danny mayes wrote:
>
>Fair enough. But if we accept those parameters does it make any sense to
>even talk about "reality."? Maybe in a philosophical sense, but certainly
>not in a scientific sense as by (your) definition objective reality, the
>only reality you say, is forever separated from what it is possible for us
>to experience, or to know. Therefore, in contemplating objective reality,
>we might as well be contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of
>a pin.
>
>In a way you are certainly right, but in another way I'm not sure it makes
>sense to talk about objective reality either. For instance, under the
>theory of relativity different observers can observe the same events
>happening in alternative sequences, and happening at different times. Yet
>neither observer is wrong. So, for example in that event you can not speak
>of an objective sequence of events or time.
But there's still an objective answer to all frame-independent physical
questions like what two clocks will read at the moment they meet at a single
point in space. The fact that the sequence of distant events (ie events with
a spacelike separation) has no frame-independent answer is not fundamentally
any more problematic than the fact that in Newtonian physics there is no
frame-independent answer to the question of which of two objects has a
greater speed, or the fact that there is no answer to the question "which of
two objects has a greater x-coordinate" that does not depend on where you
put the origin and axes of your spatial coordinate system (after all,
questions about sequences are really just questions about which of two
events has the greater t-coordinate). All of these are just issues of having
multiple equally good coordinate systems to describe the same objective
spacetime.
>And of course we are all aware of the role the observer plays in the
>development of quantum events.
Depends on your interpretation though. Most interpretations of QM give an
objective picture of the universe that includes the observer--that goes for
Bohmian mechanics (
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ ), the
transactional interpretation (
http://mist.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_toc.html ), and the
many-worlds interpretation (
http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm ).
Jesse
Received on Sun Aug 07 2005 - 17:13:13 PDT