donald@utcsrgv.UUCP (Don Chan) (08/31/83)
For those of you that are so eager to use quantum mechanics to justify
your pet beliefs, (e.g. using the Q.M. to support Free Will, or mystical
ideas about "consciousness"), I might point out that Q.M. is a two-edged
sword.
According to R.I.G. Hughes' article "Quantum Logic" in the October 1981
Scientific American, the logic of reasoning about Q.M. events does not
allow the distributive law:
P and (Q or R) <=> (P and Q) or (P and R)
does not hold!
For example, if "the car is red, and the boat is blue or green", you CANNOT
conclude that "the car is red and the boat is blue, or the car is red and
the boat is green".
If you're so eager to adopt Q.M. on the macroscopic scale, surely you
should adopt quantom logic too (and have a lot of trouble in everyday
life...)
Alan Wexelblat is guilty of a tactic used by most "scientific creationists":
quoting prominent scientists' statements out of context. I notice he didn't
quote any of Einstein's statements about Q.M., in which Einstein expressed
his doubts as to the completeness of Q.M. (remember "God does not play
dice"?)
Readers of popular accounts of Q.M. fail to appreciate that Q.M. is
an abstract mathematical model, and the explanations in popular
science books are merely inadequate attempts to explain Q.M. in
english using everyday concepts. The problem is that everyday concepts
don't work at the quantum level, so one gets a distorted view.
One should understand the mathematical model before going off and spinning
wild tales of modern physics supporting mysticism, on the basis of what
one reads in accounts for laymen.
For an excellent debunking of recent attempts to link Q.M. with Eastern
mysticism, read "The Cosmic Code", by the physcist Heinz Pagels. (available,
ironically, as a Bantam New Age paperback, the same series that has stuff
like Capra's "Tao of Physics" and Zukav's "Dancing Wu-Li Masters")
Any further discussion of Q.M. should perhaps move to net.physics, where
there are many more qualified individuals than me.
--
Don Chan, University of Toronto
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