(Theo Theocharis)

I supply here independent support to the important argument involved in the title of Foster Lindley's (tfl0@msn.com) "Creative Ignorance" (Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, Vol. 7, No. 6, pp. 1593-1601, November 2001). It is useful to quote these passages that explicate the label "Creative Ignorance":

"The probabilist converts cognitive uncertainty into physical uncertainty. … As the probabilist presents his failure to differentiate as a discovery about the nature of reality, it is a creative use of ignorance."

It is not only the probabilist who "converts cognitive uncertainty into physical uncertainty". Every professor of physics everywhere does the same, and more (ie worse). The so-called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was devised (in the 1920s) in order to codify a certain measumental inaccuracy. It was converted right away into physical uncertainty. Not much later, it was converted again - this time into some new convoluted combination of physical/cognitive certainty/uncertainty: the physicist knows (with certainty?) that the physical entities featuring in Heisenberg's inequality really fluctuate, but (at least for the time being) within the restricted bounds permitted by Heisenberg's inequality.

This last conversion is best debunked as follows:

Creation of the Universe: According to current cosmological thinking, a(n already existing) quantum of energy (obeying the again already existing law of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) transformed itself into matter which somehow inflated itself to the presently known Universe. One is bound to ask:

Which proposition is more believable?:

(i) The Universe was created by an all-mighty God;

(ii) The Universe was created by a tiny quantum fluctuation.

On careful reflection, the latter does not give sufficient credit to Heisenberg, so it must be re-phrased thus:

(ii)' The Universe was created (some 15 billion years before Heisenberg's birth) by an uncertainty in Heisenberg's knowledge.

There have been debates in physics and philosophy forums as to whether the act of observing creates the observed entity, but is there one professor of physics anywhere who has ever repudiated these other (now seventy year old) moronic abuses of elementary Aristotelian logic?

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[A presentation of the author can be found in Episteme N. 4]

theotheocharis@ic4life.net