No, I’m not a physicist and I don’t even play one on TV, but I think a rudimentary understanding of physics is necessary to understand more completely the meaning of “perception,” of what we mean when we say that we “know” something. Also, there is a mysticism about these subjects that is totally unwarranted. The Danish school holds that sub-atomic particles exist as what Aristotle might call potencia, rather than as a discrete particle. They exist as a probability cloud of positions; the particle is everywhere it can be within certain probabilities, 30% here AND 70% there. The probability cloud collapses into a certainty upon observation by the scientist or interaction with another particle that requires it to collapse.
This sounds odd, but think of real world conditions and you’ll see that it is quite normal. In war, the foot soldier lives in a world of chaos, better understood as probability curves, he might die, he might not, he might be wounded, etc. From his frame of references his life is a potencia of possible outcomes, which collapse when one of the possibilities happens. From the general’s frame of reference, however, a discrete situation presents itself because the number of particles, aka soldiers, is high enough that all the probability clouds interact and thereby collapse into a particular situation on the battle field. Since modern war movies are from the “grunt’s” frame of reference, it is necessarily anti-war because from this frame of reference all is pointless chaos; lives lost for no purpose. From a the general’s frame of reference, however, the point is clear, the objective decided upon and victory or defeat meaningful; the necessary outcome is glorious or tragic. There is no privileged frame of reference, both participants in the battle are “correct” in their perception of what was happening. This is not moral relativism, but it does demonstrate that how you frame the moral question is important to the answer you are likely to find.
The same is true for relativity. One may have read articles describing the odd nature of the world at relativistic speeds and imagine time travel and the like. But this too is not that difficult to understand if we think in terms of Galilean relativity. A plane is traveling from west to east at 500 mph. A boy at the front of the plane throws a ball at 50 mph towards the back of the plane, from east to west. How fast is the ball going? It depends on the frame of reference. From inside the plane, the ball is obviously going 50 mph from front to back, east to west; from the ground, however, it is going 450 mph from west to east. Who is right? There is no privileged frame of reference scientifically speaking, so both answers are again correct.
The key to understanding relativity and quantum mechanics is that the observer’s frame of reference and conduct determines the answer, both in terms of which question gets asked and what answer is obtained. This circles back to my concern with perception, and the idea that to a surprising large degree we determine what we see and how we experience reality. The images I create are what I see in the data from my frame of reference, which is my experience of reality.
No. 39: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Perception
No, I’m not a physicist and I don’t even play one on TV, but I think a rudimentary understanding of physics is necessary to understand more completely the meaning of “perception,” of what we mean when we say that we “know” something. Also, there is a mysticism about these subjects that is totally unwarranted. The Danish school holds that sub-atomic particles exist as what Aristotle might call potencia, rather than as a discrete particle. They exist as a probability cloud of positions; the particle is everywhere it can be within certain probabilities, 30% here AND 70% there. The probability cloud collapses into a certainty upon observation by the scientist or interaction with another particle that requires it to collapse.
This sounds odd, but think of real world conditions and you’ll see that it is quite normal. In war, the foot soldier lives in a world of chaos, better understood as probability curves, he might die, he might not, he might be wounded, etc. From his frame of references his life is a potencia of possible outcomes, which collapse when one of the possibilities happens. From the general’s frame of reference, however, a discrete situation presents itself because the number of particles, aka soldiers, is high enough that all the probability clouds interact and thereby collapse into a particular situation on the battle field. Since modern war movies are from the “grunt’s” frame of reference, it is necessarily anti-war because from this frame of reference all is pointless chaos; lives lost for no purpose. From a the general’s frame of reference, however, the point is clear, the objective decided upon and victory or defeat meaningful; the necessary outcome is glorious or tragic. There is no privileged frame of reference, both participants in the battle are “correct” in their perception of what was happening. This is not moral relativism, but it does demonstrate that how you frame the moral question is important to the answer you are likely to find.
The same is true for relativity. One may have read articles describing the odd nature of the world at relativistic speeds and imagine time travel and the like. But this too is not that difficult to understand if we think in terms of Galilean relativity. A plane is traveling from west to east at 500 mph. A boy at the front of the plane throws a ball at 50 mph towards the back of the plane, from east to west. How fast is the ball going? It depends on the frame of reference. From inside the plane, the ball is obviously going 50 mph from front to back, east to west; from the ground, however, it is going 450 mph from west to east. Who is right? There is no privileged frame of reference scientifically speaking, so both answers are again correct.
The key to understanding relativity and quantum mechanics is that the observer’s frame of reference and conduct determines the answer, both in terms of which question gets asked and what answer is obtained. This circles back to my concern with perception, and the idea that to a surprising large degree we determine what we see and how we experience reality. The images I create are what I see in the data from my frame of reference, which is my experience of reality.