What an odd thing to say, considering that you asserted physicists have been impaired by their ignorance of metaphysics, and your examples were a fail. — Relativist
That is a novel view of an "uncertainty principle" That's interesting that you think that time can't be measured precisely. You're wrong, but it's interesting that you believe it. — Relativist
Out of idle curiosity, what exactly is your objection to quantum physics?
— fishfry
If you're interested, just go back and read the posts I made in this thread. They aren't large, and there isn't a lot.
— Metaphysician Undercover
Fishfry - don't waste your time. — Relativist
Are you familiar with the frequency-time uncertainty exposed by the Fourier transform? Once you familiarized yourself with this uncertainty principle, you'll see that what it says exactly is that time cannot be measured precisely. — Metaphysician Undercover
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is in any event an epistemological and NOT an ontological fact. It's a limitation on what we can know (with our current theories) and says nothing about what truly is. — fishfry
Well this isn't so bad. I seem to recall that Heisenberg uncertainty comes ultimately from Fourier analysis or some such. The idea seems to be referenced here. — fishfry
:100:It isn't an epistemological limit.
In statistical modelling, there's a distinction between epistemic and aleatoric randomness. Epistemic randomness is like measurement error, aleatoric randomness is like perturbing a process by white noise. One property of epistemic randomness is that it must be arbitrarily reducible by sampling. Sample as much as you like, the uncertainty of that product is not going to go below the Gabor limit. That makes it aleatoric; IE, this uncertainty is a feature of signals that constrains possible measurements of them, rather than a feature of measurements of signals. There is no "sufficient knowledge" that could remove it (given that the principle is correct as a model). — fdrake
Do you have a source for this? I'd love to see the connection. — fdrake
When I say for example that 1+1=4, I mean it esoterically. When Hawking says time acts as a fifth direction of space, he is talking as a scientist. He says nothing was before this curve in spacetime, meaning I think that the free lunch is contingent. Quantum uncertainty may be the root of physics, the answer to Descartes's vortex of the universe. Any talk of the "necessary" is sitar music thinking, and if our brains control time we have access to the heart of contingency — Gregory
But if objects are trans-finitely infinite, how can they remain finite as well — Gregory
Odd that someone who denies that 2 + 2 and 4 represent the same thing, is willing to accept the Fourier transform. — fishfry
My understanding is that the zeroes might be distributed in many different ways. There might be one at every integer, say. Or what if there was a zero at each of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc. But now what if there were those zeros, and you threw in at 1/4, a nearby sequence that converges to it: 14+1n14+1n. So the main sequence 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, ... could have little tendrils coming off it. And each tendril could have tendrils. Each tendril would be countable, but there would be a graph of unimaginable complexity to keep track of. — fishfry
If you say that 1 + 1 = 4, what do you mean? Esoteric as in woo? — fishfry
What does Hawking have to do with this? I wonder if you mis-tagged me perhaps? None of this convo sounds familiar. Free lunch is contingent? What am I supposed to make of that? I apologize if I was at one point having the other side of this conversation and no longer remember. — fishfry
Descartes's vortex theory is a discredited and discarded theory of gravity that lost to Newton's. It has absolutely nothing to do with quantum uncertainty. — fishfry
Ok. I can't argue with you there! Is the heart of contingency near the root of physics? — fishfry
The point here would be that transfinite numbers are an abstraction but not an isolated one. They're an abstraction that arose naturally from the study of heat; just as the infinity of natural numbers is an abstraction that arises from everyday counting. — fishfry
The model I use to conceptualize time is cyclical. The two types of singularity in the Cosmos are interconnected, and movement from one to another creates what I call Cosmic Time. The universe in this model is a perpetual motion machine, self-causing, self-creating, self-contained. I admire the working analogy for time as a single line of dominoes, but this analogy doesn't fit in with the Cyclical Model. it doesn't apply. Its more like the inflating and deflating of a balloon. The fundamental physics of Cyclical Time at as of yet very basic, at least mine are. They will improve their explanation power with time. — Josh Alfred
I had this in a signals processing/wavelets class a while back. There's a standard proof here.
The Fourier transform of the momentum operator applied to a wavefunction is the position operator applied to that wavefunction. There's a theorem in signal processing called the Gabor limit that applies to dispersions (variance) of signals; the product of the dispersion of a signal in its time domain representation and the dispersion of a signal in its frequency domain representation is at least (1/4pi)^2. Math doesn't care that time is time and frequency is frequency, it might as well be position and momentum. The Gabor limit applied to (position operator applied to wavefunction) turns into the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for position + momentum of wavefunctions. — fdrake
It's illustrated in the link you provided, if you Fourier transform a Gaussian with variance xx, you get a Gaussian with variance 1/x1/x; the product of the two variances is strictly positive. If you scale the original distribution by k, the Fourier transformed distribution will be contracted by 1/k. Contractions in transform space are dilations in original space. When dilations in time result in contractions in frequency, it isn't so surprising that the product of "overall scale"/(variance) of time and frequency has a constant associated with it. — fdrake
It isn't an epistemological limit. — fdrake
In statistical modelling, there's a distinction between epistemic and aleatoric randomness. Epistemic randomness is like measurement error, aleatoric randomness is like perturbing a process by white noise. One property of epistemic randomness is that it must be arbitrarily reducible by sampling. Sample as much as you like, the uncertainty of that product is not going to go below the Gabor limit. That makes it aleatoric; IE, this uncertainty is a feature of signals that constrains possible measurements of them, rather than a feature of measurements of signals. There is no "sufficient knowledge" that could remove it (given that the principle is correct as a model). — fdrake
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is in any event an epistemological and NOT an ontological fact. It's a limitation on what we can know (with our current theories) and says nothing about what truly is.
— fishfry
That view assumes counterfactual definiteness; the belief that the possibility of stopping a moving arrow to construct a definite position implies that the moving arrow must have a real and precise but unknown position when it isn't stopped or it's position otherwise measured. — sime
Yet this unquestioned assumption of counterfactual definiteness is the reason why Zeno's paradox appears paradoxical. To my understanding, Zeno's arguments are perfectly sound, which means that i have no choice but to reject counterfactual definiteness in order to resolve the paradox, and is the reason why i believe that Zeno ought to have stumbled across the underlying logic of Heisenberg's principle (when it is interpreted ontologically). — sime
Of course, the rejection of counterfactual definiteness is only one means of making sense of quantum entanglement and which is also the view of the Copenhagen interpretation, which means that Heisenberg uncertainty is interpreted as ontological ambiguity/incompatibility, rather than as epistemic uncertainty. — sime
Well I had a thread a few days ago that got closed because I claimed math maps out the impossible and that the opposite flip side is true of every mathematical statement. — Gregory
So perhaps the negative numbers are positive and vice versa, e.g. I was trying to start a conversation but people got upset. I don't deny math's usefulness and it's beauty, but math might not be the last statement about math itself. — Gregory
Well I tagged you because other people weren't responding to posts I was making here. — Gregory
I started out ny explaining what I meant about the math thing so you don't think I'm a nut. — Gregory
The OP here, however, was talking about Aquinas, who said that the world was contingent and needed a necessary God. Physicist are now saying nothingness was before the big bang, making the world contingent without the need for "the necessary". — Gregory
Sean Carroll explicitly says this. He says the world is a brute fact of quantum fluctuation, using Russell's old phrase btw — Gregory
I think any mechanical theory can be resurrected in the search for a "theory of everything". I said quantum physics is answer to Descartes, but perhaps Descartes is the answer to QM. Newton replaced Cartesianism with a lot of forces. God was the ultimate one that Descartes had wanted one force to control everything and thought God could be found only in the mind. Perhaps that "one force" is pure leverage, as he thought. It's a thought that needs to be worked out for sure, but the Stanford Encyclopedia says there is growing interest into Cartesian physics again — Gregory
Probably. There are studies that literally argue our brains control time. There are lots of Youtube videos that run with this and say we are in almost complete control of our "free lunch", given us by the universe. There might be some truth in these videos that the universe gives itself to us freely. And then there are Napoleon Hill types (the forerunner of The Secret), that say our thoughts are in complete control of everything. These ideas may have a kernel of truth still — Gregory
Well I think my point was that objects are finite on one side, but flip the coin and it's infinite was well. — Gregory
There no end to the descent into an object. Imagine taking a spaceship (one that forever shrinks) into a banana. Only infinity is in there. This seems to be a contradiction of logic. I have had enough trouble trying to explain the problem to people, let alone getting a satisfactory explanation. Think about it: objects are finite and infinite in the same respect — Gregory
Thanks for your response man — Gregory
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