Good Intentions said:
Planck found that light moves in packets, which he called quanta. Which, in turn, could only accurately be described statistically. If that sounds like a contradiction to you, you are in agreement with about every physicist ever, until they just accepted that reality is not completely knowable. And they didn't accept it without a fight.
How could you even take a step towards understanding the above statements (especially Bohr's) without knowing the work? I'm not claiming that I can discuss these matters very fluently, and I'm willing to bet that I've spent a few more hours studying electron movements than you. It's work like this which only seems simple until you actually work with it.
I see. : The "not completely knowable" is presumably the Copenhagen interpretation of physics. -It used to be thought that scientific theories referred to reality, now we understand that they refer to what we can say about reality.- which is an unusually humble view for a scientist to take.
I don't agree that physicists' statements in English can't be understood and discussed by a layman. Sure I can't understand the maths of the papers they write, and at some stages I'm going to be lost as to even the argument, within the papers. But when they report what they're thinking about for the benefit of a layperson, and the conclusions they're coming to, they're doing it precisely in order to make their non-understandable papers understandable. And I've been reading a certain amount about it by competent physicists, and I certainly have the impression that I understand what they're saying, even though I can't always understand why. But I'm willing to assume they're not lying, and take the points I don't get all the reasoning for as approximate interpretations of the equations they use to model their results in English.
It's interesting that the materialists have invoked Copenhagenism in order to counter the "paranormalist" implications of the proof of the experimental validity of Bell's theorem.
E.g Steven Shore's "Quantum theory and the Paranormal: The misuse of Science"
Which basically uses the Copenhagen view to say that the non-local connection as described in mathematics and demonstrated in experiments, is a statement about what we can say, rather than a statement about reality.
But the Copenhagen view, if you take it seriously, applies this kind of agnosticism to all models in science, not just to the ones that materialists don't like. The fundamentalists are talking in absolutes most of the time, but resort to modern scientific epistemology when a new model affronts their prejudices. It's like "The models we want to believe - are basic physical laws and therefore absolutes - but the models we don't want to believe in, -are only models." It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why invoke science to prove that things like backwards in time "causation" /telepathy, /intelligent mutation/precognition are -scientifically impossible- on the basis of one set of models, and then discount a newer set of models, on the grounds that they're only models?
My own view of the Copenhagen interpretation is that it was simply created in order to keep the scientific consensus together when encountering utterly bizarre and awe-inspiring results. I think it's profoundly unsatisfactory for science to retreat to saying that it can only comment on what we can say. If it's true then what grounds are there for using scientific theories to back up certain points of view about reality? Maybe the Copenhagen interpretation played a similar role in its time to Descartes' model of mind and matter. (everything works mechanically, except the soul, which is relegated to a pinpoint in the brain) He instructed his follower Geulincx to say - if anyone asked how they interacted- to say they were set up by God to work in preordained harmony. Which is obviously bollocks, and he knew it, but he had to say that to get materialist science off the ground, without explicitly saying anything that would offend the old inquisition. Spinoza, whose metaphysics made far more sense, was considered a heretic and only escaped with his life because he lived in Holland. But Science grew out of Descartes' metaphysics, and has to some extent remained hypnotised by his mechanistic model of physical science, which left consciousness out of the realm of science, in order to keep the church happy. And curiously, it's now the new inquisition that wants to keep it that way..insisting that the metaphysics that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter is the only possible scientific view.
