[FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

[Jon Zingale]

Roger,

I feel that you may be allowing the authority of *how you imagine other
really important thinkers to be mystified* to mystify you. There was no
reason for the ancient greeks to assume that all geometry must be given
by compass and straight-edge, similarly, there is no reason for natural
philosophers to assume that all matter be given by the points and waves
of the greeks. Euclid begins with assumptions of what properties
constitute points and lines, and these ideas continued to be
appropriated (by natural philosophers) and baked into physical theories
in the nearly 2500 years that followed. For many purposes, this
appropriation and application serve just fine. With each success,
positive returns helped to constrain the conceptual toolset until the
dogma of these particular characterizations of point and wave became an
indisputable doctrine.

>From my perspective, doctrines of this type culminate in 20th-century
set theoretic thinking and finally became dislodged as richer frameworks
(where the notion of a point is not taken for granted as being Euclid's,
say) arose like those in non-standard analysis or synthetic differential
geometry. To me, that there is still so much mystification around this
topic is a vestige of indoctrinated thinking. That electrons are things
with their own properties doesn't surprise me. Every time I use one of
Euclid's points to describe nature, I assume I am also (as you put it)
*ignoring the problem* and *just following the differential equation.*

Jon



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