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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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In the old days they could interplanetary travel just by mantra sound vibration.
Yeah, those were great times. Werner, remember that time you hot-wired that vimana and did donuts around Jupiter? Arjuna was pissed.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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What, no 'sample return mission from Uranus' jokes?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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MikeL. Are you going to now tell us that these things are not real?
What do you mean by real?
As we have seen over and over, A) science and discjursive thought is reductionistic, and B) when we reduce down to particles all the stuff that seems real to our senses, stuff we can actually see and weight and so forth (with instrumentation, granted), said stuff "has no physical extent."
So while science has itself admitted that "real" does not translate to Newtonial "stuff," the arguments for real things is apparently a discussion of what happens on the meta level where life actually takes place, far above the quantum threshold, where the apparent "things" we relate to operate under their own set of rules, and in doing so underscore the limits of reductionism.
JL
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limpingcrab
Trad climber
the middle of CA
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Why is the title "vs" instead of "and" ?
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MH2
climber
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when we reduce down to particles all the stuff that seems real to our senses, stuff we can actually see and weight and so forth (with instrumentation, granted), said stuff "has no physical extent."
And yet at Brookhaven they manage to collide gold ions at 99.995% of lightspeed. How is that possible if gold atoms have no physical extent?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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How is that possible if gold atoms have no physical extent?
That's a question for a quantum engineer. They are the ones saying this is so. Don't confuse this for my opinion, which has nothing do with it.
I would point out the fact that people often have a kind of panic response to the idea that what we believe is solid stuff just ain't so in any ultimate way. It leaves us no thing to hang onto. It also means that reality cannot be explained exclusively by physical events, since at the most fundamental level physicality is not present in the way our sense organs tell us it is.
JL
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MH2
climber
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Get a grip, JL.
People do have things they panic about. Whether reality is solid or not is not one of them.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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DMT -in case you missed it the first 50 times around. I'll admit, giving up our real stuff is a tough one.
From "Discover."
"Niels Bohr, a Danish Physicist who made significant contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory once said: “if quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” Quantum physics has left scientists all over the world baffled, especially with the discovery that our physical material reality, isn’t really physical at all. “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” It seems philosophers of our ancient past were right, our senses really do deceive us.
Again, our physical material reality really ISN’T physical at all. The meaning, significance and implications of these findings within our quantum world have led to a plethora of ideas and theories, some of which lay inside the label of “pseudo-science.”
Scientific understandings change continuously throughout human history. Old “knowings” are constantly dismissed as we come across new ones. Even with our current understanding about the laws of physics, it could have some loopholes, especially with the recent disclosure of the black budget. Other phenomenon, like zero-point energy, extracting energy and heat from electromagnetic zero-point radiation via the Casimir force, also raise expectations. Some of these ideas threaten our current understanding of physics, but how can we even have an understanding of physics when what we call ‘matter’ isn’t even real? How can we understand it if when we observe an atom at its tiniest level the behavior of that atom changes? The quantum world is definitely a weird one, and it’s safe to say that we don’t understand it, but we are starting to recognize that non-physical properties govern the universe.
The notion that the atom was the smallest particle in the universe fell with the discovery that the atom itself is made up of even smaller, subatomic elements. What was even more shocking was the revelation that these subatomic particles emit various “strange energies.” Proponents would argue that the findings within quantum physics only apply and are significant at the subatomic level, but to those I say, are we not all existing at the subatomic level? When we observe ourselves and our physical environment at the smallest level, are we not made up of atoms? Are we not made up of subatomic particles? Are we not what we observe?
At the turn of the ninetieth century, physicists started to explore the relationship between energy and the structure of matter. In doing so, the belief that a physical, Newtonian material universe that was at the very heart of scientific knowing was dropped, and the realization that matter is nothing but an illusion replaced it. Scientists began to recognize that everything in the Universe is made out of energy.
Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating, each one radiating its own unique energy signature. Therefore, if we really want to observe ourselves and find out what we are, we are really beings of energy and vibration, radiating our own unique energy signature -this is fact and is what quantum physics has shown us time and time again. We are much more than what we perceive ourselves to be, and it’s time we begin to see ourselves in that light. If you observed the composition of an atom with a microscope, you would see a small, invisible tornado like vortex, with a number of infinitely small energy vortices called quarks and photons. These are what make up the structure of the atom. As you focused in closer and closer on the structure of the atom, you would see nothing, you would observe a physical void.(0) The atom has no physical structure, we have no physical structure, physical things really don’t have any physical structure! Atoms are made out of invisible energy, not tangible matter.
It’s quite the conundrum, isn’t it? Our experience tells us that our reality is made up of physical material things, and that our world is an independently existing objective one. Again, what quantum mechanics reveals is that there is no true “physicality” in the universe, that atoms are made of focused vorticies of energy-miniature tornadoes that are constantly popping into and out of existence. The revelation that the universe is not an assembly of physical parts, suggested by Newtonian physics, and instead comes from a holistic entanglement of immaterial energy waves stems from the work of Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, among others.
Despite the findings of quantum physics many scientists today still cling onto the prevailing matter-oriented worldview, for no good reason at all. As mentioned earlier, these scientists restrict quantum theory’s validity to the subatomic world. If we know that matter isn’t physical, how can we further our scientific discovery by treating it as physical?
Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still greeted with cynicism, incomprehension and even anger. (T. Folger, “Quantum Shmantum”; Discover 22:37-43, 2013)
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WBraun
climber
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The intelligent class knows that material science is the relative platform of knowledge.
The intelligent class knows that the spiritual science is the absolute platform of knowledge.
The gross materialists are always incomplete.
This why their foolish theories always change over "TIME".
Time is absolute truth and is an impersonal feature of God himself ......
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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This is about as good as it gets with a 100 word vocabulary.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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I've heard the same spirit babble all my life. Same 'power words', all pregnant with deep, deep meaning. Or something. Northern Cali upbringing, doncha know. We've got plenty of it up here, too. In the end, it's all the same tired crap, but it does make the wearer feel 'awakened' or, more to the point, it makes the wearer feel that everyone else is a spiritual zombie.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Largo posted thusly:
As we have seen over and over, A) science and discjursive thought is reductionistic, and B) when we reduce down to particles all the stuff that seems real to our senses, stuff we can actually see and weight and so forth (with instrumentation, granted), said stuff "has no physical extent."
Boy, have I been waiting for Largo to bring this up again. Near the death of the old science vs. religion thread, he made a long post about particle physics and the nature of matter. That its real form was emptiness and verified that this somehow proved his whole Zen approach to knowing.
I believe he said, "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form...exactly." or something pretty close to that. He pretty much crowed that the physicists had proved the no-thing-ness of the Universe that he believes in, through his "experiential" activities. I say that he cannot, in any way, sit, meditate, and directly experience the action of a particular electron.
Sure, if you shock him with a car battery, he will understand electrons a little more directly, but his experiential adventures do not consist of traditional scientific thought, or at least methods.
For years, he has been crowing about the limited nature of the "meat brain." I assume that this refers to the physical brain in itself, which is made up of many molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.
If you want to break down atoms and get at the most fundamental particles that we know of, matter in the conventional sense really does get odd. It does not break down, but in an atom, which can be physically observed now, most of that atom is empty space.
John went on parroting things that I really don't understand much myself..subatomoic physics. He liked this website, for those of you who would like to check it out:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/mass-energy-matter-etc/matter-and-energy-a-false-dichotomy/
Now, most of us know at least a little about this from a lay perspective. You have "classical" mechanics, which all works quite well in Chemistry, Relativistic Physics, plain old engineering (of something like the LHC itself) and what most of us are familiar with when we describe matter in that classic sense.
Largo using the work of the most reductionist observationists in all of science to prove his notion of no-thing is a joke. I believe that some popular books came about back in the seventies about the most fundamental particles of matter and relating them to philosophy, such as "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" and others. His total world view of Buddhist emptiness has nothing to do with particle physics and enlightenment. I haven't read of a single prediction made by Sidhartha or any of what MikeL calls "fully realized" Buddhists about physics that were later experimentally proved.
OK. So accept that the occupants and area within a neutron are indeed mostly empty space. That does not mean that you fire all of the engineers who built the various measuring devices from Ed's Scroungatron to the LHC itself aren't physical, and perform in precise physical ways.
Even John's beloved website says this:
“Matter” can refer to atoms, the basic building blocks of what we think of as “material”: tables, air, rocks, skin, orange juice — and by extension, to the particles out of which atoms are made, including electrons and the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of an atom.
◾OR it can refer to what are sometimes called the elementary “matter particles” of nature: electrons, muons, taus, the three types of neutrinos, the six types of quarks — all of the types of particles which are not the force particles (the photon, gluons, graviton and the W and Z particles.) Read here about the known apparently-elementary particles of nature. [The Higgs particle, by the way, doesn't neatly fit into the classification of particles as matter particles and force particles, which was somewhat artificial to start with; I have a whole section about this classification below.]
◾OR it can refer to classes of particles that are found out there, in the wider universe, and that on average move much more slowly than the speed of light.
Hmmm. Things. Stuff.
For most of us we can do perfectly good work without having to know much about particle physics. The classical physics of Newton was sufficient to navigate the Rosetta probe to next week's landing on a comet. It didn't go fast enough to require significant correction using relativity, I assume, but Relativity is acceptable when discussing the large stuff in the universe. Relativity and Quantum physics are still, I guess, at their famous impasse.
This impasse hasn't stopped us from building bigger particle accelerators any more than cosmology questions haven't stopped us from furiously building new telescopes and instruments to observe the Very Large.
So Largo's claim that the fundamental, and strange, Very Small somehow verifies any notion that he has put forth over the past few years is total bullsh#t.
He writes stories about the Stonemasters and books about anchors. All of which can be considered using the first definition of matter that the linked website fits.
So are you writing a book about this, JL? Will they be made of paper and cardboard? Man, for your sake, I hope not.
These things are of course very important, like DMT says, but the nature of subatomic particles and Largo's meditation are so far apart from each other that it is laughable. Is he saying that he meditated his way into an understanding of matter? I don't see why he took off on this dangerous tangent. Railing against all of the reductionist-discursive efforts as not being the way to understanding, and then zero-ing in on the ultimate reductionist discursive part of science as proving your notion of emptiness is a little bizarre if you consider your writings as a whole.
So John, does the LHC exist? If all matter is nothingness, as you seem to be saying, then does the tree outside your Zendo exist? I suggest that John swallow a hundred aspirin and then see what the emptiness of matter does to him.
Shoplifting from a popular physics website, and then concluding that it is the same thing as his Zen notion of emptiness, is stepping into a huge pile of sh#t.
I can guarantee you that he will never admit that his shoe stinks, though.
Remember this part of the page that you quoted from:
[quote]“Matter” can refer to atoms, the basic building blocks of what we think of as “material”: tables, air, rocks, skin, orange juice — and by extension, to the particles out of which atoms are made, including electrons and the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of an atom.
This is the most useful description of matter in all but the most reductionist ways, and is perfectly useful scientifically in almost all fields. Engineers who build bridges don't worry about subatomic particles. They worry about the physical characteristics of classical matter.
A dimensionless point is easy to contemplate if you go read a little about singularities. They are just really big dimensionless points.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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It's good having John L back to liven things up a bit. The fact that he chooses the "religion vs science" thread upon which to post clearly shows his position is one of religious conviction.
;>)
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Bushman
Social climber
The island of Tristan da Cunha
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'Dogma or Dharma'
I read my dogs some writing from this thread,
They rolled their eyes then yawned and went to bed,
But thus in passing this I heard was said,
They groaned, "whatever," as my face turned red,
It really hurt to see them act this way,
That dogs in all their apathy should say,
My interests so bored them on this day,
But food arrives they're hardly kept at bay,
For dogs and I have much more to compare,
When mastering one thousand yards our stare,
We both find common ground the saying goes,
When finding there what's right under our nose,
So all is all in success and defeat,
That we might thrive on different types of meat,
For meat is meat be chopped or finely ground,
Regardless if the argument is sound.
-bushman
11/06/2014
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Don't you see John Gill? He is now a scientist, threw his hat in the ring with Ed.
I sure wish Ed was around. Particle Physics is so alien to me.
I spent a few hours reading about singularities last night. I wasn't aware of how important quantum physics was in regards to BIG objects. It helps to predict the odd material of Black Holes and Neutron Stars. Exotic stuff. Very interesting.
I spend most of my time interpreting geophysical logs, and many of the instruments that you use to log deep well bores are based on subatomic physics.
We might send down 15 instruments on a single run, and I have spent many long nights watching the monitors in the logging truck. We use the photoelectric effect to determine lithology for example.
Field work is mainly being the well doctor. Look at the squiggly lines to see what kind of a well you will have. After thirty years I rarely need to pull out a calculator. I can look and see .
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WBraun
climber
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Modern man spends all his time trying understand all things outside of himself.
And thus never understands his own self.
One who fully understands his own self will understand all things outside of himself .....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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his position is one of religious conviction.
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As mentioned 100 times, "religion" deals with beliefs, doctrine, faith, devotion, "God," and so forth. Kindly find where I have used any such language or terms in my discussions.
BASE, you sould old and furious. Ask a question.
JL
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Base , doing a lot of fishing lately; there aren't any fish in the zen pond. There is no conflict with zen and science. Except for the one you are trying to create.
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