Tuesday, November 11, 2008

getting back to science...

STILL MORE: favorite quote from this book it's actually a re quote of Oscar Wild: "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are gazing at the stars..." D.

EVEN MORE:

some things I always had a problem with:

the analogy used to explain basic relativity: is the train moving or is the platform moving? what a silly question... you must burn energy to have that behemoth of a train move! there is no energy spent for just... standing on the platform... (if you have any doubt as to what is ultimately moving in that situation, just have somebody in the train pull the emergency break...or better still, have the train run out of fuel)

quantum mechanics: the idea that you have a measuring instrument interacting with what it's supposed to measure and thus the measurement turns-out wrong and that's a problem we just have to live with... you should be able to at least estimate the error, take it into account and move on... it's an *error of the measuring process* -- has nothing to do with the underlying reality...

a lot of things that are currently main stream appear beyond ridiculous and I think Einstein was correct (although deemed wrong according to current ideas) to question the foundation of quantum mechanics.... D.

MORE: well... I just have to give up on trying to get G. to read it (he's read a couple of paragraphs I pointed-out and said "cool!" -- not exactly the heated discussion I was hoping for... D.
...
Einstein's mistakes

Delia

P.S. science and the like may not be a perfect way to figure out what's going on but it seems to be the best we've got... D.