa Cruz was at the center of some of the chaos theory breakthroughs. It was the guys up the road, at Berkeley and Stanford, with their linear accellerators and stuff, that were all excited about the unified field theory.

Smolin's book The Trouble With Physics is a fascinating read. He argues that string theory has a stranglehold on the field of theoretical physics.

Smolin's ideas are no less speculative, it seems, revolving around a sort of cosmic natural selection, where universes reproduce themselves through black holes and big bangs.

It's not even a true theory, according to the scientific method. Just like religious zealots spout that "Creationism is just a theory," as if it were an idle idea scribbled in crayon on a paper bag, but that's not the case. In science, a theory is something that has been elaborately analyzed, has not been falsified, and has made testable predictions that have later proven to be true.

Smolin writes that string theory failed to predict the biggest astrophysical discovery in decades, the 1998 finding that cosmic expansion is accelerating, apparently owing to powerful "dark energy" that nobody can explain. After dark energy was discovered, string theorists simply revised their equations to predict it.

So the basic building blocks of matter are tiny strings of energy vibrating in some multidimensional astral plane? Could be. Smolin argues that we should get back to what science does best, figuring out why the physical world is as we observe.

 

[3113]

Here's an excellent review of Smolin's book:

L.A. Times Review

I found this part most interesting:

String theory has its troubles, which the authors analyze in great and sometimes lucid detail: It appears to be untestable because the strings are too small to be seen, and recent research suggests that the theory may have an infinite number of solutions, so it can't make predictions. And string theory is so ill-defined that even ardent supporters admit they don't know what, exactly, it is. This is why Woit calls the theory, and his new book, "not even wrong," a play on a put-down by the late physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

These issues are well worth addressing, which makes it all the more disappointing that Woit, and Smolin in "The Trouble With Physics," write mostly about how string theory has ruined their careers — and physics as well.

 

[NastyPierre]

this is fun

NastyPierre from Illinois...welcome to the forum and thank you for becoming part of discussion...such as it is...

Personally, for me, the discussion is not aimed at providing meat for sci fi stories but rather of a more mundane purpose although I can speak for no one else of course.

As you state familiarity with Dr. Jung and probably Adler and probably the entire gamut of modern psychology I suspect you will recognize a very tenuous thread that merges into the epistemology of the human mind and be well aware of the continuing professional conflict between branches of psychology and philosophy.

While most of the information gleaned by these studies, and for purposes of this discussion, add theoretical mathematics, remains esoterically abstract and dribbles down to the lay public, there are some assumptions made at very high levels and passed on through Journals and Universities, that carry a great deal of weight in common everyday life.

Being a little subjective, just for clarity, I enjoy reading science fiction, not so much fantasy, but write very little of it, and when I do, it is merely as a vehicle for that which I consider more important, the human aspect.

A deer, under protective cover, may stand quietly and watch three hunters with fire sticks creep into the woods. The deer will not count, 1, 2, 3, and wait for all three to emerge again as the deer cannot conceptualize or abstract the numbers, only man, as far as we know can look at multiple objects and assign an abstract concept such as numbers to them.

Since the abstract concept, 'two' does not exist in the physical world, then we call it a 'meta' physical, beyond physics kinda thing.

My ongoing conflict on this forum and almost in every thread is my contention that the 'abstract' does exist in a real and proveable sense and becomes, 'absolute' knowledge.

No doubt you will quickly see where this can lead, if one abstraction can be viewed as absolute, then why not others, such as 'ethics' 'morality', even the concepts/abstractions of 'good' and 'evil', love and hate.

These concepts, not having material physical form, cannot be laid hands upon and examined in the cold light of reason and logic, according to the vast majority who claim that all abstract theoretical knowledge is subjective or relative to the individual and holds no importance beyond that individual.

Some very smart people on this forum and elsewhere of course, go to great lengths to assert that all of human life and human action is secular, subjective and exists only in relation to other such thoughts and actions.

They bring up, time and time again, esoteric mathematical theories of uncertainty, chaos and incompletedness to destroy any attempts others may make to logicalize human thoughts and actions.

To me it is but a holdover from 19th century existentialism and nihilism and maybe even back to the Greeks and those who lived for pleasure only (fits fine on an erotic lit site, eh?)

And we have had some very intelligent people give us long winded rants about Kant and Hegel and utilitarianism and a host of offshoot philosophies, all emphasizing that the human mind can neither know or perceive reality and in fact, that reality itself does not exist except as a figment of the mind.

Then of course there is that offcast bastard, the political aspect, which fuels nearly half of all discussions here between those who insist that individual man has no innate right to exist and does so only at the pleasure of the collective in charge at the moment.

We also, of course, dip into that other modern buzz, human sexuality, all aspects, and whether there exists any 'rational' logical explanation or if it is but all subjective and caters to individual preferences.

I paraphrase a scenario the late Ayn Rand used in one of her essays long ago. When confronted by one of the peacenik love children of the 60's who screamed, "BUT HOW CAN YOU CLAIM TO KNOW ANYTHING? WE CANNOT KNOW FOR CERTAIN!" Ayn Rand answered: "But how can you claim NOT to know the source and reason for your thoughts and actions..."

I choose a 'buzz' topic for exemplification: I think a young woman, pregnant, faced with the question of to abort or not, should have a logical, rational foundation to turn to in order to answer the question in an absolute sense, using reason, rationality, truth and non contradictory knowledge.

When one rejects reason as a base of knowledge and turns elsewhere for answers, it troubles me to no end and thus I putter on from thread to thread inflaming the masses as I go...

such is life...


amicus...

amicus
so much to read and take in and so little time. Human consciousness cannot know an absolute. Abstraction to me is a process begining with perception and is dependent on your psychology. Meaning, that what you ‘take in’ as information about an object is only that which is of value to your psychology. People who yet imagine they actually ‘think’ of the object are prone to forming ‘absolute’ ideas, since this falsifies reality through the process of ‘objectification’. Like it or not, we can do no more then form an ‘image’ in our minds of an ‘object’, no matter how close to the ‘object’ you take yourself. Reason, intellect, and logic are mere energic ‘tools’ used to examine the ‘images’ of the mind, and never the ‘object’ (as a primitive mind imagines).
Gotta go again, but will return.

 

[amicus]

NastyPierre]amicus
so much to read and take in and so little time. Human consciousness cannot know an absolute. Abstraction to me is a process begining with perception and is dependent on your psychology. Meaning, that what you ‘take in’ as information about an object is only that which is of value to your psychology. People who yet imagine they actually ‘think’ of the object are prone to forming ‘absolute’ ideas, since this falsifies reality through the process of ‘objectification’. Like it or not, we can do no more then form an ‘image’ in our minds of an ‘object’, no matter how close to the ‘object’ you take yourself. Reason, intellect, and logic are mere energic ‘tools’ used to examine the ‘images’ of the mind, and never the ‘object’ (as a primitive mind imagines).
Gotta go again, but will return.

[/I]

~~~~

There seem to be so many 'non absolutes' on this forum and almost every one begins by making an 'absolute' statement, rejecting absolutes, sooner or later you folks are gonna realize you lose your argument the moment you do so.

Secondly you state an opinion as if it were fact, it is not: "...Abstraction to me is a process begining with perception and is dependent on your psychology..." and you include, "dependent on your psychology." as if that had some meaning...do you imply that ones psychology is instinctual or cannot be known?

Your entire statement is without meaning or merit.

Try this small statement on for size as a rational, logical, reasonable presentation of basic philosphy:

One begins with an Aristotelian axiomatic statement, A is A, or, a thing is that which it is, or, existence exists. That means that an objective reality exists independent of any perceiver or of the perceiver's emotions, feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. One holds that reason is man's only means of perceiving reality and his only guide to action. Reason being that faculty which identifies and integrates the information provided by man's senses.

Now compare your opening statement and the above...which is more understandable, more accurate and more precise?

amicus...