More Denton: A new book (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 12, 2016, 13:41 (3178 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have hunted in vain for the word “pure”. The article says: “...an early discovery was that the quark-gluon plasma behaves more like a perfect fluid with small viscosity than like a gas, as many researchers had expected." With quarks as one of the building blocks of matter, how does this make a quark-gluon plasma into a “pure plasma of energy”?
DAVID: I've shown you that atoms are considered the building blocks of matter. The substrate are all the energy particles, quarks, gluons, muons, electrons, photons, etc. They are pure energy whether the article states the word 'pure' or not. I've told you they are measured in electron volts, not weight as formed matter would be measured! It is understood they are pure energy as the basis of the construction of matter, both inextricably tied together in two layers, pure energy as the foundation of matter. The LHC brings out that foundation of particle energy.
-As always, when it comes to matters of science, I am dependent on the experts, including yourself. However, when experts disagree, I cannot be expected to take one side against another. In this instance, perhaps the much admired Matt Strassler has explained why this is all so confusing:-	profmattstrassler.com/.../matter-and-energy-a-false-dichotomy-(Sorry, I don't seem to be able to provide a direct link.)-QUOTE: The word Matter. “Matter” as a term is terribly ambiguous; there isn't a universal definition that is context-independent. There are at least three possible definitions that are used in various places:
•	“Matter” can refer to atoms, the basic building blocks of what we think of as “material”: tables, air, rocks, skin, orange juice — and by extension, to the particles out of which atoms are made, including electrons and the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of an atom.-•	OR it can refer to what are sometimes called the elementary “matter particles” of nature: electrons, muons, taus, the three types of neutrinos, the six types of quarks — all of the types of particles which are not the force particles (the photon, gluons, graviton and the W and Z particles.) Read here about the known apparently-elementary particles of nature. [The Higgs particle, by the way, doesn't neatly fit into the classification of particles as matter particles and force particles, which was somewhat artificial to start with; I have a whole section about this classification below.]-•	OR it can refer to classes of particles that are found out there, in the wider universe, and that on average move much more slowly than the speed of light.-Clearly, then, most of what you define as energy can also be defined as matter, and the others he calls “force particles”. As for “pure” energy:-Strassler: What is meant by “pure energy”? This is almost always used in reference to photons, commonly in the context of an electron and a positron (or some other massive particle and anti-particle) annihilating to make two photons (recall the antiparticle of a photon is also a photon.) But it's a terrible thing to do. Energy is something that photons have; it is not what photons are. [I have height and weight; that does not mean I am height and weight.] -“The term “pure energy” is a mix of poetry, shorthand and garbage.”-However, we are really being sidetracked here, and it's my fault for dragging you into technicalities. If your God exists, you believe that he is some kind of eternal, pure, conscious energy, and that he turned his own conscious energy into what we now recognize as matter, regardless of definitions. But even if we accept a first cause of “pure” energy, it makes just as much/little sense to say that this energy unconsciously turned itself into “matter”, and this process itself engendered consciousness, though we don't know at what point energy/matter became conscious. We are back to the fact that “being” conscious is no more of a solution to the mystery than “becoming” conscious. -Dhw: Teleology simply denotes purpose, not one person's idea of one particular purpose.
DAVID: Agreed. I use it for explanation, do you?-Yes, though only hypothetically, not dogmatically. For example, your God may have created the universe and life for the purpose of relieving his own boredom (as opposed to the purpose of creating humans, though you don't like to tell us the purpose of creating humans, which could also be covered by relief of boredom). Or evolution is driven by intelligent organisms whose purpose is to survive and/or improve (as opposed to it being driven by a computer programme whose purpose is to produce humans).