The Amateur Scientist
(shown above at the start of his career)
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Further Reading
People could criticize my essays because I don't put voluminous references in them, although I do have some. Some of my ideas are original, so they naturally don't have many references, and I don't pretend my essays are worthy of publication in scientific journals where exhaustive references are required. But I don't do things in a vacuum, and I do quite a lot of reading (although I don't agree with everything I've read). Here is a very partial list of articles and books that interested me and that I believe are worth reading, and I hope they also catch your interest. Some of books, articles, papers and essays in this bibliography are in the public domain, and they can be downloaded free of charge using the links provided. Most of the books are protected by copyrights and are available in libraries and book stores. Enjoy.
Amanda Gefter is another true amateur scientist. Her Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn is a pure joy to read. It tells a story of a father/daughter pursuit of what is real, which they decided must be invariant, or the same for all observers. They made a preliminary list of potential invariants on a napkin, but crossed them off one at a time when they discovered they were observer-dependent. In the end, they determined that nothing in the universe is invariant; hence nothing in the universe is real! Consciousness wasn't included on Gefter's preliminary list of invariants, but it turns out that pure consciousness is the only thing that isn't observer-dependent, and therefore it's the only thing that's real. I believe deep scientific explorations ultimately all lead to the conclusion that idealism is the correct interpretation.
Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He's the author of a short book Programming the Universe, which he has made available to the public on-line Here. In the book he says, “The universe is a quantum computer that processes information. Matter and energy are just information, and the laws of physics are the software.” Information is non-physical, so believe he actually means is that matter and energy are derived from information and the universal quantum computer processes the information that precedes physical actualization as matter and energy.
Robert L. Kurucz of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published two articles that are truly mind-blowing:
Elementary Physics in the Cellular Automaton Universe
Radiatively-Driven Cosmology In The Cellular Automaton Universe
Pavel Kroupa wrote a paper by that seems to disprove the very existence of dark matter halos:
The Dark Matter Crisis: Falsification of the Current Standard Model of Cosmology
Abhas Mitra is an astrophysicist and an adjunct professor at Bhabha National Science Institute in Mumbai, India. He's from the "old school" and knows the difference between physical reality and making assumptions. He questions conventional wisdom, exposing fallacies about things others take for granted, such as the big bang theory and black holes. His papers are controversial, but as far as I can tell nobody has found any flaws in them. If you're able to handle the technical and mathematical details, I think you'll enjoy these three papers:
Non-occurrence of Trapped Surfaces and Black Holes in Spherical Gravitational Collapse: An Abridged Version
No Uniform Density Star in General Relativity
The fallacy of Oppenheimer Snyder Collapse: No General Relativistic Collapse at All, No Black Hole, No Physical Singularity
In addition, in 2021 Mitra published a well-researched book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Black Hole Paradigm. In it, he explains why no object having mass can be contained within its Swarzschild radius and goes on to list all the physicists and mathematicians who have reached the conclusion he did: That the so-called black hole event horizon is non-physical and the mass of a true black hole must be zero. The book is easy to understand and it has no abstruse mathematics to confuse the reader.
John Gribbin's Alone in the Universe, by, echoes many of the same conclusions in my essay "Are We All Alone?" It presents a very sound rationale why our solar system, its location in the galaxy, and the Earth itself are very special -- unique perhaps -- and how unlikely it is for a technological civilization like ours to emerge anywhere else but here. In fact Gribbin believes we may be utterly alone in the Milky Way, although I'm not quite that pessimistic. I do agree with him on another point: There will be no "second chance" for a human-like civilization to arise if there is another mass extinction on Earth, which is quite likely to happen.
Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee published The Life and Death of Planet Earth, presenting the "big picture" of life on Earth and its climate over the past half billion years. We are currently on the knife's edge of climate change, and the future of life on Earth does not look good. This book provided reference material for Appendix B of my essay "Global Warming is Real." This (the book, not my essay) is a must read.
Marina Cortês and Lee Smolin co-authored an award-winning paper The Universe as a Process of Unique Events, which completely demolishes the deeply-flawed notion of a block universe. Congratulations to Drs. Cortês and Smolin for winning their prize, and keep up the good work!
Shoichi Toyabe of Chuo University in Japan, along with several colleagues, performed a truly ground-breaking experiment, where they literally created energy from information as described in This Article. In my opinion, this experiment ranks up there with the experiments performed by Alain Aspect and others that demonstrated violations of Bell's inequality and dispelled for once and for all the notion that a quantum wave function contains local hidden variables. The Toyabe experiment demonstrates that a physical "something" can come from a non-physical "nothing," in agreement with the Szilard equality. I believe this explains how the universe came into being. Instead of a singular, explosive big-bang event where all mass-energy was created suddenly at once, creation might involve a much more gradual evolution where mass-energy condenses from a vacuum filled with information, a process continuing up until the present.
Natalie Wolchover is the author of an article in "Quantum Information Theory" entitled The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks. "Space," Albert Einstein said, "is merely what we measure with a ruler; time is what we measure with a clock." But there is a growing number of researchers who are beginning to realize that time is inextricably tied to entropy, a.k.a. information. According to Marcus Huber, leader of the Huber Group at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information - Vienna, a clock is actually a thermal machine. “The irreversibility [of a clock] is really fundamental,” Huber said. “This shift in perspective is what we wanted to explore.” Gerard Milburn of University of Queensland in Australia flatly stated, “A clock is a flow meter for entropy." If a clock measures time and is also a flow meter for entropy, then time must equal the flow of entropy. These statements mesh with the conclusions in several of my essays. The Now moment is an expanding two-dimensional surface perpetually saturated with entropy, and the surface density of entropy, dS/dA, is proportional to time. Taking the asymmetry of time into account causes collateral damage from Noether's theorem: The law of conservation of mass-energy is an approximation that only applies during time intervals when changes to the radius of curvature of the Now surface, Δr/r, are small, and the total mass-energy of the expanding universe must increase.
E.T. Jaynes of Washington University in St. Louis, MO wrote a mind-bending and oft-cited paper The Gibbs Paradox which discusses a scenario where the mixing entropy of two dissimilar gases can be reduced by applying an observer's ability to distinguish between atoms of the mixture and thereby enabling the physical process on a micro level. Jaynes summarized this scenario by noting, "… our greater knowledge resulting from the discovery of the [ability to distinguish between different atoms] leads us to assign a different entropy change to what may be in fact the identical physical process, down to the exact path of each atom. But there is nothing 'unphysical' about this, since that greater knowledge corresponds exactly to – because it is due to – our greater capabilities of control over the physical process." Nevertheless, I think this example shows the physical entropy of a substance is somehow related to "unphysical" uncertainty in the mind of an observer, and this implies the existence of an observer-dependent reality.
Richard Maurice Bucke wrote Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind in 1901, just before the great scientific leap forward that ushered in Einstein's theories of relativity and the quantum mechanical revolution. It describes the evolution of human consciousness from simple consciousness to self consciousness and culminating in Cosmic Consciousness, which Bucke himself briefly experienced. I consider this book a classic analysis of the human psyche, comparable to the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. To me, the salient point of the book is that human consciousness evolves in defined stages, with some members of homo sapiens being further along that path than others. The acquisition of Cosmic Consciousness is aptly described as "A new Heaven and a new Earth."
James H. Jeans published The Mysterious Universe in 1930. This remarkable book shows that Jeans and many physicists of that era were way, way ahead of their times. In fact in my opinion, Jeans was far ahead of most of today's physicists even though his book contained some minor inaccuracies. For example, Jeans anticipated fusion of four hydrogen atoms into a helium nucleus consisting of four protons and releasing an amount of energy equivalent to the decrease in mass, although the neutron and the strong force had yet not been discovered. He correctly noted that gravity is not a force, unlike physicists of today who mistakenly keep insisting it is. Although quantum theory was just in its infancy in 1930, Jeans could see its intimate connection with general relativity, unlike those who currently spout nonsense about a fundamental "incompatibility" between quantum mechanics and gravity. Like Plato and Aristotle, who are sometimes dismissed as ignoramuses by today's scientific standards, scientists of Jeans' era were much closer to ultimate truth than they are given credit for. The final chapter of The Mysterious Universe presents the concept of a universal mind, from which human consciousness emerges, and which brings the "physical" universe into existence as a great thought through an act of continuous creation. I believe this concept is superior to Wheeler's interpretation of retroactive creation by human consciousness.
Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality presents a strong case in support of the hypothesis that our world of tables and chairs is an illusion. Space, time, energy, and material objects are mere symbols or icons that allow us and other living creatures to respond appropriately to the underlying reality of the Cosmic Hologram, which would otherwise be entirely beyond our comprehension or ability to interact with, and make it impossible to survive. Imagine what it would be like if you had to manipulate ones and zeros in your laptop computer's memory instead of being able to simply click, drag and drop icons on the screen.
Thomas Nagel's 15-page essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? tackles René Descartes' dualism and David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness. His conclusion is that it's not possible to explain any conscious experience in terms of physicalism. The closer we get to treating a conscious experience objectively, the farther away we get from the experience itself.
Bernardo Kastrup is a true polymath with an amazing resume, who recently wrote a 176-page book Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell. This book explains idealism in a clear, concise and convincing manner, and. I highly recommend it for those who unfamiliar with idealism as well as those who are skeptical of idealism and need to be persuaded.
Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance - The Nature of Formative Creation presents an hypothesis that natural systems have a "collective memory" in the form of "morphic fields" that direct their behavior. In terms of living things, separate species have separate morphic fields that direct their evolution. I first encountered this book before I parted ways with the material-reductionist scientific paradigm, and so I considered it as utter nonsense. But now I understand Sheldrake's hypothesis with respect to the Universal Mind directing the entire course of evolution of the universe, and so it finally makes sense to me.
Zoë Schlanger's The Light Eaters is a charming book about the private lives of plants. I was blown away by the fact that plants retain memories, can learn and even take active measures to insure their own survival, as well as the survival of other nearby plants of the same species. Plants have their own way of thinking and acting, but they simply do it much at a much slower pace than we do. And no, this book isn't just another poorly-written New Age screed or science fiction book, but a well-researched volume with plenty of references. It seem the more we learn about life in general, the more it seems the purpose of life in general is to experience and to learn.
Robin Dunn's Beyond Perception is two books in one. The first book covers Absolute Idealism and the second book covers Leibniz's Monadology. They are among the best descriptions I've read on those topics.
Christian Sundberg is the author of A Walk in the Physical - Understanding the Human Experience Within the Larger Spiritual Context. Based partially on his own prebirth experience, his book explains that our time here on Earth while temporarily embodied as humans are only one facet of our total existence across many different reality systems. While we are very limited and constrained in this physical world, these limitations proved unique opportunities for advancement. This resonates with Leibniz's assertion that our physical world is "the best of possible worlds" but not from a hedonic perspective. Sundberg graciously made his book available to read for free from his website. For a scientific perspective on this topic, also refer to my article on this website below, entitled "From Boundless Source to Realized Worlds - A Metaphysical Foundation for Physics."
Laurent Notale is an astrophysicist who came up with an original idea: The universe scales itself internal according to ratios of distances and time instead of absolute values, giving the universe a fractal/logarithmic structure all the way down to the quantum scale. His most recent paper can be downloaded here: Scale relativity and fractal space-time
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Quotables
Ray Cummings (1887-1957) made this statement in his sci-fi book The Girl in the Golden Atom: “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” I think this is a perfect explanation of why the universe has time, which is its most indispensable feature.
John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) latched on to Cummings' statement and expanded it to explain why the universe has space. He said, “Space is what keeps everything from happening to me.” Wheeler is remembered for making succinct statements throughout his long career. This one stands out: "Omnibus ex nihil ducendis sufficit unum." (One principle suffices to obtain everything from nothing.) The quest for that one Principle became his lifelong obsession. Further down the page you will find my interpretation of one of his favorite remarks, "The Boundary of a Boundary is Zero."
“It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment–evoked answers; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.”
I have a high regard for Wheeler. Although some of his ideas seemed way off the charts, it turned out he was mostly right. He was wrong sometimes, but he was courageous enough to own up to his mistakes, even in front of classrooms.
Emmy Noether (1882-1935) explained why space has three dimensions: According to her theorem, there is a relationship between conservation of angular momentum and rotational symmetry. Angular momentum is the cross product of two vectors, and this cross product can only be represented properly in three dimensions, which is why a physical universe having rotational symmetry cannot have more or less than three dimensions of space. Time has a single dimension because it is asymmetric with a preferred direction. All of this is covered in detail in Appendix M of my essay “Order, Chaos and the End of Reductionism.”
Karl Popper (1902-1994) warned about taking shortcuts in order to advance pet theories: “For if we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.”
Yogi Berra (1925-2015) once said, “In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're different.” This serves to warn us about gedanken experiments used by theoretical physicists to prove a point, especially when those experiments could never be carried out in practice because they're logically flawed or they violate the laws of physics. Yogi led a secret life as a quantum physicist. Once he was giving Joe Garagiola directions to his house and he said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." He didn't tell Joe whether he should take the left fork, the right fork, or both of them; he left the choice entirely up to Joe, just as any true quantum physicist would. Yogi understood quantum uncertainty, saying, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" and, "The future ain't what it used to be." But remember Yogi said he didn't say half the things he said, so we can't be really sure if he said them.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) hit the nail on the head: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” Being certain is not the same as being right. (See Akhenaten, below.)
Akhenaten (1380-1335BCE): "The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance." Human progress in every field, especially science, comes through a few brave, doubting souls who question conventional wisdom that is set in stone.
Publius Ovidius Naso (4BCE-18CE): "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow."
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." But he also warned, “You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday.” The many times I have been wrong were valuable learning experiences. Truth is discovered along the path of discarded ideas.
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) told an audience, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” In addition to salaries, there are NSF research grants, book royalties, lecture fees, and awards and prizes that keep scientists from understanding things such as why there are no true black holes.
David Chalmers (1966 - ): “We won't have a theory of everything without a theory of consciousness.” According to one definition, a scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of a natural phenomenon, based on a large body of evidence gathered through observation and experimentation. Here's the problem: Consciousness exists within the observer and it is not some exterior object that can be observed, tested or explained scientifically.
Roger Penrose (1931 - ): "A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand. Whereas to know what the calculations are supposed to do, what the answers mean when it's finished, requires your understanding and that's complementary to computation. And the understanding aspect of it, is something that requires one's awareness, consciousness."
Thomas Nagel (1937 - ): "Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants." On the other hand, idealism is a complete theory that regards matter as derivative from consciousness. See the following quotables from Sir James Jeans, Erwin Schrödinger and Max Planck.
Sir James Jeans (1877-1946) was a renowned physicist who came to the conclusion that reality is pure mathematics conceived by a universal mind. “The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulae and the phenomena they describe, is not a step towards, but a step away from, reality; it is like making graven images of a spirit.” Making models is what engineers are supposed to do, not true scientists.
“Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter – not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts.” The last phrase shown in italics is almost always omitted in the literature, but it definitely appears in the second edition of The Mysterious Universe. It's possible Jeans added the phrase in the later edition to clarify his position that the creator and governor of the realm of matter is a Universal Mind, opposed to the minds of individual observers, as postulated by John Wheeler and others.
The "wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity" is reflected in statements by Schrödinger and Planck quoted below.
Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) was an idealist, as shown by this quote taken from My View of the World: "If finally we look back at that idea of Mach, we shall realize that it comes as near to the orthodox dogma of the Upanishads as it could possibly do without stating it expressis verbis. The external world and consciousness are one and the same thing."
Max Planck (1858-1947) made many quoteworthy statements in the course of a very long and productive life. Here are a few examples.
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." (It equals bit.)
"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world in the moment." (Science is too important to be left to the professionals.)
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (In short, science advances one funeral at a time.)
Claude Shannon (1916-2001), the Father of Information Theory, recalled his predicament of deciding what to name his invention: "My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'"
Information = Uncertainty = Entropy
Alan Watts (1915-1973) had the feeling of being carried along by the edge of the universe – the Now. He is quoted as saying, “I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
Isaac Newton (1643-1727) offered some advice about biting off more science than can be chewed. "What certainty can there be in a Philosophy which consists in as many Hypotheses as there are Phaenomena to be explained? To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) pondered the following question: "What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all." If scientists proceed under the assumption that the answer to this question is no, they will eventually arrive at Truth. Otherwise, they will flounder around embracing one flawed theory after the next and never discover the true Order of nature.
Einstein also had this to say about some of the practitioners of science of his time. "Many kinds of men devote themselves to Science, and not all for the sake of Science herself. There are some who come into her temple because it offers them the opportunity to display their particular talents. To this class of men science is a kind of sport in the practice of which they exult, just as an athlete exults in the exercise of his muscular prowess. There is another class of men who come into the temple to make an offering of their brain pulp in the hope of securing a profitable return. These men are scientists only by the chance of some circumstance which offered itself when making a choice of career. If the attending circumstance had been different they might have become politicians or captains of business."
Einstein believed that mathematics is the essential language of science. However, he warned that there always will be gaps between mathematics and reality: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
Here's another wonderful quote from Herr Einstein. "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." Today's "industrial science" has replaced true visionaries, like Einstein and John S. Bell, with left-brain thinkers with rational minds. Rational minds are very good at inventing new patterns, whereas the intuitive mind is much better at recognizing patterns that already exist. Even Einstein himself fell into the trap set by rational thinking, and wasted the latter part of his career trying to invent a theory that unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics when his sought-after unification was staring him right in the face (see my essay "The Universe on a Tee Shirt" ).
Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) understood that the second law of thermodynamics is not just some statistical "tendency" for entropy to increase, as is purported in many modern popular science books. Rather, it is the Law of Laws that underlies all of nature. Eddington said, "The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." Nothing can occur in a static universe without expansion, and entropy must increase in order for the universe to expand. In short, time = increasing entropy.
J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) was a British polymath, whose main contributions were in the fields of biology, genetics and statistics. I believe he was an amateur scientist at heart because he had an inherent mistrust of what is perceived through the senses, and thus he didn't pretend to have all the answers. In a collection of essays entitled "Possible Worlds" published in 1927 he wrote, "Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." There is some truth to this statement – the human mind cannot possibly comprehend the true nature of the universe as long as comprehension is limited to what can be perceived through the senses.
Leonard Susskind (1940- ) would sometimes start off his lectures saying, "I don't care if you agree with what I say. I only want you to remember that I said it." Then he would say a whole bunch of things that were vaguely mad, as the British science writer Jim Baggott would later recall. I didn't agree with a lot of things Professor Susskind said either, especially when he talked about entangled black holes, wormholes, and other sci-fi fantasies, which were almost always included in his talks. But I admired the fact that he had confidence his ideas would ultimately be proven to be true, even if nobody else believed they would, and he was willing to go out on a limb to promote them. I'm like that too, knowing that very few of my ideas promoted on this site will be believed until after I'm long gone from the Earth.
An Anonymous Physics Professor: "I've always had a sense of guilt over flunking students for not knowing what was later proven to be false." I wonder how many students were flunked for not knowing string theory or the standard cosmological model?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716): "Every person or substance is like a small world expressing the large world." Leibniz seems to be describing a holographic, fractal universe, similar to the expression "as above, so below," where the hologram (above) is reflected in all of the parts of the holographic image (below) and vice versa. If the universe really is holographic, then everything should have a dual nature – a localized, four-dimensional holographic image along with a non-local hologram. Here's a quote from Leibniz's On The Ultimate Origin of Things: "From these considerations it is now wonderfully evident how a certain divine mathematics or metaphysical mechanics is employed in the very origination of things ." It seems Leibniz anticipated quantum mechanics would be employed in the very origination of things two centuries into his future. A dimensionless quantum reality expressed through relativistic, dimensional phenomena. Interestingly, the human brain is divided into a left hemisphere, which relates to an individual identity, separated from other identities by space and time, and a right hemisphere, more in tune with a holistic, universal, group identity. It seems the two hemispheres are often at odds with each other, resulting in much human suffering. I think we may find "enlightenment" through introspection, integrating two minds into a harmonious One: "Let he who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be troubled. After he is troubled, he will be astonished, and he will reign over All." - Logon 2, The Gospel of Thomas.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983): “We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.” As a practicing engineer, I was absolutely certain the materialist-reductionist-empiricist approach could solve all scientific riddles. My absolute certainty about this eroded significantly as I started to understand those riddles.
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915): "The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge." Those engaged in the scientific quest can never be 100% certain about prevailing theories and must continuously put them to the test. To the perpetually ignorant masses, who never question their own opinions, the questioning ethos of the scientific method shows a weakness instead of its abiding strength.
Richard Feynman (1918-1988): "I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." Leaving a hard question unanswered is always preferable to jumping to a conclusion based on an appeal to ignorance, which almost always leads to the wrong answer. Here's another Feynman quote: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't," Making this statement was an admission he didn't understand quantum mechanics because logically he either didn't understand quantum mechanics or he thought he did. But if he thought he did, then he didn't. But whether Feynman understood it or he didn't, he still made major contributions to it.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642): "In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man." Galileo had plenty of experience with opinions of authorities (the Roman Church) and he himself had much more than just a spark of reason.
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005): "Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why." Some people are of the opinion that quantum mechanics is weird, and that it is therefore incompatible with classical physics. What they don't realize is that quantum weirdness is the reason why classical physics works.
Yoko Ono (1933 - ): "A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality." This is a pretty good description of Idealism.
Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) : “Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.” There are certain things humans can figure out that no machine (AI) can do based on an algorithm, regardless of how large, complex or "intelligent" the algorithm may be. You can follow This Link for more on this topic. Also, see the section entitled "Gödel's Universe" further below on this website. He also said, "I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth," meaning that there are a priori truths that are completely inaccessible through scientific observation. For example, we see ourselves as being in the center of an expanding Euclidean sphere looking outward toward the edge instead being on the edge of an expanding hyperbolic sphere looking inward toward the center. This is the reason why cosmology is such a mess: It is because cosmologists base their models of the universe on what they see instead of what actually is.
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976): "Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think." Since the geometry of the universe is hyperbolic instead of Euclidean, there is no possibility that we can ever form a mental image of what it actually is. The following statement is attributed to Heisenberg, although it is less certain: "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you." The first gulp is the paradigm of the universe as the Great Machine, but at the bottom of the glass is quantum reality, with Consciousness serving as the substrate of being, which could be represented as a deity, if that is your preference.
Erik Verlinde (1962 - ): “Spacetime and gravity are emergent phenomena. They arise from the entropic forces associated with the information content of microscopic degrees of freedom.” Amen. This quotation echoes one from John Wheeler, noted above. Verlinde inspired me to reevaluate my earlier belief in material reductionism and embrace Shannon entropy as the foundation of reality.
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Misquotations
I really get annoyed when famous scientists are misquoted by those who want to borrow someone else's reputations to push their own agendas. Einstein is often misquoted as objecting to quantum mechanics on the grounds that it invokes "spooky action at a distance." Einstein never uttered those words. He wrote a letter to Max Born in 1947 where he said physics should represent reality in time and space, free from spukhafte Fernwirkung, which is properly translated from German into English as "spooky long-range effect." An effect is not the same as an action. As a matter of fact, long-range quantum effects, not actions, must be instantaneous (spooky) in order to prevent someone from using them to send faster-than-light messages (see my essay "It from Bit" Pp 12-13).
Physicists who are proponents of entangled black holes, time tunnels, wormholes, and other sci-fi fantasies are fond of calling them "Einstein-Rosen bridges," fraudulently suggesting that Einstein endorsed such nonsense. The source of this fanciful term was a paper written in 1935 entitled, "The Particle Problem in the General Theory of Relativity," where Einstein and Nathan Rosen attempted to equate the known elementary particles (there were only four of them at the time) with tiny black holes as defined by the exterior Schwarzschild metric. They realized this produces two singularities at r=0 and r=rs, but those singularities could be eliminated with a clever mathematical trick of the tail known as a change of variable. Substituting u2 = r – 2m into the Schwarzschild metric rendered the solution smoothly analytical over the range -∞ < u <∞. This produced two congruent sheets; one with u<0 and one with u>0, which some modern physicists completely misrepresent as as being two separate regions of the universe (or possibly two separate universes) connected through a wormhole, aka an Einstein-Rosen bridge. It is important to note that u is not even a physical dimension; it's the square root of a distance, which is physically meaningless. (One might ask: What is the distance of the square root of one meter?) Furthermore, if those physicists had bothered to read the Einstein-Rosen paper, they would find out that they explicitly warned against mistaking u<0 and u>0 for two different regions of space: "If we consider once more the solution from the standpoint of the information we have acquired from the Schwarzschild solution, we see that there also the two congruent halves of the space for x1<0 and x1>0 can be interpreted as two sheets each corresponding to the same physical space [emphasis mine]." It should also be noted that Einstein-Rosen placed the term "bridge" in quotes, referring to the particle being modeled and not a wormhole.
The following misquote is attributed to Erwin Schrödinger. "The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings." Unfortunately, he never said it. The giveaway is the phrase "phasing within all beings" which is gobbledygook. Nobody has provided a source for that quote, which first appeared on the Internet in 2016, although Schrödinger died in 1961. Apparently, somebody who believed in a universal mind simply fabricated this quote by the famous physicist in order to validate their belief. On the other hand, those who don't believe in a universal mind omit the part of a statement by James Jeans where he strongly suggests a universal mind is the creator and governor of the realm of matter. By the way, when I asked the AI app ChatGPT where this statement came from, it attributed it to Hungarian philosopher Ervin László.
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The Great Scientific Debate
