User:Sparkyscience/sandbox
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| “ | We seek reality, but what is reality? The physiologists tell us that organisms are formed of cells; the chemists add that cells themselves are formed of atoms. Does this mean that these atoms or these cells constitute reality, or rather the sole reality? The way in which these cells are arranged and from which results the unity of the individual, is not it also a reality much more interesting than that of the isolated elements, and should a naturalist who had never studied the elephant except by means of the microscope think himself sufficiently acquainted with that animal? | ” |
| — Poincaré, Henri (1905). "Intuition and Logic in Mathematics". La Valeur de la Science. Paris: Flammarion. | ||
| “ | Now imagine a ship, guided by radar on an automatic pilot. The guidance does not depend on the intensity of the wave. It depends only on the form, which carries, we may say carries information. The word information has the two words ‘in’ and ‘form’. To put form in...The radio wave is not pushing the ship around mechanically. The ship is moving under its own energy and responding with the form. The radio wave is giving shape and form to its motion.
This goes back to an old idea of Aristotle who was saying that there can be a formative cause as well. Now this is very common, we have it not only in radio. The computer has a form which is carried out in the process of .. machinery. You can have DNA, the form of the DNA determines, is carried to the RNA and determines the making of proteins. It is in all human experience. People generally don’t push and pull each other around, except when they are violent. They depend on the sound of waves to communicate, people move around because of that. The point is that this is the most common form of experience and the mechanic business of pushing and pulling is more limited, but our experiences of the last few centuries, has us focused on that as the main point. And saying we can always explain the other things through that. But I am saying maybe form is fundamental and that the electron responds with this form. That explains not only the interference, it explains that the electron acts like a wave, it explains this non local business and so on. It explains the superconductivity as the electrons move by the common pool of information, just as the ballet dancers do, and so on. So that means we have quite a different principle of explanation because this wave function which operates through form is closer to life and mind you see. The basic quality of mind, is that it responds to form and not to substance. And therefore the electron has a mindlike quality though it may not be conscious, almost certain not consciousness as we know. Consciousness might depend on a much higher organisation of this mindlike quality. So we could say that mindlike fields could arise, which we don’t know, in the human being, in life and animals. Interviewer: So what you are saying is that the physical universe is really more about information than about substance? Well, I’m saying it is both. But information contributes fundamentally to the qualities of substance. |
” |
| — David Bohm | ||
| “ | What I mean by 'thought' is the whole thing — thought, 'felt', the body, the whole society sharing thoughts — it's all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it's all one process; somebody else's thought becomes my thought, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thought, your thought, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings. I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent — not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence. A corporation is organized as a system — it has this department, that department, that department... they don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.
Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society — as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that system began. |
” |
| — David Bohm | ||
Axions
In 2008 Shoucheng Zhang and his colleagues showed that the equations that arise in axion physics are the same as those that describe the electromagnetic behaviour of a recently discovered class of materials known, collectively, as topological insulators.
References
- Wilczek, F. (2009). "Journal club". Nature. 458 (7235): 129. Bibcode:2009Natur.458..129W. doi:10.1038/458129e. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 19279586.
- Franz, M. (2008). "High-energy physics in a new guise". Physics. 1: 36. Bibcode:2008PhyOJ...1...36F. doi:10.1103/Physics.1.36. ISSN 1943-2879.
- Qi, X.-L.; Hughes, T. L.; Zhang, S.-C. (2008). "Topological field theory of time-reversal invariant insulators" (PDF). Physical Review B. 78 (19): 195424. arXiv:0802.3537v1. Bibcode:2008PhRvB..78s5424Q. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.78.195424. ISSN 1098-0121.
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