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3 ideas
20469 | There are probably no infinities, and 'infinite' names what we do not yet know [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: 'Infinite', ultimately, is the name that we give to what we do not yet know. Nature appears to be telling us that there is nothing truly infinite. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 11) |
20461 | The basic ideas of fields and particles are merged in quantum mechanics [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: The notions of fields and particles, separated by Faraday and Maxwell, end up merging in quantum mechanics. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
A reaction: This sounds to me just like Anaximander's 'apeiron' - the unlimited [Rovelli agrees! p.168]. Anaximander predicted the wall which enquiry would hit, but we now have more detail. |
4398 | An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first [Lewis, by Psillos] |
Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either). | |
From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro | |
A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky. |