Folks,
Pedro's question
>The "physical" existentiality of physical laws
>themselves looks intriguing ---where do they "seat"?
is neither naive nor trivial, though sounds quite disturbing to many. My
story is this.
Most people seems to accept the Greek tradition of Euclidean geometry to
some extent. It's crux is in the 5th postulate on parallel lines asking the
deed of extending two lines indefinitely. The implication is a
synchronization between the act of indefinite extension and the presence of
straight lines of an infinite extension. What is focused upon is the
acceptance of an infinite space guaranteeing the total
synchronization between the action and the events acted upon. Newtonian
mechanics has followed the same spirit and has literally accepted absolute
space. Likewise, even if one shifts the focus onto the invariance of light
velocity and the equivalence between inertial mass and gravitational mass as
parting with the parallel postulate, the synchronization between the action
and the events acted upon remains unaltered and guaranteed all through the
relativized spaces.
Quantum mechanics is different. QM on the spot where the action is going
on does not require the space, either absolute or relativized. Instead, it
focuses on the acted product that has succeeded in synchronizing with the
action. That is a quantum. If one resides inside a quantum, nonlocality in
the form of synchronization or correlation looks to prevail throughout
there. If one steps outside, on the other side, the inside may look weird
and entangled.
One decisive difficulty with the quantum world is with its limited
linguistic accessibility. If one dares to say something definite about the Q
world in third person description in the present tense, this would come to
imply something definite, whenever and wherever. This form of linguistic
practice would inadvertently have to accept a space of an infinite
extension, whether flat or curved. Eventually, the practice asking for a
descriptive invariant would reluctantly have to surrender itself to denial
of the Q world. Of course, the situation is not so pessimistic as it may
look. Unicellular organisms constituting more than 90% of the biomass on the
Earth may not be familiar with what Euclid, Newton and Einstein
accomplished, but are superb dwellers in the Q world that have kept a long
record of surviving the hardships.
Cheers,
Koichiro
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Received on Mon Jun 5 01:51:48 2006
