On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 6:48:09 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: > > Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... > > My complete answer to the late 19th century question “what is > electrodynamics trying to tell us” would simply be this: > > *Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports > them does not. * > > Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately > do the same for quantum mechanics: > > *Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. * > > In my opinion this isn't "doing the same thing". "Doing the same thing" > would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The > aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to > propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole > bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... > I disagree. It might not be doing the exact same thing, but it is doing something analogous. The Newtonian physicist could not imagine empty space being able to support waves without there being some material there, some stuff. That was eventually proved unnecessary and people got used to physical reality being less "stuff-y" than they'd thought. The jump to correlations without correlata is quite analogous. It's saying only relationships are real, that there are no underlying "things" that exist purely in and for themselves. That is very much in tune with a Buddhist understanding of the "lack of intrinsic existence" of things. The idea of "things" (including teeny weeny things like particles) is in my view a kind of cognitive evolutionary hang-over of being tool-using apes. We like things to be thing-y and stuff-y because we can then get a grip on them and use them. But QM is telling us that reality, whatever that is, does not hold the same bias, and doesn't in fact even understand what we are talking about. That one idea is really the point of the paper and it just strikes me intuitively as being right on.
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