also hi there

[ashmason]

HELLO!
im a friend of monty mike, this site's awsome.
cannot wait till i understand more of it

[haselhurst]

Hello Ashmason,

Thanks for the 'awesome' compliment. Hope you still feel that way in another year!
And I suppose you are going to be another 'lurker' like your friend. Well I hope that you read and think a bit (a lot) about the wave structure of matter, spend some time looking at the world around you from this (most simple) foundation. I find it pretty sensible, and I think it is very important. But we are creatures of habit, in both our thoughts and actions, so it will be interesting to hear your further thoughts over time.
Cheers,
Geoff

A few nice quotes for you (since I have just uploaded 2,500 images to forum image directory that Karene has made over past 18 months and I wanted to test them, and I like your enthusiasm!).

Oddly, things have now reached such a state that even among men of intelligence philosophy means something fantastical and vain, without value or usefulness, both in opinion and practice. The cause lies in chop-logic which has captured all the approaches. It is a great mistake to portray Philosophy with a haughty, frowning, terrifying face, or as inaccessible to the young. Whoever clapped that wan and frightening mask to her face! There is nothing more lovely, more happy and gay - I almost said more amorously playful. What she preaches is all feast and fun. A sad and gloomy mien shows you have mistaken her address. (de Montaigne)

To begin with our knowledge grows in spots. ..What you first gain, ... is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you line up your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instill, and to modify to some slight degree their mass. ..Your mind in such processes is strained, and sometimes painfully so, between its older beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along. (William James, Pragmatism)


The notion that all these fragments is separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.
(David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)

[ashmason]

thanks for the warm welcome,
ive just watced the videos of milo wolff discussing WSM and his interesting life, makes me want to read more into the subject, although its a little complicated to get my young head around.

http://www.physics-philosophy-metaphysics.com/forum/about98.html (Milo Wolff video interview)

[monty mike]

Great quotes. I really like the first one, the merge of science and philosophy is refreshing.

[haselhurst]

The two 'lurkers' are at our forum together I see! Good on ya! and I'm glad that you like the quotes. Philosophy is fantastic if you read the original minds, the great philosophers of history.
But I suspect that if you studied philosophy academically, then you would find much of it boring, confusing, abstract, absurd, ...

As Nietzsche wrote;

THE TEACHER AS A NECESSARY EVIL. Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply. It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly. (Nietzsche, 1880)





And one of the reasons why Einstein was so good is that he also understood philosophy and metaphysics, as well as physics.
I just love Einstein, he was very close to the truth by uniting matter and space (rejecting 'particles'). He just did it in terms of representing matter as continuous spherical fields in space-time (which doesn't explain discrete aspects of reality found in Quantum Theory), rather than spherical waves in continuous Space, where standing wave interactions explain QTs discrete light quanta / 'photons'. (See pages on Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Physics - links to them will be at the top of this page / forum by the end of today as I finish off changes to forum).


Einstein's comments on the Philosophy of Physics / Science are worth reading a number of times, as is all his work.
Cheers,
Geoff

"I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth." (Albert Einstein to Robert A. Thornton, 7 December 1944, EA 61-574)


"How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. ... Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as 'necessities of thought,' 'a priori givens,' etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long common place concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken." (Albert Einstein. 'Ernst Mach.' Physikalische Zeitschrift 17 (1916): 101, 102 - A memorial notice for the philosopher, Ernst Mach.)