Introduction - Philosophy

The Law of Identity is the Standard

The best summary I've found for the Law of Identity is from Ayn Rand:

Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

The Law of Identity is the basis of all science. When we discover that water boils at 100 °C or that rocks fall towards the earth, we have discovered something about the identity of water and rocks. An axiom of science is that water and rocks always had these properties, and they always will. If we don't take that as a starting point, there's no point in doing science. The premise of every experiment is that we are learning something about the nature of the objects in the universe, and the nature of those objects is a constant.

There's a corollary to the Law of Identity which is the Law of Causality. Again, from Rand:

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature . . . . The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it.

The Law of Causality says that things must happen for a reason. It's really another way of saying, "magic doesn't exist." Now the law does not guarantee that we will be able to predict what will happen because we don't have enough information. But it says that anything that does happen much be caused by some entity (object) and that the rules for how those object behave are a constant.

Some of the explanations or theories from the current paradigm involving light violate either the Law of Identity or the Law of Causality. A prime example is the wave-particle duality theory to explain the double slit experiment. A photon is proposed to be both a wave and a particle in order to explain the experiment, even though only particles are observed.

This blog will test the claim that the Theory of Elementary Waves can explain some key experiments from the 18th and 19th century without violating the Law of Identity or the Law of Causality. These should be our standards for any theory, and we should keep searching for theories that obey these laws until we find them.

The clearest contrast between the Theory of Elementary Waves and the current paradigm will be explaining the double slit experiment. The double slit experiment was described by Feynman as "a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics."

But before we explain the double slit, we should explain the single slit experiment in the section on diffraction. But before we look at these two experiments that don't have any everyday experience, we will look at something we have all observed in our day-to-day experience, refraction.

Next: Light bending through water by the process of refraction.