What objective methods does theology have to test and winnow not only its arguments, but its basic assumptions? And, if you had to pick a method, do you think that religion or science can tell us more about the nature of reality? ==================================== At the very heart of quantum mechanics lies a monster waiting to consume unwary minds. This monster goes by the name The Nature of Reality™. The greatest of physicists have taken one look into its mouth, saw the size of its teeth, and were consumed. Niels Bohr denied the existence of the monster after he nonchalantly (and very quietly) exited the monsters lair muttering shut up and calculate. Einstein caught a glimpse of the teeth and fainted. He was reportedly rescued by Erwin Schrödinger at great personal risk, but neither really recovered from their encounter with the beast. The upshot is that we had a group of physicists and philosophers who didnt believe that quantum mechanics represents reality but that it was all we could see of some deeper, more fundamental theory. A subclass of these scientists believed that the randomness of quantum mechanics would eventually be explained by some non-random, deterministic property that we simply couldnt directly observe (otherwise known as a hidden variable). Another group ended up believing that quantum mechanics did represent reality, and that, yes, reality was non-local, and possibly not very real either. To one extent or another, these two groups are still around and still generate a fair amount of heat when they are in proximity to each other. Over the years, you would have to say that the scales have been slowly tipping in favor of the latter group. Experiments and theory have largely eliminated hidden variables. Bohms pilot wave, a type of hidden variable, has to be pretty extraordinary to be real. [...] This paper is one of a series that is starting to reveal that our world is actually a quantum mechanical world at its very heart. Some aspects of it are non-local, some aspects of it are not real, and some aspects of it allow you to perform counterfactual operations. These have been our observations in a variety of experiments. But it seems that the observations are a close reflection of how the Universe operates. ==================================== D.J.S. arstechnica/science/2014/07/quantum-state-may-be-a-real-thing/?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 22:29:58 +0000
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