No, Vel, I didn't miss anything.
Velocima Geminosa wrote:Finally, quantum mechanics says that particles exist as a packet of probability waves. It is not that they don't exist until we measure them, it's that the particles collapse into a single wave state upon being measured.
And just how is this not rejection of cause and effect?
A particle exists as a "packet of probability wave"? Err. Since when a probability can exist in physical world as a particle or a packet?
What is a 'collapse' of a physical entity that you call your 'probability packet' ?
How about this question: in a single double slit experiment - QM can't even answer through which slit the particle went through. Is this not a rejection of cause and effect I don't know what is.
In my modern physics class last semester, one of the most useful tools in understanding quantum mechanical phenomena was to test whether or not causality was maintained. If it wasn't, we needed to adjust the math (or take out the cases in which causality was not held).
Excuse me? Adjust math? This sounds like correcting math when people through Sun rotated around the Earth. They did a lot of adjusting, too. And if they had better math as we do, they might have come up with some form of String theory as well.
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"Objectivism is not only true, it is great! Why? Because of the volitional work a mind must have performed to reach for the first time so exalted a level of truth—and because of all the glorious effects such knowledge will have on man’s life, all the possibilities of action it opens up for the future." --
Leonard Peikoff