ow, Doc...ow...LOL

Wave-Particle Duality, right.

Photons exibit characteristics of both particles and waves.  Your single photon is "particle-like."  Fire 100 of them and they exhibit "wavey" characterestics....and waves certainly interfer with one another.

But because of that duality, which is indeed observable, you can't accurately describe the true nature of the photon.  It is indeed both this and that.

And, in the end, what it reveals (along with other stuff) is that science hasn't yet REALLY figured out the universe.  

Heisenberg at play, right?  Measure it's position and you lose track of it's momentum, and the other way around.

Doc, have you ever read a book Titled "The Tao of Physics?"  Author's name is Capra.  I read it WAY back for a "Science and Religion" course.  Have reread it a couple of times, but it has likely been 15+ years since the last time.  I still have it around.  Great/heady stuff.  I suspect you would dig it.

Dr D: I like your writing; I think it is extraordinarily difficult to develop a writer’s voice, or it’s a gift (like throwing a 95 mph fastball). However your voice came about, I like it. Thank you for reminding me of the double slit conundrum. It is indeed disturbing to be faced with a refutation of an inherently rational and stable universe. I am surprised that only 30% try to find a way around it.

I hope this is not too far afield, but I am reminded of the reaction to Machiavelli. Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay entitled “The Originality of Machiavelli,” which can be found in the anthology “The Proper Study of Mankind” and which is fortunately still available online via the New York Review of Books, in which Berlin muses on why Machiavelli’s writings are so disturbing.

By way of background, Berlin believes that Western philosophy is based on these primary assumptions: first, as in the sciences (so it is thought), all genuine questions must have one True answer, and only one, all others being necessarily errors; second, there must be a dependable path towards discovery of these Truths; and third, all such True answers are compatible with each other and fit into an harmonic and rational whole. In the case of morals, we could then (in theory) conceive what the perfect life must be, founded on a correct understanding of the rules that governed the universe.

Machiavelli (most likely unintentionally) dumped a giant bucket of cold water on these assumptions. He yearns for the restoration of something like the Roman Republic, which he believed requires a ruling class of Princes who are brave, resourceful, intelligent, gifted men who gloried in power, magnificence, pride, austerity, vigor, and discipline. These he sets side by side with Christian virtues: humility, acceptance of suffering, unworldliness, the hope of salvation in the afterlife. He does not condemn Christian values; he merely observes that the two moralities are incompatible, a de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without the possibility of rational arbitration, and that this happens as part of the normal human situation. If we cannot find the final solution of the question of how men should live -- and if more than one equally valid answer to the question can be returned, it is false – then the idea of the sole true, objective, universal human ideal crumbles. The very search for it becomes not merely Utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent.

From this, Berlin draws both negative and positive implications. The negative, of course, is that the sense of certainty that eventually we can achieve the final solution to all of our ills, whereby all interests will be brought into harmony, has been severely undermined. The positive is that if not all values are compatible, and choices must be made for no better reason than that each value is what it is, and we choose it for what it is and not because it can be shown on some single scale to be higher than another, and rationality and calculation can be applied only to means and subordinate ends, but never to ultimate ends, then the path is open to empiricism, pluralism, toleration and compromise.

Thank you; I have had Berlin’s ideas rattling around in my head for some time, and I appreciate your inspiring me to put some of them on paper. One thing about Berlin, he describes but rarely advocates a position. Berlin more or less dismisses the details of Machiavelli’s preferred system, saying that Machiavelli was neither a good historicist nor a trained philosopher, and that his conception of ideal Roman virtues probably never existed, much less proved to be superior to Christian values. What I think Berlin latched onto was that Machiavelli was able to construct a value system of ultimate ends that is wholly apart from and mainly incompatible with another value system of ultimate ends, in this case Christianity. The fact that this is even a possibility (and as a friend of mine dryly remarked, if somebody’s done it, it’s probably possible) destroys the conceptual foundation for the idea that there is One Truth in answer to every question. The importance of this for Berlin is that it robs the fanatics of their ability to use the One Truth argument to justify the oppression or persecution of others who may not share that belief.

The other interesting consequence of this is that when faced with a choice of conflicting values -- where more of one necessarily means less of the other, such as freedom and equality, pride and humility, justice and mercy, to name a few -- if there is no ultimate Truth, how do we resolve those conflicting values? We each have to make choices as they arise, but have we now become rudderless and arbitrary? I think not. I believe we each have an inherent human understanding of right and wrong that we share with all other humans. And also, in my mind, here is where religion becomes so important, not only to help us make hard choices, but also to provide comfort when every choice seems doomed to tragedy.  Joseph Campbell observed that the proper question to ask of a religion is not whether it is true, but whether it is effective.

But in the end, I think Tolkien in “The Two Towers” expressed it well in this exchange between Eomer and Aragorn. Eomer was faced with the choice to allow Aragorn to pursue his quest to rescue his friends from the common enemy, or carry out his law requiring him to take Aragorn and his companions to answer to the king for crossing their lands without leave. Eomer says “It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange. … How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” And Aragorn replies, “As he has ever judged. Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear … It is a man’s part to discern them …”

Is it fair to say that the doom of choice is the foundation of all human tragedy?

This in an area where I am an expert, or at least that is how I see myself, unlike Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.  I have no interest in being dismissive, nor do I want to change opinions, but I do think some refinement is warranted.

I am going to to section-by-section in  an attempt to be simple and clear... we'll see how it goes :)

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First, there is nothing unique about a human detecting the photon.  In the fundamental double slit measurements an inanimate object (photographic paper in a traditional measurement and a hunk of silicon in many modern experiments) 'sees' the photon, not.  Nothing about quantum mechanics defines the observer.

Second, quantum mechanics in powerfully predictive, so I struggle to see how that makes it irrational. It predicts probability with perfect accuracy in the limit of infinite observations.  From a mathematical perspective, it is as predictable as the distribution of an infinite number of coin flips.

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There is no such thing as watching a photon (or electron, proton, neutron, helium double cation [alpha particle], etc.) without detecting it.  The question of interest is where you watch/see the photon. Before the slits and after the slits makes all the difference in the world.

From my vantage point the simplest, rigorous statement (borrowed from Feynman) is that energy and matter propagates (moves) like waves and is detected like particles.  As a trained scientist, I take this as an assumed paradox that reflects the limits of our intellect.  The reason why this paradox fails to be prominent in day-to-day life is that the more massive the object, the less clear the wave propagation of the object is when we detect it. Photons have minimal momentum (mass times velocity), so they accentuate the paradox.  Electrons less so, protons much less so, and molecules hardly at all.  Our eyes see visible light which can only resolve objects many hundreds of times larger than most molecules making the paradox of quantum mechanics irrelevant to day-to-day observation.

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When it comes to determining what the metaphysical impact of quantum mechanics is, scientists are novices like everyone else.  I encourage you to take scientists interpretations of the philosophical meaning of quantum mechanics with a hefty dose of salt.  Quantum mechanics is the most precisely verified scientific theory/model known to humankind.  The predictional are mathematical, the conclusions paradoxical when viewed in our simplest frame of reference.  At times like this I turn to art, rather than religion, for assist and Hamlet gives me a hand:

There are more things in heavan and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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Quantum mechanics in not irrational, but it's meaning transcends our intuition.  Make of that what you will.  

(if I may be so familiar) That's a clear explanation. I am not a scientist by training, yet the rationality and coherence imposed by the natural sciences informs us all. But as you allude to, Hamlet would never have consulted Newton to resolve his dilemmas. The Enlightenment, on the other hand, treated Newton as a demi-god; if Newton could explain the workings of Nature in equations and concepts anyone could understand with a bit of effort and study, then it was certainly possible to discover the laws of how men should live, and even if discovering such laws might prove practically improbable, at least everyone assumed that such laws in fact existed. And the Enlightenment came down hard on religion, myths, anything that could not withstand the rigid hard calculations and proofs of science. And so there is a war between religion and science, but I personally think it is a false conflict. Alas, the hard sciences do not achieve the same reliable results when applied to the soft sciences (ethics, political philosophy, sociology, etc.), but that is precisely religion’s sweet spot -- and art and literature and poetry. J.G.Hamman said that God is a port, not a geometer. Whether the double slit experiment is either true or real, or false and unreal, doesn’t help me a bit in deciding on a moral conflict, or what to have for dinner, or how to live. And by the way, I very much view baseball as a soft science, which is why I think relying solely on sabermetrics to make baseball decisions is driving the bus through the rear view mirror.

I do like conundrums, especially in science, that make you want to go huh? Here’s a cool discovery. Benoit Mandelbrot, a mathematician who made a special study of roughness, proved that although the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the longest distance is infinite. Think about a map of a coastline. Pick any two points, measure the distance, then notice as you make the scale more and more granular the length increases; roughness adds length, and if you assume infinite scale, you have infinite length. At least, that is my layman’s oversimplified understanding of it.

I am glad you liked the Aragorn quote. Tolkien is full of gems like that. Later on Gandalf says, in a Tolkien shot across the bow of science, “Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.”

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I understand your problem with Campbell, but in this instance, and not to invoke the ghost of deposition Clinton, it depends on how you define “true.” I think Campbell means true as in factual or historical truth, and uses the word “effective” to distinguish that from something that is true to human nature or the human soul or human behavior. But it seems to me that many Christians spend a great deal of energy on defending the historical or factual accuracy of the Bible, which I think Campbell is trying to point out is the wrong question to ask. I remember reading John Dominic Crossan, a former Jesuit who wrote the Historical Jesus and other works along the same line. I slogged through a whole section of his on scientific studies on the inconstancy of oral transmission of history or eye witness testimony, and how nothing was written about Jesus for decades after his death, so how could the information be reliable, and frankly I’ve read insurance policies that are more interesting. J.G. Hamann, a crazy 18th Century German whom Berlin wrote a short book about called “The Magus of the North” which I highly recommend, said “God is a poet, not a geometer.” To me the Bible is poetry, not a peer reviewed research paper (thankfully).

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And speaking of baseball, and sabremetrics as a predictive modeling tool, Hamann also said the greatest mistake is to confuse words with concepts, and concepts with real things. A model might be useful, but it is not reality.

Dr D, reread your “quick impressions” and some good thoughts in there.

<<Pursuing a lie can never pay off in the long run, I don't believe. - >> Totally agree wi’ dat. The NCAA comes to mind as an example of how a system built on a lie (or a false value), the ideal of “amateurism,” results in dysfunction, corruption, and oppression – inevitably so, despite being led by otherwise good men and women.

<<this idea of Universal Truth and its importance is the key to the thread. >> Per usual you cut to the chase, and this is where the rubber meets the road. It is a concept that Berlin returns to time after time in his writings. The Romantic revolution attacked the notion of a Universal Truth applicable to all men in all times, a set of rational laws that once discovered or revealed would show us how we should live. Ironically one of the small pebbles that started this rock slide came from Kant. He believed that to be truly free, a man must be free to choose the bad as well as the good. Autonomy, then, is the basis of all morality. If an external entity or force orders me as it wills, then I am a mere object, the choices are not mine, and I deserve neither praise nor blame for them. (The origin of the insanity defense to crime?)

Kant went one extra step, and this is what opened Pandora’s Box. Kant conceded that a man must follow rules, but he was still free if those rules were of his own making. Values are created by free rational human choice, not discovered or revealed by some external power. Moral commands are not factual statements, or descriptions, and they are not true or false. They may be right or wrong, but they don’t describe an object or a thing. A man sets himself to aim at a value, it is not an independent entity that can be stumbled upon.

The Romantics took this notion, and morphed it into the idea that man’s ultimate state was in the creative act. This is all well and good in the arts; the artist creates, he does not transcribe or discover. Where is the song before it is sung? Where is the poem before it is written? But when you move this notion into morals or political theory, something potentially very bad can happen, a complete reversal of values. If we alone are the authors of our values, then what matters is our inner state – motive, not consequences. There is a very dark side to this path, as evidenced by what arose in Germany in the 1930’s. But there is also a side of this that is not dark and that influences how with think in our everyday lives – the idea of the right to develop one’s individual capacity, the protest against despotism, however rational and benevolent, not because it diminishes human happiness, but because it is intrinsically degrading, a falsification of what human relationships between equal and independent beings should be.

It’s easy to get a mental charley horse from this stuff. But as Kant himself put it, out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.