Re: idealism vs materialism

[Dan MacIsaac <Dan.MacIsaac@NAU.EDU>]

> > He was surprised by this paragraph and I said I'd ask the august
> > PHYS-L to
> > opine.  Please think philosophically so your response will be in his
> > language.  Are we (still?) materialists?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Larry


I have noted a re-interpretation of QM by well-educated people who
don't follow physics but who have heard of HUP that goes something like
"QM means that when you get small enough, the world goes to porridge;
nothing is predictable or real, all is uncertain (or created by our
measurement)".  Some folk seem to miss the conjugate pairs of
measurements aspect of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- my
thoughts are that HUP imposes limits on the precision of certain, few,
well-defined pairs of measurements.  I'm not an expert on QM or the
philosophical interpretations of QM, but this seems to be at least an
oversimplification in the  mathematical sense.  I've run into this
interpretation a number of times, and I consider it incomplete, and it
may be the same effect you are referring to.  I don't believe the world
goes to mush, it still has patterns and predictability, although
statistical or probablistic predictability.  If I'm allowed mass-energy
equivalence, then I'm comfortable being called a materialist, though I
likely don't understand all of the philosophy behind that term.

I have also encountered (with suspicion) science educators using chaos
theory to describe student learning, but at least some of them do
understand the mathematics so far as I can tell, and I have probed a
little.  I'm still trying to decide whether "metapatterns" is more
insightful than I am reading it to be, or if Tyler Volk has
re-discovered or interpreted symmetry (itself a very profound idea I
don't fully understand), or if my physics background has made me
dismissive of symmetry b/c of our training in coordinate system use.
There are some very bright and imaginative people out there, though
many of those have not had much mathematics.  They keep surprising me
and teaching me things though :^)

Dan "I'm a material girl" M

Dan MacIsaac, Assistant Professor of Physics, SUNY-Buffalo State College
222SCIE BSC, 1300 Elmwood Ave , Buffalo NY 14222 USA 716-878-3802
macisadl@buffalostate.edu  http://PhysicsEd.BuffaloState.edu