PeterJ

Erm. Sorry, but what is a fundamental result? The fact that we cannot say anything about time for photons?

It seems to me much of what Immortal says is correct, but I'm afraid I have to agree with you on this. Maybe it is true that knowing oneself is necessary for moral perfection, or these words describe roughly what is the case, but we cannot use God as any kind of argument for this view, or as an axiom to base one on. It is a logical argument that need to be made. Schopenhauer is good on this one. He explains what immortal may be getting at, the reason why ethics is so closely intertwined with self-knowledge. The central point would be that if we have the recognition that he speaks of, then ethical behaviour becomes indistuingishable from free and self-interested behaviour. For this form of religion sin, evil and suffering would not really exist, making most the the questions about them unanswerable. Interestingly, the Jesus of the Nag Hammadi Library is quoted as saying that sin, as such, does not exist. At any rate, this would be the gnostic appraoch. These things are really only a problem for a rather unsubtle form of monotheism. In the Foundation of Morality, Schopenhauer asks the question: How is it that a human being can so participate in the pain and danger of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s rescue? How is it that what we think of as the first law of nature - self-protection - is suddenly dissolved and another law asserts itself spontaneously? Schopenhauer answers: this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical truth - that you and other are one, and that separateness is a secondary effect of the way our minds experience the world in the frame of time and space. At the metaphysical level, we are all manifestations of that consciousness and energy which is the consciousness and energy of life. This is Schopenhauer: "The experience that dissolves the distinction between the I and the Not I … underlies the mystery of compassion, and stands, in fact, for the reality of which compassion is the prime expression. That experience, therefore, must be the metaphysical ground of ethics and consist simply in this: that one individual should recognise in another, himself in his own true being … Which is the recognition for which the basic formula is the standard Sanskrit expression, ‘Thou art that’, tat tvam asi." (John Mathews, Joseph Campbell and the Grail Myth, in At the Table of the Grail, Ed. John Mathews)

We are already there in metaphysics, where just the first four integers and one imaginary number are required for the universe.

Not worth having such disussions imho. In my opinion religion is the answer to many scientific problems. But try mentioning this to a physicist. Not worth the hassle that follows. It seems to me that scientists are completely determined to make sure religion has no role in our thinking, so it would not be very surprising if it doesn't. The quantum pioneers made a tremendous start, but then it all went pear-shaped. Religion does not depend on God. If this is not understood the disussion will be stuck forever in 19th century arguments about the creation. Please can we move on. Hmm. It seems to me there is a constant bombardment of PR eminating from scientists. And why not? It needs the money. Yes, I would agree completely. In fact I can't see any other way to do it. I don't think you need to apologise for this. I look forward to some future battles. Quite so. But I think you need to show it rather than say it. You ask 'who can resist an argument?' In my experience almost everybody, top scientists included, if they don't like the way the logic is working out. Well, I know that many are. If it's 95% I'd be depressed. Yes. A more famous one was a Jesuit priest. I'm sorry if I gave the impression that that I though all scientists were atheists. My point was that few scientist investigate religion, whether theists or not.

I think the main problem is that atheists very rarely take the trouble to understand religion while theists rarely take the time to understand science. Dawkins is a classic example of what happens when we forget that scholarship is as important to religious discussions as it is to scientific ones. The dismissal of evolutionm is what happens when our lack of confidence in our 'faith', or just lack of faith, makes us worry that science is going to prove something that would undermine it. Ridiculous. How can one claim to have faith in a theory and then worry about whether science might falsify it? If we really do have faith then we must believe that all science can discover is evidence that out faith is justified. Thus either science is our friend or our views are temperamental and uncertain. My view would be that a religion that is inconsistent with science is obviously absurd and ad hoc. I'd want nothing to do with it. No scientifically minded person could happily co-exist with a religion that makes claims contrary to scientific data. The trouble is that many scientists make claims about religion that go beyond the data. In fact there's an ongoing epidemic of it. Religion is perfectly entititled to dismiss such claims as temperamental nonsense. I think we need to get along but not to compromise, and to keep arguing politely until we sort out the truth. Impossible to do, of course, because so many people look at their naive model of religion and dismiss it as nonsense, which it probably is, rather than do the research, and assume that's what religion is, while others assume that their religious beliefs will not withstand scientific scrutiny, probably correctly, and so do not do the research, assuming that science is the work of the devil. For an example of what happens if take the trouble to do the research I'd cite the writings Erwin Schroedinger. He shows that religion and science may be bedfellows rather than mortal enemies. Trouble is, of course, his view is considered heretical in both monotheism and quantum mechanics. This is because he sees beyond both to their resolution and reconciliation. I wish we could move on from opposing a naive dogmatic monotheism with a naive dogmatic scientific materialism. Neither is the answer to anything. This argument is a cultural problem, mostly in the US, not an academic one, and takes place mostly between between people who cannot or will not use their brains. It should not concern serious scholars.

Thank you doctor. I think I've sorted my problem now. I missed the obvious, as is so easy to do. For me anyway. One thing. How does one convert the complex number that is the output into a single value for the the vertical z-axis?

Lol. It's okay. I've decided to stay confused.

Right. This is what I've been misunderstanding. Now I need to go think some more. Many thanks. Very helpful.

Not so easy I think. There will always be one more, and it might not be on the line. Thanks. I've read du Sautoy's book a couple of time but it's not much help on this issue. I did not know that the inputs were being plotted with the outputs. I thought the landscape was created from only the outputs. Are you sure about this?

Thanks. Not many people seem to know much about this. So do we enter each integers in turn, each with a range of imaginary components, and the landscape includes all possible complex values? (Or a sample of all values). I'm wondering if it is possible to list the input values that create non-trivial zeros.

I would say the photons are at rest in their frame. Is this a problem? There would be no change and no possible observation of other photons or indeed anything at all. Is this not a possible solution? But couldn't we just say that while this is true for all observations, the case of something traveling at c is a special case where observation becomes impossible? What about the absorber theory of time? Does this not imply ftl particles? Or is this not an equivalent interpretation?

Well, actually you do. The idea of 'Nothing' and 'Something' work no better in philosophy than in physics. That's why the Something-Nothing question of cosmogony is an intellectual dilemma. The brains of philosophers are no different to those of physicists, and to say that logic produces no answers is to throw away your reason. Yes. a lot of philosophy is pointless or badly done, but so is a lot of physics and many other things.

Um. What does 'no notion' mean here? Do you mean the idea makes no sense? Didn't Einstein do quite well by giving the photon a pov? Not arguing, just clarifying. If I were riding on a photon then wouldn't time stand still for me? Why would it not be the very same frame in which the particle is measured as travelling faster than c?

Not sure if this the right place for the question. Please move this post if not. Is there anyone here able to help me understand how R's Z-function is used to create his famous landscape? I will never understand the Z-function but am happy to treat it as a black box. What I'm trying to grasp, among other things, is what numbers have to be used as inputs in order to produce the necessary outputs. My thought is that each output value must have an input value associated with it. Yet I've never seen a discussion of the inputs, only the outputs. So maybe I'm misunderstanding something very basic. Just a discussion in natural language would be fine. I am not a mathematician. Thanks.

Much confused about this. Am I right to suppose that for a photon time stands still, and if it went any faster time would have to go backwards?

Yes, well said. Not much real philosophy going on here. But I would agree with Swansont that professional philosophy is a century behind the times, possibly longer, and it's not surprising that physcists despair of its ever catching up. The problem is not philosophy, however, but philosophers. As a member of a professional philosophy forum I read most of the discussions with horror and amazement. I feel that any progress is likely to come from outside the profession. This is why I think physicists, and all of us as individuals, should take an interest, and not just leave it to the people who have been failing so spectacularly for so long. I have never seen one proposal by a philosopher in the European academic tradition that might account for the weirdness of QM, SR etc. After a century of thought there is not even one. It's ridiculous. But this does not mean there is any problem with philosophy as an area of research and study. I can't undertand the Zeta function but that doesn't mean mathematics is pointless.

The way we have to describe Nature is incomprehensible to us according to Richard Feynman, so don't be surprised if it is incomprehensible to you. I don't think the layman can be expected to understand what the specialists themselves do not understand. Every particle in the universe is connected to every other in some magical way. This is easy to understand. It's a claim as old as the hills. Science must reduce the magic to science before it can hope to explain this phenomenon to anyone else. Don't mistake Cox's fluent exposition of this phenomenon for an understanding of it. Now I'm going to go make tea and so disturb particles all over the universe.

Quite a story. But you know, many people have these kinds of problems. Nothing for it but to grit your teeth. Having children is great, but it is also a fantastic drain of energy, money and time, and makes you worry for the rest of your life. And being crazy is the only sensible course of action in this crazy society. I have every intention of becoming increasingly crazy. As for domineering wives, it is often their most vital role to be domineeering and usually very difficult to prevent them. To hell with it all. There's no rule that says you have to be a winner, and the meek may inherit the earth. How about you take one bold and slightly frightening decision today and act on it, and do this every day for a fortnight. Your self-respect will benefit from your decisiveness and ability to act, and it will remind you that it is you who are in charge of yourself.

I've followed this discussion for a while but I struggle to understand what the disgareement is actually about. The use of the terms 'realism' and 'idealism' seem to be non-standard, and I cannot see how either in its general philosophical form would be inconsistent with SR. Why does idealism or realism have to say that objects either do or do not have an 'absolute' or fixed shape, mass, velocity etc.? Hell, if one of these 'isms' were found to be inconsistent with SR then we would have a scientific way to decide a philosophical problem. Swansont notes that under realism the laws of physics vary with frame of reference. But surely the laws are invariant. And if they vary, why should they not vary under idealism in the same way as under realism? Is it that 'realsim' here is shorthand for 'naive realism', by which we live in a wysiwyg universe, and then being contrasted with 'naive idealism'? Maybe we're talking 'scientific realism' here. on which I'm a bit vague, and by 'idealism' mean something other than mind-dependent. I'll catch up eventually.

Interesting article. I'm not sure I see how it would invalidate Swansonts position, but I liked this: "So again we have an object lesson in the history of science, that a careful examination of the implications of a theory is sometimes neglected by professional science. Inconsistencies can be revealed by even a lay examination." I find this is true in all fields of study. It is amazing what a little naivity can reveal. <BR clear=right>

This is well explained in Cox and Forshaw's recent book 'Why Does E=MC2'. It's a good read, and addresses most of the issues being discussed here.

Of course, This is what ontology is for. Not irrelevant, but not crucial. Crucial to me, and maybe to you, but that's just us.

In its defence, I would not see Owl's view as an endorsement of philosophy of science but as a rather odd view of it. I understand his frustration with the refusal of physics not to address ontological questions, or at least to treat them as important, but it is their right and a part of their method. This is how physics is defined, how it's done, what stops it being cluttered up with troublesome metaphysical issues. Metaphysics does not build power stations. The term 'fundamental physics' means 'as fundamental as physics gets', and shouldn't mislead us into thinking that physics deals with ontological questions. It is useless arguing that physics should be redefined. Physics is what it is. When mathematicians tells us that 2 + 2 = 4, we don't insist that they tell us 2 of what?, 4 of what? It doesn't matter. This is how the numbers behave. To dig deeper means moving to a metaphysics or mysticism forum. Still, I don't see why we shouldn't discuss how ontology and physics might be brought into line with each other. A theory that worked for both areas of research would be useful.

I do apologise, Moontanman. I hadn't realised you knew absolutely nothing about it. 'Mysticism' is a technical term. Quite intelligent people write books about it. Here's a general definition. "Mysticism is a term which has come into common use from about the year 1900 onwards. It has since then become terribly overworked. The term itself is derived from a Greek word, mustes, which means a person who has been admitted to secret knowledge of the realities of life and death. It is only that those who have once attained to such a state should desire to prolong it or to reproduce it at intervals. It has been suggested that all mystics, whether Christian, Moslem, Hindu or Buddhist, are agreed on a few fundamentals: (1) that all division and separateness is unreal, and that the universe is a single indivisible unity; (2) that evil is illusory, and that the illusion arises through regarding a part of the universe as self-subsistent; (3) that time is unreal, and that reality is eternal, not in the sense of being everlasting, but in the sense of being out of time." A. C. Bouquet - Comparative Religion(288) Penguin, London (1962) There is another definition for the word, by which it means something a bit more like what you take it to mean, but I hadn't expected to have this misundertanding on a science forum. I'll probably not post in this thread again, given that one or two people seem hell bent on torpedoeing the discussion. Happy Christmas...

ASTROLOGY!!! Ha ha ha ha... No seriously... If you believe that mysticism has something to do with astrology then I'll be very depreressed. I think most people do. Mind and Matter to most people are different things. 'Res extensa' and 'res cogitans'. The difficulty of understanding mysticism stems from the claim that there is a third category of phenomenon. Well, I'm not so sure. An event requires a consciousness and that would require some sort of material substrate. The idea would be to go beyond thing-events to where nothing ever happens. Pure or pre-conceptual awareness is what is explored, the phenomenon Kant characterises as 'not an instance of a category'. Yes. A brain would be a necessary condition, although not sufficient one for the words you're typing and the thoughts you're thinking. Well, it is true that scientists often rubbbish mysticism and metaphysics, but they cannot deny that their data and findings fail to give them any ammunition. When any data contradicts the finding so metaphysics or mysticism there will be a big hoohaa wordwide, Nobel prizes and all that, so we'll all know when it happens. Yes. That's about it. I'm not trying to persuade anyone, only to get people to take the idea seriously enough to have a conversation without continually being accused of being an idiot, as if my view will collapse before a few ill-considered objections. People have being trying to falsify this view for millenia, and it is not likely anyone here will succeeed any better. But for the Upanishads the unity would come before anything. If you were right then Advaita Hinduism would be monotheism. Rather, it is nondualism. This would be the orthodox view. If mysticism were monotheism it would be no improvement on it. I wouldn't want to argue with your own belief in this respect, but it is not found in mysticism. It is true that the word God is used, but it would be a code word, often used for didactic purposes or to prevent charges of heresy and so on, or just because it is difficult to find a better or more evocative word, and not the claim that monotheism is true. Good point. This would be what makes mathematics so relevant to metaphysics and psychology. Ah. There is way around this. Not ideal, but the best the intellect can do with no help. If we can read the literature of all the traditions, from the Buddhist sutras to the verses of the Upanishads, from the Tao Teh Ching to the Mystical Theology of the pseodo-Dionysius, from the Anelects of Plotinus to the poetry of Honghzhi and Rumi, from Schroedinger to Wei Wu Wei, from Badley to the Dalai Lama, and if these writers and texts seem always rigorous and perfectly consistent with each other, then you will know you have the correct interpretation, or are on the right track. If you see substantial disagreements between different traditions, more than just the usual cultural, linguistic and methodological differences, then some adjustment is indicated. I suppose it's a coherence theory of intepretation. It will work as long as there is only one mysticism and if there is only one truth. If we adopt a neutral metaphysical position then there will be nothing to disagree with in the literature of mysticism, and if we want to render its doctrine implausible we would only need to refute this position. It's the handy thing about mysticism, as a an area of intellectual study. If the issue is important then whatever we know about the doctrine of one tradition we know about the doctrine of all them.