ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Monte Davis]

> Found this thing:
> 
> 
> Photons express themselves in space, but have no sense of 
> time relative to themselves...
> http://www.dpedtech.com/OP13.pdf

Umm... Even though I indulged in a bit of the same reflexivity at the end of
the Maxwell piece, take Douglass White ( http://www.dpedtech.com/ )with a
*lot* of salt. His physics _per se_ is legit, but he's determined to
persuade us that it leads to the same conclusions as the Tarot, Egyptian
occultism, etc...

Understand that although discussions of both relativity and quantum
mechanics involve a lot of talk about the observer ("what would you see if
you rode along with a light wave" and so on), much of that is for
pedagogical purposes... with the drawback that beginners can come to believe
they're all about altered perceptions, "the speeding spaceship or the light
going through two slits would *look to you* as if..."

It's important to understand that every bit of special relativity can be
expressed purely in terms of what happens to clocks and meter sticks, with
no one along for the ride. Every bit of quantum mechanics can be expressed
as instrument readings. Every time they have been tested, they've come
through with quantitative precision -- in the case of quantum
electrodynamics, to twelve decimal places. Their weird phenomena "really
happen" in the everyday sense that they can be replicated anywhere, any
time, by anyone (whether skeptical or credulous, Grand Cohen or bored
undergraduate following a lab manual), recorded and played back, etc. This
is as far as can be from Magick, in which the cool stuff always seems to
depend on a properly enlightened practitioner with the right attitude,
operating at midnight in the dark of the moon with just the right kind of
candles burning... and, of course, no skeptics around to interfere with the
vibrational aura... 

Yes, at their outer reaches relativity and quantum mechanics *do* raise
fascinating questions about consciousness -- how could it be otherwise when
they challenge our Kantian categories, the very deeply ingrained conceptions
of space, time, and causality? But it takes a lot of humility and care to
open the mind that far without your brains falling out.

There's a remark that comes up occasionally in fundamental physics (I don't
know the original form or the source): 

We're trying to understand extravagantly large and small, rapid and slow,
far-away and long-ago phenomena with nervous systems and language that
evolved to locate the ripe fruit and chase the hyenas away from the freshest
carrion.

So patience and caution are indicated.