Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

How does science work? And what's all this about quantum mechanics?

Moderators: AMod, iMod

seeds
Posts: 2127
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2016 9:31 pm

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by seeds »

Atla wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:05 pm
seeds wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 5:28 pm
socrat44 wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 5:21 am Quantum Mechanics, Plato’s Cave and the Blind Piranha
Can we ever really know the world?
/ By John Horgan on July 24, 2021/
-------.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... TA4eOPNU6E

----------------------.
That's a pretty good article, socrat44, and it is apparent that at least one of the participants in this thread (he knows who I'm talking about) is completely fooled by the shadows in our little cave.
_______
Atla wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:05 pm I've been thinking about QM for 10 years.
Wow! 10 whole years!

10 whole years of formulating dubious conclusions about QM.

Congratulations, Atla, you are now starting to remind me of Veritas Aequitas and how he has somehow managed to convince himself that he has become a leading expert on Kant because he studied Kant's writings for 3 years.

Sabine Hossenfelder has been thinking about QM (on a professional level) for far longer than your astoundingly unimpressive 10 years as an amateur, yet that still doesn't make her assertions about superdeterminism any less speculative or irrefutable. And the point is that if I am inclined to dismiss her theory, then just imagine how I feel about your take on the subject.

(Btw, just for the record, I created an illustration depicting the double-slit experiment that I used in one of my video lectures that aired on public access television almost 30 years ago. And the point is that you're not the only one who has spent time thinking about QM. None of which means anything when it comes to the veracity [or lack thereof] of our respective arguments.)
Atla wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:05 pm As we are leaving that particular cave,...
In what way are we leaving the cave of QM? Please explain.
Atla wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:05 pm ...one of the first things we realize is that people who are like

"Boohoo we don't know the correct interpretation of QM, therefore my version of a Berkeleyen God and my seeds theory and all that holographic shit surely must be true, but people are too dumb to get it!"

can be gently pushed aside.
Not "too dumb" (Mr. exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger Effect), just not conscious enough to realize that you are not conscious enough to understand where I am coming from.

Do you actually believe that no one on this planet could have experienced something in their life that might have given them a different perspective on reality than the one you hold?  Are you really that naïve?

Furthermore, "gently pushed aside" and replaced with what? Superdeterminism?

Are you seriously attempting to suggest that the unthinkable order of the universe was somehow "predestined" to unfold in such a way that I had no choice (no free will) but to end this sentence with a period instead of what should have been a question mark.

(And if you don't understand what I just said, then you don't understand superdeterminism.)

Furthermore, if you are going to promote super-duh-terminism, then you need to provide a LOGICAL explanation as to how (and why) disparate and chaotic (post-Bang) fields of blind and mindless (inanimate) quantum phenomena were imbued with the "deterministic" impetus to create the perfect setting from which life and consciousness could then arise into existence.

(And by all means, Atla, punctuate your assertions with vulgar words, because it not only adds a lot of impressive gravitas to your arguments, but it also lets me know that I'm dealing with someone who is ultra-confident in his belief that the shadows on the cave wall are all he needs to know about reality.)
_______
User avatar
RCSaunders
Posts: 4704
Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2018 9:42 pm
Contact:

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by RCSaunders »

Terrapin Station wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 2:16 pm
RCSaunders wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 1:10 am
Terrapin Station wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 9:02 pm

Here's an example of a paper that mentions simples a lot (the first occurrence is on page 537 in the last paragraph, but it's worth reading the whole paper as the topic is related to simples):

https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/bare_p ... /Davis.pdf
Thanks for the link. Perhaps I'm not familiar with the, "simples," idea because I dismissed all ontologies that assumed some kind of underlying, "substrate," to which attributes pertain, as in this example from the article:
Aristotle and Plato in terms of some external (spatio-temporal) relation in which they stand. For example, suppose that Aristotle and Plato stand in theis six inches from relation; it then follows that they must occupy distinct spatio-temporal locations and thus count as distinct spots. However, as Moreland and Mertzrightly observe, this individuative solution will not work; for a pair of objects to occupy distinct spatio-temporal locations, those objects must already be distinct.
What's wrong with all of that is the notion that existents are something to which attributes are applied or which attributes, in someway, cause to be what they are. First of all, an ontological entity is whatever its intrinsic attributes (qualities, properties, characteristics) are and no two ontological entities can be identical, that is, every entitiy must have some attribute that is different from all other entities or it does not exist. An entity's attributes do not make an entity what it is, they are what it is.

Secondly, what is called, "position," is only the identification of a relationship between entities. The basic relationship between all entities is position. If two things are perceived their relationship in the field of perception is their position in that field. From that comes the concept of space and the idea that two things cannot occupy the same space or position.

The concepts of position and change can actually describe all physical phenomena. A change in position is motion. A change in motion is acceleration. Mass, force, and energy can all be explained in terms of motion and acceleration.
Yeah, I also don't at all agree with the notion of "bare particulars," but the issue of ontic simples doesn't hinge on that. Ontic simples again are rather like the idea of elementary particles (and on some accounts, the two would be an identical issue). If there aren't elementary particles (ontic simples), then we kind of have a "turtles all the way down" problem, but if there are elementary particles (ontic simples), it's not necessarily the easiest thing to identify them.
That sounds very like an ultimate constituent notion of material existence--some basic elementary building block of all matter. I have my own thoughts about that, but don't want to get into that discussion. Thanks for the thoughts. Perhaps we can discuss ontology proper another time,
Atla
Posts: 6607
Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:27 am

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by Atla »

seeds wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 11:59 pm
Atla wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:05 pm
seeds wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 5:28 pm
That's a pretty good article, socrat44, and it is apparent that at least one of the participants in this thread (he knows who I'm talking about) is completely fooled by the shadows in our little cave.
_______
Atla wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:05 pm I've been thinking about QM for 10 years.
Wow! 10 whole years!

10 whole years of formulating dubious conclusions about QM.

Congratulations, Atla, you are now starting to remind me of Veritas Aequitas and how he has somehow managed to convince himself that he has become a leading expert on Kant because he studied Kant's writings for 3 years.

Sabine Hossenfelder has been thinking about QM (on a professional level) for far longer than your astoundingly unimpressive 10 years as an amateur, yet that still doesn't make her assertions about superdeterminism any less speculative or irrefutable. And the point is that if I am inclined to dismiss her theory, then just imagine how I feel about your take on the subject.

(Btw, just for the record, I created an illustration depicting the double-slit experiment that I used in one of my video lectures that aired on public access television almost 30 years ago. And the point is that you're not the only one who has spent time thinking about QM. None of which means anything when it comes to the veracity [or lack thereof] of our respective arguments.)
Atla wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:05 pm As we are leaving that particular cave,...
In what way are we leaving the cave of QM? Please explain.
Atla wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:05 pm ...one of the first things we realize is that people who are like

"Boohoo we don't know the correct interpretation of QM, therefore my version of a Berkeleyen God and my seeds theory and all that holographic shit surely must be true, but people are too dumb to get it!"

can be gently pushed aside.
Not "too dumb" (Mr. exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger Effect), just not conscious enough to realize that you are not conscious enough to understand where I am coming from.

Do you actually believe that no one on this planet could have experienced something in their life that might have given them a different perspective on reality than the one you hold?  Are you really that naïve?

Furthermore, "gently pushed aside" and replaced with what? Superdeterminism?

Are you seriously attempting to suggest that the unthinkable order of the universe was somehow "predestined" to unfold in such a way that I had no choice (no free will) but to end this sentence with a period instead of what should have been a question mark.

(And if you don't understand what I just said, then you don't understand superdeterminism.)

Furthermore, if you are going to promote super-duh-terminism, then you need to provide a LOGICAL explanation as to how (and why) disparate and chaotic (post-Bang) fields of blind and mindless (inanimate) quantum phenomena were imbued with the "deterministic" impetus to create the perfect setting from which life and consciousness could then arise into existence.

(And by all means, Atla, punctuate your assertions with vulgar words, because it not only adds a lot of impressive gravitas to your arguments, but it also lets me know that I'm dealing with someone who is ultra-confident in his belief that the shadows on the cave wall are all he needs to know about reality.)
_______
See you have confirmed what I just wrote.

There isn't a sentence in your comment where you know what you're talking about. No one said it wasn't speculative or was irrefutable. It doesn't contradict the order of our universe. It doesn't mess with our everyday notion of free will. And just because you have this God theory "different perspective" of yours, doesn't mean that others aren't conscious enough, it just means you are one of the many millions of people who try to justify their personal little theories using QM. Sad that they let you on public television with it, but I see you failed to save the world with your presentations, how strange. :)
socrat44
Posts: 309
Joined: Tue Jan 15, 2019 4:20 pm

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by socrat44 »

seeds wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 11:59 pm the shadows on the cave wall are all he needs to know about reality.)[/i]
_______
"Shut up and calculate"
---------------
Atla
Posts: 6607
Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:27 am

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by Atla »

Image

seeds has gone where no man has gone before and reached a level of butthurt previously thought impossible
Atla
Posts: 6607
Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:27 am

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by Atla »

socrat44 wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 9:28 pm Quantum ontology without speculation
Published: 30 January 2021
/ by Matthias Egg /
-------
Existing proposals concerning the ontology of quantum mechanics (QM) either involve speculation
that goes beyond the scientific evidence or abandon realism about large parts of QM.
This paper proposes a way out of this dilemma, by showing that QM as it is formulated
in standard textbooks allows for a much more substantive ontological commitment
than is usually acknowledged.
For this purpose, I defend a non-fundamentalist approach to ontology,
which is then applied to various aspects of QM. In particular, I will defend realism about spin,
which has been viewed as a particularly hard case for the ontology of QM.
#
How to be a realist about spin
The problem with spin
#
Against underdetermination about the ontology of spin
#
Against underdetermination about wave function collapse
#
This concludes (for the time being) my account of a non-speculative ontology for QM.
There are still ontological lessons to be learnt from QM, even if we refuse to engage in speculation.
---------
https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 20-00346-1
---------------------
He seems to explicitly define his quantum ontology to be a non-fundamental, functionalist pseudo- or quasi-ontology, that doesn't attempt to solve the measurement problem. But we already more or less know how things behave functionally, the point of speculation is to try to go beyond this.
FrankGSterleJr
Posts: 211
Joined: Thu Feb 17, 2011 6:41 pm

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by FrankGSterleJr »

And then there's speculative ($$$) science ...

Due to increasingly common privatized research for corporate profit aims, even ‘scientific fact’, to a concerning degree, is for sale. Research results, however flawed, can and are known to be publicly amplified if they favor the corporate product, and accurate research results can be suppressed if they are unfavorable to business interests, even when involving human health.

Health Canada (our version of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) was established to act in Canadian consumers’ best interests yet is susceptible to corporate lobbyist manipulation. For one thing, it allowed novelty-flavored vaping products to be fully marketed — even on corner stores’ candy counters — without conclusive independent scientific proof that the product, as claimed by the tobacco industry, would not seriously harm consumers but rather help nicotine addicts wean themselves off of the more carcinogenic cigarette means of nicotine deliverance.

A few years before that, Health Canada had sat on its own research results that indicated seatbelts would save lives and reduce injury; it wanted even more proof of safety through seatbelts before ordering big bus manufacturers to install them in every bus. To me, those examples smell of science-be-damned lobbyist manipulation — something that should not prevail in a government body established primarily, if not solely, to protect consumers’ safety and health rather than big businesses’ monetary concerns.
socrat44
Posts: 309
Joined: Tue Jan 15, 2019 4:20 pm

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by socrat44 »

FrankGSterleJr wrote: Sun Aug 15, 2021 10:47 pm And then there's speculative ($$$) science ...
A huge amount of money is wasted learning unnecessary things.
For example:
1 - CERN / LHC (searching for the last block of nature :
because the minimal quantum particle is Planck's particle - h)
2 - Searching the "Gravity waves"
(because Gravity effect is 10^39 (10^41) times weaker than EM force)
3 - . . .
---------
Atla
Posts: 6607
Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:27 am

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by Atla »

A huge amount of money is wasted learning unnecessary things.
For example:
1 - CERN / LHC (searching for the last block of nature :
because the minimal quantum particle is Planck's particle - h)
2 - Searching the "Gravity waves"
(because Gravity effect is 10^39 (10^41) times weaker than EM force)
3 - . . .
---------
Children in Africa are starving therefore we must get rid of science asap people.

Personally I wouldn't mind a world with more and bigger LHCs and gravity wave detectors, and less football stadiums, Pokemon accessories and warfare spending.
User avatar
attofishpi
Posts: 9939
Joined: Tue Aug 16, 2011 8:10 am
Location: Orion Spur
Contact:

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by attofishpi »

Atla wrote: Mon Aug 16, 2021 9:00 pm
A huge amount of money is wasted learning unnecessary things.
For example:
1 - CERN / LHC (searching for the last block of nature :
because the minimal quantum particle is Planck's particle - h)
2 - Searching the "Gravity waves"
(because Gravity effect is 10^39 (10^41) times weaker than EM force)
3 - . . .
---------
Children in Africa are starving therefore we must get rid of science asap people.

Personally I wouldn't mind a world with more and bigger LHCs and gravity wave detectors, and less football stadiums, Pokemon accessories and warfare spending.
A_greed. :wink:
socrat44
Posts: 309
Joined: Tue Jan 15, 2019 4:20 pm

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by socrat44 »

Aug 17, 2021,
Don’t Let String Theory Ruin The Perfectly Good Science Of Physical Cosmology
/ Ethan Siegel /
-----.
Many scientists who work in these fields — on the frontiers of high-energy and particle physics — have begun to openly express frustrations about the lack of promising new directions to explore. At the Large Hadron Collider, there’s no indication of any particles beyond the Standard Model, or even of any non-standard decay channels for the Higgs boson. Proton decay experiments have extended the lifetime of the proton to ~1034 years, ruling out many grand unified theories. Experiments probing for extra dimensions have come up empty.
#
Although a few alternative ideas have emerged in theoretical high-energy physics and in quantum gravity circles in recent years, it’s proven very difficult to introduce new physical ideas or concepts that aren’t already ruled out by the vast suite of data we already possess. The combined measurements of subtle effects like quark mixing, neutrino oscillations, decay rates, and branching ratios severely limit what sorts of new physics can be introduced. And yet, as long as you’re willing to push whatever new physics you want to invoke to higher energies and smaller cross-sections or couplings, you can keep ideas like supersymmetry, extra dimensions, grand unification, and string theory alive.
#
It poses a conundrum for theoretical physicists who work on these problems, though: what should they work on? It’s one thing to engage in fanciful ideation and to calculate the consequences of whatever scenario you’ve envisioned; it’s quite another to continue to plow ahead, undaunted, into further exploring a scenario with no evidence behind it. You can, of course, but you must worry that you’re deluding yourself in doing so, just like perhaps the previous ~40 years of high-energy theorists have done. You can always attempt to explore alternative scenarios as well, although that has arguably not been fruitful, either.
#
What’s most exciting, however, is that some of the astrophysical observations we’ve made indicate there’s more to the Universe than the Standard Model alone can account for. In many ways, it’s our measurements of the cosmos itself — the Universe on the largest scales — that offers us the most compelling clues to what might be out there in the Universe beyond the limits of currently known and well-understood physics.
#
And yet, there are still unknowns that we must be honest about. We do not know the cause of baryogenesis, or the nature of dark matter. We do not know whether inflation really must go on for an eternity, whether it really began from some non-inflationary predecessor state, and we cannot test whether the multiverse is real or not. We do not know, to put it bluntly, how far the range of validity for these theories extends.
#

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... 89e39444ad
socrat44
Posts: 309
Joined: Tue Jan 15, 2019 4:20 pm

Re: Can Physics Be Too Speculative? / by Sabine Hossenfelder /

Post by socrat44 »

OCTOBER 11, 2021
Teaching ancient brains new tricks: New research shows how modern physicists think
by Carnegie Mellon University
------
" One of the most novel findings was that the physicists' brains organized the concepts
into those with measureable versus immeasurable size. Here on Earth for most
of us mortals, everything physical is measureable, given the right ruler, scale or radar gun.
But for a physicist, some concepts like dark matter, neutrinos or the multiverse,
their magnitude is not measureable. And in the physicists' brains, the measureable
versus immeasurable concepts are organized separately."
. . . "duality" would tend to be rated as immeasureable
(i.e., low on the measureable magnitude scale).
An example of a "new" physics dimension significant in 20th century,
post-Newtonian physics is "immeasurability" (a property of dark matter, for example)
that stands in contrast to the "measurability" of classical physics concepts,
(such as torque or velocity).
This new dimension is present in the brains of all university physics faculty tested. . . ."
------
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-10- ... Zf6ILDA4Lo
----------
The new scientific ideas in physics were built on effects of immeasurable parameters
--------
Post Reply