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From: rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re: Help
Message-ID: <410@opus.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Apr-84 14:01:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: opus.410
Posted: Thu Apr 26 14:01:58 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 30-Apr-84 05:55:57 EDT
References: <7341@decwrl.UUCP>
Organization: NBI, Boulder
Lines: 36

<mumblegrumblemuttermutter...>
 >You guys are doing great work.  More bombs please...
Hmmm, talk about opening a still-raw wound...better go ask that one in
net.politics.  Nukie bombs are the reward we all got when Einstein made the
mistake of trusting a politician...

 >AND HOWEVER FAR YOU TRACED THE STORY BACK YOU WOULD NEVER FIND THE LAWS OF
 >NATURE CAUSING ANYTHING. (italics mine)
 >
 >The dazzlingly obvious conclusion now arose in my mind: IN THE WHOLE HISTORY
 >OF THE UNIVERSE THE LAWS OF NATURE HAVE NEVER PRODUCED A SINGLE EVENT...
 >  . . . the source of events must be sought elsewhere.
You got it!  If by "laws" you mean the body of postulates and the theory
derived from postulates, etc., you're right - they constitute an abstract
model.  Abstractions have a hard time influencing reality.  (No, wait, if a
tree falls in the forest because it was cut to make pulp to print a physics
text, you might say that the laws of nature were responsible.:-)  But
seriously (maybe:-), "...the laws of nature causing anything..." is
grammatically correct but not meaningful, so it's impossible to say yes or
no (I know, I should say it isn't imparseable but there's some antics with
the semantics).

 >The smallest event, then, leads us back to a mystery which lies outside
 >natural science.  
Do you mean to posit unnatural science?  Not on my terminal, you won't!
Actually, you get to trace everything back to the situation of the
singularity at the big bang - at which time everything was so weird that
none of the physics-as-we-know-it works right anyway.  There's a lot of
hypothesizing about what happened right at the start, but thus far NSF
hasn't seemed willing to fund the experiments to find out.

At this point, it seems like we ought to jump over to either net.origins or
net.philosophy.
-- 
...Cerebus for dictator!				Dick Dunn
{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd				(303) 444-5710 x3086