Re: THIS STATEMENT HAS NO PROOF IN ANY SYSTEM = true or false?

examachine_at_gmail.com
Date: 02/02/05 

Date: 2 Feb 2005 08:01:57 -0800

Mitch Harris wrote:
> That is probably so. The emotional reaction I do know I had was with
> your statement "there can be no such thing as continuum in the
> physical world", which sounded just too (baselessly) authoritarian to

> pass up comment.

I do not mean to be authoritative. That would be a Torkelism.

I think the evidence for a discrete world far outweighs the evidence
for a continuous world, which is basically non-existent.

If the world were continuous, then there might be a way to store a real
number as a physical property. However, all storage devices have to
rely on fundamental properties in the atomic world which are _all_
discrete, e.g. quantum physics.

There is also something called Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Why
would I believe that something exists beneath the Planck scale, while
our physics tells us that you cannot physically subdivide the Planck
scale. There is no such thing, as far as I can tell, as to measure time
or space in fractions of the Planck scale. I would of course be
interested to know if there is a work that shows the Planck scale is
bogus!

The problem with that kind of a belief is its similarity to theological
"reasoning". There is something called "God" that is fundamentally
unobservable, but some people believe in its existence. Substitute God
with continuum. (That is I object also on metaphilosophical grounds)

The only "evidence" for a continuous world is classical and
relativistic physics cast in the language of geometry which makes use
of real-valued numbers, that is they are no evidence. (How can a
"theoretical assumption" be an evidence?) If we take particle physics
seriously, which we should, we cannot say that they are equal ways of
describing the world.

Here, something interesting you might ask: but the wave function is
continuous right? Right. Does the wave function exist? I don't think
so. It is merely another theoretical instrument.
Regards, 

--
Eray Ozkural

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