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A different view of "fuzziness"
October 7, 2008 by Fred Bortz, 1 year 7 weeks ago
Comment id: 32297
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Our brains are hard-wired to see sharp distinctions even when we really have only fuzzy information about the world. It's a necessary survival skill, since our not-too-distant ancestors did not have time to ponder whether that motion in the periphery is a predator. It was act quickly or be lunch.
(For fun, see my review of Man the Hunted.)
So we have a hard time accepting that our constructs in physics such as momentum and position are just that--mental constructs. When we allow our scientific mind to ponder these things, we develop quantum mechanics, which includes the uncertainty principle that tells us that momentum and position are not absolutely definable, and that the uncertainty in our measurements of the two are inter-related and nonzero.
It is the same with spacetime, according to this proposed way of viewing the universe. Just as we had to change our view of space and time to accommodate the observations and theory of relativity and our views of particles and waves to accommodate the discovery of the quantum universe, so we now may have to reconsider our view of spacetime as granular rather than as a continuum.
Eventually, someone may come up with mathematics that describes Nature in a grand unified way. But I see this "fuzziness" not as a problem but rather as the way Nature is, even though our minds are better adapted to seeing the behavior of our universe as "clockwork" and phenomena as non-relativistic and non-quantum. In other words, our brains evolved under circumstances where we don't experience relativistic or quantum effects. When we probe Nature as it is, it seems fuzzy to our inherently absolutist minds.
This philosophy underlies the approach of my Physics: Decade by Decade in the Twentieth Century Science series from Facts On File (2007).
My website also includes a list and reviews of a number of popular books that address that history and more recent developments.
Happy reading!
Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)