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fit only for the flames. But note that its antithesis, "God does not exist" is also an untestable hypothesis and therefore nonsense. This is the foolishness that arises when we mechanistically apply a methodology to a subject for which it has no reasonable application.
Quite remarkably, from the early part of the twentieth century, researchers in quantum physics have been discovering many empirically demonstrable phenomena that do not fit the materialist-determinist interpretation of reality. Factually, so many such misfits have now been unraveled that scientific materialism and determinism must be classified as being hopelessly naïve. In their own defense, materialists dismissed these findings as being confined to the sub-atomic world and irrelevant to the "real world." But that defense, too, has fallen with demonstrations of quantum phenomena that have now been shown to occur at atomic and molecular levels that must be included as the "real world."
One of the early postulates was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle according to which it is impossible to know both the exact position and speed of any particle at the same moment of time. In fact, the more we can define one of these, the less we can know about the other.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle should have shattered Laplace's dictum that if we knew the position and motion of all the particles in the universe, the whole of the future could be calculated. A general ignorance of physics and a "not wanting to know" attitude among a materialist-minded population ensured that it did not. And as it turned out, not even Heisenberg guessed how truly strange his principle would eventually be shown to be.
For our purposes it will be necessary to know a little about why some physicists have become interested in the problem of consciousness. First, something about light. In 1803, Thomas Young carried out his famous two-slit experiment that convinced physicists of the wave nature of light. By arranging for a light beam to pass through two close-together slits in an opaque screen, Young showed that when the light beam was focused onto a second screen, a pattern of light and dark bands appeared. He interpreted these as being due to light waves interfering with one another--just as waves from two sources traveling in a pond of water interfere with one another so that their crests add together to give a bigger wave and their troughs add together to give a deeper trough to the wave pattern, or when a crest from one source meets a trough from another source, they cancel one another.
This concept of light as being uniquely a wave phenomena lasted for a hundred years until shattered by Albert Einstein when he interpreted the photo-electric effect--the same kind of effect that we use with solar panels to convert sunshine to electricity--as being evidence for light occurring in discrete particle-like packets each with its own "quantum" of light energy and now known as "photons." And so arose the puzzle of the century--light is a wave and particle at the same time. How can that be?
As a point of interest, the puzzle of the dual nature of light has never really been resolved--we have just learned to live with it. It was given a name by Neils Bohr, he called it "complementarity," and the materialists were happy to announce that Bohr had solved the problem though he had really only given it a name.
Young's two slit work was extended, and the puzzle deepened, in 1927 by Davisson and Germer at the Bell Laboratories but using a beam of electrons. Since our eyes do not see electrons, Davisson used a screen constructed from a very large number of tiny Geiger tubes that register a hit on a counter when struck by an electron. With just one of the slits open, there was enough scatter of the electrons during their passage so that every Geiger tube in the screen managed to score a hit. But with both screens open a strange thing happened. Not only did Davisson get an interference pattern similar to that obtained by Young with a light beam--an alternating barred pattern indicative of waves--but there were whole columns of tubes that did not score any hits, even though they had done so when only a single slit was open.
Because of advances in technology over the more than one hundred year interval, Davisson and Germer could perform experiments that were not even remotely possible for Young. They
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