Re: SUO: Metaphysical choices - position. mereology and constituti on
Re: metaphysical choices (and the difficulties inherent in using ordinary
language.to make sense of scientific claims) -- some considerations which
point to a practical need in a SUO to allow conflicting (or alternative)
axiomatizations to co-exist, in some sense. Below is an interesting current
scientific development, which bears upon the difficulties we're discussing.
Is what these scientists (below) have accomplished a case of teleportation,
or of transportation and transformation? If I boil a pot of water, and then
collect and condense the steam back into the pot, have I teleported the
water, or transported and transformed it? If I have teleported the water,
then what these scientists have done is in a sense not very remarkable
(although interesting to scientists trying to create new phenomena), since
teleportation already occurs.
Jay
Source:
<http://www.tiscali.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/newswire.cgi/news/reuters/2002/06/17/
topnews/australiamakesteleportingreality.html&template=/news/templates/newsw
>
Australia makes teleporting reality
17/06/2002 11:42
By Belinda Goldsmith
CANBERRA (Reuters) - In a world breakthrough out of the realms of Star Trek,
scientists in Australia have successfully teleported a laser beam of light
from one spot to another in a split second but warn -- don't sell the car
yet.
A team of physicists at the Australian National University (ANU) announced
on Monday they had successfully disembodied a laser beam in one location and
rebuilt it in a different spot about one metre away in the blink of an eye.
Project leader Dr Ping Koy Lam said there was a close resemblance between
what his team had achieved and the movement of people in the science fiction
series Star Trek but reality was still light years off beaming human beings
between locations.
"In theory there is nothing stopping us from doing it but the complexity of
the problem is so huge that no one is thinking seriously about it at the
moment," Lam told a news conference.
However Lam said science was not too far from being able to teleport solid
matter from one location to another.
"My prediction is...it will probably be done by someone in the next three to
five years, that is the teleportation of a single atom," said Lam, who has
worked on teleporting since 1997.
But he said humans posed a near-impossible task as we are made up of
zillions of atoms -- quantified by a one with 27 zeroes -- so forget Star
Trek where the Starship Enterprise crew step into a transporter, vaporise,
then re-assemble elsewhere.
The laser beam was destroyed during teleporting which is achieved using a
process known as quantum entanglement.
However the breakthrough opens up enormous possibilities for future
super-fast and super-secure communications systems, such as quantum
computers over the next decade.
WORLD RACE
Physicists believe quantum computers could outperform classical computers
with enormous memory and the ability to solve problems millions of times
faster.
Teleportation became one of the hottest topics among physicists in quantum
mechanics in the past decade, after the IBM lab in the United States
provided theoretical underpinning for the work in 1993. Since then about 40
laboratories globally have been experimenting in this area.
Although teams in California and Denmark were the first to do preliminary
work on teleportation, the ANU team of scientists from Australia, Germany,
France, China and New Zealand was the first to achieve a successful trial
with 100 percent reliability.
The idea is if quantum particles like electrons, ions, and atoms have the
same properties, they are essentially the same.
So if the properties of quantum particles making up an object are reproduced
in another particle group, there would be a precise duplication of the
object, so only information about the particles' properties need be
transmitted, not the particles.
The inability to pass the information reliably has been a major stumbling
block in past "entanglement" experiments.
ANU team member Warwick Bowen said they first successfully teleported a
laser beam on May 23 to their great surprise, and repeated the success time
after time in following weeks using their small-car-sized transporter,
ironing out certain glitches.
"Even in Star Trek they realise there are problems with teleportation,"
Bowen told the news conference.
"It is such a complicated experiment that nobody knows whether their
particular set-up is going to work until you do it....and it turns out our
system is very good."
----- Original Message -----
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
To: "Ian Niles" <iniles@teknowledge.com>
Cc: "'Chris Partridge'" <mail@ChrisPartridge.net>;
<standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>; "Adam Pease" <apease@ks.teknowledge.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 06:10
Subject: Re: SUO: Metaphysical choices - position. mereology and constituti
on
> Re metaphysical choices: The kinds of circles that Chris and Ian
> have been cycling around the question of roles, Queen Elizabeth,
> etc., illustrate my point that many fundamental philosophical
> issues must reach some stage of closure before it is possible to
> write useful axioms that could seriously be considered candidates
> for standardization. Following are the implications:
>
> 1. Until these issues are resolved, any axioms based on or related
> to them could never be considered "standard".
>
> 2. Since roles, intentions, and related issues are fundamental to
> every topic outside of pure mathematics, that means that any
> axioms in SUMO that apply to anything outside of mathematics are
> unsuitable for anything that might be called a "standard ontology".
>
> 3. Point #2 does not imply that the axioms of SUMO or OpenCyc should
> be rejected. It only implies that the axioms should not be given
> the status of "IEEE standard". To adopt Frank's suggestion, I
> believe that a suitable term would be "registered"; i.e., they
> have been assigned a place and a unique identifier in the kind of
> registry that Frank was discussing.
>
> 4. A registry for modules (i.e., collections of axioms) would not
> imply that any particular module had reached a definitive status
> that could be called "standard". It would just mean that it had
> been registered and agreed to by some number of users for some
> stated purposes.
>
> 5. Associated with the modules in the registry could be comments and
> certifications of compatibility with other modules and various
> other standards. For example, a module that axiomatized concepts
> related to grains and cereals might be certified as compatible with
> the ISO standard for durum wheat.
>
> Bottom line: I would strongly object to any application of the term
> "IEEE Standard" to any collection of axioms related to the topics that
> Chris and Ian were discussing. But I would be quite happy with putting
> them into a registry, where the users could certify their applicability
> and compatibility with other related standards.
>
> John Sowa
>