Quantum Reality - worlds within worlds. Solipsism.

It is still amazing that quantum theory still presents such problems in terms of classical (real world) interpretation. Nobody really understands what it is all about yet it works!

The mathematical formalisms (which only exist in 'things' like Hilbert Space or phase space - all multidimensional and defined over complex numbers) are our best ways of describing the quantum world. Unfortunately there is no ready translation of this esoteric language into everyday vernacular. The two worlds exist in splendid isolation.

To enter the quantum world you have to become conversant in high level mathematics. There is no easy way in other than the hard slog. The curious thing is that as more becomes revealed the less you are able to communicate the revelation to ordinary souls. That is the quantum conundrum! You can only converse with the initiated and even then you and they have limited and even solipsistic understanding of it all.

After a trip into the quantum world re-entry to the classical world entails a reorganization of the modes of thought. Quantum ways are not just jettisoned but must be unlearned. This is because the two worlds are complementary in Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation sense. When you look at the quantum world you force your thought processes into quantum thinking. You have to use a microscope to see the very small - no point in using a telescope. Our eyes unaided can only see the classical world. Our brains, unaided, are likewise restricted to the everyday world. It has taken thousands of years for our brains to gather up enough insight to finally see beyond the everyday. The mechanism unfortunately is the mathematical formalism. Each brain must grapple with acquiring this skill and in so doing each brain develops its own interpretation of a resulting ontology.

Quantum worlds within worlds.....

Nested Porcelain by www.claregreene.com

Silhouetted in shadow by the tall Florentine window
The moments slip idly by.
Rest awhile from the world.
The silence can be louder still
than the tumult of busy streets;
and the great sights of yore
will still be there later,
to peruse and walk past
with only brief memories extant.

Questions for Quantum Theorists to answer:

• what is the nature of the probability amplitude - real or formal?

• is the measurement process circular? Question determines answer.

• is wave/particle duality all there is?

• is non-locality real

• is time a quantum phenomenon? 

Site of Myndos City Ionia

Thousands of years ago Greek philosophers pondered similar questions on the beautiful rugged shores of Ionia.

End of year thoughts!

Another unit of life comes to an end - but is it an end? We think in terms of years that are eeked out by the movement of our lonely cosmic planet about our equally lonely sun.

These revolutions of our homely orb are marked by seasonal changes in weather that remind us of time passing.

After a cold December, the thaw has set in and the wet winds of winter return. Life, at its nadir, struggles to survive. The birds, of all kinds, seek out food to keep alive. All, who can, hibernate.

I often think that the word 'hibernate' and 'Hibernia', the latin name for our isle, are two of a kind. In Hibernia, in winter, we struggle to survive, and given a chance, we would all seek a place to sleep away the odious winter.

The wind howls and the rain beats against the windows. The days are darkly short and cold. The colour grey persists.

The return

The follow up philosophical work of fiction to 'The Island' (www.desgreene.com) is called 'The Return' and is partially complete.

In it I have developed further my ideas on the role and influence of modern science on the state of philosophy as it is today and its importance to our everyday lives.

I hope to have it available for download in the new year.

We are not alone - death of solopsism?

The recent discoveries of other earth-like planets in our galaxy have made the likelihood of finding other life more than probable.

The paradigm has truly shifted.

What does this mean for humanity?

How will this shape the course of human history?

These are questions I hope to treat in the sequel to 'The Island' called 'The Return'.

There is an exciting philosophical landscape waiting to be explored with the aid of this new paradigm.

Virtual Particles

The curious concept of particle physics and quantum field theory, virtual entities, are the briefest temporal existences in the cosmos. Other aspects of existence trump them in being briefer but alas are not separate existences in themselves. The frequency of a virtual photon is of necessity such as to provide a period inferior to that of the photon itself but is only an aspect of that virtual photon.

This raises the concept of a negative infinity or the idea of an absolute zero. Heisenberg rules out such absolutes in terms of the Uncertainty Principle. The absolute vacuum of quantum theory far from being empty is awash with virtual entities with vanishingly small temporal existences. The negative infinity reveals an infinite world of the infinitesimal.

What does this new world view portend for the philosophical outlook of humanity. Should our innate fear of nothingness be replaced by the warmth of the never ending virtual sea of the vacuum?

These virtual worlds are realms only recently revealed to us via the great scientific endeavours culminating in the current Large Hadron Collider project at CERN. Philosophy has new doors being opened for it by science. Only a few intrepid explorers have ventured to enter this brave new world.

Escher's Stairs

I always thought that this was an original Escher creation but was amazed to find that it was in fact the father of Roger Penrose (Road to Reality) who was the original creator;

Goodreads Debate

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/350886-philosophy-of-science?order=d&page=1

Try this link for a good debate on the philosophy of science.

String Theory

String theory in its many formulations has yet to make predictions about reality. It not alone posits a greater than four dimensional spacetime but sees our actual living spacetime as only one of almost countless possibilities - all of which exist.

For the last twenty or so years, the best minds in theoretical physics have dedicated their whole energies to developing the many string theories that have emerged.

The increasingly bizarre paradigms of their world have not been critiqued by the world of philosophy. Why has this been the case given the revolutionary hypotheses being set before us?

That string theory may turn out to be a theoretical wrong turning for physics should not make philosophers happy in their passivity.

Pascal's Pensees

On holiday took the opportunity to peruse Pascal's Pensees and found there a total antipathy to science as a route to truth - this from one of the great mathematical minds!

I was disappointed yet felt that there was genuine depth to the revelatory metaphysics of this great man. In ways he was enlightened before his time and many of his ideas sit well alongside modern quantum theory - this is surely by chance since the science of the day was more mechanically deterministic. However it shows that his thinking went deeper than the level of his mathematics.

Who is the modern day Pascal?

New book of poetry

Download free from http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13583

Elegy to Mac

Lest we forget!

The Island - proving most popular download!

It's great to see a more obscure and difficult work like 'The Island' being the most popular download for 'Read an eBook Week'.

I hope those who can struggle through its depths will be amply rewarded.

There is so much out there for us all...

Read an eBook week

From March 7th to 13th it is 'Read an eBook Week'

My ebooks on www.smashwords.com/profile/view/desgreene will be free!!!! for the week.

Enjoy!

New Philosophical Novel

"The Island" is my latest novel dealing with my interest in the linkage of philosophy and modern science - mainly quantum theory.

It is available on www.amazon.com and I'd welcome any reviews or comments whatever!

Cogito, ergo sum!

The modern equivalent might be "I blog, therefore I am virtual." Virtual reality has displaced objective reality for millions of lonely souls (souls in the greater non-religious sense).
The virtual presence will long outlive the physical objective presence. There is no virtual death - just a long stasis of presence that is unchanging but still there to those who happen upon it.
Perhaps we need a type of virtual death (or for those who want to ape reality even more closely, virtual suicide or even virtual murder).
The virtual world is still in its infancy and the thought of death seems so far off.

UFO

2 am left the Bulman bar and walked up the road from Summercove to Kinsale. It was a clear moonlit night and the air temperature was below zero but the air was completely still on this the first few hours of 2010.
After walking for some minutes I noticed something in the sky and looked up. What I saw was beyond belief. A bright orange globule shape was moving at a fast constant velocity across the sky. It was oval in shape and was about a third of the size of the moon. It made no noise but moved across the sky at a constant height and as it passed away in the distance after maybe three or four seconds it became a small star like white speck and then disappeared.
My wife who was with me saw it all too. As it almost disappeared I gestured to a passing couple to look and they too saw the speck.
I spent some time today checking the internet to see if there were any other reports of strange sightings but there were none.
I am one of the most skeptical of people and am not one to embrace the non-normal but this was weird in the extreme.
The UFO sites on the internet are mainly of dubious quality or just plain loony and not for a moment would I want to be associated with such stuff. Yet the experience forces me to report same in some form and to try and understand the source or origin of the object.
A possible explanation could be a meteorite entering the atmosphere at a very low angle of approach causing it to heat up and glow. The fact that it didn't descend to the horizon and turned white as it got smaller may mean that it passed through our atmosphere and escaped again to space - a near miss event??
I am still trying to seek explanations.

Timeline

There are similarities between a line as a sequence of points and movement of an object as a succession of positions. A line is a space transformation whereas a moving object is called a time transformation defining the concept of time. Yet we can view the three dimensional object as being just a point (taking a point of view sufficiently distant) and the movement appears as just a space transformation.

Time and space are equivalent when the correct view is taken. When we view objects at great distance we see them as moving in space when in effect they are moving in time. The views of distant galaxies are events of time yet we see them in ordinary space.

When we look at the quantum scale the opposite occurs - what are events in space appear as event in time. Energy the prime concept of all science is seen as a frequency - as something intricately linked to time.

The funny thing is that this fourth dimension that we call time is really a space dimension but one that is so small that it is not appreciable to us but manifests as time. What's more there may be an infinity of such rolled up infinitesimal dimensions each labeling a time. Time may be a property of matter that heretofore we thought was singular.

Life may be more complex than we ever imagined!!

Musing on Time

I sat in the weak winter sun today for over an hour. My eyes were closed but yet I sensed the countryside around me. I heard the sound of crows in nearby trees and the cries of the gulls over the creek. A bee had appeared out of season and was buzzing around the flower pot beside my chair. I started to muse on some of the ideas that I had been striving to write about in my latest novel. In particular I struggled over the concept of time. It became clear to me that time really only exists as the present - the continuous present of the living. The future does not and will not exist except as a construct of the past. The past has existed but it represents a part of spacetime that can only be reached by the complete reversal of the expansion of the entire universe. We cannot go to the past without carrying the whole of existence with us and in so doing we actually destroy our present. Time travel to the past is theoretically impossible. Time travel to the future has had many outings in the musing of those acquainted with Special and General Relativity. If I set off in a rocket at a speed close to the speed of light and return after some time then I expect to see the earth in a distant future to the time I set off. The flaw in this thinking is that I am not going into my own future but only that of what would be a very distant earth. For me time is always the same.
Out of all this I see that time is just the continuous present. The memory of the past has an impact and causal relation to the present but there is no memory of a future that doesn't and will never exist. The continuous present is orchestrated by the laws of science both dynamical, physical and biological. Our acquired understanding of these laws that we have gleaned from analysis of our memories, allows us as cognitive beings to shape our present by using these laws to change our otherwise determine path. The non-living parts of being are forever bound determinately by these same laws.
The goals of science and philosophy are to understand these laws to better shape our present.