Science and Mysticism 2

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I'm starting this second thread because the first Science & Mysticism thread was getting so long and taking so long to load.

Here are Tom's two most recent contributions to that thread:

Here is a quote from Hans Reichenbach that speaks to the constituting (absolute) character of light:

Clocks and yardsticks, the material instruments for measuring space and time, have only a subordinate function.  They adjust themselves to the geometry of light and obey all the laws which light furnishes for comparison of magnitudes.  One is reminded of a magnetic needle adjusting itself to the field of magnetic forces, but not choosing its direction independently.  Clocks and yardsticks, too, have no independent magnitude; rather, they adjust themselves to the metric field of space, the structure of which manifests itself most clearly in the rays of light.

Interestingly enough, one of Einstein's earliest memories was pondering a compass and how it could be that a needle might orient to something invisible.

Here's a question: is there a meaningful answer to the question 'to what does the metric field of space orient itself?'  I contend there is no answer as yet.  That metric is a priori and can be known only by inference of effects occurring in that space.  Light itself is an inference and is outside inferential knowing is entirely unknown.  Light has never been observed to be a particle.  We see particulate 'events' or 'happenings' in matter, but we do not see light particles.  Those events and happenings are entirely the realm of matter.

Light thus seems to 'particulate' matter, or perhaps better, matter is the realm of the particular, light the universal, and in the realm of matter we never observe other than in a particular guise.  This is IMO the probable meaning of collapse of the Schroedinger wave packet: that wave, which describes a continuous possibility (which is a description appropriate to light), and that possibility, at the scene of an event called an observation, 'materializes.'  That materialization is a matter-description in particular mode.  Particles, particles, particles.

Mind you, the wave structuring of this particulate realm we call matter can be seen clearly-empirically and visibly-in a Bose-Einstein condensate.  I love how Einstein shows up in such places.