At 16:40 26/01/00 GMT, you wrote:
>Chris,
>
>What exactly is you concern?
>
>I have only briefly glanced through the article and the review a few
>pages earlier. Does your possible objection lie in the fact that the
>experiment would appear to bolster Schrodinger's thought experiment
>(I am personally rather hostile to thought experiments per se) which
>as I understand it - from the few, contractory, accounts I have read
>- is an undialectical 'proof' for idealism (or possibly just
>Kantianism? Or possibly I'm wrong?)
< >
>John
What struck me was the opening paragraph, and Nature is a very
authoritative journal.
It rang bells for me with arguments presented by Roy Bhaskar, the
dialectical philosopher whose writing is exceedingly detailed and complex.
One central idea in his "Realist" theory of science is that every "closed"
experiment is artificial. In the universe there is no such thing as
something without interconnections with the outside. But an "orthodox"
scientific experiment which is closed, ie states there are a limited number
of variables at the beginning and the outcome is the result only of those
variables, is actually idealist. It is idealist because it tries to jump
from empirical data straight to Truth, to reality. It is therefore an
empiric*ist* version of idealism. A correctly "realist" approach to
scientific knowledge accepts that material reality exists, often in ways in
which we do not have full direct experience, and attempts to understand the
pattern behind that Reality.
It was the opening sentences of the Nature article which I thought were a
strikingly confident assertion in an empirical journal, even though I do
not pretend to understand the details of the subsequent study.
>The theory of quantum mechanics applies to closed systems. In such ideal
>situations, a single atom can, for example, exist simultaneously in a
>superposition of two different spatial locations. In contrast, real systems
>always interact with their environment, with the consequence that
>macroscopic quantum superpositions (as illustrated by the 'Schrödinger's
>cat' thought-experiment) are not observed.
Chris Burford
London
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