Religious belief

[Valka]

Have you ever read Contact by Carl Sagan?  There's an important bit in the novel about the Creator leaving clues in the laws of the universe -specifically the value of Pi having embedded messages, in the novel, but the aliens said there were more.  The observer effect could be interpreted as God's joke on physicists - or "Hello; I AM"- or both...

I'm basically just saying the strangeness of quantum physics appears to me to be an entirely different order of 'we don't understand yet' than previous gaps one could name, being almost like they're set up to contradict the possibility of rational explanation.  Lori can probably articulate this better than I, this being a interest of his that he's studied extensively.

I'm an agnostic, personally, and this is just speculation.

I've read Contact twice, and I actually hate this part of the book. If Sagan were still alive I'd ask him why the cop-out where Elly finds mystical messages where it's just one more pattern of nature.

I have a request to a couple of posters upthread: Would you please leave a blank line between paragraphs? That makes your posts much easier to read.

[Buster's Uncle]

I always wondered about that, too, actually.  It was a very strange creative decision coming from an avowed atheist.  Someone hid a picture of a circle in the value of Pi - "I AM THAT I AM", pretty much...

[Elok]

Thedarkest, guess how western civilization started?
When some greeks in Ionia refused to succumb to this urge of mysticism and instead started thinking what is actually going on.
From there the philosophy tradition and the rest is history.

I'm a bit sketchy on the archeological record, but I think Western civ started some time earlier with these vaguely Persian-ish guys coming out of the east and having their way with the women.  Then they fought each other and interbred a dozen different ways for several centuries.  There were some invasions, a dark age, a half-remembered war in Asia Minor, and some five hundred years after that people on the coast of said region got around to borrowing and riffing on some ideas from a (thoroughly kooky and mystical) group of Semites far to the southeast.

[Lorizael]

I'm basically just saying the strangeness of quantum physics appears to me to be an entirely different order of 'we don't understand yet' than previous gaps one could name, being almost like they're set up to contradict the possibility of rational explanation.  Lori can probably articulate this better than I, this being a interest of his that he's studied extensively.

I agree that quantum mechanics defies our intuitions, but I don't think it's irrational. I also think it's possible that we're incapable of fully grokking QM, because we just might not be able to escape the limitations of our monkey brains. We've evolved to have a firm grasp on the big, classical world, and there's no particularly good reason why we need to/should be able to grasp any more than that.

But again, I don't think QM is inherently inexplicable. I think it forces us to question some deep-seated assumptions about the way the world works, but I also think it's possible that it's unreasonable of us to expect the world to exist as we imagine it must. I'm not just repeating the first point here, though. Take Einstein and relativity, for example. He showed that uniform time, an unspoken assumption that everyone holds about the world, is actually incoherent and leads to contradictions, which is why simultaneity is not a thing once relativity comes along.

I think QM probably contains similar insights about the world, but we probably haven't quite figured them out yet. That is, we have some beliefs about the world that seem foundational but are actually logically problematic, and the experimental facts of QM might bring this to light.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've always wondered if the QM mysteries have some connection to the 'missing' spatial dimensions, actually...

[binTravkin]

I'm a bit sketchy on the archeological record, but I think Western civ started some time earlier with these vaguely Persian-ish guys coming out of the east and having their way with the women.  Then they fought each other and interbred a dozen different ways for several centuries.  There were some invasions, a dark age, a half-remembered war in Asia Minor, and some five hundred years after that people on the coast of said region got around to borrowing and riffing on some ideas from a (thoroughly kooky and mystical) group of Semites far to the southeast.

Looks like you're referring to Indo-Europeans.
According to latest, most of Europe has 3 fathers.
So I guess, they continued to "have their way" for quite a some time, including amongst themselves.
They also migrated to quite a few other places, as far as India and Western China, all the while seemingly continuing to "have their way".

Anyways, I was referring to intellectual/cultural roots of Western civilization, you are talking more about ethnic/genetic.
I also remember Egyptians and various Mesopotamian cultures having some tradition of inquiry, but it seems nowhere on the scale of greeks, which, being much lesser in number, produced so many great thinkers and ideas.

[Valka]

The Egyptians were talented at math and engineering, but not so much in what we would consider science.

[Elok]

Cultures are invented by large groups of people, not scattered handfuls of philosophers.  The Greeks were Greek long before they discovered philosophy.  Democracy was developed independently from philosophy, at any rate--the most you can say is that both were developed in ethnic Ionian communities, but for different reasons--and Christianity has had a far stronger influence on Western culture than Plato or Aristotle.  Of course, the former had ample influence on Christianity itself, because plenty of the early philosophers were religious or quasi-religious.

[Valka]

...Christianity has had a far stronger influence on Western culture than Plato or Aristotle.  Of course, the former had ample influence on Christianity itself, because plenty of the early philosophers were religious or quasi-religious.

They go hand-in-hand. There's a good reason why Copernicus waited until he was on his deathbed to publish his book that dared to say that the Sun is at the centre of the solar system and not Earth: He'd have been executed for heresy, in one of the many gruesome ways employed by the Catholic church/Inquisition.

[Lorizael]

I've always wondered if the QM mysteries have some connection to the 'missing' spatial dimensions, actually...

I am not an expert, but my guess would be no. If the spooky parts of QM rely on information passing through "missing" dimensions, and those missing dimensions are local for quantum particles, then violations of Bell's inequalities rule out that possibility.

I don't know if you've read this one, but I did a post recently trying to explain what Bell's inequalities are all about. I'm not sure I did a particularly good job of it, but there are pictures of cookies!

[Elok]

...Christianity has had a far stronger influence on Western culture than Plato or Aristotle.  Of course, the former had ample influence on Christianity itself, because plenty of the early philosophers were religious or quasi-religious.

They go hand-in-hand. There's a good reason why Copernicus waited until he was on his deathbed to publish his book that dared to say that the Sun is at the centre of the solar system and not Earth: He'd have been executed for heresy, in one of the many gruesome ways employed by the Catholic church/Inquisition.

This is the standard church-and-state-conflict narrative we've been telling since the Enlightenment, one which blurs the truth considerably.  Galileo and Copernicus got in trouble not for contradicting the Bible or patristic teaching (neither of which says much of anything about what goes around what), but for feuding with an academic orthodoxy based on the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition.  It was called heresy because the RCC had a monopoly or near-monopoly on education back then, and heresy was a catch-all for PO'ing the RCC, but they were refuting Aristotle and Ptolemy, not St. Paul or Jesus.  The Church had spent the past several centuries adopting pagan classical teachers into a synthesis with Christian teaching--Thomas Aquinas basically baptized Aristotle--and didn't appreciate all that work getting undone.

The only reason academic snits today don't turn similarly violent is that today's academics don't have the power to arrest, punish and suppress their opponents.  If you don't believe they'd be tempted to do so given the opportunity, I'm guessing you don't have much experience with the tone of contemporary academia.  Read any book by a scholar in a controversial field; s/he will spend at least a chapter on "my opponents, and why they are stupid and biased."  Heck, you'll find it in books about paleontology: "Jack Horner thinks T. Rex couldn't be a predator because it was slow?  Please!  Given that its prey animals had to have been equally slow, this is a perfectly ridiculous position to take.  And furthermore, Horner fails to recognize blah blah blah . . ."

[Buster's Uncle]

This - and there's just no missing how much foundational science has been done by clerics, particularly monks.  For every Copernicus, Elok can name you at least one Gregor Mendel...

It's complicated, something we nerdz don't want the world to be, but usually find it is, to our vast annoyance, if only we'll look.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've always wondered if the QM mysteries have some connection to the 'missing' spatial dimensions, actually...

I am not an expert, but my guess would be no. If the spooky parts of QM rely on information passing through "missing" dimensions, and those missing dimensions are local for quantum particles, then violations of Bell's inequalities rule out that possibility.

I don't know if you've read this one, but I did a post recently trying to explain what Bell's inequalities are all about. I'm not sure I did a particularly good job of it, but there are pictures of cookies!

I have an old mental block when people start throwing in equations, and have trouble not automatically skimming.

You're very welcome to copy/paste, y'know - I tend not to click licks, and don't think I'm unusual in that...

[Lorizael]

I have an old mental block when people start throwing in equations, and have trouble not automatically skimming.

I do, too, actually, and I study this stuff. I totally understand that. I have to be very curious about the subject matter to not simply skim over math or symbolic logic when I see it. You'd think I'd try to find a better way to represent this stuff when I write about it, given that I experience the aversion myself...

Here's as non-mathy as it gets while still possibly being close to explanatory: Quantum mechanics is weird because it involves correlations between objects that should be causally separate from each other (entanglement). It's not actually a problem for separated objects to be correlated; that just means their correlation has to have been established beforehand. When we talk about correlations, we talk about probability: how likely it is that two events will coincide. The math for working out probabilities has some pretty ironclad rules (that seem to be based on nothing more than obvious logic) about how probabilities add, subtract, etc.

But the correlations that appear in quantum mechanics lead to probabilities that do not line up with classical probability. This means the correlation couldn't have been established beforehand. The solutions are: (a) quantum correlations are non-local (making Einstein unhappy), (b) quantum objects don't have intrinsic reality (making everyone, including Einstein, unhappy), or (c) probability doesn't work the way we think it does and only conforms to classical probability in classical situations (making everyone confused).

[Buster's Uncle]

I should have said, in addition to the maths thing, something you must have deduced about me a long time ago - I've close to zero formal education in physics, even high-school level, and that's a real barrier in reading a physics student explaining what he's learned.  I fancy I have a well above average layman's understanding, but that's all.  Throw in the maths, and the level of work required tends to defeat my deep desire to understand fully.

I don't know enough to intelligently question the base assumption that there's a wave function that collapses when observed, (though I've been exposed to many explanations I, at best, partly understood, but too technical to readily follow) - the rest is a house of cards without that superimposition, of course.

I'm sure the explanation is far sounder than it looks when you can only follow popular science analogies, but I'll never have the math...

(I'd definitely already seen the cookies, but couldn't manage to not skim towards the end, even trying hard.)