Keith Russell

Greetings:

Good grief. Anyone who has difficulty imagining particles as waves only needs to look at water--

--or beaches.

Sand dunes are waves made of particles.

Keith.

Adrian Selby

Back to an earlier point, because its something I'd be keen to know more about, this complementarity that you refer to Niels Bohr on regarding particles and waves, what happens if there is a unified explanation for this two slit experiment in the future (or even a better experiment), could the complementarity that your hypothesis relies on dissolve?

Beoran

Well, you tell me. What conclusion do you want to make? The universe is as it is. Not much can be concluded from that.

Beoran

Sorry, Keith, but scientifically speaking, the wave model is not a model of a wave in a medium. It is a model of a wave (ie, a cange) of the electric fields and the magnetic fields that exists without medium. There is no "ether".

Quantum mechanics are facinating, but they are also very counterintuitive. There are some good pages on the web that try to explain in more detail such as this page:

<a href="http://www.howstuffworks.com/atom8.htm" target="_blank">http://www.howstuffworks.com/atom8.htm</a>

Russell E. Rierson

Do you mean that while the current explanation says that reality can be complementary, i.e. wave or particle... An explanation could be discovered in the future that says reality is niether wave nor particle...

not{p or q} == not-p and not-q

Complementarity basically means duality.

Which also sets the foundation for relativity.

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Who knows???

Russ

Adrian Selby

I know almost nothing about this subject, but if I read right regarding the data that appears to conclude that a particle can be in two places at once, well, if we have an imperfect explanation that is forced to treat the particle also as a wave, we might get a better explanation down the line that can dissolve this counterintuitive notion.

Perhaps I'm saying that p and q are representative of current ways of categorising these ickle bits of reality, and that they're not the most useful ways of breaking reality up at a physical level.

What new information do you think can be found by postulating reality as a complex self organising system? Also, do you have a response to the criticism that consciousness is not in fact ubiquitous?

Russell E. Rierson

What could be the fundamental principle of self organization?

Self organization is a phenomenon whereby a system self organizes its internal structure independent of external causes. Such self organizing systems exhibit other properties of chaos...non-linearity, feedback, fractal structures and sensitive dependence.

Self similar systems are open and part of their environment, yet they can attain a structure and maintain it in far from equilibrium conditions. These systems also run contrary to the second law of thermodynamics which states they should move towards disorder, and not order.

The flow of energy in these systems allow them to spontaneously self organize, creating structure and maintaining structure, in far from equilibrium conditions. These systems also create new modes of behaviour. These self organizing systems are "creative".

Self organized systems are complex with parts so numerous such that a causal relationship between them cannot be established. Components that are connected via a network of feedback loops.

Russ.

Russell E. Rierson

Particles are also waves:

DeBroglie equation: wavelength{lambda} = h/p

h is Planck's constant.

p is momentum.

A human brain is basically an information processing system. Particles with momentum, frequency, and wavelength. A rock, also by this definition, would have a type of basic consciousness? in that it is processing information with the kinetic energy of its atoms and molecules.

Reality as a whole, is an information processing system. Consciousness is ubiquitous. Though it can be surmised that there are different "levels" of consciousness.

Russ

excreationist

Russell E. Rierson:
You're talking about the <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation" target="_blank">Copenhagen interpretation</a> aren't you?
That link also says:
In my reply to you, in the Science and Skepticism CTMU thread, which you still haven't replied to, I also wrote:
You wrote:
Do you know what an information processing system is? It involves symbols that represent other things that are manipulated and often it would encode signals coming from senses into symbols and after processing it according to its program (which may be partly self-taught) it translates or decodes the symbols in physical outputs (muscle movements, characters on a screen, etc).
Do you think a rock has a symbolic language? I mean it is amazing enough for animals such as apes to have a symbolic language (e.g. sign language or pressing symbols on a keyboard).

Russell E. Rierson

Hello excreationist. My apologies for my forgetfullness, concerning the science and skepticism thread.

Yes, a rock is basically processing information with input and output ...

A-----&gt;B, particle A absorbs energy which becomes kinetic energy, this energy is transferred to particle B from particle A.

Information is transferred from A to B, also from B to A.

So even at the primitive level of "rocks", information is transduced.

A higher level information processor called the human brain invents the symbolic mathematical representations.