Thank you for the time you spent on this, I learned quite a bit I didn’t know before. I am still curious about how QM was the key to the junction transistor. Would it have been possible for it to have been developed with out QM? And of course nothing here implies that QM creating anything.
Thanks for your explanation, and looking at the posts again you are right, it was me who went off on a tangent. You must certainly have seen some technology changes during your career.
Would you say that QM is used in designing semiconductor heterojunctions, in particular, analyzing the band diagrams?
As a fellow ex-member of this industry may I say nicely explained.
.Yes, there were a lot of changes made during my career, but you can’t imagine how primitive the technology was in 1960 when I started. And now when I contemplate the technology that produced the smart phones that can do everything with but toast bread I can’t help but think how primitive the technology was when I retired in 1994. The advance of technology is mind boggling. And not just in the chip but also in the packaging and the displays.
That is exactly the point I wanted to make when I reacted to your comment about QM and took this thread off on a tangent even though I knew you probably were just using a throw away line for effect.
Love the first one, and the interesting thing about it is there are guys I’ve run into that make the joke completely plausible. The human mind is beyond imagination.
Blue,As a fellow ex-member of this industry may I say nicely explained.
Long live the OC72 transistor which I played with as an 11 yr old in the late 1960s
Just
Linus
I hope this little afterthought gets me back on line with the “theoretical aspect” of QM as implied in the OP and away from the “application direction” of QM that the semiconductor technology entails. However, I won’t ignore any technology questions.
How does God do it then?
It sounds to me that actually the technology could have developed without QM theory.
Not sure what you are saying here. What do you mean by " explicate level " and " implicate lever ? "
No one can provide " observable " proof of this. It is an invalid conclusion based on a mathematical model. Only God creates, though creatures can produce something new from some previously existing matter.
We have offered many proofs, Thomas’ offere his Five Ways and others. Peter Kreeft lists about 24 proofs. Then there is Divine Revelation. So why are we in trouble? We cannot be expected to present arguments which give atheist no choice but to agree. Lack of arguments is not the problem. Atheists, or at least many of them, just do not want God to exist, so they reject Him and any argument offered.
I think what yopp is saying is that many technological innovations we have today which have in fact been created in light of QM theory might not of ever been realized or may have taken longer to invent if not for QM. I think it is a reasonable argument that some of the technology we have is a direct result of understanding how QM works as opposed to just trial and error. Which of course does in itself lend some validity to QM.
Quite frankly I don’t know how God really does it; what I developed is what I consider a plausible explanation of how God might create and sustain reality at an implicate level (the ground of reality). It consists of a very extended argument that I have presented on two threads in this forum with a variety of skeptical, disputatious, inquisitive, and accusative responses but very little genuine understanding and sustained interest (except for JDaniel). The threads are my, “God Exists, But How”, now on page 66 and JDaniel’s “Space”, now on page 52.
You almost got it. I would substitute “discrete space” for quantum probability. Superposition leads to the Many Worlds Interpretation (Parallel Universes) that is part of my thesis.
I am in no position to question QM theory. But that theory does not conclude with the assertion that it proves that creatures have created something out or nothing. In fact it does not make the assertion that anything has been created at all. It merely states that given certain well defined conditions and applying a mathematical model to these conditions, a certain outcome is expected. That does not mean anything has been created. Indeed if something new has appeared, it would be impossible to prove that it was a creation. The only valid inference is that something has appeared that did not appear to be there before. You may say that God is creating whatever has appeared but you could not prove it. Indeed, if something new appeared no one can prove it has not been produced from some, hetherto unknown, pre-existing matter of some sort.
What I would say is that your interpretation seems to be limiting God’s act of creation to scientific theories that did not exist prior to the act of creation. To that I would answer, with all due respect to science and the abilities of scientists, that God’s Power, Concursive activity, and Providence is not limited by man and his science or by anything.
Linus,
Yppop who did you work for - Bell, General Electric, RCA, Motorolla?
I worked for Western Electric, as you probably know, was the manufacturing arm of the Bell system. We had a large Bell Lab section in our building and we worked closely together. I also spent sometime at Murray Hill, the hub of Bell labs. The Allentown Works where I was stationed was the site of the first transistor manufacturing line.
Read post 75. It expresses my opinion on the matter and since we are dealing with a hypothetical (the non-existence) of QM, that can never happen, all this verbiage is nothing but water over the dam. I apologize for taking this thread down the technology vs. science road.
When God created the world, He created it with such coherence (relationships between elements are dependably repeatable) that the phenomena that we observe can be described with mathematical equations and a selection of abstractions ( like mass, energy, gravitational force, etc., etc.). This is the “explicate” level of reality at which we experience phenomena that science describes
Nasty thing you did here to split the first part of a sentence from the conclusion in the second part and answered the fragment with comments that I cannot imagine where they came from. I didn’t say that they can provide observable proof, I wrote “even though”, a phrase which requires a conclusion to complete the thought, and you separated it from my conclusion “that is the way God created it” that implies that no matter what science discovers I believe that that is the way God created it. And I back up my use of the “God did it” argument with a very extended argument as to HOW He did it. How is the operative word in the part of my comment that you separated from the first part of the first sentence.
Again I can’t coordinate your answer with my comment. I never mentioned “proof”. You can’t prove God exists or doesn’t exist in spite of Thomas’ and Kreeft; their proofs have no impact on the minds of young people when compared to the materialistic, liberal college professors they are exposed to, even those in many of the so-called Catholic colleges. My thesis is aimed at those young people that are wavering and find no way to answer the scientific based arguments of materialist, the cynic, and the skeptic and not aimed at the atheist whose mind is every bit as set in concrete as yours and mine.
That’s Interesting. I did not work on the manufacturing side, just small electronics design houses. Did a stint as a humble field applications engineer involved a bit with Philips, Fairchild, Philips and Agilent semiconductor products.
I borrowed the implicate/explicate terms from a physicist named David Bohm; he has written several books that you can find on Amazon. I only read one of them, “Causality and Chance in Modern Physics”. He has written about QM, the Quantum Mind, Mysticism. and Society (he was a Communist). He splits reality into the two levels. He refers to them as the implicate and explicate “order”. He maintains a connection with scientific view in that he doesn’t view the observations of science as abstractions. Since Bohm was several intellectual levels above my intellect, my thesis is a lot simpler. He never left QM, I do. So my thesis in its entirety is my own even though I have borrow pieces from many sources. I think the biggest difference from Bohm’s view of the implicat/explicate is that I constructed my model of reality based on the unimpeachable idea the “God exists”, from which I speculate as to HOW God creates and sustains reality.
I guess, you might say that. In some sense the implicate level is not known because it is hidden (Bohm’s theory is referred to as a hidden variable theory) by the intense manifestation at the explicate level. Who can argue with the observation that gravity exists? Well someone that might ask what do you mean by gravity? How about this: gravity is an action at a distance, a universal force, gravitational field, a bending of space, or an exchange of a boson called a graviton. Because science can describe a phenomena in a variety of ways, the question then is not so much HOW does it exist (because it can be described in a number of ways), but WHAT IS THE CAUSE of a phenomena’s existence because all of science’s answers to the HOW question are nothing but abstractions for the cause. Describing HOW a phenomena happens is very important and I am devoted to science. That is why I believe, in the intellectual war between believers and materialist, we believers need a way to explain HOW God creates and sustains reality to counter the materialists’ use of science as their intellectual weapon.
Here is my very brief view of God’s mechanism: