Like you said, where to start...
First of all you'll want to notice that I wasn't trying to get into a theological or metaphysical argument. My only point is that Quantum theory is just a theory, an unparsimonious one at that, and sometime people take it as gospel. For an example of one of those people, look in a mirror.
user wrote:Particles <i>do</i> exist in discrete packets, but as we all know it takes gajillions of these quanta to make up a person, and the particular particles that make up one organism are constantly changing, so that at the quantum level there really is no difference between you and not you.
To quote myself: "I don't know enough about Buddhism to debate about it". I brought up the term quanta to differentiate Quantum Physics from regular Subatomic physics. I definitely agree that the quanta that make up physical matter are dynamic, as a result of the second law of thermodynamics.
user wrote:The Pauli Exclusion Principle only applies to fermions ("mass" particles); all bosons ("energy" particles) can coincide. If anything, this only reinforces what c hack said--physically (relating to mass), we're all separate, but spiritually (here I'm considering thoughts as being made up of energy, which they are) we can coexist perfectly, in the most literal sense of the word. The fact that mass and energy are actually just different versions of the same thing (and are quite interchangeable) also helps cater to the idea that the universe is one big soup of particly goodness (or badness, or neutralness, however you see it).
I'm not about to debate theology (I like to keep arguments logical so I know who's winning
), so I'll just assume we have different definitions of 'spiritual'. A neurophysiologist will tell you that thoughts are not 'made up of energy' (other then because everything is made up of energy, which makes the previous statement pretty obtuse); at the lowest level they are made up of changing patterns of Na+ concentration. Obviously this
has energy, but it also has physical particles, so to say thoughts are 'made up of energy' is misleading.
user wrote:Let's see... also, Schrödinger’s Cat: perhaps no one mentioned to you that the theory does not actually apply to macroscopic objects such as cats--that <i>would</i> be retarded retarded. The cat is just a metaphor for a very small particle, one small enough so as to affected by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
Checks... yep, that's what I said. Arguing by agreeing with me is an odd tactic. The problem I used this to illustrate is that famous metaphysicists (Deepak Chopra, for example) have misapplied this thought experiment in widely read books, and then people end up with a distorted view of the world. A lot of the wackier aspects of Quantum Physics are based on misapplications of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Note that the principle has implications regarding empirical observation of subatomic particles,
not the behavior of those subatomic particles.
user wrote:Bohr's model ain't correct.
Yes, there are some serious and well documented shortcomings with Bohr's model. I misspoke: I meant to say "and probably still best". Bohr's theory, at least in its rudimentary principles, forces us to make the fewest assumptions about our universe. By Occam's Razor I think Bohr's model (or whatever refinement of it I was taught in high school. I'm not up on physics circa 1910) is a pretty reasonable theory.
user wrote:The Ether Theory was a fairly irrelevant theory, since nothing useful could be learned from it except on a theological, philosophical, or very broad universal basis. It was hypothesized ad hoc by people clinging to an old religious idea: that the "heavens" are immutable.
It's a useful example of a theory that corroborates empirical observations without representing the underlying mechanics accurately.
user wrote:Quantum theory actually <i>does</i> hold thus far for everything except stuff involving large amounts of gravity. String theory is a very intelligent but currently unsuccessful attempt to unite quantum theory with gravity.
What passes for a theory in the world of subatomic physics is sad. Theories need to be
a) testable,
b) they must be supported by the findings of new research, and
c) they must conform to the law of parsimony. Many implications of quantum theory are not testable, examples being virtual particles, quantum chromodynamics, and anything that collapses when you look at it. Saying "you can't disprove it, so it must be right" is fallacious. There are many examples of empirical observations not lining up with quantum physics' predictions: gravitons, gravity waves, the limits of the strong force, proton decay, etc... Finally, quantum physics forces us to make so very many wacky assumptions about the nature of the universe that Occam's Razor hacks it to pieces. Because these 'theories' have arisen to explain mathematical discrepancies in older theories it is much more accurate to call them mathematical models or functional representations. The biggest problem is that people who don't know much about physics learn summarized versions of these models and start believing that wacky shit is going on in the universe.
user wrote:And finally, c hack was right that subatomic particles lack shape/form. They are not spherical, nor elliptical. They are "solid" in the sense that they have mass, but that's it.
What?! Why didn't somebody tell me? That blows my whole 'oblong nucleon' theory out of the water.
"They are 'solid' in the sense that they have mass" is solid enough for me.
As you can tell, I am a skeptic. I have zero faith, faith (to me) being the ability to believe in something without reasonable proof. I've read loads about Quantum Theory, I've argued with many professors, and every time I do it seems more and more like hocus-pocus. The fact is things like quantum chromodynamics have arisen not because someone saw a 'green' quark, but instead just to explain holes in the existing theories. They are correct mathematically, but who knows what's really going on inside a proton. If you check out Quantum Chromodynamics you'll notice that it stipulates that colored quarks can never be directly observed. All of Quantum Physics feels like one big kludge to me. Does no one else see beauty in simplicity?