My blog earlier this week discussed the Wuh Lax discovery that the universe was an inside out universe and that light was not moving and there was something to the idea of a cosmic lantern. The main point behind the blog was to get the reader to think, but at the same time there is an element of humour involved. The notion that all the many millions of scientific hours spent researching the movement of light when it is in fact standing still has to be funny.
The question is what do you think I, the author, believe. If you think my view point is one of humour and I am sitting back think how clever or witty I am having cracked a joke, then that is one thing. But, if you think I am deadly serious when I say that science may have got things wrong. That is a very different thing. In any event, does it really matter what I think or what my real point of view is?
What is really paradoxical is that I don't believe I am right nor that I am wrong in saying that science has got its view point incorrect. I can hold both viewpoints simultaneously. That has to be strange. I can believe two things at once that are diametrically opposed. This suggests, does it that I am a bit unlike a computer. A computer generally requires one answer, either this or that. Unless we were trying to build a world of uncertainty, we would not want a computer to dither or hold two opposing views. So I am not a computer, and if Professor Penrose is right, I may be linked in a very exact way to the world of quantum matter. What does that really mean?
For one thing, it suggests that my behaviour or belief may not be programmed. Wow! I could tell you either this or that in complete honesty and be wrong in both cases. I could change my mind from moment to moment. There is no predicting what I really believed because there is no section of me that I can find, or any one else, that contains the things that I believe. Does that make me in any sense abnormal.
I suspect that sitting on the fence in ones beliefs is pretty normal. If I said to you that I have a coin in my hand and it is a pound coin, what would you believe. You would probably not believe anything. You would say to yourself that you would not have an opinion on the matter because you did not have enough information. The question, I would ask you is whether you would have enough information if two people said that I had a pound coin in my hand. How many people would you need to have faith that what I was saying was the 'truth.'
The fact is that you would probably not believe what I am saying if a thousand people were to tell you that light is standing still and you are exploding at the speed of light along with all the other things around you. You might be willing to take a bet on it, but that would depend on whether you thought that you would win the bet, but that would in turn depend on who was judging the bet and determining what was true or untrue. Who would be this marvelous judge?
If the judge were a member of the scientific community, you would probably make the bet that I was full of nonsense in thinking that we were exploding. We can see the universe is exploding, but we don't see ourselves as exploding. Strange that? So do you hold one belief or two? Do you think that the scientific method would be adequate to determine that light was moving or standing still? What would you accept as a method of testing the 'truth'?