Re: [asa] Leibnitz' objection to atomism

Quoting Bill Powers <wjp@swcp.com>:

> One last question. It has often been argued that X cannot exist because its
> very existence is incoherent. Such arguments are employed against God's
> existence from the problem of evil or omnipotence. The presumption is that
> anything logically contradictory is not possible. We must either conclude,
> we
> are told, that X does not exist or that our conceptions of X are seriously
> flawed.
>
> If our notions of atoms are incoherent, does that mean they don't exist?
>
> bill
>

It could well mean that the thing we imagine or visualize as our model for the
atom does not exist. I recently discovered a children's book about Mars that
had been written in the fifties. One could say that "technically" the Mars
described in the book didn't exist since their conception didn't yet have
information such as actual pictures and data from the surface. Yet even now,
the Mars we imagine is still not the "real" Mars though we would hope it is
quite a bit closer.

Bohr's solar system atom may have been closer to the truth than the "plum
pudding" model that preceded it, but it is probably not as close as the quantum
model now taught. And our visualization of protons may now have to include the
two up-quarks and one down-quark. Who knows how a quark may be visualized if we
could really examine one. Maybe your particle X isn't matter, but is just pure
energy? That would be one solution to the otherwise proposed infinite regression.

B.T.W. in mathematics, infinity times zero is one of those context-sensitive
quantities that in general is undefined, but in certain problems can have finite
and computable answers. So an infinite number of infinitesimals could give you
zero, or infinity, or and answer like 2.6 depending on which got smaller or
bigger faster.

--Merv

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Received on Tue Jul 7 01:47:19 2009