Re: Debating Uncertaintity uncertainly...


"smurrish" <smurrish@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1125015975.243498.93450@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
|I am currently in a debate with a new-ager.
|
| This person is under the idea that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
| PROVES that our cognition of events brings them into existence and
that
| we can create realities by visualizing them hard enough.
|
| Admittedly, I have not taken a Physics course since high-school and
| what I know about it I have learned from watching NOVA and reading
| things here and there, but my understanding (or misunderstanding) of
it
| so far is this:
|
| The fact that we cannot know a particle's position and velocity at the
| same time is a statement about the limits of our measuring tools, our
| sensory apparati (both natural and derived from tools). Just because
| we cannot KNOW them simultaneously does not mean that one or the other
| does not exist. To say that they don't exist until observed is like
| saying that when a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to
hear
| or see it ... it does not, in fact, fall.
|
| This smacks in the face of common sense. It's like saying that when
| mommy or daddy put their hands over their faces when they play
| peak-a-boo that they literally disappear from reality. Every
| developing child learns object permanence eventually and discover that
| mom and dad are really there, even if it looks like they aren't.
|
| I mean, it all seems like a game of bunko. Which shell is the pea
| under? Position or velocity?
|
| Would someone more learned and facile than I please inform me about
| this issue.
|
| Thank you,
| Stephen


Groan...
All the HUP is saying is that when you are blind and deaf,
to detect someone else in the room with you, you have to
bump into them. On the atomic level, we are blind and deaf.
We detect single atoms by bumping them with photons or electrons,
and that moves them. So in a sense we create a new reality when
we bump into a person in a room, they are now lying on the floor
and would not have been had we had not have "detected" them.

That new reality results in a phone call, an ambulance, a long stay
in the hospital, flowers at a funeral.
Had you not knocked that person over she would have given birth
to a son, he'd have become the leader of Germany, a war would
have broken out and millions of people would have died, my mother
would not have met my father and I would not have been born.

To invent a plane to carry people across the Atlantic in three hours,
you have to think of the idea first. We have always created new
realities by thinking about them.

You can't think a new skyscraper into existence, you have to build it,
but you can't build it unless you can think it into existence.

I can cause this mouse on my desk to rise into the air one foot
and then float gently back down again, by thinking at it.
So can you.
The muscles in your hand and arm are under the control of
signals from your brain, your mind is the volitional program
that controls the low level subroutines of tactile sensing and
stimulus. You are a computer that controls a crane, with your
hands the hooks.
It's only magic if you don't understand it.

Androcles


.

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