SUO: Re: Ontology, Epistemology, and Semiotics
Pierre,
PG> Are there really theories which litterally consider the observer
> as part of the formulation? Can you provide references? This must
> be a figure of style. The only people capable to come up with
> such insanity would be i) French and certainly not French physicists,
> ii) their illuminated friends writing scientific vulgarization book
> which conclusion is infallibly that the only answer to the marvel
> of the world is some obscure mysticism.
The two theories that I was thinking about are relativity and
quantum mechanics. Einstein introduced the notion of Gedanken
experiments in his famous 1905 paper on relativity, in which
he discussed how light would appear to travelers going at
speeds close to the speed of light. Then the German (and
Danish) physicists developed them in much greater detail
in their analysis of the foundations of quantum mechanics.
Physicists are still arguing over Schroedinger's cat.
As I said in my earlier note, the question of how or
whether the observer must be included in the theoretical
formulation is still not entirely clear.
John