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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (40292)	6/13/1999 12:41:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

The spectrophotometer, the thermometer, the balance, and all the other instruments you place your faith in were designed and made by human beings, whose imperfections are in the imperfections of the instruments. No two instruments will ever measure a temperature precisely the same. No two instruments measuring a block of steel will come up with exactly the same length or the same weight. All measurments of non-discrete phenomenon are approximatations. All claims of replicability are approximations. But that wasn't the point I was making. Rather, I was pointing to the studies, which I can't cite here, that the very presence of the observer changes the results. This is clear in the social sciences -- have a black man and a white woman ask the same questions of the same people and they will get different answers. But it is also true in the "hard" sciences. If I weigh more than you do, then by my mere presence I exert more gravitational pull on the balance than you do. If I stand closer to the light I am measuring than you do, more of the rays are reflected off my body than were reflected off yours, changing -- minutely but in some degree -- the value of the light being measured. The presence of my body in the same room as the object I am taking the temperature of will change the temperature of that body. There is and can be no such thing as a truly invisible observer. Every observer changes the experiment in some way. No experiment is truly replicable. You will quickly say, of course, that these changes are all within the limits of accuracy of the exeriment. And I will say, well, then, an ant is the same size as an elephant if you merely use the correct limits of accuracy. Certainly science is accurate enough to create televisions, telephones, computers that sometimes work (and sometimes, for inexplicable reasons, don't), etc. But as we all know, every computer, however much we want it to be identical with all other computers of that make and model, is different. There is no true replicability in the real world any more than in the laboratory.

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (40292)	6/13/1999 2:18:00 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

"Now if you are talking about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle," I was a little disappointed that nobody got a chuckle out of - #reply-10087957 .. was it a little too obscure maybe .. it's the only nuclear physics joke i can remember ... nice and short ... they say it is deeply carved in the wall of a men's room in Cern ... and yes, the [mis]spelling was intentional, the other H fit the specific case well imho. I believe in what i see demonstrated, and while realising well that my vision and understanding is severely limited, i figure that belief [or worse, faith] in anything specific beyond that is absurd. Which is your point, but you say it better ...... cheers