Greta wrote: Unfortunately so did the most scientifically literate,
My feeling was that scientific literacy was an undervalued commodity at OPC, which was rather disappointing. There were quite a few members with some genuinely significant contributions to make on matters of science and more than a few with a keen interest in reading them. Like you, I've noticed that almost all have fled in horror.
Greta wrote:A civilisation a million years more advanced than ours would surely use models of reality that we would find unrecognisable.
I suspect you're being somewhat pessimistic with this view. My own prediction is that this will occur within a generation and perhaps even within a decade. The current models of physics are dead and buried and are merely awaiting a decent burial. Already the buzzards are circling and many of the new generation of theorists have lost all patience with the eternal verities which have stalled their progress for a century. A few of them are even openly defying their masters to suggest that sacking the philosophers may have been somewhat premature.
Greta wrote:My garden's being overrun with clover. I'm feeding the lawn and garden beds to help the grasses compete without poisons but it's like spitting at a bushfire.
I know the feeling. Unfortunately your clover will love the feed as much as your grasses will and for broadleaf weeds the only remedy is on hands and knees across the surface with a sharp flat knife. A light top-dress and over-sowing in the autumn is probably your best option (after the weeds are out, alas.)
Greta wrote:Physicists try to explain how "observation" of quantum phenomena doesn't actually mean a human looking at the entities but an instrument making an automatic measurement, as though it renders the observation problem non-spooky. They are seemingly loo limited by the agenda of their specialty to think of "consciousness" as not a separate "spooky" phenomenon to be explained away with Dennettesque rationalism but a subset of the larger phenomena of general reactivity and responsiveness, be it gravity at cosmic scales, machines interacting with quanta via photons or the interactions of what we currently define as life.
YES. For some reason physicists seem to think that detecting a particle on a screen is in some way a more "objective" observation than eyeballing the thing directly but this is simply nonsense. Experiments are set up to test a prediction and a prediction can only reflect the narrative of the observer, not reality as she is being enacted. The worm in the apple will not be testing his prediction about the behaviour of the apple by using the same experiment as the orchardist growing it for commercial consumption because each of these observers is asking a totally different question of his apple.
Einstein understood this very well when he said this
"It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe"....Albert Einstein
and this:
"Mathematics can be used to prove ANYTHING"....Albert Einstein.
The pioneers of the quantum theory in the early part of the 20th century ALL understood this perfectly well and it was only considerably later that the geeks decided that the universe could only be understood in the language of mathematics. They got this badly wrong because what they should have said was that their models of the universe could only be understood in the language of mathematics and ever since then they've conflated their map with their territory. This, too, a paraphrase from the great man:
"We should never forget that spacetime is NOT a physical model of reality but a mathematical representation of a physical model of reality"...Albert Einstein.
Greta wrote:
So at present the Standard Model has been effectively rendered immutable by its predictive efficacy and the fact that physicists are unable to professionally move beyond their professional brief.
Correct. They can't move beyond the SM because of its own inherent theoretical framework. It is inextricably interwoven into SR and SR is a model which specifically excludes gravity. They actually know what the limitation is but simply can't see how to move beyond it and bring the SM into line with GR. As I've said time and again, Greta, they're overlooking the elephant in the room. Their continuum of time and space is an observer effect and the truth of GR is hidden in plain sight. The ding und sich is the continuum of time and gravity and entanglement is the proof of it.
Greta wrote: Or it may be entirely replaced by deeper principles.
Deeper and far simpler principles. Maybe somebody will realise that the universe is exactly what it appears to be. An EVENT.