[lbo-talk] Evolutionary theory/Gravitation

boddi satva lbo.boddi at gmail.com
Sat Dec 24 12:31:00 PST 2005


Uh, Hello?

Andie or JKS or whoever wrote that what I said was

"false insofar as it implies that gravity is a force, and misleading insofar as ut suggests that "forces" are specially associated woth aprticles. Electromagetic radiation is not a force but it is certainly associated with a wide range of particles (photons, electrons, etc.). Some forces are not associated with any particles at all, but that is beside the point"

Uh, Hello? Quantum Electro-Dynamics, Quantum Chromo-Dynamics, anyone?

Photons are the sole **mediating** particle of the electro-magnetic force. Electro-magnetic forces are mediated by the exchange of photons, weak forces by intermediate bosons (W+, W-, and Z0) and strong forces by gluons, of which there are 8 kinds.

Gravitons would complete that picture if they could be proved to exist. Indeed many physicists simply assume they do exist.

I'm sorry to rock your boat but the whole thing about the uncertainty principle is that it shows that the universe does not simply act according to space-time "geomotery". Particles can violate space-time geometry - pass through barriers as if they don't exist, occupy more than one line of travel in the same moment, move faster than the speed of light - because of their probabilistic and not deterministic existence.

Saying we know the mechanism of gravity is like saying that because you know the path and speed a car will travel you know what kind of engine it has. We have not been able to look "under the hood" of gravity yet.

By the way, the reason that "survival of the fittest" seems "tautological" to people is that it is an iterative process. You also can't really give it an absolute direction only a relative direction. It seems, in general, to favor organisms with more and more genetic instructions in their cells but viruses and retroviruses may have something to say about that.

Because we all are taught to favor hierarchical causalities, iterative, probabilistic processes without clear direction are hard to accept mentally.

boddi



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