First causes

Well, Eastern "scientists" would argue that there is no difference between tangible/intangible, real/virtual, matter/mind.  These are only dualistic distinctions and are thus illusory.  

They would agree that mind cannot exist without memory, or another way to put it is that a sense of time/personal history gives rise to a sense of self apart from the rest of infinity.  By existing only in the moment, with no memory, there is no self.  If no self, then no dualism.  No dualism then there is no illusion.

Does not compute.

Think about it this way.  If you dream of eating an ice-cream cone, does it exist?  While you were in the dream, it sure seemed real, but when you woke up, you realized that you only imagined it; it was an illusion.

So, what if you're just dreaming that there is a "you" and a "universe" and that the universe was once "created", and that there are such things as "mind" or "matter" and "transient virtual pair particles".  They sure seem real, but then if you (or whomever is doing the dreaming) were to wake up, they'd realize that it was all just an illusion.

So, I suggest that there is bias in both trains of thought.  They are both biased by duality....

Philosophical "Eastern" thought IS NOT SCIENCE!

If a man speaks in the forest, and there is no woman to hear him, is he STILL wrong?

Since Hubble (the scientist not the telescope) first noticed the red-shift of the light from distant stars, most astronomers "believe" in the big bang theory, where the universe started in a big explosion and is still expanding. That expansion would be the cause of the red-shift (Doppler effect). There are also other facts that support the big bang theory.

On the other hand, few "rebel" astronomers "believe" in a so called quasi-static universe, with no begining or end, both in space and time. And explain red-shift as a consequence of light travelling long distances, and losing energy due to interaction with gravitational fields.

This static universe would solve many problems caused by the big bang theory, such as "what was there before" or "what and why exploded" or "what is there beyond". A universe with no begining in time would be infinite in size. And it would have an infinite quantity of matter and energy that would only flow, not be created or destroyed.

The biggest problem with general relativity is the lack of experimental comprovation. Unlike quantum mechanics, only few experiments can be performed to test the theory.

Now about the creation of pairs of particles. That really happens, and it has been extensively comproved by experiments. But what has it to do with mind? It only proves that matter can be converted into enegy and vice-versa. It doesnt prove that mind can create matter. And until someone finds a mind without matter associated with it, then a mind needs a brain.

a logician would collapse in a heap of twitching flesh after having read this question. first you've made wrong assumptions about how a mind or computer works, then repeated those wrong assumptions in reverse to expose some sort of flaw in what you consider to be the consensus of most educated scientists. but more to your question, virtual particles are not intangible. they do exist, and as someone else has already stated, it's been proven. the only reason they're given the name "virtual" is because they can not exist without their symmetric pair, and they never remain in existence longer than a plank second. also, as someone has also stated, the big bang can be proven in many ways, and the other theories regarding a static universe, or a universe that began static and is now expanding require still more theories to be postulated on top of those, and in the end it is just bad science. one should not multiply problems to higher degrees than necessary ;).

Quantum mechanics is a very weird theory. But it works really well.

It predicts that particles can appear from nowhere and then dissappear again. It throws away (in some cases) classical conservation laws of mass and energy. It seems like a flaw in the theory, but when you do the experiment, it works.

So if you think that quantum mechanics is weird, than nature itself is even more weird.

Aristotle believed that you could understand and predict the behavior of nature just by thinking. Galileo proved him wrong. Galileo demonstrated that you must make experiments, because sometimes nature behave in a very illogical way.

Philosophy alone is not enought to describe nature. Nature is not always logic.

In the book 'Dance of the Woo Lee Masters' there are interesting apt comments about the impending marriage between eastern philosophy and Quantum science.

Linear time, that is one event follows another, is purely human concept. If you understand time the way a child understand it, then, you get closer to a real distinction.

In 'time-less-ness'all possible events can be seen to take place at once.

Einstein suggest the concept should be named space-time, inseparably.

Now that Quantum Physics includes the 'observer' (and his opinion) as an inextricable part of an experiment or event, no reality exists independent of the observer, thus the observer shapes his own illusion of what he calls reality.

Past exists only in terms of 'memories' which do not exist anywhere except 'right now in the mind of the subject.' Future maybe said to exists only in terms of mind extrapollations, and exists only 'now' in the constructs of the mind.

The Moment (and for time's sake the 'current moment') is apparently the only experience of time humans have. Sequencing events in the mind creates linear time.

Thus, you ask who came first, the chicken or the egg, and I suggest to you that both are simultaneous.

If you search on the Net for "virtual particle" you will find at least one article
that suggests that the "virtual particle" construct is only a device to make the
mathematics work.  That makes sense, because no human can observe a "virtual particle".

Therefore, if only a construct, then it is quite likely that some other construct
could be made that would close the mathematics just as well.

Yes, I see the inherent bias in the line of thought you first presented! (question answered!) And in my last post I explained it.

:)

Yes, I see the inherent bias in the line of thought you first presented! (question answered!) And in my last post I explained it.

:)

In standart quantum mechanics, time and space are different. Time is a parameter and space is an observable. On the other hand, in quantum filed theory (quantum mechanics + special relativity), time and space are exactly the same. They are both parameters.

In quantum field theory there are some strange stuff concerning time, such as "a particle that comes from the future". "Cause and effect" or "one event after another" is not always valid.

Quantum mechanics does include the observer as part of the event. They are inseparable. But the observer's opnion doesnt have to come along. The observer could even be a machine or a computer, with no opinion whatsoever.

The purpose of science is to describe the world as we see it, real or not.

The nature of time... I dont know it. If you do, good for you.

"Thus, you ask who came first, the chicken or the egg, and I suggest to you that both are simultaneous"

Wrong topic area...

no human can observe a "virtual particle"

Not with your eyes, hands or nose. You can't see a electron with your eyes due to the nature of light itself. But you can detect the particles through their effects.

"Therefore, if only a construct, then it is quite likely that some other construct could be made that would close the mathematics just as well."

Sure. They are called models. If you propose another model for the atom that predicts the same effects, it would be right as well. If some day you find new experimental results that prove the quantum theory wrong, it will be changed. Science is not religion. Science can be proved wrong and changed. Quantum mechanics appeared because Maxwell's electrodynamics couldn't explain everything.

It is like sovling math problems. There are many ways to solve a problem. Is one way more correct than the other?

I'm with you Whit3Hawk, but since your post mirrors mine (the first in the thread) then if the question is anwered, I answered it ;)

Western "science" -> mental masturbation

chicken and egg refers directly to the cause-effect implied in the first post, and is also a comment on time-space of other posts.

:P

"Western "science" -> mental masturbation"

The computer you are using right now is possible thanks to mental masturbation.

Some guys here are just agreeing with pleasenospam to try to take the points. They just say "I agree with you" and give no counter arguments to the ones that disagree with the initial question.

Also, an arrow -> is not a very good argument.

acerola -> the greatest guy in the world

I always enjoy responses from the meatheads here:

http://www.setileague.org/articles/meat.htm

ROTFLMAO
That is the best and funniest writing I have read for years.  Thank you so very much for that one link.  I am eternally in your debt.

That reminds me of the old joke or maybe it was a story? about what should we do if aliens arrive on the planet.  The answer?  Cook them and eat them.

May I proffer some on-topic ramblings:

Your original question is a good one, nay, a very good one.  It has all of the hallmarks of a Very Good Question (VGQ).  In the manner of all good answers then, it deserves to be addressed in the power-point style, which is a sure sign of veracity.

1.   It encourages everyone in the world to imagine that the are an expert.

2.   It is phrased in such a way that everyone in the world is able to propose a VGA, and its close variants VGAN.  Very Good Answer (Not).

3.   I allows all manner of speculation to be called apon in support of 2.  These may be claimed to be the opinion of VGAE (Very Good Answer Experts) who are acknowledged leaders in the fruitful field of VGA and VGAN.

4.   The quantity of meaninglessness that characterises the various attempts at answering the question, increases with time.

5.   The large degree of meanininglessness in the answers leads to a suspicion that the question itself, like all great VGQ, has the necessary quality of being meaningless.

6.   But that never stopped me either.

Of the tree it was asked:)
--------------------------
"If a man speaks in the forest, and there is no woman to hear him, is he STILL wrong?"

Zen answer: Only if she says so.

Of General relativity it was claimed above:
-------------------------------------------
"The biggest problem with general relativity is the lack of experimental comprovation"

The suggestion that Einsten's theory is somehow too distant and sterile is simple wrong - the "cosmological constant" is the single biggest outcome of the theory and a remarkable property of our universe.  Additionally, the static universe theory is far from laid to rest.  These matters are at the forefront of modern cosmology, and the jury is still out.  The big bang theory is generally accepted, back to a certain point.  But then it things are not well explained yet, the theory uses a concept called "inflation" for the early universe, which is rather "ad hoc".  And this all says nothing about multiple big bangs, repetitive bangs, or multi-universe theories to just scratch the surface of the field.  Even less clear is the big crunch theory, given that reversal of expansion is even possible.  For instance there may be leakage between universes, just as a black hole leaks information back into its universe.  Plus we only know the rules (laws of physics so to speak) in out current state, in our part of the universe, for all we know the rules could be different under different conditions, or the laws themselves could be "selected" say.

Of Quantum mechanics it was claimed above:
------------------------------------------
It throws away (in some cases) classical conservation laws of mass and energy."

This is news to me.  Please provide a reference.  You may be in for a Nobel prize.

Of eggs it was stated:
----------------------
"Thus, you ask who came first, the chicken or the egg, and I suggest to you that both are simultaneous" and replied to with "Wrong topic area... "

I should like to add - wrong anyway.  If I learnt nothing else from Special relativity class, it was that Einstein showed that simultaneity is NOT an absolute.  (What is simultaneous for one observer occurs at different times for another, (and in proportion to relative velocity))

It was stated that:
-------------------
"Quantum mechanics appeared because Maxwell's electrodynamics couldn't explain everything."

I should be happier if the word "because" were substituted by the word "when".  Once again it was Einstein who lifted the lid on Quantum mechanics.  He did some simple experiments on the photo-electric effect, and published an extra-ordinary conclusion - that a brighter light produced more current rather than more voltage.  That light that was normally considered to be a wave effect was producing a particle effect.  He discovered it but he was never happy with what he had found, even though he couldn't find a better explanation.  And whilst on the subject, you do not need "virtual particle" to encounter quantum wierdness, light is already totally wierd.  Read Richard Feynman to find out about how wierd it is.  In order to explain a simple reflection/refraction effect in a window, you have to start thinking about photons "exploring" all possible paths available whilst "knowing" what other photons are doing.  Feynman explains it better than I.

It was suggested:
-----------------
"Therefore, if only a construct, then it is quite likely that some other construct could be made that would close the mathematics just as well. "

It is worth a comment to put to rest the idea here that mathematics can make any kind of "closure".  Mathematics began with Pythagorus, with the idea that god connects with man's mind to produce "ideals", but that the real wold is "imperfect" because it is not so close to god.
It was a shock when they found "irrational" numbers because they wanted a nice orderly system.  Right up until recently the idea was still around that mathematics could be closed.  When computers were invented it was hoped that a program might be written that would generate proofs automatically, and even churn away looking for new knowledge and proofs to go with it.  There was a lot of effort in philosophy to to support this goal, it was like "mapping the human genome" but in maths.  Until Goedels theorm put a fly in the ointment when he proved that all systems of thought have a fly in the ointment.  He proved that by writing the ointment in mathematical language and showed that you can always write a fly too, and you never be sure which one you have got.  Take this paragraph:

 The "Incompleteness Theroem" proved that you can always write statements in mathematical language that are true, but cannot be proved within the language.  

He proved that by the clever trick of writing the above paragraph as mathematics, and then using that as a good example! The "halting problem" in computing is a similar deal.  Much to the dismay of the whole world, these findings  destroyed the hopes for computerising mathematics.  But it also lead to a new kinds of claims by people like Roger Penrose about the brain being a special quantum mechanical thing because it can do maths (but I am not completely convinced by that argument).

It was claimed:
----------------
"Western "science" -> mental masturbation

Oh come come.

The original question:
----------------------
Was about first causes.  Perhaps we need to see the universe as a quantum thing in itself.  The quantity called "Action" is used in physics to explain systems, it can be broken down into momentum * distance, or it can be Energy * time which has the same units.  If things are set out so that the the position of a particle is bound to a space, then we find its momentum to become unbound, and it doesn't have a clear momentum.  If we allow set things out so that it can have a narrow momentum, then we have no idea where it is.  Same with energy and time.  A radioactive particle has a unique energy range, so we don't know when so much.  If you narrow down the amount of space to investigate, you find that the range of enegies possible gets enormous.  (Those are the virtual particles mentioned in the earlier posts).  There is a nerdy bumper
sticker that reads 'physics is where the "action" is".
So maybe if you want to narrow down the the universe to a point called its beginning, you can't because its not like that.  Maybe its more that you have to narrow the energy to one place.  But one place means massive momentum variation, and one time means massively uncertain energy.
But the universe conserves energy, so it might just get to complex to describe itself any more, and maybe it can't do that?  

In other words if you want to have a big bang and fix the energy of the universe, then the time to do that gets increasingly spread out until it becomes infinite, ie impossible to occur.  That is not the usual mental model of creating somethwe like to think that we can have our cake and eat it too, to make precise energy at precise time, but then Quantum mechanics is wierd after all.

"Do you see the inherent bias in this line of thought? "

Maybe the universe sees it too.  There is something called "The anthropic principle" that is a theory that the universe is precisely the way that it is, because if it wasn't that way we wouldn't be here to see it.  Since that puts man back in the center again, you can shove him out again by having some kind of survival of the fittest universes theory as well.

>  having some kind of survival of the fittest universes theory as well.

Maybe I am just too dense, but I see no reason that any number of universes would
need to be contiguous or have any relationship with one another.

My original question was based on the obvious (to me) conclusion that mental
activity is a byproduct or artifact of the human condition. More like a process
than even a virutal reality. Therefore, all concepts like Zen that suggest a merging
of mind and matter tend to irritate me.

Yet, most religions claim that mind came before matter and even produced matter.  There
are still many things about physics that we don't know yet, so maybe that is possible.
But, based on all that we know so far, it isn't plausible.

Statistics deals with plausible outcomes by use of normal distributions and confidence
intervals.  However, even the word "outcome" is rather vague here, because it suggests
a starting point and processes.

Anyway, the bias comes in when religious thought dictates a starting point in some sort
of universal mind for which there is no evidence.  At least not yet.

"Of Quantum mechanics it was claimed above:
------------------------------------------
It throws away (in some cases) classical conservation laws of mass and energy."

This is news to me.  Please provide a reference.  You may be in for a Nobel prize."

Ok. First conservation of mass. You can use a very energetic photon to create a pair of electron-positron. A photon has no mass, and both the electron and positron have. Thus mass was not conserved.

Conservation of energy: Cassimir effect. In vaccum, the energy fluctuations of the ground state of the electromagnetic field causes the creation and anihilation of pairs of particles. The particles haven't (yet) been directly detected, but Cassimir effect shows that energy appears in the vaccum.

"I should be happier if the word "because" were substituted by the word "when".  Once again it was Einstein who lifted the lid on Quantum mechanics.  He did some simple experiments on the photo-electric effect, and published an extra-ordinary conclusion - that a brighter light produced more current rather than more voltage."

You seem to be an Einstein lover.

Prior to the photoelectric effect (1905), Max Planck, in December 12 1900, if I am not mistaken, explained the blackbody radiation by introducing a discrete energy spectrum (quantization). He did that because the classical explanation of the effect (Raighley-Jeans) had the "ultraviolet catastrophe" problem. Since the classical explanation was wrong, phisicists needed to find the correct one. So quantum mechanics came because classical electrodynamics couldn't explain it all.

Einstein contributed A LOT to quantum mechanics. He even got his nobel prize in quantum mechanics. But the lid was already lifted by Planck. When older, Einstein tried to prove the theory wrong. That's ok. He was old...

Of General relativity it was claimed above:
-------------------------------------------
"The biggest problem with general relativity is the lack of experimental comprovation"

Can you name 10 experiments that prove general relativity? I can name more than 10 that prove quantum mechanics.

General relativity keeps beeing tested against itself. Due to lack of experimental results, phisicists can only test if the theory is "consistent". They cannot test if it agrees with reality.

What is the experimental data on which big bang theory is based?

Still about conservation of mass-energy. There is also the opposite effect of creation of pairs, which doen't conserve energy. A electron and a positron collision produces much more energy then they had before the collision. And the mass disappear. Thus, the conversion of mass<-->energy violates both the conservation of mass and energy.

Also, nuclear fission. If you take a uranium nucleus and measure its mass before the fission. Then later, you measure the mass of the resulting nuclei. The mass after is less than the mass before. The difference of mass was converted into energy. Another example of mass-energy conversion which violate classical conservation laws.

"If you narrow down the amount of space to investigate, you find that the range of enegies possible gets enormous."

You were correct when you talked about space*momentum and time*energy. These are two of the many aspects of the uncertainty principle. But there is no uncertanty for space*energy. There is no direct relation between space and energy as there is between space and momentum and energy and time. And space*energy doesn't have the units of action.

You are trying to put general relativity and quantum mechancs toghether. Man, if you do so, you will get a Nobel prize for sure.

All spoken like a true computer program believer, which BTW is a new American religion :)

Sure I am an Eistein fan.  Here is why.  
The idea that electricity came in little units was reasoned out much earlier, by my real hero, the greatest scientist of all time, Michael Faraday.

Rutherford worked out that the atom was a nucleus surrounded by electrons by shooting particles into foil.

Maxwell came up with some equations to calculate energy for these things.

But there were a LOT of major problems with a lot of theories around the turn of the previous last century.

The theory of the atom was known to be wrong, because inside an atom a moving electron should radiate all its energy away and crash into the nucleus, but of course this "death spiral" didn't happen.

The specific heat curve of solids was screwy, (The Dulong-Petit law) and got more wrong the harder the substances were.

Another problem was the theory to explain the spectrum of light coming from a heated cavity (black body) went hay-wire at higher frequencies, and predicted infinite energies, which is dumb.

The photo-electric effect couldn't be explained.  I was too sloppy above, I should have said that the energy of electrons produced did not depend on the intensity of the light at all, instead it depended on the frequency.  Not only that, no matter how weak the light was, the photo-electrons appear at once.

There was no classical explanation for this counter-intuitive result.

The spectrum of light couldn't be explained, it has lines in it.

What actually happened was that first Planck (who was working on the black body problem) chucked the classical "Equipartition of Energy" theorem out the window, and set up some two rules, one was that THERMAL VIBRATION energy could only exist for these vibrations in allowed values, and secondly that it could only change in allowed steps.  It was a theory about vibrations of atoms and molecules.  It is important to recognise that Planck's result was completely successful for black body radiation, but WERE COMPLETELY DISREGARDED until Einstein applied them in other areas.

It gave Einstein the all important constant h, and he was a great thinker when it came to generalising concepts.  Einstein applied Planck's formula to the specific heat problem and got correct results.  More importantly he applied it to the photo-electric effect and cracked that one too.  Einstein had a bigger goal in mind, he was working out what light was all about, and even bigger than that, he was unravelling the structure of the universe.  He was interested in Planck's thermal theory because he saw the implications for energu itself, was working with the idea that the energy itself must be travelling in packets.

Neils Bohr got in the act and then cracked that atomic structure problem.  etc etc.  And there you have it.

And as we all know, Einstein eventually showed that mass and energy were EQUIVALENT, and that the TOTAL is always CONSERVED.

Since so many points are raised, I will try to backtrack my answer until I get back to answering your original question.

You wrote:  "You were correct when you talked about space*momentum and time*energy. These are two of the many aspects of the uncertainty principle. But there is no uncertanty for space*energy. There is no direct relation between space and energy as there is between space and momentum and energy and time. And space*energy doesn't have the units of action."

You are quite right too.  Not all pairs of variables commute.  Some can be known accurately in combination, to as much precision as you like.  Far too many people seize on the  uncertainty principle and take it that any pair are uncertain, ar even worse, they make ridiculous claims that the whole structure of the universe is uncertain.  BALONEY!
It has spawned a whole literature of crappy "Quantum Spiritualism" that seeks to use the "mana" of science as a source of legitimation.   You can easily see the traditional religious roots underneath, with a pseudo-scientific trappings overlaid.  Its called "scientism".

Not too many people are aware also that Einstein's relativity work explains the magnetic effects of electricity, and extends the brilliant thinking of Faraday who always thought in terms of fields.  Who was the genius who reasoned that if motion makes electricity that electricity should be able to make motion, and that these must be deeply connected?  Where would we be without motors and dynamos?   Thank Sir Michael Faraday.

"Can you name 10 experiments that prove general relativity? I can name more than 10 that prove quantum mechanics."

Unfortunately I cannot name one theory about anything at all that proves anything at all.  It simply is not the nature of science to offer proofs.

Inside the copper wires of your computer, a metallic conductor, electrons can "delocalise" themselves.  In other words a single electron manages to exits everywhere at once in the matrix.  It simply does not have a defined position in this universe.  But we can say is that there are consequences of its existence pattern, we know that is is incredibly unlikely to have a consequence behind your left ear, and much more likely to have a consequence on the surface of the conductor.

Inside the packages of the chips on your computer are the chips themselves, thin wafers of doped silicon.  The "dope" is lumpy impurities deliberately introduced upset the nice regular silicon lattice.  Delocalised electrons this time canb allow electron "holes" in the conduction band do move about.  A moving hole going left has the same electrical effect as a real electron going right.

The vacuum itself is not empty in this sense, it is an energy band of itself.  Leaving mass out of it for now, you can create energetic particles in this band, but at the same time a "hole" is left that has exactly the negative energy amount to balance the equation.  That is what happens when a high energy gamma photon creates am electron positron pair.  The energy conservation law is not be be messed with.  It just takes a more elegant form.

If a pair like this is created, and them annihilate together in a short space of time, there will not be any outside consequence, unless you go looking for it, and you mentioned one of the effects.  Conservation law still applies though.  

The uncertainty principle just ups the ante - the energy can be bigger and bigger provided the time is shorter and shorter, energy * Time = action.

QED

Now we are getting back to the interesting stuff.  I better start using the email convention for quotes like you are doing.

>>  having some kind of survival of the fittest universes theory as well.

>Maybe I am just too dense, but I see no reason that any number of universes would need to be contiguous or have any relationship with one another.

And also, can you think of any reason why they shouldn't?
Can you think of any reason why there shouldn't be gazillions of universes?  Not enough space for them all?  You want to limit the hand of God?

> My original question was based on the obvious (to me) conclusion that mental activity is a byproduct or artifact of the human condition. More like a process than even a virutal reality. Therefore, all concepts like Zen that suggest a merging of mind and matter tend to irritate me.

I used to think that, especially as a teenager.  But then teenagers are irritated by everything.

>Yet, most religions claim that mind came before matter and even produced matter.  There are still many things about physics that we don't know yet, so maybe that is possible. But, based on all that we know so far, it isn't plausible.

There are more things in heaven and earth.....The Prince of Denmark thought not!  
If anything philosophies such as Solipsism have become even more plausible!  Thats the whole point - QM is NOT classical. It needs a whole different mindset.  We are just beginning to see the extent of the thing.  The nature of the brain and thinking is an intriguing puzzle, and the nature of knowledge is more interesting than ever, and is definately bound up with the structure of the universe.

> However, even the word "outcome" is rather vague here, because it suggests a starting point and processes.

The post-modernists have emphasised the revealing nature of our language itself, and that can only lead to more mature writing, and better science.  The idea of a "universal mind" is a reasonable scientific hypothesis.  The Gaia hypothesis was an interesting one too.

>Anyway, the bias comes in when religious thought dictates a starting point in some sort of universal mind for which there is no evidence.  At least not yet.

However Einstein's work kind of outlawed the idea of universal fluids of any kind, or anything that would need those kinds of properties.  That is not to say that an even more sophisticated view of things won't come along.  On the other hand we might just end up with a Goedel-type proof that we simple cannot know anything past a certain point.  Like asking a fish what it means to be wet.

So i agree, you don't need to add mysticism into Quantum Theory, its already got enough problems of its own, it already suggests a kind of Zen complication.  If you don't believe me, consider this.  Einstein was the first person who really pointed out that there was something profound about Quantum Mechanics, he didn't get his Nobel prize for nothing.  And also consider that he (and others) found the whole thing incredibly unsettling. They could do the math, they just couldn't unsderstand what the hell it meant. Shroedinger said once he wished he had never come across it, with all that "jumping about".  Maybe he used an expletive, I wasn't there :) Feynman said something along the lines that if you understand it, then you probably haven't studied it enough.  And this is the brains trust talking.  Bohm went off and developed a whole philosophy.  Einstein couldn't figure it really.  He endlessly tried to produce counter-examples such as the EPR Einstein-Rosen-Poldolsky paradox, but QT always managed to give the answer without helping at all with a meaning behind it.  The idea of "hidden variables" was put forward and a host of other attempts to try and RATIONALISE it.  What do you do when you have a theory that doesn't seem to fits the expected rules of rationality?  In the end they just accepted as a practical thing, and just got on with it in the hope that it would become clearer as toime went on, but if anything it has got more mysterious.  Now we have the promise of Quantum Computing, and that will be interesting.

One of my favourites is Bell's Thereom.  If you thought you had a handle on rational thinking, and what you think you know about information and your sense of self,  try this one for size.  I can find a web reference, but I would rather enjoy myself here and explain it as I see it, if I am not boring you to death.

Here are two links to Bell's Theorem anyway that Google threw up, just to show that I am not alone in my understanding that the place of the mind as a causative agent is not at all clear ..........

http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html

http://www.berlinet.de/schmelzer/PG/Bell.html

My observation of Bell's Theorem has been that SOMETHING is operating outside time
and space.  That would hint of shortcuts in the cosmos that could take one anywhere
instantly, without regard to the speed of light.  The goofy part, of course, would
be that the immediate transportation would arrive at a location that was not yet
visible, and might not be for some infinite ordinary time.

Bell's theorem means more than that, it implicates YOUR MIND in ways that you cannot wriggle out of so easily.  
What you are talking about is classic science fiction, that involves moving mass or energy in unrealistic ways.

That smacks of transhumanism religious beliefs.

Bell's theorem means more than that, it implicates YOUR MIND in ways that you cannot wriggle out of so easily.  
What you are talking about is classic science fiction, that involves moving mass or energy in unrealistic ways.

That smacks of transhumanism religious beliefs.

Well, I used my example improperly.  Actually I was thinking more along the
lines of the recent experiment that claimed to have reconstructed a light packet
at a distance.  Small distance, of course, yet it opens up possibilities for further
analysis for information transfer.  For instance, was the transformation instantaneous?
Also, is there a theoretical limitation on the distance?

Here is how I see it, massively simplified.
The two guys are in opposite ends of a long corridor, and the source is in the middle.
Suppose each of them has a detector with two bulbs that can be red R or green G.
Then the two scientists write down the results is a table.
Somone gets
R G
G G
R G
R R
etc
and the other guys gets some other set of data results.
They go nack to the lunch room to discuss the results.

They both notice that there is an equal number of reds and greens, in other words its a random 50:50 deal.
But when they bring the results together - and this is the point - it is now pure information - they notice correlations.

Suppose that when one guy notices that whenever his data says R R then the other guys data says G G or R R.  But otherwise its all random.
Then you would say that there is some effect causing that right?  So there HAS to be something that gets transmitted through time from the source to cause that.  WRONG! What do you mean WRONG kaller2?  

I mean wrong.  There just isn't.  Thats the alarming thing that Bell discovered.

OK well explain then.  
Ok I will.

Lets make up an ALGORITHM to explain the data.  Some set of rules that we can give to each particle at the start of their trip, so they can interact in whatever complex way you like with the detector, that can be as complex as you like.

The real problems set in right here, because there IS NO POSSIBLE ALGORITHM IN PRINCIPLE EVEN that can produce the desired pattern with the observed statistics.  The closest that can ever be produced IN PRINCIPLE even, does not match.  

That is where the quiet little word "inequality" hides a terror of confusion.  We are looking at the failure of classic reasoning, right there.

Its not that we are not clever enough, its just that there IS no algorithm.  There is NOTHING about the observation to consider, apart from the fact that the other PERSON has been made consious of the other side of it, and that the CONSCIOUSNESSES ARE SHARED at some point.  

And that is not the end of it.  In fact it can be shown that the property that makes the detector activate DOES NOT EXIST until the detection process occurs.  
Suppose that one guy takes the reading, but the second guy lets the particle go and it shoots off in the direction of Alpha Centauri.  It could be measured in a million years time.  Our guy already knows the result the aliens will get, EVEN THOUGH THE PARTICLE DOESNT EVEN HAVE THE PROPERTY YET!  And whats more THERE IS NO POSSIBLE INFORMATION THAT CAN EXIST TO CAUSE THAT even in principle.

Think about that carefully before replying.

I haven't explained what the correlations are about either, so I should do that too.  So what it that the particle is trying to do, without there being any information that can exist in any shape or form anywhere at any time or place or ever be transmitted?
But it manages anyway, and implicates our minds in that?  

Quite simply the truth can only be that is some sense the two particles are one particle, not two, and the one particle, our false perception of their movement and space and time, and our thoughts together are a SINGLE unity, that therefore does not NEED information.

Think about it, the whole history of western religious thought (and science is just an offshoot of that) has been to set man up in opposition to nature, and a dispassionate observer - actually no, worse than that, as a USER.

What an irony, it is the very dispassionate science that has stumbled into the magic room where we are at one with that which we sought to distance ourselves from.

And that is why Einstein had such a problem with it.  it wsn't jealousy that he didn't get there first, because he was first.  Einstein had a RELIGIOUS problem with it.  It is all well documented.

The idea you raised that the brain is a computer has nothing to do with brains or computers, and everything to do with american religion.  Perhaps in the future when neural network technology takes over the claim might have slightly more substance, but right now it is nothing more than an extension of the western religious mythology.  

The belief system goes about computers is incredibly naive, and incredibly American, if you will forgive the observation.  I don't mean to sound anti-American, I am not.  I hear so many Amertican "experts" and professors of this and that trying to convince a skeptical world that "information is the new currency", and "computers and the internet are the key to the next millenium" and crap like that.  Somebody should remind them that clean drinking water and renewable energy supply is closer to the point.  Bugger computers.  (Anyway the best approach is always to ask people what they need instead of telling them.)

The belief system runs like this:-

What is orderly and logical comes from god, what is chaotic and disorderly must be of the earth, and therefore not of man.  (So computers must be from god it is obvious that cults will try to use them to find god's computer message in the bible, which would have to be numerical).

Equally bizarre is the idea that we can use pure reason to find god so it must be possible to use logic and reasoning, and the ultimate symbol of that in American society is the computer.  And using pure logic, we can start an Experts Exchange and get actual answers and that will be that.

With apologies to the more active contributors here, I am going to start awarding
exterior points to try to attract the others back to this question.  I think the
question is important, so for now points are based more on participation than content.
In other words, I want to keep the dialogue going.

By the way: My 'take' on stuff like Bell's Theorem and Quantum Mechanics is that
they are 'creatures' of THIS universe.  What do you think?

"It simply is not the nature of science to offer proofs"

I thought that in religion you used faith and in science you proved things. Isn't this the scientific method? To propose theories and test them?

"The vacuum itself is not empty in this sense, it is an energy band of itself.  Leaving mass out of it for now, you can create energetic particles in this band, but at the same time a "hole" is left that has exactly the negative energy amount to balance the equation.  That is what happens when a high energy gamma photon creates am electron positron pair.  The energy conservation law is not be be messed with.  It just takes a more elegant form"

This idea that we have a sea of negative-energy particles was abandoned long ago. It is valid only for fermions. You can't have a filled negative energy band with bosons. Bosons would all fall down to the lowest energy state, which would be minus infinity, and would never jump to the positive energy band, sice it would require infinite energy.

Nowadays, Feynmann's picture of quantum field theory is the most accepted. Instead of a negative energy particle, we would have a particle travelling backwards in time. It is weird, I know, but if you stop to think, in special relativity and quantum field theory, space and time have the same nature. So if you can travel back and forth in space, you can also travel in time. And quantum mechanics equations are symmetric in relation with time.

I'm not saying that time travel is possible. It is just a theoretical interpretation. You can see it clearly when studying Feynmann diagrams.

I am going to shut up for a while after this because I am being too dominating.  Thanks for the points BTW.  

The tradition of being non-committal is an intellectual one that prolly goes back to ancient Greece.  There are analogous statements in religion and in science.
In science it is said "I do not seek to prove..."
In religion it is said "it is not for man to know the will of god.", and I believe that under interrogation jesus would have said something like "it is for you to know who is god and who is not" .

In other words it is guaranteed to be a frustrating answer from the perspective of the other party, not the answer the other party wants to hear perhaps.

The scientific position is that all knowledge is subject to revision.  Therefore there are no proofs or disproofs, given that these are absolutes.  The religious mindset has no problem with the idea of absolute proof, and is mystified or frustrated by the scientist who does not and will not acknowledge that concept to be relevant.

So the story goes, there are only descriptions and some guidelines for accepting which decriptions to "approve".  This "approval" does not constitute proof, but in practical terms it means you have to convince real people, other scientists. Here is where it gets "social" and the post-modernists have a field-day deconstructing the notions of power and privilege that they see as inherent in this game.

I suspect that theology proceeds along similar lines anyway.

The 'scientific method" seems to me to be almost a post-rationalisation of the underlying philosophy to try to operationalise it - things like "Occam's Razor" are dragged out at times - that says that when you have competing theories, choose the least complicated explanation.

Actually "non-committal thinking'it is now more than mere philosophy, the growth of statistical thinking has meant that the physical world is not seen as an absolute, the descriptions are increasingly about 'relative probability'.

In statistical mechanics, there is a remote but finite probability that all of the molecules of gas in the room you are in will suddenly and spontaneously migrate to a corner of the room.  However the calculated probability of this event is so small that you would have to wait for many lifetimes of the universe before you might get a chance to observe this rare occurrence.  So there is no alarm raised by scientists over the life threatening consequences of this possibility, but when pressed you will find that a good scientist will admit to its possibility.

I am no cosmologist, but I have an idea that it is this kind of open-endedness that also allows people like Stephen Hawking to investigate ideas like "inflation" as a causative event of the early universe, because extremely unlikely events have less meaning when you have all the time in the world ?  That last phrase is a good illustration of the language problems I have in trying to say anything sensible about things outside of everyday sense in areas I am not really qualified to pronounce apon.  Maybe you can find a real expert?

"Not too many people are aware also that Einstein's relativity work explains the magnetic effects of electricity"

They were already explained by Ampere, Faraday and Maxwell.

Do you know the postulates of special relativity? You seem to imply that Einstein created Maxwell's equations.

You are right to pull me up on the way I carelessly lumped the ideas of particle creation and the nature of the vacuum.
There are actually three ideas that need to be distinguished:
1.  The idea that the universe is densely packed with particles.
2.  The idea that virtual particles exist where-ever there is a force.
3. The idea that the vacuum is a seething mass of virtual particles.

A virtual particle is really associated with (2) and (3).  I am not sure of the connection with (1) which is an early idea of Dirac, but I am sure that this idea is still curent.
Here is are some links to set the record straight:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/inquiring/questions/virtual_particles.html

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_particles.html


This clearly states that energy conservation must apply in Quantum mechanics.

"all this talk of virtual states is just an approximation to quantum mechanics, in which energy is conserved at all times. The way I've described it also corresponds to the usual way of talking about Feynman diagrams, in which energy is conserved, but virtual particles can carry amounts of energy not normally allowed by the laws of motion"

>"Not too many people are aware also that Einstein's relativity work explains the magnetic effects of electricity"

Emphasis on "explain" rather than "describe".  The relativistic effect of the electron's motion precisely accounts for a "missing distance" that translates into "missing force", and exactly explains the mysterious magnetic forces we see in ferro-magnetic materials and around wires.

And incidentally, at the risk of being sloppy again, the fact that E=mc2 is a quadratic with two roots +mc and -mc, (and when you have rest mass using terms such as +mv and -mv) anticipates the concepts of negative mass etc.

I read a bit about Maxwell at one point, he is an interesting figure.  Of course Maxwell fathomed out the radiation equations, and the how magnetic force propagated with electric force, but he did not "explain" the magnetic force.  In a sense Einstein extended Maxwell's work.

And here is a good link to explain how virtual particles are involved in creation and annihilation of particles.
Some particles when they decay can form an intermediate virtual particle that is heavier than itself.  This must be what you were referring to when you talked about the creation of mass.  Note however that energy is conserved in spite of that.

http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/frameless/virtual.html

Actually I take that back.  The last one is a lousy mischievous link, that promulgates the impression that energy conservation can be violated during the process.

This is a completely wrong view.

The earlier link is much better:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_particles.html 

What happens is that there is a chance that it can make the transition WITHOUT violating energy conservation, because it has a number of choices for its energy.  The rate at which the events happen is related to the narrow restriction it has on NOT violating energy conservation.

>> space and time have the same nature. So if you can travel back and forth in space, you can also travel in time

I am afraid that there are logical problems with that sentence.  

I will have to look you up in my book called:
Straight and crooked Thinking" by Robert H. Thouless.

Appendix I is called "Thirty-eight dishonest tricks which are commonly used in argument, with the methods of overcoming them". Of course dishonest shouldn't mean to it with the deliberate intent to deceive.  I think he must have used that word as a joke to see if the reader had read the rest of the book properly ;)

The whole virtual particle thing is just an extension of the basic idea that einstein had about photons anyway.  Einstein had the idea that light could be viewed as a photon flux field, where the number of photons in a given volume was proportional to the electromagnetic field strength.  That means that he did not regard photons as being conserved like ordinary (massive) particles.  He viewed them almost as being a property of the field, so he was like Michael Faraday in his understanding that a field is the clue to understanding how things work.  More field=more photons , less field=less photons.  He realised that photons were coming and going "out of thin air".

So you see that a religious tradition that believes everything was created at one time by the will of god is going to have a real hard time with the idea that creation is going on around us all the time, as we speak.

No wonder Darwin got a hard time from the Bishops.

The thing about quantum mechanics, is that it doesn't limit itself to the here and now anyway.  The equations are written to apply to all time and all space.  Does an alpha particle get emitted from a radioactive nucleus at 4:30 pm on wednesday 22nd november, because the one behind it says, "hey buddy, wake up, your turn now."  Does it dip its tiny toe into the water of the vacuum and say "nah, too cold right now". The answer is a resounding no.
I mean what the hell does an electron or a photon say know about these things?  Does it carry a tiny pocket watch with it?  
Here is my take on your original question.

It is not some kind of scripted play, where electron X has to stand at point Y and wait for its curtain call.  It has no bloody idea where it is supposed to be or what it is supposed to do.  Nothing has.  So nothing can "be" anywhere, or "do" anything, of itself.  What can "be" is never "of itself".  What it means for these things to "be" is a set of interactions that connect everthing into a super-determined universe multidimensional set of universes.  None of this knows "where" it is so it isnt "at" any place in the first place, so it cannot "be" infinite.  The best is that parts of the universe supporting brains can dream of it "having" that property.
Being and doing are functions of the signalling field.  Spacetime are simply particular kinds of signal patterns with multidimensional properties.  Energy patterns can be involved in certain signalling patterns in certain ways.

Stupidly simple things interact is massively complex ways, wheras massively complex patterns can interact in stupidly simple ways.

> The best is that parts of the universe supporting brains can dream of it "having" that property.

Please elaborate.

> Stupidly simple things interact is massively complex ways, wheras massively complex patterns can interact in stupidly simple ways.

Circular double talk?

Even the hardest AI proponent must agree that the universe can certainly attain sentience in some places, namely originating in the small dome-shaped pieces of meat called brains.

Leaving "mind" out of it, if our brain can attain sentience and our brain is physical, then a physical structure has attained sentience, and if that structure is a part of the universe, therefore a part of the universe has attained sentience.  

>Stupidly simple things interact is massively complex ways, wheras massively complex patterns can interact in stupidly simple ways

>>Circular double talk?

Could be. :)


What I really meant was that simple things such as electrons share in the total complexity of everything.  Their wave function wraps over all time and all space.  Every wave function overlaps with every other wave function, it all depends on how things are "arranged" before you see any "consequence" of all this deeply shared structure.  And even then it may present in a "delocalised" or "overlapped" way.  There is no such thing as a "trajectory", for anything, only approximations to that when you get to large enough collections of complexity like a football or a person or a universe, and then they can behave more and more simply.  Gravity may be implicated in allowing this to happen.  (To get even something as simpl as a "trajectory" you need a mass to exist at some point with a precise momentum (ie direction) and nothing can do cannot do that.)  Planks constant defines the cutover where complex structures can behave in simple ways.  If Plank's number was bigger, we would see the ideas much more clearly - but then our chemistry probably wouldnt work so we wouldnt be here.

It may just be a western vanity that the universe is intelligible.  IT has no reason to be intelligible to us, does it.  I have a deep suspicion that it has a dualistic nature, or quadralistic really.  The four poles are truth, falsity, paradox, and contradiction.  We can arrange to see any of these depending on the setup.  We just prefer the first two.

I must be dense, but I keep suspecting that the discussions here have focused
on creatures of THIS universe while implying that they would apply to ANY universe or
even NO universe.  In that sense, the interchange has quoted Einstein, Maxwell, and
other physicists, while ignoring that these men were well aware that they were trying to
understand THIS universe and THIS life.  I feel certain in my own mind that Einstein either
used a metaphor when talking about "God ... playing dice", or he actually did believe in God.

I am back to square one in all this.  Even otherwise well-educated scientists unconsciously
start their analysis from a fixed point, deity related perspective.  Of course, they won't
admit that, but to me it is as plain as "the nose on your face".  If it isn't a deity in their
first cause, then it is something equivalent to that notion.

Sometimes as I drift off to sleep, I think along the lines of what would be involved in
bringing SOMETHING, ANYTHING out of NOTHING.  It wouldn't have to be sophisticated or
anything like the building blocks of our present universe.  Just a speck would do,
because evolutionary processes would do the rest, given enough time.

Once again you are denying that creation happens now, you want to relegate it to some time in the past, and that is a purely biblical notion.

You just have to constrain that notion to be subject to energy conservation.

>I think along the lines of what would be involved in
bringing SOMETHING, ANYTHING out of NOTHING.

That is a self-referential statement.

The clue is the word "bringing" which PRESUPPOSES an agency.

It is a known feature of language that we are able to make statements that sound like they might be meaningful, but in essence they have no right to such a claim.  The oldest suh statement which I have already used here is that by Epimenedes when he said "All cretans are liars".

The Greeks made classical errors in logic - they did not understand that there was an important and necessary distinction in logic to be made between a set containing an object and the object itself, and got into terrible messes with things like numbers as a result.  We now understand the nature of predicates a little better.  You are making an error at least as old by accepting the sense of your sentence at face value.  Epimenedes came from Crete of course.

And yet, I have MAJOR difficulty trying to grasp your inherent, even if implied,
assumption that ENERGY is and always has been PERVASIVE. I have read that Hawking
entertains such notions, too.  To me that is a copout, and the "end of the line" for an
otherwise great thinker.

If I understand what you have written, you do not accept the idea that TIME itself had
a beginning that was unique to THIS universe.  Yet astro-physicists not tell us that
time slows down and even STOPS near or in a black hole.

You can't have it both ways.

Typo above: "not" S/B "now"

Something else you have to give up, I am afraid, not just that time is an absolute which you are still clinging to, but also your primitive idea that reality is unique.  Black holes make that even more obvious.

What Einstein, de Broglie et al discovered from Energy = h * frequency was that energy (and therefore matter) is just harmonics.  The uncertainty principle in this regard is such a simple idea, its not hard to understand, and its well known in acoustics anyway.  For example how do you play a randomly chosen pure musical note?  The answer is that you can't. Because to vibrate at a randomly chosen pure frequency, a physical object has to have infinite time available.  The same goes for wavelength, in order to have a randomly chosen pure wavelength, the wave must be infinite in extent.  The same goes for listening to music.   You cannot hear a pure musical note unless you listen for eternity.  And the room must have infinitely wide acoustics.  

The big argument you raised about dualism is true, that is hotly debated.  We get a kind of two levels of "reality", the unreal-reality where things happen that we cannot possibly experience because this substratum generates experience.  And the real-reality where we (and the rest of the things here) "experience" eachother. A "time signal" must be used before you have to worry about what "things" are, how special relativity affects things, that is a whole bunch of waves to define a pulse that is one way that energy can re-distribute.  That means matter has a "group velocity" for its energy-as-wave which is slower than wave velocity(c).  But we can still run through two doors at once if we go fast enough, because we, and the doors, are just energy patterns involved in feedback situation.
 
Time as we know it is just a measure of the way that energy is redistributed in these kinds of wave pattern feedbacks.  Matter is also just a collection of entrapped feedbacks that can also be moved around and affect other collections of entrapped feedbacks, and the whole thing creates feedbacks. hehe.  If you carry the acoustic analogy over into what exists, then "existance" is NOT the instrument or the string or the player, it is the MUSIC.  So the trick is that energy connects to time in more than one way, and so that creates kind of feedback loops, and the feedback loops themselves affect the instrument and the player.  That is why I like listening to Jimi Hendrix playing Manic Depression/Voodoo Child.

Anyway getting back to multiple realities, around a black hole we have major big time feedback (Hendrix doing Star Spangled Banner).  Relativity has some wonderful implications here.  There are definitely multiple realities involved here, depending on whether you are falling into the hole, or being observed from outside, they victim is at a different place for the falling observer compared to where they are in the reality of the outside observer.  (I would not recommend either).

As an aside: I have two kinds of relatives, rich and poor.

I don't want to have anything to do with the poor ones, and the rich ones won't talk to me!

One amazing thing about Maxwell is that he predicted electromagnetic waves in 1865 but Hertz didn't demonstrate them until 1888.  

All stories have a story teller.  Outside of the story, by definition.  The god-like observer to whom the rules do not apply is actually a total myth.  Take the question about the tree falling over in the forest, in this topic area.  Well an observer is IMPLIED in the telling of the story.  Then having accepted an implied observer we are asked to comment on the truth of the existence of the implied observer.  Another sentence that sounds like it means something but is actually a self-referential fallacy.  All cretans are still liars.

Time is all based on non-periodicity.  If you were in a room where absolutely nothing changed, I mean nothing at all, and the clock on the wall kept time without actually changing any part of its internal structure apart from the motion, ie a platonic universe, (and you yourself were a god-like observer/story-teller so the rules don't apply to you), then that is ground-hog day, but with no difference.  Every six oclock is the SAME six oclock.

That is in fact a standing wave, a set of freqiencies, a set of harmonics.  The universe of time is the universe of time for that room.  That is all the time in the world for that room, it has twelve hours.  The only change was the clock, so that in itself defines time - time is just another word for change.

Well, I am not convinced that the referenced "experts" can arrive at any sound conclusions
about anything OUTSIDE this universe when THEY are (or were) creatures INSIDE this
universe. When you INSIST that I take your word for it that some sort of mental
gymnastics with quantum mechanics, energy equations, simultaneity provides the
ultimate answer, then you are REALLY suggesting that I "take it on FAITH".  That
takes us back to square one, and some of the original contributors here said much
the same thing with a whole lot less verbiage.

As a practical matter, if scientists can't come up with some sort of provable tests
or otherwise frame their arguments in such a way that lay people can understand, then
there is no way to convince the average peon that he/she should follow the new righteousness.

Unless we can draw others into this discussion, I don't think we will get anywhere
by continuing this thread.  BTW, do note that you have points available in a separate
thread that refers back here.

All I am suggesting is that it is possible to frame questions and statements that are provably meaningless.

If that is your conclusion, did it take so many words to say so?

Unless you are referring to your own words as examples of questions and statements.
Actually, I have sort of suspected that might have been a ploy on your part, partly because
I read about serious-sounding speeches along that line.
But, I am too old and too tired
and have too much to do to try to follow all of the twists
and turns of the apparent logic.

A link to some comprehensive ideas that are more on target with my original question:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/infpoint.html

A link to some comprehensive ideas that are more on target with my original question:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/infpoint.html

If you lookup this FAQ in your link above

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_constant.html

you will see that what I was alluding to earlier, that is the Comological Constant is in fact measurable, eg from supernovae data.  It is effectively equivalent to the important idea of a "Vacuum energy density".  Einstein called it his greatest blunder, but that may have been premature.

That is an interesting article.  

The author points out that the big bang is not a black hole theory.  A black hole is a region of the space-time metric where light cannot escape due to extreme gravity.  A white hole by contrast is a kind of time-reversed black hole with a radius where nothing can enter.  Black holes should not be able to be destroyed because the singularity must exist over all time, not at a particular time.  For the similar reasons a white hole should not be able to be created.  But if these objects have always existed, then there is no need for such events.  Hawking has suggested that our universe can be both at once, with thermal equilibrium between the views due to leakage.  A kind of resonance effect maybe?

Reality is self-causing, and your mind is part of it.

You were right about ulterior motives, when I think about that.  What I wanted to do was to attack your point of view.

The first part of my attack was aimed at your willing acceptance of sentences at face value.  That a sentence does not always mean what we think it does at first reading, and may be self-contradictory.  
The second part of my attack is your belief that you can debunk spirituality on the basis of an appeal to science.  The net result I would hope for is that you maintain a completely open mind on the future role of spirituality in science, and not fall into the usual human trap of misrepresenting both.  

The birth of QM has shown that we cannot ignore the human mind in our equations.  We simply cannot debunk mysticism on the grounds of non-physicality, especially when reality is self-causing, and your mind is part of it.

We have finally arrived at the point where we agree that the question about first causes is inextricably tied up with one of the oldest and most difficult questions, the nature of time itself.  

Apart from the fact that our descriptions of time are hopelessly entangled by being within it, I maintain that our minds helped/help/will help  to INVENT it, not merely discover it.  We may be more godlike than we have ever  allowed ourselves to imagine.  

Did it never occur to you that the the very reading of that article allowed that knowledge to "enter" your universe, and as it did so it collapsed wave-functions, creating the very fabric of that universe with its complete history and future development potential in that single creative act?  
So now you DO live in such a universe, whereas before you MAY NOT HAVE?  Have not the great thinkers been claiming for years,  that you write your own story.  You choose your own path?  Guess what - welcome to the hall of mirrors - you choose your own UNIVERSE my friend, and it is physically consistent, complete with its own portfolio of past accomplishments and possible futures.

Take the observation of two things in the same place at once.  That is now accepted. The words "at once" mean "at the same time".  Who's time is that?  Within the understanding of the understander.  

The great discoveries in science are always "dreamed" or "imagined" first, ever since that old greek was relaxing in the bath and yelled "Eureka!"  Kekule dreamed up organic chemistry, he say the molecules dance in front of his eyes and make patterns.  He did not realise it, but in the process he would have been "seeing" an electron existing in six places at once if he "saw" Benzene. There is that hypothetical storyteller/author again, the theoretical physicist this time, and he has created a time frame using bits of paper, that exists in the universe of his imagination.

Like the particle that exists in more than one place at once, the physical reality is that we do have the ability to create a mental reality that can only exist with the assistance of our minds, but shockingly, has physical consequences we can experience.  

Your past is part of the construction your mind is ALLOWED to make, not just one that happened incidentally.  The laws of physics you know are the ones your life-path has chosen, the entire history of the planet you know is consistent with accidents along that path, including your experience of the version of the people you know, and what they do.  The laws of physics you learn about as time progresses is a completely personal experience for you.  The grand canyon is only there, with all its truths and complete connectedness to all the rest) in your experience becuase of the way your life unfolds.  

You literally choose your path, but only after you have landscape-designed the choices.

But when it comes to people the story changes - the version of people we know is sharable, so the version of reality shared by people is also sharable, not merely on a mental level, but on a physical level.  The law of gravity for example is true because an ape in my past cognised it and eventually it passed into language, and that is only true because of things I chose to do, and that thinking agents chose which would become to be on my behalf.

Reality is self-causing, and your mind, all minds, are intricately part of its physical ongoing creation.

Try this:

http://home.ntelos.net/~write/memes.html

>> "There is no way to measure or compute the mass of a human mind, just as there is no way to measure or compute the mass of a computer program. Neither exists in tangible physical reality"

Completely and utterly false.
Computing is a thermodynamic activity.  Otherwise how do you explain the heat sink on the CPU chip?  You cannot destroy a "one" without burning it to a "zero" by a PHYSICAL action.  If electrical, then it must be passed through a resistor to give a voltage drop, and heat is released.  (It is possible to re-use some of the "ones" by skillful circuit design, withing the limits of the laws of thermodynamics, these gives a so-called messure of "reversibility" in CPU design.)  It costs energy to isolate any signal from its background noise.  When you view it like this, you can see that Computing is simply a form of refrigeration (and energy is a form of mass as you know.)  Hence the phrase 'A cool idea ':)
The bit is not a hypothetical construction, it is physically meaningful.  Even if we allow quantum computing into the argument with fractional bits, thermodynamics stil holds.

Well, for you only, let me rephrase it a bit, by adding something to the effect
that to be considered tangible and physical the examination (with instruments
or whatever) should take place, say, 3 YEARS later!

Food for thought

http://home.earthlink.net/~dolascetta/MetaFrameSet.html

Interesting link.  However, there could be other models that frame the reality in
ways that are more comprehensible.  For example, a wave on an oscilloscope is only a
model of what actually happens in, say, a radio circuit. So, all mathematical presentations
are only representative models of events which are used as a communication tool to explain
events.  For instance, a sine wave on a graph is drawn out horizonatally to represent the
passage of time.  The actual event would better be described by an increase of
voltage or current to a maximum point, then receding past the axis to a minimum point, and
then repeating -- all in place.  Thus, time is assumed but not graphically represented in
this method.  To go even further, consider a dynamo in a power plant that is creating
those electrical changes through rotational energy as it is transformed by magnetism.

But how many observers of a sine wave on an oscilloscope would think about the dynamo?

Well Dick says he is not a real physicist, so I think he ought to get a real one to critique his companion paper, and publish the comments.  

>>So, all mathematical presentations
are only representative models of events which are used as a communication tool to explain
events

That is too big a jump.  Math is far broader than that. I used to share an office with a topologist who was also well versed in Category Theory.  To these guys the idea of "representation" is primitive, their idea of a "model" takes some getting your head around, but then they progress way past that - they can mathematicise the concept of "concept" with ease, if you get my drift.  (I suspect that category theory will one day put computing on a firm mathematical foundation, it badly needs one).

I guess your point though is that physical theory cannot be pure math.  That discussion goes right back to Plato or Pythagorus even.  In that respect even Quantum theory is not a mathematical theory, it rests on a bunch of independant physical postulates.

The strange fact that the universe can be made intelligible by something as un-expected as mathematics, has not escaped the attention of the great thinkers, and is today actively researched.  Math itself can be researched empirically now, too.  (Gregory Chaitin as an example.)  Arithmetic itself may have a particular random structure that is a characteristic of this particular universe, and there is active research into the theoretical limits of mathematics.

I invented my own numbers once.  It struck me that if some numbers seem to go on forever, like a decimal expansion of pi, then they have a left hand end but no right hand end.
Well that seemed to be unbalanced, so I invented numbers that have a right hand end but no left hand end.  Like this: ...354374  :)

That is not different in spirit that using i as the square root of -1 so you can show those Lissajou's figures or sine waves on your oscilloscope.
And let us not overlook that nature insists that we use imaginary numbers because she gave us a quantum universe.

pleasenospam asked me to post some additional comments on my opinion/knowledge about what was said last. so i will.

some discussion here (and in other topic areas) are about semantics (meaning of words) for example:

I said:

"It throws away (in some cases) classical conservation laws of mass and energy"

kaller2 said:

"Einstein eventually showed that mass and energy were EQUIVALENT, and that the TOTAL is always CONSERVED"

Both are correct. Classical conservation laws state that mass never increaser or decreases. Same for energy. Mass is always mass and energy can change from one type to another, but it is always energy. That is true for Classical Mechanics, Classical and Quantum Electrodynamics and Standart Quantum Mechanics. But in Quantum Field Theory (which is stantdart quantum mechanics plus special relativity) you can change mass into energy and vice-versa, according to the very famous equation e=mc2.

So, in Quantum Field Theory, you do not conserve mass nor energy separately (like I said) but you do conserve the total (like kaller2 said).

About experimental comprovation/proofs of theories:

The scientific method, as proposed by galileo, states that theory (mathematics) and experiments must walk side by side. With physics we want to describe nature, how it works. The word physics means nature. So, the ideal situation is where we have lots of experments that agree with a theory and where all experiments can be explained by the theory. But the world is not perfect.

Quantum mechanics deals with very small stuff, such as electrons, atoms, photons, etc. It is easy to work with those in a lab. So we can get a lot of experimental data on quantum mechanics and use it to test the theory. So far, no experiment has show that quantum mechanics is wrong. But there are lots of problems that are very hard to solve, mainly because we deal with a great number of particles in real life. For exemple, supercondutivity. There is a class of superconductors with high temperature that have no complete explanation on how they work.

General relativity deals with very big stuff, such as stars, galaxies, black holes etc. We can't do like in Star Trek. Travel to different stars, make experiments, etc. We are confined here on Earth looking up. Plus, general relativity deals with gravity, which is a VERY weak force that is only measurable when we have big masses, unlike electomagnetic forces that quantum mechanics works with.

None of those are perfect theories. Quantum mechanics lacks theoretical calculation. General relativity lacks experimental data. But they are both advancing very fast.

explanation versus description

again, sematics. but this is an important issue.

I checked the definition of scientific method in encarta.

http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?z=1&pg=2&ti=761578797

"Whereas philosophy in general is concerned with the why as well as the how of things, science occupies itself with the latter question only, but in a scrupulously rigorous manner."

So, philosophy is "why and how" and science is just "how".

Explanations (why) can't be provided by science. Science can only describe how things work. It is like nature is a game of chess and we are in it trying to guess how the pieces move. You can tell how the knight moves but you can't tell why he moves that way.

As an example, I will take one Eisntein relativity postulate: "nothing can move faster than light". That is a description of nature. It doesn't say why nothing can move faster than light.

Also: "gravity makes the apple fall to the ground". Why?

"opposite charges are attractive". Why?

"you can't measure momentum and position with absolute precision". Why?

I think I made my point.

On the issue of hidden variables and bell's inequality.

Quantum mechanics can't tell us what quantum particles will do for sure. When a electron goes through a small hole, it may turn left, right, up, down or go forward. There are two possibilities:

1-Nature is random. There is no way to know where the electron will go.

2-Quantum mechancis is incomplete. There is a way to measure some characteristics of the electron (a hidden variable) that would tell us where will the electron will go.

The most accepted hypothesis is the first one. But there are some very few scientists that pursuit the second one. Until someone measures these hidden variables, the first one will be considered the correct one.

Bell's inequatily is an evidence that there are no hidden variables in nature. There are also some experiments that show this same result, but I can't comment on them because they are far too advanced for my knowlege.

about physical theories beeing wrong.

There is no theory of everything. And maybe there will never be. For each class of experiments we use a different theory. For example:

velocity close to light - special relativity
very small particles - quantum mechanics
planets and stars - classical mechancis
planets and stars with high gravity/acceleration - general relativity

And so on.

So, you can't say that a newer theory proved an older theory wrong. It is just that the older theory can't be applied to the new class of experiments that the new theory can.

personal opinion versus scientific fact

The scientific method exists in order to not let someone's personal opinion interfere in his/her scientific produciton. But scientits are humans. They are influenced by opinions, philosophy, religion, culture, etc. So a single scientis may not follow the method perfectly, buy the scientific community as a whole does.

I, for example, don't like the hypothesis of a big bang. That is a personal opinion. Since high school, where I had my first contacts with relativity, I have had serious trouble understanding it. But I'm just human.

"So, all mathematical presentations are only representative models of events which are used as a communication tool to explain events."

That is Niels Bohr point of view also. He treats reality and mathematics as separete things. I also agree with that. But Einstein didn't like that very much.

"I guess your point though is that physical theory cannot be pure math."

physics = experiments + math

mind versus matter (back to the original question)

Two (maybe more) hypothesis:

1-There is no God, soul, spirit, etc. We are just a pile of atoms. Or mind is composed by electrical/chemical connections between neurons, similar to a computer, but far more complex. When we die, our mind dissapears.

2-There is something more besides the atoms in our bodies. Our mind is an entity by itself. When we die, the mind remains.

Make your choice. If you ask me what I think... The first hypothesis is just terrible, isn't it? It is painful just to think that someday it will all end. I can't even imagine that. The second one is not very scientific. So my answer would be: "I don't know".

1.  That QT only applies to the very small.
Response:
Not true.  It applies to all stuff, all sizes.  The size of the effects often makes it hard to see that.  Classical is a good approximation in most cases, that is the only reason we use that. If Planck's constant had a bigger value your mass would plainly diffract as it went through a doorway.  (Assuming you would be able to exist but as chemistry etc would be radically different you probably wouldn't)

2.  That relativity only applies to cosmic sized things.
response:
Not true.  eg. Magnetic effects have a direct relativistic explanation, due to the motion of electrons.

3: When a electron goes through a small hole...etc, turns etc...
Response:
Not true.
The phrase 'goes through' in this context is undemonstrable
and efectively meaningless.  "Trajectory" is a classical idea.  But we can still have collisions without trajectories though.  Get your head around that!  

>Whereas philosophy in general is concerned with the why as well as the how of things, science occupies itself with the latter question only, but in a scrupulously rigorous manner

There is a recognised philosophy of science. Also can't really see how science doesn't address "why" questions.  Encarta sounds a bit trite.

Particles are an illusion, a useful approximation.
There is no contest between waves and particles.  
Waves win out every time.

The idea of a particle is a simplification for the wave view called a "wave packet".   When a so-called particle travels through a dispersive medium its wave nature, ie the wave packet, is apparent.

Think of motion of mass (momentum) as a migrating standing wave.

Why a wave packet forms connects to the way that interactions occur when other wave packets interact with standing wave systems, or when wave packets interact with eachother, ie "collide".

What are the waves?  The waves are essentially waves of energy creativity, creativity waves that affect the vacuum.

When the packet represents the form of energy called rest-mass, as for an electron, then the idea of a velocity for the mass is acually the group velocity for the wave packet, which can be slower than the velocity of the component waves, but equal to the classical velocity.

But in the case of photons, the group velocity of the packet is the same as the velocity of the component waves.  In the frame of reference of the photon packets themselves, there is no concept of time or distance.  On the "inside" the photon packet waves are equivalent to the base frequency.  Einstein asked what it would be like to travel with light.  It is only be observing light from "outside" that we can experience that light photons have relativistic mass and to us, this relativistic mass is carried by a mass creativity wave, and we can observe the packet behaviour as its energy resonates with other wave systems.

As the electromagnetic energy in a volume of space increases, the photon flux density in that volume increases.  In other words the potential to create a photonic wave packet increases. The photons do not actually exist until an interaction occurs with a resonating system.

There is no such thing as a trajectory, but there is the transport of energy across time and space according to interaction rules.  It is just very convenient that the scattering rules for wave packets just happen to be approximated quite well by imagining particles of mass bouncing like billiard balls.

As a consequence photons can be detected in greater numbers in that volume.  As the field strength diminishes, the photon flux density reduces, there are fewer photons to be found in that volume, ie fewer can be created.  So the motion of photons, or all particles for that matter, is an illusion, a crude approximation to the creativity patterning that happens in volumes of space at certain times.

I need to take back my first sentence, I got carried away.  Waves are an excellent way to view things, and they lead to a kind of holistic explanation of events, but I did not properly understand that waves themselves can be derived from a particle view.  Richard Feynman derived the wave function by imagining a particle tries all of the available routes and each attempt contributes to the observed result.  It is as if particles sample the available universe at some level.

http://home.pacbell.net/stevepur/physics/qw/qw.5.html

To understand the universe we have to get a good picture of its mathematical "shape". Once that is clear, then maybe we can start to explain it better.

Interference effects have been demonstrated in the superposition of two light beams from two independent lasers, under conditions where the intensity was so low that one photon was absorbed, with high probability, before the next one was emitted by either of the two sources.

That means that the photons would have to know what was going to happen before it happened. You could say that  they sample time as well as space.  (Or you could turn it around and say that spacetime samples the same photon).

If you take the limit in quantum mechanics of action >> plancks constant, you get the same results of classical mechanics. Also in special relativity, the limit velocity << light gets you back to classical mechanics. I didn't say you can't apply modern theories in classical situations in the sence they would yield wrong results. They would just yield the same results, up to a very small precision difference that is usually not measurable.

"Magnetic effects have a direct relativistic explanation, due to the motion of electrons"

What is this explanation you so much talk about? What is there new in special relativity that was not present in maxswell's electrodynamics?

Magnetic effects are explainded by Lorent's and Ampere-Maxwell equations, both postulates of classical electrodynamics.

"When a electron goes through a small hole...etc, turns etc...
Response:
Not true
The phrase 'goes through' in this context is undemonstrable
and efectively meaningless."

How can you say that. If you shoot a electron on a metal plate that has a hole in it, the electron arrives at the wall on the other side. If you close the hole, the electron doens't get there. Then why can't you say that the electrons (wave or particle) goes through? Why you say that a wave or wave packet can't go throught something?

You are discussing semantics once again. The fact is that the electron arrives at different points in the wall behind the hole. That is a experimental fact!

Check out this link:

http://www.lactamme.polytechnique.fr/Mosaic/images/DIFF.32.0.16.D/display.html
 
It shows the results of a electron diffraction experiment. Even when you shoot single electrons, you can't predict where will they arrive, only probabilities.

"Also can't really see how science doesn't address "why" questions"

Give me an example of a "why" that science answered? It only describes more complex results based on simple experimental resuts, the postulates.

"Waves win out every time"

You just solved the wave-particle duality problem. Nobel prize for sure.

"What are the waves?  The waves are essentially waves of energy creativity, creativity waves that affect the vacuum."

Good answer. The waves are essentially waves.
A creativity wave that affect the vaccum. Man, artists would love those. I don't remember what unit we measure creativity though...

"But in the case of photons, the group velocity of the packet is the same as the velocity of the component waves"

There are no wave packets for photons. And you can't make a wave packet whose components have the same speed. If you think otherwise, please give me a mathematical representation of a wave packet that has that characteristics.

kaller2, what is your formation in physics?

Do even know the postulates of the theories you talk about?

About the wave-particle duality.

It exists because you can only measure electrons as particles. But they show behavior of waves. They have a DUAL behavior.

Particle:
-Fotoelectric effect
-Compton effect

Wave:
-Diffraction patterns

In the theory of quantum mechancis you treat the electron as a wave, given by shrodinger's equation or dirac's equation. When you measure them experimentally, they show all the characteristics of particles, but behave also as waves. DUALITY.

About what are waves.

Hard to answer that. You could say that waves are a mathematical representation of something that is oscillating and moving at the same time.

What is this something?

In the case of sound waves, the atoms are oscillating.

In the case of light and other electromagnetic waves, the magnetic and electrical fields are oscillating.

In the case of waves of water, water molecules.

Wave on a rope, the rope molecules.

In the case of a electron, the PROBABILITY is oscillating. This is a very new idea introduced by quantum mechanics. It is not the mass, nor the charge which oscillates, it is the probability of finding the electron. So you can't say that a electron is spread like a wave. That is wrong. The electron's probability of beeing measured is spread like a wave. But the electrons is still concentrated as a particle when you measure it. If the electron was spread like a wave you could measure a part of it, but you can't. You can only measure the full electron or not measure it at all.

For those also reading this TA that are not familiar with some terms:

Wave packet:
It is a (infinite) group of waves that interfere (sum) with each other. Around a point, the sum yields a non-zero value. Far away from that point, the sum yields precisely zero (very close to zero).
Similar to a taylor serires, a fourier series is a representation of a function as an infinite group of wave functions. A wave packet is a representation of something as a infinite series of simple waves. Mathematically, a wave packet is usually a gaussian function represented by its fourier series.
So, you can't say that particles are an aproximation of wave packets. In this sence I pointed, it is just the opposite.

Standing waves:
When you have forces acting on waves, they may be forced to stop propagating. For examples, the strings of a guitar. The string is fixed in the ends of the guitar, so the wave can't propagate beyond those poitns. It then oscillaties between those points.
A free moving electron is not a standing wave. But when it is on a atom, it becomes a standing wave due to the interaction with the nucleus.

about photons (particles of light/electromagnetic waves) and electrons.

Standart Quantum Theory works with the shrodinger's equation. This equation is applied to electrons and yield very good results if the electron isn't moving very fast (high energies). But it can't be applied to photons, simply because photons don't have mass, and shrodinger's equation have mass in it. You can study interactions between photons and electrons with it, but you treat the photon as a pertubation and apply the equation to the electron only.

Quantum Field Theory (also Relativistic Quantum Mechanics) began when Dirac quantized the electromagnetic field. Dirac's equation deals with both photons and electrons. In this theory many ideas present in Standart Quantum Mechanics don't apply. For example, position is not an observable. It is a parameter, just like time. You can't measure the position of a electron or photon, only its density of energy in a specific point. Also there are no wave packets for electrons nor photons.

Let's don't forget the original question:

> But, the best that (at least some) scientists have come up with as a source
> for creation of the universe was probably transient virtual pair particles that
> somehow separated for good and produced the original matter

It seems to me, if I have stated the premise correctly, that the conditions clearly
imply that something came before.  Before what?  Why, the so-called "Big Bang", of course.
That hints of some sort of evolutionary process.  It doesn't really go back to the
"beginning", whatever that is.  I grant that it is impossible to describe what
ACTUALLY happened, so another approach is required. How about a "thought experiment"
to build a framework for what MIGHT have happened BEFORE any of this.

Here we go: If you started with absolutely nothing at all, no energy, no matter, no particles,
no waves and set out to create anything, how would you do it?  Even more basic: How could it
happen without a "you" intelligence to trigger the action?

Only one tool and one operator of that tool is available. It is called "forever".

I will label these so you know which ones to shoot down.

What I mean to point out is that it is incorrect to give the impression that because QT applies so well to the large scale, it has negligible effects in our macroscopic world.  This would be a mischievous mis-representation, and I am sure you do't mean to make that.

It seems to me there is an unwarranted impression abroad,  that we really can ignore this nonsense, because after all its for really really tiny things and we are so big!  (Oooh thats was spooky - I just made a typo that said "Time thinks" instead of "tiny things")

Not only does QT explain all the the classical results, but the reality is that there are an enormous number of readily visible observations in the macroscopic world.

The whole notion of stability takes a hiding for a start.  I mean according to classical theory you should be able to balance an umbrella vertically on its point.  (OK, given that you eliminate air drafts and the vibration of trucks passing in the street outside). QT explains why it falls over, because it cannot be stationery, it has to be moving through that point, so it is always begun to tip.  If it is completely stationery, then it won't be exactly vertical, so once again it has already started tipping over.  Classically you could preserve its potential energy indefinitely, but QT says no, you must begin converting it to kinetic.  And that means it will fall, because once the conversion has started it is away.

Most of the components in your computer, including large scale macroscopic devices, such as the LED on your disk drive, the laser that reads your laser disc, have no classical explanation, and even the plastic that the CD is made from, have no classical explanation, because modern chemistry would not exist either, we would still be trying to mix bat's blood and urine with the hair from a virgin to make magic stones that turn lead into gold.  

You cannot explain how a bucket of liquid helium defies gravity, by any classical explanation.

And the recent bunch of "non-local" effects have absolutely no respect for the size of things as measured by distance.  

The fixation of the large mass of objects, that they are somehow a "separate domain" conveniently overlooks the fact that we also do not visibly diffract as we pass through a doorway, because we are moving too FAST.  The wavelength of a moving mass increases dramatically as its velocity decreases.

The appeal to the mass of a person as a secret charm against QT, as an insulating principle, is like pretending we are wearing a magic cloak that protects us dangerous spells.

That was 1. This is 2.
Yikes, my spelling has gone to pot, sorry.  I am even using stationery instead of stationary.

A lot of what I write is from memory, because I read it before the web came along, so I love to find out I was wrong because with this stuff is not easy to find good explanations.

You can get to radiation by starting from the idea of induction, but who is going to explain induction, or magnets in the first place, since Michael Farady started the hunt?

I always thought that magnetism is the fore-shortening effect when observing charges in relative motion amounts to a missing distance which means missing force (electrostatics) which explains why a mysterious force is experienced in the unexpected direction that it that does?  How else are you going to conjure up the magic of the magnet?  
And then we can justify the three finger rule and call it magnetic, and then we can get to radiation by propagating alternate changes of electical and magnetic force (which once again has to implicate space-time, because there are no electrons moving with the wave). There has been a search for magnetic monopoles to carry the force, but you don't see much effort going into magnetism as a fundemental problem because it is so nicely explaned by relativity.

>>How can you say that. If you shoot a electron on a metal plate that has a hole in it, the electron arrives at the wall on the other side. If you close the hole, the electron doens't get there. Then why can't you say that the electrons (wave or particle) goes through? Why you say that a wave or wave packet can't go throught something?
You are discussing semantics once again. The fact is that the electron arrives at different points in the wall behind the hole. That is a experimental fact!

Hmm.  This sounds a lot like the question posed elsewhere 'Are you saying Jesus was a liar?'  
When what I actually want to do is to develop my concept of "Jesus" without necessarily even accepting the existence of a flesh and blood person at a given point in time.  (Wow, there's a thought  Quantum Jesus!)
Your use of "experimental fact" is the same kind of semantics as a believer who points to the bible for facts.

What is obvious to me is that the very notion of "thingness" has taken a major battering.  The notion of "trajectory" is majorly flawed.  The notion of "identity" is highly suspect.  QT replaces a whole raft of historically useful language with a few extraordinary phrases like "indistinguishable", and leaves us struggling with what that means.  

This is not some parlour game, this is for real.  And that has major consequences for the vanities of the age.  That we can somehow produce a mind from pieces of wire.  That a complete duplicate of a person would be possible to construct, and that it would have a separate identity.  That we could duplicate our body in principle, atom for atom.  That if we destroyed a duplicate it would not be murder.   That an animal does not share in human consciousness at any physical level.

>>The fact is that the electron arrives at different points in the wall behind the hole. That is a experimental fact!

No it isn't!

You use the word "arrive".  That mischievously connotes a journey, by implication.  What journey?  You did NOT observe the journey, you only DEDUCED it.  Spare me empirical appeal to "FACT".

Ha!  So run the particle through a cloud chamber and you do have a trajectory.  But then you do lose the other effects.  Hehe.  But it is not that nature laughs in our faces, it is that we that are the fools.  We have to give up the vanity of where we have placed ourself in relation to the universe, and as we know only too well, the status of the human animal is maintained through the power of the language.  Our questions are only stupid because the language we use is stupidly inappropriate.  Sematics are not trivial, they are the essence of understanding.

Might as well get this off my chest too and make a feeble attempt to get back on topic - here is my contribution to whacky off-the-wall quantum mind theories of the universe:

Whereas a von Neumann processor can emulate asymetrical processing using a bit-shifting trick, (if then else) the brain is an asymmetric processor that is able to process  asymmetrical "implication" operators directly on sensory data, which puts it directly on-line to the universe of cause and effect, and allows it to create "mind".  The implication operators have evolved to become massively multi-dimensional and can filter time signals, but the process of filtering signals, "thought",  is not physically passive.  It has a feedback effect on itself, but especially on the actual time signals themselves, because they inhabit the quantum universe.  The effect is that the mind "conducts" time signals.  The net effect is that certain kinds of self sustaining connects are manifest that are essentially indistiguishable as states in "universal mind", and operate as "selection rules" on the kinds of allowable universes in which that mind state can exist.

But then how's this for a theory?

'All theories are wrong'

>>How can science talk about properties of something that was never observed?

If that were true there would never be any theories.  Don't buy into that "Science is only about observation" crap.  Just as there are two kinds of doctors, medical and surgical, tere are two kinds of physicists, empirical and theoretical.

>>"It has always been what it is and it will always be. Because, if it had come to be, necessarily it would be nothing before comming to be. Thus, if it were nothing, in no way it could come to be from nothing."
His basic point of view is that something can't come from nothing.

Can you see the basic flaw in that logic?  The basic flaw in that logic is that he is presuming that he can use that particular logic!  You can hardly blame him, though, extended logics had not been discovered when he wrote that.

But even apart from the unquestioned acceptance of classical logic, the semantics here are very interesting.  It occurs to be that the author is mapping "existance" directly to the boolean logic values "true" and "false".  Let us try that by replacing the word "be" used here with the word "true", and replace "not be" with "false".  

Allow me:

It has always been TRUE what it is TRUE and it will always be TRUE. Because, if it had BECOME TRUE, necessarily it would be FALSE before BECOMING TRUE. Thus, if it were FALSE, in no way it could BECOME TRUE from FALSE.

Everything looks fine up until the last sentence, and there it starts to get a bit shaky.  What my transformation has done is to strip away the emotional content, and look at the logic directly.  You can plainly see that there is the notion of an "Operator" implicit in the sentence construction, especially the last sentence.  The emiment gentleman is proving noting, he is in fact ASSERTING something -  the denial of such an operator.

>>If you started with absolutely nothing at all, no energy, no matter, no particles,
no waves

One important ingredient missing from your list of lists, you set of all sets....I didn't see you mention "no observer, no story teller".  You just created that anyway!

>>Standart Quantum Theory works with the shrodinger's equation. This equation is applied to electrons and yield very good results if the electron isn't moving very fast (high energies). But it can't be applied to photons, simply because photons don't have mass, and shrodinger's equation have mass in it. You can study interactions between photons and electrons with it, but you treat the photon as a pertubation and apply the equation to the electron only.

The Schodinger equation is nothing special, it doesn't care specially about mass, it is just the standard wave equation with TIME factored out, so that it becomes a standing wave equation.  And you get that by binding particles to a region of space using a force field, the same way that you get standing waves by binding the ends of a violin string. That is why a photon doesn't use that particular simplification, because its FREE to move, not because it is massless.  (Anyway it is not massless, it just has no rest mass). And when you bind things using forces, THAT is when the quantum numbers start popping out. Waves waves waves.

>>Quantum Field Theory (also Relativistic Quantum Mechanics) began when Dirac quantized the electromagnetic field.

Not quite.  Planck quantised the oscilators.  It was Einstein to whom the credit should go for quantising the field itself, and practically invented the modern idea of the photon.  Schodinger cracked the atomic wave equation.  Heisenberg figured out complementarity.
What Dirac did was he took all this work and welded it together on a mathematical basis, (Einstein was never as good at math as he could have been) including the existing theories as special cases.

>> Dirac's equation deals with both photons and electrons. In this theory many ideas present in Standart Quantum Mechanics don't apply.

Dirac subsumed all of the standard stuff.

>> For example, position is not an observable. It is a parameter, just like time. You can't measure the position of a electron or photon,

Sure you can, just so long as you don't care which direction it is moving or how fast it is going.

In case someone reads this and gets the wrong impression - just mentally deciding that we don't care about a property is not enough to affect the result of a measurement.  It is just that those arrangements that make some things precise will make some others variable, and vice versa.

Will power is not enough, we have to actually set things up.  Willpower points to the future which we don't seem to know a lot about or have control over.  But knowledge is something else.  Looking back after collecting knowledge, we can see spooky connections that seem impossible to explain.  

Time now for the bifurcating universe theory.  (Not mine rest assured).
That every decsion, every quantum choice, whether made by a person or a leaf falling from a tree, causes the universe to bifurcate.
ie to split into two universes.

So that each possible choice actually happens, in each universe.
there is a small time delay (the uncertainty principle again) whwre leakage between the splitting universes can occur - of information typically.  But as time progresses the opportunities become less and less and the universes are logically more and more separated.

This means you have to have plenty of room to keep replicating universes.  (No problem, have some more)

Then what about me, do I replicate too?
Hmm.  Some say yes, same say maybe.
You mean that in some universes Hitler won WWIII?
Sure, Take you pick.
Then what I do doesn't matter.  Who needs ethics - I am going to make all choices anyway?  
Whoah not so fast.  This one universe you are surfing on here my man, has a version of people you chose to come with you, and they won't appreciate your attitude.
So keep your version under control!

Just a note:
What if there are six equal choices?
Then each one actually happens, and you get six separate universes.

What does that do to the big bang?
Oh well, maybe there are a gazillion universe where that is not the history they got.
In other words when the universe splits, it carries its whole history with it.

Eneter conscious minds - maybe we can create a consistent history to go with each universe by just thinking it!

So what did i do to warrant a big bang in my history?
Ah, perhaps you were very bad in previous incarnation!

Although it makes for fascinating reading, the thread is getting too long.  I am
giving the points to acerola because that should bring his total up enough to qualify
for KPRO, which provides a large number of bonus points to use for questions.

Now, here is what I would like to do, if you can bear with me:

If the content can be worded more carefully to increase the potential number of
readers, I think it could be edited into a small book for popular readers.  If I am
right, there should be MONEY in it!

Obviously, my own background in physics is too limited and too old, but I do have a
background in technical writing.  I am not saying that we could reach the general
public.  However, we should be able to attract readers who have had some background
in radio, electronics, higher math, and physics.

In the meantime, I suggest that you can look at your own words and phrases and edit
them to include in a new thread.  For one thing, if you have a quote that is basically
metaphysical poetry, you should identify it as such.  Also, most readers don't know
about the various "effects" or experiments.  Where they are identified by name, there
should be a SHORT description.

What do you say?

Thanks again, pleasenospam. One teacher I had once told me that philosophers are much nicer people than scientists. I am stating to understand it now...

Scientists discuss as if they were battling for their own lives. They are very agressive and many good friendships are lost due to these discussions.

Philosophers seem to be more friendly when discussing. They listen and respect each others opinions. Everybody learns so everybody comes out as a winner.

--------------------------------------------------

It is a true challege to write a science book "for dummies". Modern physics is very complex. A physics Ph.D. spent 10 years studying to start working with it. But it is very important to inform the general population about what science is doing with the tax money we all pay.

Science is supposed to be non-faith based. But many people who read these books take their contents as a new religion. Science is no religion. It is no absolute truth. It can and must be changed and improved when needed.

Your book is a great idea. If you need my opinion/knowledge just ask.

Some very good discussions appeared here. I will soon be posting them as separeted threads in this ta. This one is waaay to big.

Well, I liked the interchange between acerola and kaller2. I think that format could
be a winner.  However, my gut feel is that one or two additional people could be
an asset.  My role would be that of the "dummy" to ask questions and edit the text.

By the way: I did write a computer text for a private computer school where I was
an instructor.  My technical writing work saw service in one of the recent wars.

kaller2,

Note you have more points here at P&R.

acerola,

You need 600 more expert points this month to make KPRO.

acerola,

> You need 600 more expert points this month to make KPRO.

But, that works only AFTER you have 10,000 cumulative points.  Sorry, my mistake.