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Originally Posted by dessin d'enfant
How do you know classical theories can't reproduce bulk matter? Why can't somebody really really smart explain everything we see purely with classical mechanics and really really tough math no human is close to understanding?
Because classical mechanics is set of forces and assumptions about nature which can't explain matter.
You can quickly get to gravity and the nuclear/electrical forces from observing the world. The lack of diversity in basic building blocks (atoms, merely in the hundreds of types) and the limited types of bonds disproves another type of force - the world would look completely different.
Given that, how can you explain chemical bonding (and all the macro properties that entails in huge observable variety) without quantum? What possible principle could you come up with from the classical world - consisting of waves, continuous forces, non-discrete fields and point of matter - that could explain chemical bonding as we see it?
Perhaps this creature wouldn't call it QM, but the description would be near-identical to QM and the violation of classical a certainty.
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You keep saying stuff like this....but I don't think you get at all why smart people took the ether idea seriously.
Smart people from that era took absurd philosophy about God seriously too. Smart people take all kinds of things seriously. Hell, smart people clung to the aether decades after it was shown to be unnecessary (the nature of the aether is such that it can't be disproven - which should have been a clue).
They took it seriously for a simple reason - it fit with the math and allowed them to posit away conceptual difficulties they had around imagining "waves" being transported through nothing. The last is why it was posited. There were no grand intellectual reasons for the aether. It was a clown's invention, and indeed, the number of things it was absurdly posited for by smart people - see the criticisms quotes I posted above - shows the cognitive flaw it's derived from. That you think people had good reasons for believing in it is unjustified, imo.
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Which makes your viewpoints very superficial and dumb.
Perhaps. But the fact that people were openly mocking it at the time, that absurd contortions were made by very smart people to cling to the notion of the aether or get around problems, should be a clue.
I mean, much the history of physics is one of people being unable to question basic assumptions, until someone smart comes along and does just that in some new way. An intelligence won't have these low-level cognitive flaws that humans have; they're a direct result of lacking the processing power to easily go a level higher or model beyond a second or third level of abstraction/assumption questioning. They're a direct consequence of rigid habitual thinking - look at the abuse I'm getting from the olds in this thread, for example.
Last edited by ToothSayer; 10-21-2016 at 12:51 AM.