scott wrote:How about light moving as a wave... and a particle? It's a wave when you don't look at it, and when you do look at it, it's a particle? How does that fit in? It's okay because it's only one of the two contradictory positions at any given instant? Or when you're looking at it, one statement is true and the other false, and then they switch validities when you're not looking at it? So it's not really true and false at the exact same instant?
Ah, Aristotle of course came upon the same problem (though not with particle physics per se). He solved it for all of us. You can either go read Aristotle, or ask me nicely.
Go on.
Go on.
Okay, fine. I'll tell you. NO STATEMENT CAN BE TRUE AND FALSE IN THE SAME TIME AND RESPECT. Take a round stone. You look at it and say "This is round". Okay, now imagine yourself shrinking, very very tiny, and crawling on the desk towards the stone...now you're on the stone...at which stage does it stop to lose it's 'roundness'? Aha, but you're in a different respect to the stone, aren't you?
Same with photons.
What scientific measurements were used in coming up with theories about time dilation? When some dumbass woke up one morning and imagined that time comes to a stop at the speed of light (something which has no basis in sensory perception, or information gleaned and processed from [his] environment) and believed it as fact, what rational means of acquiring knowledge was employed?
Einstein, of course, was a master theorist. To a lesser degree, Feynman was the same way. No one knows how their brains worked. But they would imagine the universe, imagine some theory, and then TEST IT. This is very important. Until it was tested and proven, it was just a theory. To test his theory, Einstein had calculated what he thought the light from a certain eclipse would do if I remember the science right....and he set up the test, and was very nervous. He was at heart an empiricist, as all good physicists are. (the eclipse helped prove relativity).
This may confuse you..but we can imagine it by illustrating a similar thing on a smaller scale. A Greek philosopher notices ships descending on the horizon. He figures the world is round, suspended in air, with the sun as a secondary object. To test this out, he calculates the difference in the angle of the sun from a couple different distances, at the same time...and figures out (to an amazing degree of accuracy for the day) the size and curvature of the planet.
If there's no big-C Creation, and no intelligent design, and the Universe just happened to come together the way it has, how do you resolve that against the scientific concept of Entropy, which says that things *don't* arrange themselves into more complex and more intricate systems over time, but rather do the EXACT OPPOSITE? Are you comfortable suspending disbelief long enough to say that the idea of Entropy applies to everything in the presumedly-closed system that is the physical, material world, *except* for living things that can reproduce? And also that those living things somehow spontaneously came into being and grew over time to be more complex and more diverse, the very idea of which seems to go against Entropy?
This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." Now you may be scratching your head wondering what this has to do with evolution. The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way, "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.
However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can't have more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes try to get around this by claiming that the information carried by living things lets them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?
The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They obviously don't violate any physical laws.
BTW, I think that the three laws you spelled out here are rubbish. If you can't see how they are, then that's fine. At the very least, I would hope you can recognize that there are a virtually unlimited supply of statements that can never be proven as true or false, thus rendering these laws as pure speculation. For example, take my statement, "The smartest person on the planet is a woman". Is that true or false? And what if, hang with me here, the smartest person on the planet is an archetypical hermaphrodite? Then the statement is both true AND false, in a sense. I'm sure there are countless better examples. This one was just fun.
Boy, I miss galanter's politeness. Alright. The law of contradiction doesn't state we have to know if something is true or not, just that it must be. "The smartest person on the planet is a woman" is either true or false. The statement is indeed either TRUE or FALSE. That's what the law states - it can't be both.
Now, the statement could in theory be proven true or false, to a degree of accuracy. You could, for instance, take the last 50 Nobel Prize winners and give them all IQ tests. There'd be assumptions and valid reasons for not taking the results too seriously, but it could be done.
You're not understanding what those laws are supposed to do. They enable you to process information. For instance, you have a pencil. It appears a certain width. Now you put the pencil in water, and see it larger (an optical illusion). Instantly your brain, capable of rational thought (well, other people's perhaps) perceives something is wrong - the pencil cannot be both small and large at the same time. So perhaps you then investigate, through theories and experimentation, to find out how light diffuses through water. Now the contradiction disappears and you have gained knowledge about the universe.
These three laws are NOT arbitrary. They are the bedrock of reason. If you take one out, just for fun, do you have some bizarre alternate system, like non-Euclidean geometry? No. You have NO SYSTEM AT ALL. You have a world where everything can be it's opposite, a convention is also a non-convention, and you reach Aristotle's vegatative state, where no statements at all can be made. Those laws are what give us the capacity to communicate in the first place.
I keed! Who cares about these speeling? Is of no consequence. Still, I keed! Do I think you are more smorter than me? Without question! So I will take my shots at you where I can find them.