Tensorman

A measurement of a quantum mechanical system is an example of the interaction of that system with its environment. We now know that interactions with the environment lead very quickly to decoherence of the QM system. This is also an explanation of the classical behavior of macroscopic systems and also why there cannot exist a superposition of an alive and a dead cat in Schrödinger's thought experiment (it isn't the observer/a consciousness that destroys the superposition of the quantum system, but the environment in that box, such as the apparatus that triggers the breaking of the glass). A measurement apparatus is just one particular example of a macroscopic environment that decoheres the QM system, decoherence can also occur due to gas molecules in the atmosphere or even due to the cosmic background radiation. That was in fact the pragmatic solution of Bohr at the time, as he didn't know the mechanism of decoherence, so he made a divide between the quantum system and the classical measurement apparatus, which allowed people to use all the machinery of quantum mechanics, while ignoring what exactly happened in the "black box" between the quantum system and the classical measurement apparatus. For most applications that wasn't a problem, you could do all the calculations. But it was of course theoretically unsatisfying, which prompted Schrödinger to come up with his cat example, which lead people to think that it was somehow a consciousness that caused the collapse of the wavefunction. Now we know that this is not true, that it is the mechanisme of decoherence that is responsible for the transition between the quantum system and the classical, macroscopic world (like the measurement apparatus).

Peikoff writes: I find this unbelievable, this is a pure argument from authority. No word about the question whether the (at the time internal) criticisms by a highly qualified member of the Board of Directors of ARI might perhaps be valid (these imply that Harriman has rewritten history, a practice not uncommon within ARI), no, the fact that a criticism of the book implies criticism of Peikoff because he's recommended and praised the book is enough to kick McCaskey out. The only conclusion that we can draw is that ARI is morally corrupt.

Aleph_0 is in this respect of course also a giveaway...

I don't see why there could not be an infinite number of physical objects. The argument that this is an arbitrary assertion doesn't hold, as its negation "every set of physical objects is finite" is equally arbitrary. It cannot be proved and the question whether there exists infinite or only finite numbers of objects will probably always remain unprovable, as there exist numbers that are so large that we in practice will never be able to determine the difference between such a number and infinity. So this remains an undecidable question, there could be an infinite number of physical objects, but we'll never be able to prove it, nor its negation.

Such a system of course has an antecedent cause for its existence, it wasn't eternally there, neither did it jump miraculously into existence. So at any stage you'll find antecedent causes, whether those are of local or of environmental origin (ignoring here quantummechanical randomness, as that is not relevant to macroscopic systems). Self-organization is an interesting subject, but there is nothing miraculous about it, its development is deterministic at any stage.

So you admit that your "self-causation" implies having antecedent causes.

No, the fact that the influences are not external does not mean that there are no antecedent causes, antecedent is not synonymous with external, it only means that the state of the system at a certain moment is determined by the state of that system at a previous moment.

Ha ha ha! Apparently that bartender judged her correctly, after three drinks she could no longer walk steadily...

The processes of self-organization do have antecedent causes. Those processes can be considered as properties of those systems, that are fully determined by the properties of their constituents. They may be more complex than simple properties like falling down of a massive object in a gravitational field, but they are just as determined. You shouldn't be misled by the word self-organization (that would be like thinking that imaginary numbers are more imaginary in the common sense than other numbers), it is not some new mystical property of the system, it only means that there is no external organizing principle at work, but that the structure develops due to local interactions, between the constituents of that system. A simple example is the forming of snow crystals out of water droplets, a self-organization with a local decrease of entropy, but fully determined by antecedent causes.

That doesn't follow. That we can understand such a process best by looking at the grand picture, seeing the logic of a final cause, is in no way contradictory to the fact that every stage is determined by the previous stage. A computer program can have a final cause, for example a chess program works with the final cause of winning or not losing a chess match, or another program works to solve a certain problem. Yet every step in that program follows deterministically from the previous steps and the input it gets. The evolution of living beings is another example. Living systems that do not sustain themselves well are weeded out, the winners remain automatically. It may seem that for example the eye evolves because it enables the organism to see its environment with all the advantages that gives for surviving, and in fact there is nothing wrong in describing that process in teleological language, as long as we realize that it is a metaphor for a blind mechanistic process that only occurs because it results from the fact that zillions of other processes that are less efficient, not efficient at all or self-destructory, do not preserve that organism and are therefore automatically aborted. Evolution cannot look ahead, it takes only one step at a time, blindly. Most of those steps will either be indifferent or disadvantageous for the survival of that organism as a species, but once in a while some step will mean a slight improvement for the odds of survival, so that it will replace the original organism (in terms of species) and so on. When we look at the grand picture, we can see the logic and the structure in that development and understand it in terms of a final cause. But every step in that process does have an antecedent cause, and that is no contradiction. These are just two different ways of looking at the same thing, one looking at the "microstructure" and one at the "macrostructure" of the process, but they are fully compatible. Finding a final cause does not eliminate the antecedent causes.

Indeed, energy can change into matter. If you let two protons collide with enough kinetic energy, this energy is converted into new particles that didn't exist before. In other words, a "property" (kinetic energy) becomes a "thing" (matter).

Q.E.D. is correct, he gives the formulas in units that are used in theoretical physics, in which c = 1.

What I find so fascinating is that the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was very different from the analytical and rational Holmes and the down-to-earth, common-sense doctor Watson (although I think that Watson was modelled after Doyle himself, who also was a physician), he was an enthusiastic believer in spiritism and other "paranormal phenomena" and even thought that the very obviously fake photos of the Cottingly fairies were real. Nothing could be more removed from the rational world of Holmes and Watson. On the other hand, there is his series of SF books with Professor Challenger. The first books, like "The Lost World" are still a nice read, but "The Land of Mist" is an embarrassing read, with its defense of spiritism, the once so fierce Challenger swallows it hook, line and sinker. But nothing of that can be found in the Holmes stories. (IIRC there is a reference in one of the stories to some spiritual explanation, which is rejected however).

This experiment means nothing. Apparently the suggestion is that the balls emulate thermal particles in a gas, but nothing could be further from the truth. The movement is far from random, in fact it is a primitive model for the functioning of a water wheel: you pump up water that falls then down due to gravity and you extract some of the energy you put continuously into the system. Had the experimenters never heard of a self-winding watch, a centuries-old invention? Hitting the soft side of a vane some of the energy of the beads is absorbed, that would mean that the temperature of that soft side increases. In a real gas that would mean that the particles there would be moving faster, but the whole analogy with thermal particles is false and Feynman's conclusion isn't in any way falsified.

I don't use the chat function, but the forum was unreachable for some time (some database error), it's now just back when I write this.

There are always companies and even government agencies that are bamboozled by such quacks. Such contracts aren't worth the paper they're printed on. The real question is: do those companies produce energy by those miracle methods? I wouldn't hold my breath.

Indeed. This is obviously a crackpot theory, I've seen similar claims made by misunderstood Galileos for many years and curiously enough you never hear that they result in practical machines and applications (surprise, surprise). No doubt they'll tell you that that is the result of a conspiracy of all those evil scientists who thwart the poor genius. Often they have a fake "demo" model, just like those of the "inventors" of perpetuum mobiles.

In the first post the following basic concepts are mentioned: mass, force, energy, charge and field. These are all introduced to explain regularities in the movement of objects that we observe. We observe for example an accelerating object, therefore we introduce the concept of a force (similarly for inertial mass). So the movement (acceleration) is in fact the basis of the concept of force, even if we may later reverse the hierarchy for convenience and say: "this force causes the acceleration of that object with a certain mass, etc." But we don't observe forces or masses or charges, we observe movements, things that change, in other words, events, so these form the primary basis of all later theorizing.

Not at all, no one claims that the impulse transfer is disembodied, but it is the essential factor that determines the movement second ball. You may replace the first ball by countless other objects and still get the same result for the second ball, as long as those objects can generate an impulse that is large enough. So the event of movement, collision and ensuing impulse transfer is the determining factor, not the identity of the first object, therefore it's much more sensible to call that event the cause of the movement of the second ball. Moreover, if that object lies still, nothing will happen, it doesn't cause anything in itself.

I know this is the Objectivist position, but in my opinion this is an impractical viewpoint. The cause of the movement of the second billiard-ball is not really the first ball, but the fact that the first ball is moving and strikes the second ball. It's much more useful to consider that event as the cause of moving the second ball. After all the first ball may lay still till doomsday and nothing will happen to the second ball. When we consider events we can see also the causal chain: why did the first ball move? Because I hit it with a cue, which was caused by the movement of my arms etc. All those objects may be instrumental in what happens, but it is the highly specific events that create a chain of causes and effects. I could also have used a hammer to make the billiard ball moving by giving it a certain impulse, but what is really useful is to know what happens in those events, that is also the way to understand them, to calculate the effects, to predict how the ball will move. Merely stating that the first ball or the hammer is the "cause" is not very informative. It is the impulse transfer from these objects (or from any other object that might be used) to the second ball that determines its motion.

Be careful: a force doesn't cause movement, but a change in movement, or an acceleration. It is true that any explanation is in fact a description of what happens. In physics we look for the regularities in those descriptions, which we call physical laws. Those enable us to make calculations and to predict what will happen in certain circumstances, so that we don't have to find a new explanation for every new phenomenon that we see, but we can catalog them according to the existing system that we already derived. But the basis of those laws is always experimental evidence, a systematic description of what we see happen in specific circumstances, of which we assume that this is universally valid (until proven otherwise). For example that objects on Earth always fall with a constant acceleration (at least in vacuum or when we can ignore the air resistance), which we describe by introducing the notion of a force (something that causes accelerations) that we call "gravity", which is approximately constant on Earth. Later we learn more about that gravity, its relation to the mass and the mutual distance of objects, etc. We also see that there are other kinds of forces, like the electrostatic force, that also can cause accelerations, etc.

I think I've made clear that infinite distances are not relevant for the question whether the universe is infinite, but mathematically this isn't difficult: if there are two points P1 and P2 with distance D, then we can say that D is infinitely small if any sphere with center P1 always contains P2, and that D is infinitely large if there is no sphere with center P1 that contains P2. In those cases D is not a real number.

Here is the misunderstanding: I didn't say that there could exist an infinite distance between two physical objects, I said that it was possible that there is no largest distance, i.e. that for any two objects O1 and O2 with distance D1 I always can find an object O3 with distance D2 to O1, with D2 > D1. That also implies that there is then no upper bound on the total number of objects. In other words, the universe could be infinitely large with infinitely many objects, while the distance between any two objects is always finite. "Infinite" is not some point far away, it means that there is no farthest point.

No. But that doesn't mean that there cannot be infinitely many physical objects. Take for example the set of integers, and define the distance between two integers as the absolute difference between those integers. For any two integers that distance is always finite. Nevertheless there are infinitely many integers.

There is no a priori reason that the universe cannot be infinite. Suppose the universe is finite. That would imply that there is an object with the greatest distance to the earth. There would be no object that is farther removed than that object. Why should that be the case? There isn't any logical contradiction in the hypothesis that there will be always objects farther removed than any finite distance we can think of.