EDNote 1: A reminder and entreaty to all to include only the most
necessary portions of previous posts.
EDNote 2: Has the list previously noted that Max Planck shared
Nabokov's adopted birthday? ~SB
On 01/08/2008 20:31, "joseph Aisenberg" <vanveen13@SBCGLOBAL.NET> wrote:
JA's
response
Are
you saying that what's so great is that humans can as it were quantify
exactly what they can't know? I would say the hubris of this negative
assertion tells us the difference between the world Nabokov sprung
from, and which collapsed, and the modern world of radios and gadgets
he distrusted.
No, I'm not saying "humans can quantify exactly what they can't
know." My carefully-chosen assertion (specially emboldened)
relates to quantifying "exactly the limits of what can be observed
and measured." We leave it to philosophers, epistemologists,
novelists, dreamers, cranks and other layabouts to banter on about knowability
and unknowability! Our physically platformed thesis is what can
be observed and measured.
[There are other objects which are "knowable" without
observation/measurement -- they fall outside the scope of
Heisenberg/Planck (see later)] In spite of all the instrumental
complexities, HomSap the scientist is kicking reality's tyres (as it
were!) and continually cross-checking different sets of measurements to
reduce the risks of human and instrumental error/malfunction. Jansy
rightly points out HomSap's sensory deficiences [hallucinations etc]
and our instruments are imperfect, too. I'll reply soon, JM, since I
was an RL Gregory guinea-pig at the Cavendish.
Dip each week in the AAAS's Science (or Nature, or similar) magazine
for a glimpse into how real, hands-on, give'n'take science unfolds in a
democracy! Results are challenged. Experiments are repeated. Tables are
thumped. Papers are withdrawn.
Forget Quantum Mechanics for a moment. ALL measurements carry some
instrinsic +/- error range. E.g., we numerically round off people's
heights to, say, the nearest 1/4 inch since rounding to the nearest
foot is too coarse, and rounding to 1/32 inch too fine. There's no
angst about your _real_ height. At the molecular level your _real_
height is in constant flux. So, be happy with 6 ft 1 1/2 ins whatever
-- it's near enough! When we move down to the sub-molecular scale we
hit a different kind of measurement problem. But I'm sure you've read
about the fact that observing a tiny particle alters its state. That's
in the very nature of "observing" (e.g., to "see" something you fire
photons at it). A better translation of Heisenberg's original German
(Unbestimmtheit) is INDETERMINANCY rather than UNCERTAINTY. The magic
referred to was establishing with great accuracy the limits imposed by
this observer/observed interaction (though some, veering towards
philosophical speculations, interpet the limits differently as implying
an underlying 'granuality' in the ultimate fabric of reality. This
takes us into controversial technicalities!) The original (Planck)
quantum of enegy, though, was forced on us by the failure of classical
physics to account for black-body radiation (much scope there for
literary allusionment.)
There's nothing negative about determining these physical limits to
real-world measurements.
You are free to dream and write about angels giving head on pins
smaller than Planck's length**. Write about them like VN and you'll
grab my attention & admiration. But physicists, unlike
novelists/poets, are not iicensed to assign arbitrary
properties to "real" physical measurable objects. Not for long, at any
rate. Entities such as phlogiston and the luminiferous ether come and
then go when their assumed properties clash with observations. And
maybe they return with revised properties.
Just to remind you, pure mathematics, rather like art/poetry, knows,
and handles knowingly, abstract objects that are beyond
physical observation and measurement. It's a long-running puzzle why
some of the most abstract, "unreal" objects (e.g., non-Eucliean
geometries, non-Abelian groups, large primes) devised by pure
mathematicians can suddenly prove useful to physics many years later.
How "unreal" can we get in pure mathematics? We have Cantor's endless
sequence of ever "larger" infinities. We have known primes too large to
be witten out as a digit on each particle in the known universe.
Certainly HUBRIS (not the same, surely, as intense PRIDE) has NEVER
been more absent. There are major problems in Cosmology (Dark
Energy/Dark Matter) and we await CERN's confirmation of the mooted
Higgs Boson. At the theoretical level we've been waiting 40+ years for
some bright mind to UNIFY what are at the moment two incompatible
PARTIAL theories (QM and GR Gravity). Einstein tried and failed! Each
work divinely in their own sandpits, but that pale force Gravity just
doesn't fit the quantum model. It doesn't affect the remarkable flow of
tools, gadgets and pills, which only the misguided luddite would
condemn wholesale. Gadgetry is quite relative. Why shun the radio but
have Vera process your handwritten words on one of those horrid
new-fangled typewriter?
** Leave them with a laugh! From my July 2008 ACM Queue col.
fnote 3: Min (Minna; Wilhelmina) Planck belongs to that growing
bunch of neglected sisters, such as Fanny
Homer, Nannerl Mozart,
Siobhan Shakespeare, and Doreen Kelly-Bootle, who quietly
produced their brothers' works without fuss or fame. It's quite
clear that Max Planck had nothing to do with those tiny natural
units of
mass, length and time. It was Min, Min all the way.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=8