Evidence...

qmagick_at_yahoo.com
Date: 02/03/05


Date: 3 Feb 2005 15:31:00 -0800

John Baez wrote:
> In article <1107418335.324750.294210@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
> Keith Ramsay <kramsay@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >examachine@gmail.com wrote:
>
> >| I think the evidence for a discrete world far outweighs the
evidence
> >| for a continuous world, which is basically non-existent.
>
> >On the contrary, there's essentially no evidence that the
> >world is discrete. Really, there's not much that could
> >reasonably be called evidence in either direction.

I disagree, there is evidence that allready exists that suggests that
the universe is neither continuous or discrete, it is fractal. Besides
just looking around at all the fractals you can see in Nature with ones
own eye, the evidence comes from physics. Specifically, in QFT, to make
sense of a number of Feynmann diagrams you have to use Renormalization.

If you look at the Renormalization formulas, they look surprisingly
"like" the Hausdorff dimension formula. This is not a mistake as far as
I can tell. QFT got the idea from Condensed Matter physics, and
condensed matter physicists got the idea from the mathematicians. The
QFT people even use the terms from dimension theory, "scale", "flow",
etc...

I think though because where the idea for "Renormalization" came from
became lost (dimension theory), or because a lot of physicists believe
in Democritus like thinking, the idea that the world might be fractal
all the way down has never been considered seriously. There is even a
term for what the Renormalization procedure does that bypasses the idea
that the procedure might be usefull because of dimension theory:
cutoff. The procedure cuts off our ignorance of what happens in a realm
with higher energy. Maybe what the procedure really does is cut off our
ignorance that the world is discrete or continuous, because it is
fractal!
                                       -- NPC

note: I do agree that Renormalization also gives us a cutoff, but that
would have just complicated the argument.



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