Re: attractive force via particle exchange - how?

In article <1124928428.652481.59290@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"PD" <TheDraperFamily@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Mitchell Jones wrote:
> > In article <1124912524.920707.70730@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> > "PD" <TheDraperFamily@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > > > > is
> > > > > the part that is presumptuous and overly confined. In fact,
> > > > > originally,
> > > > > the effects of light were *not* supposed to be caused by photons.
> > > > > Indeed, one of the items of interest was, "So, how do we describe
> > > > > what
> > > > > this causal agent is?" And the best way to determine what it is was
> > > > > to
> > > > > figure out how it behaved and what classes of causal agents that
> > > > > behavior most closely matched. There were many competing notions:
> > > > > flying corpuscles (Newton believed this in the 1600s), a disturbance
> > > > > in
> > > > > a collection of corpuscles (like sound), a fluid (that was *not*
> > > > > composed of particles
> > > >
> > > > ***{To say that a thing is not composed of particles is to say that it
> > > > does not exist, that nothing--no thing--is there. The reason: naught
> > > > exists save entities and the void. --MJ}***
> > >
> > > Aha, and this little point right here is your fundamental assumption,
> > > whether justified or not. It is not an axiom, as it is not
> > > self-evident.
> >
> > ***{The notion of a third state of existence, of a presence that is
> > neither a ponderable thing nor no thing at all, does not differ in any
> > essential respect from belief in ghosts. Therefore it is just as I said:
> > you guys are proponents of magic and the supernatural, not of science.
> > You just refuse to admit it, that's all. Q.E.D. --MJ}***
> >
> > [snip]
>
> Then let's get down to what you mean by "ponderable thing". What are
> the properties of such a thing?

***{Entities are localized momentum carriers that follow continuous
pathways through space and exert force by contact. To say that "naught
exists save entities and the void" is to say that everything real,
everything ponderable, everything capable of exerting force, is either
an entity or is composed of entities. The reason for saying such a thing
is that if force can be exerted by a presence which does *not* follow a
continuous pathway through space--a presence which is capable of either
leaping into existence out of nothing or vanishing into nothing--then
knowledge itself becomes impossible. For in that case, we might think we
saw a cow, but instead the image of the cow might have simply appeared
on our retinas out of nothing. Similarly, we might think we have a pair
of legs, but in fact the sensations that we think are coming from those
"legs" may, in fact, be leaping into existence out of nothing. The
implication: either naught exists save entities and the void, or else we
have no basis for belief in the existence of anything, including
ourselves. --MJ}***

> PD
.

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