Toward a Comfortable Existence
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POSTERMINARIES
Toward a Comfortable Existence Do you sleep better knowing that the quantum prevented the ultraviolet catastrophe? Does the twin paradox keep you awake at night? Well, you are only human after ail, and we humans are bothered by things we can't explain. In fact, we hâve been doing everything we can to eliminate the vexing unknowns of our universe. With "I think, therefore I am," Rousseau offered an existence postulate that, at least subjectively (which is of course the only way we can ever do anything), is confirmed by its own enunciation. Ail such propositions, trapped as they are between religion and natural philosophy, can be considered exercises in introspection meant to fill the hollow prospect that we and ail we perceive are hère for no reason at ail. It follows naturally that the human need to fill in blanks permeates modem science. Actually, it defines science itself. Not surprisingly, there are many more objects of curiosity besides ourselves which exist by postulate, objects required to bridge observational gaps to satisfy a satisfying theory. Traditionally cited are such things as neutrinos, which rescued conservation of momentum for the weak interaction. Quarks, another charming example, were themselves needed to rationalize known properties of known hadrons, but then went on to require yet more subatomic particles to exist. Of course, you say, there were subséquent experiments that "saw" neutrinos and other predicted particles, so they must be "real." Indeed our ability to find phenomena after their prédiction brings the comfort of internai selfconsistency. We can be fickle, too, when a once-embraced myth runs afoul of a more powerful story. Remember the lightpropagating ether which rose to explain
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experiment and fell for the same reason. And speaking of light, we should note that electromagnetism in gênerai has also moved us to postulate the photon, forever mired in a wave-particle duality, the field line, drawn to guide the mind's eye, and magical action at a distance. Sometimes thèse new objects sneak up on us under the guise of mathematical artifice. We were not told that object X must exist for theory Yto hold. Instead we were told that the mathematical exposition of the physical theory may be visualized in terms of things (like field lines) as a pure fiction to aid our limited human intuition and enable us to apply the theory. But don't be lulled into thinking thèse are physically real, we were taught! Then came the magnetic vector potential, which more than fulfilled its potential by turning out to be at least as real as its field. Another handy attribute invoked to explain fine structure caused by magnet
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