Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Cream for your Coffee

[The following paragraph has just been added to our essay, "A New Proof of the Existence of Coffee-Cups".]


Having at length satisfied ourselves as to the reality, or at least reliability, of coffee-cups, would should not  on that account sink back into an attitude of Moorean complacency (“I’m all right, Jack;  I’ve got hands”).  For our commitment to these  suggests yet further commitments, which we had not realized were there to assess.  Such as :  Realism with regard to quantum state vectors.

The question of ‘reality’ must be addressed in quantum mechanics -- especially if you takes the view that the quantum formalism applies universally to the whole of physics -- for then, if there is no quantum reality, there can be no reality at any level.
-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 508

And:

The question of the objective existence of the objects of mathematics … is an exact replica of the question of the objective existence of the outer world.
-- Kurt Gödel, “What is Cantor’s continuum problem?”, in American Mathematical Monthly, 1947.


A complex Schrödinger equation,
after the Collapse of the Wave Packet


In for a penny, in for a pound.

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