Posted:
Originally posted by: BirdieNumNum
to get back to what i had mentioned previously about 'light'- do scientists even know what 'light' is? Can we even begin to fathom what it is? My claim is that we dont. Only thing we 'know' is its impact on other things. It is something that defies classical experience and is likely something that is interpreted by the mind, never experienced directly. It seems to also transcend space and time. Which brings me to another point- when people think of 'physical' they are usually referring to the classical world of 3D space and time. But what SR tells us is that it's spacetime continuum which can manifest as 3D space and time, but is far more than that. In other words, there is more than meets our classical eye.Other weird things include things like the faster you go, the more compressed space becomes. Really! Space by itself and time by itself have been shown to be almost meaningless. Note too that light itself has no mass, yet it travels at the speed of light. Nothing else does, unless it's mass approaches infinity.Ok, so why bring up light? Because to me there's a parallel with our 'mind'. If we think of our minds (in the sense of consciousness) as a disembodied observer, then it would have no mass, same as light. In strange ways, it seems to me to have a 'light-like' quality to it- unknowable in terms of the paradigms we have built into our physics, but probably as 'real' as light. Like a TV image, there is no duration. There is no before, no after, there is just now...following is a quote from Erwin Schrdinger that should make us think more, at least those of us who want to rely so much on QM: If we think we can picture what is going on in the quantum domain, that is one indication that we've got it wrong.makes you wonder!
Just wanted to add here that what binds us together, as in what keeps us from falling apart, is electromagnetism.
So while we have the strong force keeping the nucleus of our atoms together, we have electromagnetism keeping the rest of the body together. Correct me if I am wrong.
So, yes, light plays a role that is beyond our everyday understanding of it.
Anupamaa
