Re: heat is a form of energy

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Thu, 9 Sep 1999, Daniel Schroeder wrote:

> Do such models have limitations?  Absolutely!  Should we therefore
> abandon them?  Absolutely not!

Uh oh.  I feel a severe attack of Philosophie coming on...

I think that the central problem is that we mistake our mental models for
the real world, then when we encounter a different model, we are
absolutely horrified because THE WHOLE WORLD SUDDENLY CHANGED.  We had
been looking at a painting of a woman seated in front of a vanity mirror,
when suddenly the image changes into a realistic depiction of a human
skull.  To a person who is intolerant of ambiguity and who requires a
solid and static world in which to live, alternate mental models are a
profound threat.  The world is supposed to be REAL, and the drawing of the
old lady with the big nose had damned well better stay that way, with no
subversive shifting into a drawing of a young woman in a hat looking away
into the distance.

What if we all wore green glasses for all of our lives, and came to
believe that the entire world was green?  Then one day a teacher takes our
green glasses off and replaces them with red glasses.  Some people would
be overjoyed and want to start switching glasses back and forth, but I
think most people would first be stunned, and then would lash out at that
teacher in murderous rage.  The sudden change in mental filters proves
that the entire world is an illusion.  It pulls the rug out from under
everything, and our most deeply held beliefs about the solidity of reality
are toppled.

I suspect that the physical sciences attracts people who want the world to
be real, and who are threatened by the ambiguity and contradictions
inherent in alternate mental models.  For them there is but one right
answer, and one correct way to view the world, and alternate models must
be wrong.  Physics is exactly the *wrong* field for them, no?  Physics
isn't a safe haven, physics is the home of the nightmare.


What if I experienced a detailed dream in which I built an atomic force
microscope, then plucked a dream-eyelash and viewed its surface with my
dream-instrument?  Would the resulting images be real?  What if I built a
dream accelerator and used it to take apart dream-substance and to
establish an entire menagerie of dream-subatomic-particles?  In addition,
what if many other people were dreaming the same dream, and the elements
of the dream behaved quite solid and static?  We could explore an entire
dream-physics, never realizing that the whole thing would evaporate upon
awakening, or could be distorted beyond recognition should any of the
dreamers figure out how to directly screw with the solidity of the common
dream world.

How do we know that the world is not a dream?  We cannot see the real
world. Nor feel it nor hear it. Everything we experience is just a set of
nervous impulses, and those impulses require interpretation.  (Maybe even
the "nerve impulses" are an interpretation, like a dreamer who dreams of a
detailed dream-body.)  Sure, there's something out there, but it certainly
is nothing like what we imagine.  It more resembles a set of points in
phase space, or a piece of computer code being run by the Mind of God.
When western mankind arrives at a consensual agreement about what is
really out there, and forces reality to become static by refusing to
change mental models, then what we've really done is to figure out how all
of us can dream the same dream at the same time.


"I refute you thus" and kick a rock very hard.  But what if your foot goes
through the spot where the boulder once was, and the boulder is suddenly
nowhere to be found, and the old derelict on the park bench smiles quietly
without attracting attention?  I suspect that such things are possible.
I've never encountered them myself.  Maybe I believe too strongly in the
consensual agreement (although sometimes an object will vanish from the
spot where I placed it, only to reappear in the exact same spot many days
later.  Perhaps I'm "forgetful" at the deeper levels.  Or, when nobody is
around in the quad except God, perhaps sometimes God momentarily blinks.)

If there are any mystics or seers hanging around on phys-L, can you
explain to me why this dream-world is so solid, yet there are so many
stories around of those who've figured out how to violate the rules?  I'm
sure that some physics people would be utterly fascinated by such rule
violations. (Oops, I forgot.  We already have Fred Alan Wolfe pursuing
such things. If he's figured out how to violate the rules, I wish he'd
give a summer seminar on how to make objects suddenly remember that
they're supposed to be someplace else, and how to make stones fall
upwards.  Then we could do some REALLY cool physics demonstrations!  :)

((((((((((((((((((((( ( (  (   (    (O)    )   )  ) ) )))))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty                                  SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb@eskimo.com                                  http://www.amasci.com
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