h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Dalai Lama has spent many years meeting and talking to top boffins, many of whom are his personal friends, especially in the world of quantum mechanics and relativity. I'm about halfway through his Holiness's book, the Universe in an Atom, and it's becoming more and more intriguing. The quantum world and the world of the Dalai Lama are strangely similar. It seems we may not even be here. Even the Big Bang is in doubt. The universe may not even exist. Is this possible? Could we just be imagining everything?

Shouldn't this be asked in the PEx - Philosophy Explained forum?

I think therefore I am?

Rather, I post therefore I am?

For every freaky new scientific discovery in neurobiology or quantum physics it seems like the Buddhists knew it already... Odd that.

Ste

one person says 'well, I don't really know'
Another person working from another angle says 'this is really complicated and as yet we don't really know'

Equating the two because they both state they don't know seems to be a little odd to me.

And yes, due to our subjective view of the world it is entirely possible that we are all little blue angel fish swimming through the silicon mind of some great entity. But it's not a very effective philosophy for organising ones day to day life.

Anton Zeilinger is a reputable experimental physicist, and he is "interested" in comparing these two "theories of knowledge" because as he sees it, they "both reject any notion of objective reality".
Both, "theories of knowledge" it seems to the Dalai Lama, are searching for the final basic building block, if there is such a thing.
It's just like the Greeks, the atomists, only a few steps further along the way.

leaving aside QM not being objective, how can a discipline which asserts it is searching for the final basic building block reject the notion of objective universe? If the universe isn't objective then there is no basic building block.
?

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics"
Richard Feynman

that's a very good point, which neatly scuppers the idea of anyone equating it with anything, but it doesn't really address my point above. As far as I am aware QM is objective.

Traveller in Time spinning half
"It is all in the mind. For the mind none of this is real, we only have to convince the fysical world we are. "

In QM they say that the presence of scientists and their equipment affects the results. If this is true how can anything in QM be objective?

the theories can be. The particles can be. The forces can be. The effect the observers have on the particles can be.

At the QM level we *are* the particles, the effects, the forces and the theories and we are *in* the QM experiment. We are, so to speak, some of the ingredients in the test tube, are we not?

Not quite. Quantum effects stop being noticeable above a certain size, say around 1 micron (in general).

Oh and Lucky... *Please* don't use the phrase 'top boffins' It makes me want to vomit all over the tabloids who think 'scientist' is too hard a word for their readers to understand. Honestly.. top boffins

Quantum Mechanics: All Spin and No Delivery?

Sometimes the words we use to describe scientific theories trigger associations to, or act as filters for, ideas we've come into contact with from other disciplines. Which could include philosophy and theology.

However, the language of science is, generally speaking, maths. When we put this into words to describe theories, its a rather poor and distorted reflection. And maybe, if you don't know the weird symbol language of maths well enough, it looks like magic or divinity.

But that's not what it is.

In the same way that, when Astrologers and faith healers talk about energy, its got nothing to do with science. In the same way that newer theories/hypotheses postulate something that has been described as 'vibrating strings', yet we don't suggest that the universe's fundamental nature is music and God is the Ultimate Fiddler.

Quantum mechanics assigns particles a property called 'spin'. Indisputable evidence for the cosmic universality of New Labour's media relations techniques. Learn divine wisdom from the hallowed Forty-Five Minute Doctrine: could it be we are only as real as Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?

I don´t know much about this, but I would be interested in reading The Dancers of Tao or what it is called. However I get the feelign the reason why these things seem familiar is more about the way our language doesn´t have the words necessary to describe it. So you end up using words which are imprecise, and which happen to be used in certain religious contexts as well. I remember someone saying that perhaps since during the Dreamtime everything was supposed to have been sung out of the ground, and song being vibrations perhaps this really described super strings being created during the Big Bang. Not sure how serious they were.

This conversation is getting very interesting. And I promise not to use the boffin word again - my only excuse is that my brother-in-law is a QM scientist. Well, he's more a salesman really. He'll flog you the equipment so you can smash up your quarks and things. When I asked him what he thought about QM his one word reply was
"skeptical". So where does that leave us sitting daily on the 41 tram, when a man who has spent 40 years of his life in the industry at all levels says he's "skeptical". Mind you, he also plays golf. Is that a clue?

Skeptical of what exactly? If he´s skeptical about quantum mechanics he could use all that stuff he has to make a few experiments. That should show him the quantum effects are really happening. But what the exact implications of that are might be more difficult to know.