Christoph Schiller wrote:
>
> What I meant with the word "is" in the title was:
>
> "Is the most precise description of " the uniwerse a set?
>
> I am not talking about ontology or epistemology, just about
> experiments and comparison with theory.
>
> Of course, both quantum theory and relativity *assume*
> sets to start with; the whole point is that despite this,
> when one takes them *together* (and in fact, it turns
> out, only then) one can deduce that these sets make no sense.
>
> I do not know how to think without sets, but I sure want to
> know whether and how far this is possible. That is the real fun here.
>
> It is said than one fallacy in the argument is that it is assumed
> that all sets used in the physical description of nature are derived
> from space-time and particle sets. I do not know of any others;
> I'd thought that all are built up from these. I am *very*
> curious if there are any other, independent sets. That is indeed
> extremely important for the argument, and would kill it.
My understanding of QM is that it is based on a set (the Hilbert space
of "wavefunctions") that is neither a space-time set nor a particle
set. It has infinite dimensionality while space-time sets are finite,
and is continuous while particle sets are discrete.
Let me know if I'm missing something here, but I would have thought
that this does kill your argument.
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Received on Mon Oct 16 2000 - 15:55:52 PDT