Joe wrote:
The cracks - below - may be the pit - where human minds have finally bottomed-out, ceasing to have any sense, reason or decency left in them. In 1979, Glashow, Weinberg and Salam were awarded a Nobel prize for their theory that electomagnetism and the weak interaction were one force. In 1983, exchange particles called W and Z bosons were discovered, confirming the unification. One year later, the experimentors who discovered these particles were honored with a Nobel prize.
According to Jerry (below) and other cultists (elsewhere), I am supposed to publicly concede that what is known to science are human mind-dependent illusions. From Newton to Einstein to Planck to Feynman to Glashow to the Nobel committees, mind-independent constants, laws, forces, etc. have been detected in the world. Is everyone except those here batty, regarding the nature of reality? To paraphrase Billie Holiday: "Let's call a cult a cult.".
The rates of physical decay are governed by the electro-weak force. It's a fundamental force of the universe, and it is bound-up plentifully with physical constants. If the rates of radio-active decay were not mind-independent features of reality, then Jerry (or someone else) could travel to a nuclear dump, making the rates of radio-active decays change as he wished them to change - with his mind alone.
I'm sure that the people who were vaporized by fission bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be glad to know that they were not vaporized by fission bombs. According to the cultists, this technological application of e=mc² could not have been applied on them - because "e=mc^2 is not mind-independent". However - if e=mc² is not mind-independent, then it would be impossible for the US government to build viable, reliable and lethal nuclear devices, and further - without a mind-independent e=mc², no nuclear reactor ever ran a controlled chain-reaction, and no star ever burned.
Jerry has excluded the possibility of admitting to himself that physical constants prevail in the universe and that they are linked to fundamental forces - such as gravity and the electro-weak. It took humans about 150 thousand years to develop a culture sufficiently advanced for scientists to devise and test theories (against objective/mind-independent conditions) in experiments. It would less destructive for us to return to the cave, the savanna, the forest, the sands, the seas or even the "soup" - than for us to sign onto Jerry's idiocy that physics is a mind-dependent apparition.
Whether any of the solipsists in this cult likes it or not, science has discovered mind-independent forces, constants, laws and evolutionary drivers, operating in this god-damned universe.