AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! MY BRAAAAIN!!! Why? Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

Interesting. I happen to be reading "Einstein Defiant" at the moment. It deals with the tensions mentioned that developed in physics from the teens through the late twenties, as well as being a biography of Einstein and his thought during that period.

Of course for me, as an INFP, it's the metaphysical implications that come out of of the research and how they mesh with my personal value system that I find most interesting. Couldn't care less about real world applications. : )

Thanks for putting that up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZtw1yt8Kc

I haven't seen all the videos yet, but I get the impression that Quantum Mechanics is a largely philosophically-driven physics theory. For all the crap evolution gets about being "just a theory" (some deserved, lots of times not), the quantum stuff seems way more suspicious--and I say this ater having gotten my A in the quantum physics class last spring. There are still a fair few physicists working to find deterministic explanations for what we only seem to be able to measure probabilistically, and my quantum physics textbook even gave examples of deterministic processes that, if we didn't fully understand them (that is, if another theory had gained popularity before our current one), and measured them a certain way, would churn out experiments that confirmed all the probabilistic measurements and math came out accurately--and the scientists would say "huh.... I guess we really cant really know how this works, except for by probabilities."

Yes, it does seem to work and predict things quite accurately. No, that doesn't make it a certain uncertainty... just that we don't have anything better yet--like all scientific theories. Max Plank was famous for saying "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."--and in this case at least, I think he's right.


...don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that scientists prematurely jumped on the idea and used it as an excuse to get lazy and not do an real thinking (though I do think that philosophers jumped on it because it fell in line with the popular trends in philosophy, and started teaching about it, which then probably had an effect on the physicists who grew up and accepted it. There's lots of good evidence for it, and experiments have been carried out constantly that verify it, but I do know that it's not exactly universally accepted yet, and it's still (somewhat) respectable if you want to do research into other alternate explanations. I think scientists learned their lesson from Einstein, to respect their colleagues who doubt these universally accepted theories.

Yes, this stuff fascinates me. I love trying to understand it, even if some of it may lie beyond my abilities, or common understanding in itself. Though I test at the poles of I, N, and P, I'm much nearer the median in F/T, so this subject I guess is right up my alley. I'm a sucker for both abstract ideas and complex feelings...

^^ What you are saying fits in nicely with Einsteins theory of "light quanta," which later became known as photons. Bohr's model of the behavior of electrons contradicted classical physics and eclipsed Einstein's suppositions concerning the matter. Many at the time assumed that experimental proof of one of the conflicting theories was impossible until, 10 or so years later, Compton came along and proved that Einsteins determinist view was valid.

Posted By alysaria on 08 Aug 2009 03:07 PM
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! MY BRAAAAIN!!! Why? Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

yes, yes, it's not the how's of it it's not. Everyone knows it was the ENFP that Invented wine

wine....or whine?