Last time I checked the most accurate physical theory in human history was Quantum Electro-Dynamics. The value of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron has been measured and compared to the QED theory to one part in 10^12. That's pretty impressive. Everything else is coffee house argument, until somebody comes up with a new experiment. Rowan (the ex-theorist and ex-experimentalist). On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
I'm a complete ignoramus when it comes to quantum mechanics.
But I wonder whether many of its impossibility pronouncements are more about what we can possibly measure, rather than what can be actually there.
(Is this generally agreed upon among professional quantum mechanics, or are interpretations like whether QM is a limitation on human knowledge or on what actually may exist still matters of debate today?)
I guess positivists -- as Tom Knight says -- would say that anything we can't detect is meaningless to talk about.
But I don't hold with that attitude. (E.g., maybe there are other universes that always were and always will be separate from ours in every respect. A positivist might say it's meaningless to speculate about whether intelligent life might exist there. But the positivist humanoids in those other universes are thinking the very same thing about us.)
--Dan
On 2013-02-09, at 4:27 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/9/2013 8:23 AM, Tom Knight wrote:
There can't be a continuum down there, simply because we can't have enough information to specify it.
That's a very positivist attitude. . . . . . .
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