fredrik

Boltzmann distribution is statistical distribution of energies. Temperature just represents the statistical average energy of the molecules in a sample. Boltzmann distribution considers how large % of the population that has other energies, lower or higer. Here are a couple of related links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell-Boltzmann_distribution http://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/basicrates/introduction.html#top /Fredrik

Since I've been trying to understand the behaviour of a yeast cells in making beer the last 3 years... I've ran into the "mystery" of life.. and I've found that the answer to the mystery of things is not in biochemistry, it is not chemistry, it is not physics... it's something more "general"... something that transcends all fields... and is commong to origin of life, and "intelligent" life and probably also to the origin of the cosmic scale universe. I don't think they are just analogous in a popular sense... I think the reason for this increase in intelligence is a common thing... I don't think we will ever grasp.. but there is something even better than grasp - growth of understanding. There is an apparently very clever guy called John Sowa who has written a line that I find both clever and amusing because philosophers are often claimed to be methaphysical. "For scientists, the discovery of the laws of nature is the ultimate goal of their research; but for many philosophers, the concept of law is an embarrassing metaphysical notion." -- John Sowa, http://www.jfsowa.com/ where you may find food for thought. Read the first part of his ontology, and you will get what I was trying to say about causal. /Fredrik

> making sure the approach is completely valid can not be understated in my view. That should be overstatated. /Fredrik

> After learning a thing or two about "probability" on my first thread, I wanted to ask about "uncertainty". Hey Membrain, since you're a "philosopher" I'll want to add that my previous comments is pretty much a kind of standard answer, but if we are to find a new grand formalism, I think we need to go deeper, so nothing is carved in stone, which is important to keep in mind. Don't let my comment put constraints on your thinking. My philosophy is that my questions will guide me to the answers. That's why I prefer to start out from very basic philosophical ground and start analysing what the heck I am really asking. The answer will never make more sense than the question. The concepts of causality isn't all that obvious that one may think, yet the human mind is kind of constructed to look for causal explanations. Already here we have a broken symmetry. In a certain sense our theorizing is an attempt in imposing causality in the underlying facts. I'd say that in a certain basic approach, causality is an invention to explain a set of facts. A fact is a fact without internal causal rules. I think that when one works out this approach, our plain way of looking for an answer does put several symmetries on the systems from step 1. This is sort of how I picture all the symmetries in physics. What I am still struggling with is the exact nature of this. I am trying to understand if the mathematical formalism of the wavefunction is the most natuarl approach. But I think I am onto the key. Once I have established this (convinced myself of it's legitimacy, I tihnk alot of things will pop out all on their own as I break the given symmetries. And if I am right the classical limit of GR is probably reached. I already did some prefiddling. But since I use the power of the legitimacy of each step in forcing constrains upon the model, the importance of making sure the approach is completely valid can not be understated in my view. An alternative approach is to not bother about this, but rather just consider empirical evidence and instead try to "invent" patterns or laws to explain it. The obvious question then is, what do you have for guidance in choosing the candidates? Randomization works, but is highly inefficient. Some people tend to rely on consistent mathematical models, resembling those previously known, and see if some of them happen to fit. The problem with my approach is that it may be too general, and it may give rise to many things not yet seen. So I have to figure out how to view it. I am currently considering a few different approaces where the key isn't the final model, but rather a consistent model of how to evolve the model as new, to principle, arbitrary observations are made. And most probalby (my feelin), only a few evolutions are needed to explain the typica forces we already know. But this is my task to find out... I may be be wrong. But the idea I have is pretty much clear. This is just my philosophy and people may consider it baloney, and to me this is not absolute, there are several ways to skin a cat, but I think this is an efficient way for me. To sort of define my internal guide, then I just follow it and see where it takes me. Simple and not very cpu consuming either /Fredrik

I assume you want an understanding without using the abstract formalism. So in the general case, the intrinsic uncertainties means that some variables of the system can not be known precisely at the same time, because they have a relation. There are different ways of viewing it, but here is one way to see ordinary QM. First of all what IS time, and what IS energy? Wouldn't it be good to have a more proper definition of energy? In QM, time coordinate and energy can not be known simultaneously because, the energy of the of the system is in fact defined in terms of the time evolution of the system. The energy states is simply taken to be the "harmonics" of the system in time so to speak. And each harmonics (single energy) is timeless. Same for momentum which is the defined in the systems space evolution, so you can say that space changes generates/craves the momenum, and time evolution generates/craves energy. I'm not sure what math tools you are used to, but are you aware of fourier analysis? If so, that's a mathematical analogy where you can transform information between the time domain and the frequency domain. Uncertainty in space in relation to knowledge of momenum is one uncertainty, but it's a special case. Another implication is the the laws of energy an momentum conservation are only mean values in QM. For example the law of energy conservation is allowed to be broken during a short instant of time due to the uncertainty between time and energy. This is how "tunneling" can occure. A particle that classical has too little energy to penetrate a barrier, can do so in QM by exploiting the uncertainty. /Fredrik

Yes that's true. The conservation of probability that is considered important requires that the electron must not dissappear. But this is in basic QM. In the generalizaiton with particle-antiparticle interactions there may be fluctuations to this. But yes, "summing over all possibilities" you are always 100% right so to speak. That is sort of by construction. /Fredrik

The electron as an elementary partle has a fixed intrinsic spin magnitude, it's only the direction of the spin that varies, since the spin is really a vector quantity. In the hydrogen atom there are several quantum numbers. One quantum numbers for the radial "shell", and two angular orientation quantum numbers, and one for the spin orientation. These first three quantum numbers give rise to the various orbital shapes/clouds. The impact of the electron spin is called the fine structure as it's notice on close up that the spectral lines are splitted. The split is exaplained by the electron spin and the difference in energy. There is only one wave function. One observer and one wavefunction for his observations. The ideas is that the wave function represents the total information the observer has of the system. But of course the system may have different, not very interacting parts, so one part of the system may "collapse" while another part does not. So in a sense you are still right in your thinking except the custom is to talk about a single wavefunction. So it depends on what kind of measurement you do. A measurement is usually targeted to a particular property. In QM a measurement is represented by operators which basically perform a mathematical operation on the wavefunction. Operators correspond to different observables, and compatible or so called commuting observables can be determined with certainty at the same time. Non-commuting means that if you first measure for A, then for B, you get a different result than if you to B first and then A. It's when two observables (and observable variable) do not "commute" that you get into the HUP between those two observables. However two compatible variables can be known at the same time. For example, there is no uncertainty between the momenta in the different space dimensions. So it's possible to know the "x position" exactly at the same time as "y momentum". /Fredrik

But then the second point was that this does not make sense for an electron to explain it's magnetic moment. Which really give new meaning to your question what is spin, or what is magnetism or what is an electron? /Fredrik

Like I tried to say in simple, spin is intrinsic rotation, as opposed to orbital motion. But other than that I forgot to add (which is a key) in experiments and atom talk is that the point is that in classical electromagnetic theory a "spinning charge" generates a magnetic field who interacts with the rest of the EM field, and thus the spin up or down have different energies as relative to the positive charge of the atom nucleus. So the fact that the electron is charged, and spins, it behaves as a little dipole magnet. So does the nucles - relative to the electrons orbit. /Fredrik

Classically, spin is pretty much what it sounds like. Spin or rotation is the same thing. For example the earth has as an instrinsic rotation around it's own axis, yielding day and night. The earth orbiting the sun OTOH generates a year. You could say that the earth has as "spin". Spinning a massive body, means we have mass motion and thus energy. Just like a mass in constant motion has a momentum and kinetic energy, a spinning massive body has a so called angular momentum and also a kinetic energy of rotation. In quantum mechanics, when you quantize spin, it takes on a discrete set of values (called "eigenvalues" of the spinoperator), just like a "particle in a box" takes on discrete momemtum values. As is known to the word at least from chemistry, an electron has two spin states, up or down. And it's kind of the flip of the other, corresponding to the direction of rotation. In the wave picture duality a standing "wave" clearly has to match in wavelenght to it's resonance. Otherwise it's not a standing wave. At first, it seems spin ½ particles can exists in odd resonances. If you picture yourself the electron as a classical rigid body and try to solve the quantum equations, you cannot wrap your head around these half integer spins. This suggest that the electron is really kind of a weird thing. So the angular momentum, or spin is quantized, but some particles (like the electron) appears to be able to possess strange values. That's a simple explanation without going into all the math. need to go for now... /Fredrik

Btw, this is sort of touches the concept called "supersymmetry". What I personally don't like is that often these things are treated in a matter that really abstract out the link to the previous step. To speak for myself who is going the philosophical route, the concept of "supersymmetry" is also intimately related to the time evolution and time reversal. You unavoidably step into this when working you are trying to work out implications of starting points. What bugged me beyond belief as as student was that the attitude was to let's step "over it", rather than "into it", and resolve it. This is one of the things I'm goint to revise in detail as soon as I get some spare time. /Fredrik

Another conjugate variables are also angular momentum, or spin vs the "rotational angle" if you use polar or spherical coordinates. The odd part becomes half integer spin of fermions, because there is no way of understanding half integer sping in terms of classical rigid body systems. This is one of the reasons, the rigid body concept is inconsistent with the electron. When you try to derive the dirac equaton the half integer spin can be created from rotations in complex spacetime of an initially bosonic field. So there seems to be different interpretations, depending on what peculiarities ones finds least annoying. /Fredrik

I guess with the notion that the electrons exists within the atom you mean that the electron is bound to the atom, which is energy dependent. Given sufficient energy, the atom will ionize, and one would not longer say that the electrons are bound to the atom. So if you know the energy with certainty to forbid any electron beeing ionized it will stay bound. But if unsure there may be a probabiltiy seeing an excitation. Also what is the size of the atom? Unlike the classical orbit model, the "electron clouds" of the atom while defined, really smear out to infinity. So there is a finite, but incredibly small probability to find those electrons pretty much anywhere at an arbitrary (but finite) distance, outside of the classical atom. It's just that the probability quickly gets so small that we are unlikely to ever observe such unlikely event, like detecting the electron from an atom in the lab while beeing on the loo. And if we did we are unlikely to be able to reproduce it to reach any significant experimental confidence level in a human lifetime. So if you think that we are sure that the electron is never found without som finite radius r, I think this is not quite true because of the above. Another problem is that elementary particles are by their concept industinguishable. Since electrons can come from all over the place, we can not with absolute certainty trace the origin of the electron and distinguish it from other nearby electrons, only consider what is the most likely source of it. And in a controlled experiment the likely source by order of magnitudes in probability outcompetes other options. For practical purposes ignoring overley utterly unlikely evens works great, but from the philosophical point of view, I wouldn't ignore it. /Fredrik

Kygron, I am not sure if I got your exact point, but while I guess your ideas are expressed in an informal manner (which is sometimes necessary, because of lack of formalism - so it is not bad per see), some of the essence of your thinking as perceived by me are sort of all in line with normal quantum field theory. If I borrow your word of un-abstraction. To really simplify, one could see a repeating philosophy in history to guided by consistency, un-abstract to resolve the inconsistency. And typically this un-abstraction defines the existence of a new concept. This is repeated until all inconsistencies are solved. The worst thing that can happen is that you get stuck in a never ending loop, which creates a sequence of an infinite amount of these un-abstractions until reaching consistency. These tricks has been used in the past. In GR as well as QED. The consistency requirements of GR are to require invariance under so called diffeomorphisms. QED can be though to be implied by requiring local gague invariance of the phase in the complex phase. This is beautiful techniques. These consistency requirements often can be motivated on philosophical grounds. So there should IMO be no need to consider them all as ad hoc requirements if you use a somewhat combined axiomatic approach guided by human philosophy. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's the best we've got at times. he technique can be powerful but must be used with care. The idea that particles are self-contained energy fields of some kind is loosely speaking well in line with commo thinking. So I think your thinking is sound. The problem me be how to find sensible formalism, that is sensible and does introduce ad hoc stuff. I will try to review things again myself, and reproduce some of the historic derivations to start with, but it remains a fact that so far physicists has not been able to resolve all consistencies. Wether it's because we are missing something even more fundamental or because we have applied the techniques wrong remains to find out. Also I sure haven't bothered reviewing every single attempt that has been done in the past either. Considering the amount of research that has been done to resolve this, you can easily waste a lifetime to just review the stuff. I have no intention to do that. I'll rely on my philosophical standards and ignore something that has clearly started off wrong. String theory included. There may be an advantage to keep your brain clean from unsound logical patterns, at the price of some ignorance perhaps /Fedrik

I understand that you are out for some kind of philosophical understanding, and I'd say there there are probably *several* equivalent ways to view this. a) Loosely speaking, it is on one hand clear that our measurement is a key, but it the uncertainty is not due to our ignorance to device a better more accurate measurement. It has do with with that there is a deeper connection between, measurement/interaction, and reality. An interaction/measurement by definition changes reality. Each measurement "pokes" the reality a bit. I'm going to come up with a really silly analogy, so don't taken it litteraly but maybe it explains part of my point: Suppose there is (as per some speculations) at some very instant a very tasty cookie somewhere in the universe. You (choose) ask yourself two questions 1) *Is* there really here a cookie here Now? or is the cookie an illusion? 2) Is the cookie really *tasty*? How to find out? To be absolutely confident about (2) you may need to eat the cookie, but once you eat the cookie it doesn't exist anymore, or more specifically you loose track of when it existed, because of the time it takes to eat it. So maybe you think you could eat part of the cookie? But then, perhaps the other half of the cookie doesn't taste as well? b) Quantum mechanics suggest instrinsic uncertainties between various variables, and they are called conjugates variables. Exaples are momentum and position energy and time It means you can not with 100% certainty know both momentum and position at the same time. Same goes with energy and time. I the axiomatic approach to QM, this can be viewed simply as a consequence of how the time and momemtum measurements are *defined* c) Another way to try to "understand", is that if we consider a particle to have a wave-particle duality, wether a standing wave or a wave packet (doesn't matter), we know from fourier analysis, that a wave propagation in can be written as a superposition of harmonics. An implications it that it is impossible to for example have a localised pulse, that consists of only once frequency. A pulse requires a distribution of various frequencies to get it's shape. In quantum mechanics and in particular the wave particle duality, the frequency or wavelenght of the wave is associate with momentum. Meaning that in order for a particle to be well localized in space (be a finely contained wave packet), this wave packet is made up from many many different momenta. The fourier transform decomposes an arbitrary wave packet into it's momemum components. So the conjugate variables are By the same token, a system with a well defined energy has an uncertainty in time, because the energy components build up the time position just like harmonics build up a wave packet. I'm not sure if it was the answer you were looking for, but it's an attempt to explain how come the uncertainty is not because of plain ignorance, but rather the definition of variables. Or put another way, some variable just aren't independent, and that's how determining one, does affect that other one, or at least our knowledge of the other one, and there is btw, no difference in this case. Because there is no other way to know that to interact. /Fredrik

> "A good scientist is never wrong. He or she is only incomplete. There are just dimensions to the problem that you don't know about." I used to have a similar "philosophy", but I have found that trick no longer works for me. Dunno, but it's like, "I know what I know, and when I don't know I declare my ignorance.". So using transformations one can also transform wrong into incomplete, and thus still be right But I came to kill this rescue myself because this strategy seem to suggest that there is a finite amount of knowledge, and we acquire it bit by bit. I am not sure that is in line with my mind. I think we are in continous motion and growth, and I think I am constantly wrong.. but still learning. Weird, but each time I find an answer, my new insight generates a follow up since my first answer wasn't consistent. I just can't leave it simple. Symmetries really DO break spontaneosly don't they? I think that I keep learning, thanks to my ignorance. Anyway, I get your point, and while I disagree for a number of reason, it kind of makes sense Well that's enough of my posterior talking for tonight. Nice talking to you Norman. ( Btw, in despite you beeing a piano tuner, I take it you are not a fan of strings either? Is there *any* fan of string on this forum btw? I'd would have been nice to have some arguments in favour of it, because I am sure there are a few. ) /Fredrik

Thanks Norman. I suspect we are all different. Once you get to know people, you tend to get to know how they think (generally), like what sort of abstract patterns they tend to prefer. This is interesting stuff. I guess everyone who is living in a relation have found that it happens more than what would be allowed by conincidence alone, that you know you partners point before the lips has started to move. Our brain is amazing, and I am sincerely impressed by nature. It's unbeatable. I have too sensed, and it is not hard to imagine, that it's very interesting to get indoctrinated into typical patterns of thinking. And different kinds of problem solving needs different thinking. I've found that the typical thinking required to solve typical "student problem", like proving this and showing that etc. It really requires a kind of logic that often tends to be very strict, ie non-fuzzy. Such thinking can I think severly inhibit creative thinking. Apart from physics, I have spent alot of thinking to these general phenomena from a philosophical aspect. And everytime I do something, wether it is brushing my teeth or solving a problem, I have come to the habit the last 10 years to try to observe myself (brushing your teeth can feel so silly at times) and reveal myself of repeating patterns of thinking, and the most repeated pattern I have perceived is a kind of induction. If I abstract something, then I tend to immediately want to further abstract the abstraction until I reach a "point". Which I find that this usually doen't happen, which is annoying. But then again the rescue is another abstraction. That the ultimate abstraction isn't the abstraction, but the abstraction process which is just the induction step. I've always belived in catching the moments, so this sudden resumption was not planned two weeks ago. I think I know why this happend. When I left this project 10 years ago, I was part emotionally rejected by the reality of reasearch politics, and second I have to admit I was kind of a little bit stuck, and felt that in order to solve the physics problem, I need to solve this other (bigger problem). While I have not solved the bigger problem yet, I feel that now I have improved my thinking alot since that time, and I have plenty to small ideas inside that accumulated during the time, sufficient to motivate another attempt. I too, think contemplation is severly understimated. Nature is so amazing, and it has perfected our brains for a long time. Why the lack of faith in the human mind? In particular when it comes to solving problems, where data is not so abundant and experiments are expensive. We can not waste an infinite amount of money to do experiments on random just to get something to feed on. /Fredrik

When one thinks of it locally, it is almost clear that time itself is never perceived directly. Time defines itself trough relative change. The typically periodic change of some choice of clock device, interacting with the same environment as the "observer" can be used to parametrize chanins of events. So I seems the fundamental concept of an events preceeds time? I'd think most people would agree on that, right? Yet, this symmetry is disrespected in the formulation of quantum mechanics when we pull out a spacetime reference to describe something. So it seems almost obvious that it is our choice of formulation of the formalism that breaks this symmetry. The same goes with space. Without configurational changes. Einsteins postulated a signal whos speed would give an upper bound to information transfer in "spacetime". This postulate is a key to the development of relativity. IMO, the missing additional part, is that information transfer has to be an interaction. To imagine some "principal" information transfer that implies no configurational changes or events anywhere, and that "only" has a defined "speed", is also inconsistent with basic philosophical guidelines, right? So what are we looking for? I don't have the answer but to me the basic quest is clear in this way. - Consider Einsteins general relativity (GR) to be a relativitiy of some "old fashioned reality". - Consider the essence of quantum mechanics, though not as well formulated as GR!, can be thought to be an non-relative "information mechanics". So what we are looking for is a General theory of relativity of information. Which IMO must imply a equivalence principle that there is no physical difference between the information possessed by a superobserver, and the reality that is giving rise to it. Ie. we respond to the given information we have, not to the information we could have had in some unobservable, imaginary world. This principle is to me clear and must be respected. Anything else would IMO be ridicilous. Perhaps the theory may prove wicked, but we need to find the information transformations, that respect the observer symmetry. Also, to explain reality and creation of the universe, we really need something wicked, so bring it on. Loosley speaking, Einstein postulated that the laws of physics should be the same to all observers, regardless of frame of reference. This is an almost obvious constraint on anything that is to be considered a universal theory. The problem is that Einstein didn't seem to consider information to be relative in the full meaning. He only considered the speed of information exchange. Not the contents of information. I think the full symmetry is that the laws of physics should be the same to all observers, regardless of fram of reference AND regardless of relative information possession. I suggest we all go back to the basic postulates. That's where the key is IMO. Rather than try to by mathematical means just try to get to obivously fundamentally incompatible formalisms to fit by means of ad hoc manipulations. I say we start from scratch with a new formalism, and just make sure it corresponds to the old stuff in the limiting cases. So to me the first step IMO is to find a new set of postulates. And each of them should be philosophically motivated rather than overly ad hoc, like is custom. /Fredrik

What about the mechanical mechanical pressure on local tissue as a likely regulating factor of local blood flow? I think I watched that once or twice and from what I recall they seem to work some pressure or slow technique. Putting high mechanical strain and pressure on the skin, as opposed to what happens if you get an instant stab? Maybe if you can stop the initiation of bleeding by keeping the tissure under pressure while withdrawing a needle, the surface tension of the blood may possibly reduce the external bleeding? Just my clueless guess. /Fredrik

I have to add this. > In a gas, we don't know the position of every single molecule. A fundamental difference is of course, is that in classical statistical mechanics, the reason we don't know the position of every molecule can technically be kind of said to be due to "ignorance" of the observer. This is not so in quantum mechanics, where the reason we don't know everything is an intrinsic uncertainty, that is beyond even a "superobserver". /Fredrik

> creationist approach from start. I'll add that this has *nothing* do with religious beliefs as such where the same word is used, so there are no misconceptions of my intentions I use it in a totally different meaning. /Fredrik

Just to comment on Norman's post. > The important focus here is, that the matured theory of the vacuum will choose the more correct answer, or declare the synthesis of future understanding. This is a good scentence which I like. > or declare the synthesis of future understanding. This part is where I personally will put my main focus. For various philosophical reasons, I do not believe that that theory of everything will really be a theory of EVERYTHING. It would even be almost selfcontradictory in my eyes. I am absolutely sure that once we have this fantastic answer, it will generate new even more mind boggling questions. This is why I consider the "process of synthesis" to be important, it is not only a tool to me. If we can abstract the "process of synthesis" a little bit more than what has been done, my hope is that this may live also past the next revolution. My own reflections over how in the abstract sense, problems are solved, each revolution is so dramatic, and I am not sure it has to be that way. What I am looking for as a model for physics will partly apply to generic systems. Not necessarily physical. That's kind of my point of view. It would by construction be a creationist approach from start. The conceptual idea is relativelt clear to me, and what remains is to formalize it and then apply the idea on various systems. Physics is a particularly interesting area, but my hopes is that the ideas will reach beyond that. /Fredrik

Students of quantum mechanics are taught the "system". Ie. here are the axioms, and here are it's implications, and here is how we apply it and compare with experiments. If you take it that way, isolated "classical" quantum mechanics is quite crystal clear. However what is not part of the education is to question the philosophical validity of the axioms. This is often completely ignored, by the motivation that whatever the origin of these axioms, experience has taught us that when we apply them, we tend to det lucky, so there is got to be something to it, which is indeed correct, but the whole thing is still inherently fuzzy. Learning QM, is to learn the axioms and what they imply. And they learn the formalism. As for reality, it just isn't that easy of course. My conviction that many students and engineers learns quantum mechanics and then later forgets that it's all build upon a number of assumptions or axioms that really isn't obvious. As an engineer it could even be "easier" on your mind, to just accept the axioms and learn the formalism, given the acioms. But from the philosophers point of view, one typically studies not an abitrary sytems of axioms, but rather reality. Roughly speaking it seems you are on the right idea thouhg. If you still find some things are odd, I'd that's part of the current construction. /Fredrik

> Now my understanding of "probabilities" is that when you measure the > electron you can't measure the whole wavy/liquidy/smeared-out thing; you > can only measure it once it is collapsed into a point. > > Is this where the probability comes in? I can see how the electron can > seem probabilistic since the electron is in all places within the shell at the > same time That seems like a decent description. One can imagine the similariy between the statistical concepts from thermodynamics. In a gas, we don't know the position of every single molecule. And if we try to detect a single molecule, it's energy will vary. But the temperature defines a statistical distribution, that says that there is a mean energy and certain % of the "population" has another energy etc. So when we know the temperature of a gas, we know it's mean temperature, and the probability that any randomly chose molecule has a given energy. Quantum mechanics can be interpreted in the same way, except that we picture an imaginary enseble, like suppose we repeated this experiment a trillion times or had a trillion side by side systems, quantum mechanical propability density gives the probability for detecting the system in a certain state. The concept of quantisation OTOH, is something else. It has to do with that the concept of energy and momentum in QM are have different meanings that in classical mechanics. The energy state for example taken to define the energy transformations of the system. I find some of these mathematically extremely basic things philosophically unsatisfactory. In the formalism, they can be taken to be axioms or definitions or the parameters and you get a mathematically sensible thing that can produce numbers. But the nature of these axioms or coulping of defined quantities to real observations are somewhat fuzzy. Here is room for improvement from philosophical sides. In a logical formulation there are a number of postulates of classical quantum mechanics that by no means are self evident for a philosopher. So their nature are ad hoc stuff that are invented to make it logically self consistent at lest. The problem is of course if the set of axioms make sense from a realistic point of view. They most probably don't IMO. /Fredrik

Thanks Martin, no worries about your free writing, I understand It seems we both see the need for something new and at least at this point there are no obvious disagreements. I am probably more philosophically inclined than others when it comes to methods, and philosophical inconsistencies isn't something that I can ignore, even if data show none. It tells me that there is something yet to be found. And more often than not, such thinking are successful in many modelling attempts, that is my experience. The example of a priori knowledge of spacetime is one example where philosophers long has askd questions that physicists has ignored because it was allowed of their data, at that time. Dismissing it as metaphysics or whatever their motivation may have been. I remember discussions with one of my old teachers, who is currently a professor of string theory and while nothing in the world would have me say that he seems anything but bright! to me, as a young student even, he seemed somewhat ignorant about essential philosophical aspects, and it was beyond me that it was happening at that position he had. And as a young student, you can not really enter argumentations, because you are by definition ignorant, at least that's what your beeing told. And philosophical argumenation was efficiently debunked as metaphysics. I also figure that if I wanted to go that route I'd have to participate in research political battles of which I had no desire to waste my energy. My interpretation of this was that he inofficially admitted some legitimacy of the question but that they were too hard to solve, so instead of sitting 30 years and think about this hard questions, it was best "ingored" for the time beeing. And look what we got instead... I think my philosophical nature served me well. Hopefully we can have some interesting discussions of concepts here in the future. Since these are all private projects for me, it is all "afterwork stuff" so it takes some time. So far most of that time has been dedicated to studying biological systems that last 3 years, I will have to compete with that, or swap projects. I will read the links you posted alter. /Fredrik