Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Friday, June 30, 2017
PROTRACTOR
MEASURING BY ANOTHER "MEASURE"
Measure for measure means tit for tat; this for that; reciprocal action, reaction. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, at least this was once assumed true.
It is in the Bible, and it is still a part of the Standard Model in physical science, from Isaac Newton's work.
http://biblehub.com/matthew/7-2.htm
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-4/Newton-s-Third-Law
However, this may not be so under all circumstances nor conditions. It now appears that "reciprocal" may not be as predictable as supposed.
For years, I sought the opposite of linearity in causality. This "causal ambiguity" comes very close to it.
It also seems to refute physics' standard model by complementing its certainly with its own measure of quantum uncertainty. "There is no well-defined order of events."
This assertion is made by Phillip Walther of the University of Vienna.
Phillip Walther's group's 2015 experimental findings "mash up causality: the idea that one thing leads to another. It is as if the physicists have scrambled the concept of time itself, so that it seems to run in two directions at once." Says, a June 28, 2017, NATURE magazine article by Phillip Bell, "How Quantum Trickery Can Scramble Cause and Effect," which is subtitled "Logic-defying experiments in quantum causality can twist the notion of time itself."
http://www.nature.com/news/how-quantum-trickery-can-scramble-cause-and-effect-1.22208?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20170629&spMailingID=54382085&spUserID=MjI1NzY1NDYzMzk0S0&spJobID=1184869696&spReportId=MTE4NDg2OTY5NgS2
Thus as sequential linearity and logical causality are not exclusive in nature, neither, then, is measure for measure; tit for tat; this for that ; nor is Newton's law of reciprocity.
Translation: A response to that famous, idiomatic query about which came first, the chicken or the egg maybe "Each exist, each coexist but order is unknowable!"
Amen.