I have a friend
Submitted by F.O.D. on April 12 1999 at 05:44:17
In reply to Re: Neitzsche is dead - God Submitted by Andy on April 11 1999 at 15:21:25
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He's a musician. But he enjoyed science at school, and so took one course of Physics at university. He did well at it too. Surprising, for a musician ;) What I'm trying to say is that the theory for propagation of light is a little bit more convincing than talk of an imagined "ether". I think the ether theory went out ages ago, last century. The Maxwell equations provide a decent explanation of light and radio waves (although if you really want to make things interesting, you can talk about quantum field theories). The basic idea is that a moving electric field generates a moving magnetic field, and that a moving magnetic field generates a moving electric field (this is how an electric generator works - you spin a magnet around and it starts generating an electric field). So get the timing right, and the two fields generate each other, and you have an electromagnetic field - light or radio. And that's why it can pass through a vacuum. Self-propagation. Your basic point is completely fair, though. FOr instance, there are some obscure quantum theories that talk about the probability of matter or energy being generated spontaneously by the fluctuations of a vacuum. There are certainly things our minds are incapable of understanding or explaining. Personally I'm fond of the theory of quarks - the most fundamental unit of matter (nothing smaller has been successfully theorized as far as I know). And the really cool thing with them is that they are not known to exist in isolation, ever. You can only take three of them together to form a proton, electron, meson, whatever. One on their own doesn't happen. And so you have the nature of God - essential Trinity - reflected in the nature of his creation at a most fundamental level. F.O.D. |