the metaphysics of physics — apokrisis

The best sort then :)

I've been reading up on QM and fields and have found an article from which I have drawn some conclusions. Do you agree?

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-a-static-electric-field-conservative

"Any field that has no means of dissipating energy is conservative. This is stemming from the law of conservation of energy. To be non-conservative, there must be a mechanism to convert energy to another form, since even non-conservative fields must conserve energy as a whole, with dissipated energy included. Thus a non-static field can radiate away energy or dissipate is as heat in eddy current in conductors, while a static filed has no dissipation mechanism. The most common way of energy dissipation is a conversion to heat, usually by friction, eddy currents and magnetic cycle hysteresis." (me: we know particles are field eddies, we know there is heat in the universe)
"Being conservative relates to path independence or lack thereof. If you move a charge from point A to point B within an electric field, the energy gained or lost must be the same regardless of the specific path taken through space between these two points. If it's path independent, then the field is conservative." (me: velocity of an object)

 The universe is a non-conservative field – meaning there is a mechanism to convert energy from one form to another form.
 Particles created in non-conservative fields display conservative field properties, except in the case of acceleration. They are path independent at a constant velocity through space (the same amount of energy is used to get from A to B regardless of the path taken) with no way to dissipate their energy.
 When a particle is accelerated, it behaves like a non-conservative field and begins to convert energy so it now interacts with space and time fields.
 Acceleration of a particle occurs when it is affected by another field (eg gravity)
 Rather than dissipating energy though, the particle gains energy as it accelerates.
 The universe is nothing but fields and so a particle must constantly be in a state of flux between being a conservative and non-conservative field.
 We would expect to see many high velocity objects (approaching C) in our universe relative to each other because of a net gain of velocity through acceleration: assuming that for at least half of all particles the net sum of acceleration is positive.
 Particles at constant velocity behave like static fields, and seem to violate the observation that all fields move at the speed of light.
 The idea that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light could really be reworded as, everything is travelling at the speed of light except particles, which will never reach it.

Based on the observation above that Particles at constant velocity behave like static fields, and seem to violate the observation that all fields move at the speed of light, and in fact seem prohibited from doing so, we can conclude: Particles can therefore be thought of as secondary fields trapped within primary fields.

An electron has its own electron field but is part of the electromagnetic field. [Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg]

I have tried to devise a thought experiment to try to understand why a particle can’t go faster than the speed of light, or faster than the field it is in (which is moving at the speed of light) and the experiment is suggesting it can, so I need some help.

Imagine a conveyor belt. When I turn on my machine the belt will be pulled in a circular fashion. This is our field. For convenience, now let’s make that rubber conveyor a piece of rope. At part of the rope I loop it around a pencil I am holding. I turn the machine back on and the rope runs over the pencil, creating a standing loop- a particle.

Now it is also true that I can run my pencil up and down along the string, moving the position of the loop. If I go backward along the rope the field takes on a faster value (which for a field would mean the particle is travelling faster than the speed of field, C)

However, if I move at the speed of the rotating string, the string will not flow over my loop. Both loop and string will be stationary with respect to each other. This would be the equivalent of going at the speed of light. If I do go faster than the speed of the string, the field/string does not break, but rather begins to flow backward relative to the loop.

The loop would experience a flow counter to the actual direction of the field that is creating it. But so what? I’m confused at this point. The loop should still hold its integrity but the rules suggest.
1. The loop can be a standing loop with no motion
2. The loop can move in the direction of the field but not at a speed greater than the overall speed of the field.
This is a very small range. Can we justify these rules with this analogy?
Is the argument that there is nothing to move the loop that fast or counter to the flow? If so, my counter would be, what is there to cause the loop to move at all? If we cannot travel faster than the speed of light, we should not be able to travel at all (V should = 0) :=0

Any takers?

A baseball breaks a window because the ball has enough kinetic energy to push/bend the glass far enough to separate its silicon-dioxide molecules enough to break the bond between them.

(Strictly speaking, window glass, usually soda-glass, has other mineral compounds mixed with the predominant silicon-dioxide, to achieve the glass state at a lower temperature, lower melting-point, and better workability).

Michael Ossipoff

Call it b what you wish, it is all arbitrary with no hard boundary. It is for this reason that any symbolic approach will utterly fail and the search for truth and facts will equally fail. All is in continuous flux and cannot be frozen. You can try but then the infinities and infinitesimals will start popping up all over. — Rich

I like this, Rich. You are a poet or a mystic of the continuous whole. Do you like Parmenides?

How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown. (B 8.20–22)

Nor was [it] once, nor will [it] be, since [it] is, now, all together, / One, continuous; for what coming-to-be of it will you seek? / In what way, whence, did [it] grow? Neither from what-is-not shall I allow / You to say or think; for it is not to be said or thought / That [it] is not. And what need could have impelled it to grow / Later or sooner, if it began from nothing? Thus [it] must either be completely or not at all. (B 8.5–11)

[What exists] is now, all at once, one and continuous... Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is. (B 8.5–6, 8.22–24)

And it is all one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again. (B 5) — P

I'm not saying that I agree with you, but I appreciate the charm of the vision as I understand it.

And it is all one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again. (B 5) — P

This is a most crucial idea. The wholeness of nature and being. However, it I've comes to it by simply reading it, one can never wholely embrace or fully believe it. I've must come to it by actual experience of wholeness, by full observation and practical applications. Via this method one thoroughly understands and proceeds. I am a very practical person who discards that which doesn't present more and embraces that which leads to greater understanding.

Thanks for sharing the passages with me. I believe at one time I had read Parmenides when I was much younger, one of several philosophers who have probably affected the course of my life.

I'm starting to see where you're coming from. I don't know much about Schelling, but I think he thought that everyone was one in the "absolute." Existence or Being is thinkable as a unity is always "distorted" when it is analyzed or broken up. Every "analysis" is a "lie," one might say, even if such analyses are necessary for practical reasons or justified in terms of theoretical pleasure.

I'm also interested in continuity and its relationship with the discreteness (math, for instance). In case you haven't seen this:

… the conceptual world of mathematics is so foreign to what the intuitive continuum presents to us that the demand for coincidence between the two must be dismissed as absurd. (Weyl 1987, 108)

… the continuity given to us immediately by intuition (in the flow of time and of motion) has yet to be grasped mathematically as a totality of discrete “stages” in accordance with that part of its content which can be conceptualized in an exact way. (Ibid., 24)[14]

The view of a flow consisting of points and, therefore, also dissolving into points turns out to be mistaken: precisely what eludes us is the nature of the continuity, the flowing from point to point; in other words, the secret of how the continually enduring present can continually slip away into the receding past. Each one of us, at every moment, directly experiences the true character of this temporal continuity. But, because of the genuine primitiveness of phenomenal time, we cannot put our experiences into words. So we shall content ourselves with the following description. What I am conscious of is for me both a being-now and, in its essence, something which, with its temporal position, slips away. In this way there arises the persisting factual extent, something ever new which endures and changes in consciousness. (Ibid., 91–92)

By 1919 Weyl had come to embrace Brouwer’s views on the intuitive continuum. Given the idealism that always animated Weyl’s thought, this is not surprising, since Brouwer assigned the thinking subject a central position in the creation of the mathematical world[18].

In his early thinking Brouwer had held that that the continuum is presented to intuition as a whole, and that it is impossible to construct all its points as individuals. But later he radically transformed the concept of “point”, endowing points with sufficient fluidity to enable them to serve as generators of a “true” continuum. This fluidity was achieved by admitting as “points”, not only fully defined discrete numbers such as 1/9, e
e
, and the like—which have, so to speak, already achieved “being”—but also “numbers” which are in a perpetual state of “becoming” in that the entries in their decimal (or dyadic) expansions are the result of free acts of choice by a subject operating throughout an indefinitely extended time. The resulting choice sequences cannot be conceived as finished, completed objects: at any moment only an initial segment is known. Thus Brouwer obtained the mathematical continuum in a manner compatible with his belief in the primordial intuition of time—that is, as an unfinished, in fact unfinishable entity in a perpetual state of growth, a “medium of free development”. In Brouwer’s vision, the mathematical continuum is indeed “constructed”, not, however, by initially shattering, as did Cantor and Dedekind, an intuitive continuum into isolated points, but rather by assembling it from a complex of continually changing overlapping parts. — Weyl

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weyl/#DasKon


On the hand, we need math as a tool, so I think it's justified to use the math that ended up winning that famous metaphysical war. Still, this might make for a nice version of calculus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_infinitesimal_analysis

Yes, this is pretty much it in a nutshell. Those who think in terms of discontinuities are constantly dealing with infinities and paradoxes, which should be a big red flag that something is fundamentally wrong, but they just ignore it.

As you suggested, mathematics is practical but can also be highly detrimental if carried into a ontological context. In such a case, life and nature are totally misunderstood with unhealthy results in the spiritual, mental, and physical realms or bandwidth.

Well I suppose we have more in common than I supposed, even if we have different ways of expressing it. I also strive toward a holistic metaphysics that does justice to our lived experience of "flow."

I have the same approach. For various reasons we express it differently, but however it is expressed, skilled observation of life has substantial benefits in many aspects of living.

I'm with you on the skilled observation of life. I like a descriptive approach. Yes, arguments have their place. But often it's just a matter of paying attention, noticing something, and pointing it out. In both Taoism and in early Heidegger, for instance, there is the idea of the ready-to-hand. We often meet the things in the world in a non-theoretical sense. We know how the use them. When we use the hammer (a famous example), it "disappears" in our hand as we focus on what we want to do with it. The "how" of its being has little or nothing to do with the usual theory of objects. Similarly, not-doing is the ideal kind of doing. We have mastery when we no longer have to try.

I agree.