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But captain, I can't change the laws of physics!




The point I'm trying to make could better be stated as "humans are not like
INDIVIDUAL electrons".  Yes, we're made of the stuff, but to compress the view
away from the human is to claim that a white piece of paper is black because a
period printed on it is black.  There is simply a lot more to it than that.  The
quantum chaos that leads to the "no absolute" argument cancels itself out at
larger scales like noise in a digital photograph.  Right now NASA and a spy
satellite agency are arguing over whether or not three pixels in an orbital
image are the lost Mars Polar Lander.  If they had more than three over the same
surface area, like say three million, the argument would be over - the absolute
answer would be obvious - everyone would see the lander or a rock, whichever was
true.  Yes, the pixels are an illusion of an image combined by the eye.  But,
the image is still an image of reality, not an illusion.  Shall we command the
Hubble Space Telescope to follow Mir into the Pacific because it's all an
illusion?  No.  The photos from Hubble are valuable because they carry far more
information than noise, South Atlantic Anomaly notwithstanding. (Sorry.  That's
a tip of the hat to our dear astrophysicist.)

As you well know, any number of cultists point to QM as the underlying science
behind their worldview.  They take scientific statements out of context and
build them back into lies about reality.  Where Soviet and Nazi schemes of
"repeat a lie often enough and it becomes true" are now given credibility rooted
in wacked interpretations of QM.  They've taken the theory that an observation
impacts the actual state not only in the present but in the past and turned it
into revisionist history.  They've taken the idea that reality is completely
subsumed and subordinate to observation/interpretation and made it Dianetics, or
The Matrix, or (prototypically) Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  Take a CLOSE look
at how QM is treated in documentary television/text and by whom, and you'll see
this.  They use information on QM and specifically pick parts of it to lay
foundations for Postmodernist philosophy. From the right, it drifts into "word
of faith" televangelists teachings, the whole "name it and claim it" tip of the
hat to magic.  From the left, it's all over the Jesus Seminar.

Richard Feinman (sp?) once said "Nature cannot be fooled", yet he was a
physicist.  Where do you stand on that one?  Could they have wished away the
Challenger disaster?  No.  The cat in the box is dead.  We have observed it.
Absolutes suck sometimes, but that doesn't change the facts.  Pilots take off
with uncertainties and land with absolutes.  Even Hindus look both ways before
crossing the street.


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