Knowledge, belief & agnosticism (Agnosticism)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 22, 2008, 16:27 (6088 days ago) @ clayto

"Quote "I've had one person tell me he knew there was a God because of the principle, for that was were God was, on the other side of the wall." What on earth --- heaven or hell --- does that mean?" - Sorry if I seemed obtuse. I even misspelled 'where'. I was alluding to the problems in quantum mechanics. A quantum of energy is either a particle of energy or a wave, depending on how we measure it. It never seems to be both at the same time. Quantum calculations are accurate but are the average of all particles or waves. Quanta are entangled. If you split one Quantum into two parts, both parts 'know' what is happening to the other even at great distances, and respond to the other's changes faster than the speed of light. Einstein called this 'spookiness at a distance'. As a result we never can fully investigate energy bundles as we seem to dictate 'what' they are at any given moment through our chosen method of measurement. Thus we look at quanta from 'our' side only. For this reason Heisenberg developed a principle of uncertainty. We can never know everything that is going on. Thus the 'wall'. There are some folks who claim, as a result of all of this, that the universe exists only because we are here to observe it, since quanta become what we choose to observe. I think that is very extreme. The person who gave me his theory about God, felt God was in the area of quantum mechanics that we were not measuring, on the other side of the 'wall of quantum uncertainty'. After all, we never can 'prove' God in an absolute fashion. By the way, Einstein's frustration was that his ingenious insights were in classical Newtonian mechanics, and he could never resolve or accept that he could not bring quantum theory into his relativity theories. And no one has done that since. Which is why we don't have a 'theory of everything', and why there is a huge argument whether 'string theory' will ever lead anywhere. And this why I said we will never know everything.