The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics

[Brant Gaede]

I can't stand to be ignored.

Let all ignorers be warned.

--Brant

[sjw]

Anyone looking up these experiments and trying to get details is going to find a lot of complicated stuff, so it would seem to anyone on its face that I'm correct: there's quite a bit of interpretation going on.

A good book on this is "Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity" by Maudlin.

[George H. Smith]

But these are physicists! How dare you impose on them the same standards of intelligibility that we require of everyone else! Who are we, who have not been initiated into the mysteries of the supersensible subatomic world, to question what they say? Only a silly, ignorant Objectivist would ever dare engage in such blasphemy.

It's true that Objectivists are particularly prone to such stupidity. An intelligent person would understand that physics not a question of "initiating into the mysteries", but of (gasp!) studying the subject first and that means learning it the hard way, including the math. The "knowledge" gathered by reading some popularizing texts is useless, as modern physics cannot be dumbed down to the layman level without losing a real understanding of the subject. But tell that to a particularly arrogant branch of philosophers, who think they can understand the world from their armchair without doing some serious study that is indispensable for a real understanding and who insist that a simple popular text can give, nay should give such an understanding. I suspect that they're frustrated with envy of physical sciences as they're left out and not taken seriously, as they're too lazy or not intelligent enough to study first what they want to criticize. Compare this attitude with the condescension they display against a person who dares to criticize Rand's ideas without having studied those extensively. Double standard, anyone?

As I have repeatedly stated before, including on a previous thread about indeterminism, I have no quarrel with the experimental findings of physicists or of any other scientists. Modern science is a remarkable achievement. As I have also stated before, however, I do sometimes have a problem when physicists draw philosophical conclusions from their discipline. Here they have no more authority than anyone else, and here you will find physicists contradicting one another, just as philosophers do.

I agree that it can be very difficult for physicists to translate their findings into terms that laymen can understand. I thought that Feynman put it well in the video that was posted earlier. All I ask is that physicists admit when they cannot explain themselves in this manner.

I would add that mathematics is a highly abstract language, and someone proficient in math may not really understand the implications of his findings. To construct a lengthy and complex mathematical argument is not the same as understanding the philosophical implications of that argument.

Another problem is that physicists often use operational definitions, and these definitions are often expressed in mathematical language. This has proven a highly productive procedure in physics, but a problem arises when an operational definition is wrenched from its context and translated into a natural language.

I once had an argument with a physicist who claimed that physics had disproven the Law of Non-Contradiction. When I pointed out that this claim destroys the very concept of "proof" and renders all of science meaningless -- since any given claim, including his claim about the Law of Non-Contradiction, could be both true and false at the same time and in the same respect, so to say that p is true would be meaningless -- he was unmoved. He simply did not want to be bothered with rudimentary issues like this.

You will also find Christian physicists who claim that QM proves the existence of God and that probability theory proves intelligent design. (The latter claim is especially popular today; indeed, it was credible enough to convert the former atheist Antony Flew to deism.) A much older claim is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics proves the existence of an eternal being. Of course, you can point out that these are minority opinions, but so what? Even if the majority of physicists agreed with such arguments, I would still reject them. And I reject them for the same reason that I reject a number of other metaphysical conclusions that are supposedly based on physics. When the physicist, no matter how competent, ventures from his house and enters the house of of philosophy, he leaves his credentials at the door.

I suspect that many OLers, including scientists, are highly skeptical of global warming claims, especially those that posit a tipping point that will bring about a global catastrophe. Yet, to my knowledge, there are no climatologists on OL, so what is the ground for this skepticism? Why don't we just accept these claims on authority?

Not since the Middle Ages have philosophers claimed that we can understand the world from an armchair. Philosophers such as Bacon, Locke, and Voltaire were the shock troops of the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, a number of philosophers, such as Descartes and Leibniz, made substantial contributions to mathematics. And if you read Rand's comments on science in ITOE, you will see that she steered clear of presuming that philosophers should dictate to scientists. Like other empiricists, she had a very modest metaphysics, because she well knew that much of what has traditionally been called "metaphysics" is properly the domain of science.

Ghs

[BaalChatzaf]

For those of you who have not yet read Harriman's book there is an excellent review by Travis Norsen, a genuine physicist of Objectivist persuasion (rara avis in terum!).

Please see the review on the amazon. com web page:

http://www.amazon.co...=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited August 23, 2010 by BaalChatzaf

[sjw]

As I have repeatedly stated before, including on a previous thread about indeterminism, I have no quarrel with the experimental findings of physicists or of any other scientists.

That's only because you haven't looked at some of these experiments in detail. What do you think of an experiment that "demonstrates" instantaneous action at a distance separated by 18km? In other words, an event instantaneously (no real apparatus can actually measure instantaneous, they measure many times the speed of light) allegedly causes another event 18km away. Physicists say this with a straight face followed by the qualification "oh, but you can't actually transmit any information using these events." Right.

Modern science is a remarkable achievement.

Most (all?) of what rely on happened before the intellectual collapse of physics. Einstein called the above "spooky action at a distance" with good reason, now he's viewed as a throwback. What have this latest crop of physicists come up with that's so useful to our modern world that those in the class of Einstein didn't already come up with? A lot of expensive experiments and little to nothing to show for it.

Shayne

[Brant Gaede]

As I have repeatedly stated before, including on a previous thread about indeterminism, I have no quarrel with the experimental findings of physicists or of any other scientists.

That's only because you haven't looked at some of these experiments in detail. What do you think of an experiment that "demonstrates" instantaneous action at a distance separated by 18km? In other words, an event instantaneously (no real apparatus can actually measure instantaneous, they measure many times the speed of light) allegedly causes another event 18km away. Physicists say this with a straight face followed by the qualification "oh, but you can't actually transmit any information using these events." Right.

Modern science is a remarkable achievement.

Most (all?) of what rely on happened before the intellectual collapse of physics. Einstein called the above "spooky action at a distance" with good reason, now he's viewed as a throwback. What have this latest crop of physicists come up with that's so useful to our modern world that those in the class of Einstein didn't already come up with? A lot of expensive experiments and little to nothing to show for it.

I'd tend to think that the measuring equipment was suspect.

Would we have gotten the alleged beneficient consequences of QM anyway if there had been no QM observations? And what were those? I thought Ba'al listed a few.

--Brant

technology is the best way to validate science: if something works it works, but that doesn't mean it's an absolute validation

[sjw]

I'd tend to think that the measuring equipment was suspect.

Would we have gotten the alleged beneficient consequences of QM anyway if there had been no QM observations? And what were those? I thought Ba'al listed a few.

Brant my position is not that QM is bogus. It is a true characterization of an *aspect* of what is going on. Physicists think it is the whole of what is going on.

And no, the measuring equipment is not suspect. This stuff has been checked out repeatedly over and over and over at great expense (billed to you of course). The answer is staring the physicists in the face but they don't care to look. Their contempt for philosophy is their Achilles heel.

Shayne

[Ellen Stuttle]

[...] an event instantaneously (no real apparatus can actually measure instantaneous, they measure many times the speed of light) allegedly causes another event 18km away.

How is many times the speed of light measured?

Ellen

[sjw]

[...] an event instantaneously (no real apparatus can actually measure instantaneous, they measure many times the speed of light) allegedly causes another event 18km away.

How is many times the speed of light measured?

Ellen

http://www.physorg.com/news132830327.html

[sjw]

The most ironic part of these Aspect experiments is that physicists are using cause and effect in order to reach the conclusion that there is no cause and effect.

[Brant Gaede]

I'd tend to think that the measuring equipment was suspect.

Would we have gotten the alleged beneficient consequences of QM anyway if there had been no QM observations? And what were those? I thought Ba'al listed a few.

Brant my position is not that QM is bogus. It is a true characterization of an *aspect* of what is going on. Physicists think it is the whole of what is going on.

And no, the measuring equipment is not suspect. This stuff has been checked out repeatedly over and over and over at great expense (billed to you of course). The answer is staring the physicists in the face but they don't care to look. Their contempt for philosophy is their Achilles heel.

UFT?

--Brant

feeling my way around the room in the dark

[sjw]

UFT?

--Brant

feeling my way around the room in the dark

No need to be confused Brant. Just imagine a magician's tricks. That is all that's going on in the world of modern physics, at least as it pertains to experiments such as this. If you looked at what they were doing in enough detail, you'd see the trick, but you see, that's part of the trick: they've got a lot of arcane and intimidating stuff to distract you from seeing what is really going on. And so you keep feeding them your tax dollars and get nothing in return but your own amazement at how incomprehensibly miraculous the universe is.

Shayne

[tjohnson]

UFT?

--Brant

feeling my way around the room in the dark

No need to be confused Brant. Just imagine a magician's tricks. That is all that's going on in the world of modern physics, at least as it pertains to experiments such as this. If you looked at what they were doing in enough detail, you'd see the trick, but you see, that's part of the trick: they've got a lot of arcane and intimidating stuff to distract you from seeing what is really going on. And so you keep feeding them your tax dollars and get nothing in return but your own amazement at how incomprehensibly miraculous the universe is.

Shayne

I think the problem is that it is incomprehensible to you, and so you think its incomprehensible to everyone.

[sjw]

I think the problem is that it is incomprehensible to you, and so you think its incomprehensible to everyone.

Actually, I see the trick, so no, it's not incomprehensible at all.

But supposing I was just dismissing the conclusions of the experiment on the philosophic grounds that cause and effect cannot be used to disprove cause and effect (as George might do), I would still be on rock-solid ground. one doesn't have to know the trick to know there is a trick.

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

That's only because you haven't looked at some of these experiments in detail. What do you think of an experiment that "demonstrates" instantaneous action at a distance separated by 18km? In other words, an event instantaneously (no real apparatus can actually measure instantaneous, they measure many times the speed of light) allegedly causes another event 18km away. Physicists say this with a straight face followed by the qualification "oh, but you can't actually transmit any information using these events." Right.

See -no communication theorem- on Wikipedia. Quantum Entanglement cannot be used as a kind of faster than light Morse Lamp. In that sense, the falsification of Bell's Inequalities does not collide with relativity theory.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[BaalChatzaf]

UFT?

--Brant

feeling my way around the room in the dark

No need to be confused Brant. Just imagine a magician's tricks. That is all that's going on in the world of modern physics, at least as it pertains to experiments such as this. If you looked at what they were doing in enough detail, you'd see the trick, but you see, that's part of the trick: they've got a lot of arcane and intimidating stuff to distract you from seeing what is really going on. And so you keep feeding them your tax dollars and get nothing in return but your own amazement at how incomprehensibly miraculous the universe is.

Shayne

Arcane and intimidating. Translation: you don't understand the mathematics. That is remedial condition should you decide to learn the stuff. I managed to do calculus (by myself) at age thirteen and linear operator theory with very little help by the time I was 18. It is not easy to do, but neither is it impossible.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[sjw]

Arcane and intimidating. Translation: you don't understand the mathematics. That is remedial condition should you decide to learn the stuff. I managed to do calculus (by myself) at age thirteen and linear operator theory with very little help by the time I was 18. It is not easy to do, but neither is it impossible.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Actually the translation is that I've taken graduate level probability theory and understand the math just fine, but I regard it as arcane for the layman.

By the way, impressive feat for an 18-year-old, it's too bad it's damaged your inductive abilities.

Shayne

[Ellen Stuttle]

See -no communication theorem- on Wikipedia. Quantum Entanglement cannot be used as a kind of faster than light Morse Lamp. In that sense, the falsification of Bell's Inequalities does not collide with relativity theory.

See the lengthy comments by "GoodElf" following the PhysOrgNews article Shayne linked to in post #884. Click for the article. I can't link directly to individual comments. GoodElf's start about halfway down the queue on June 18, 2008.

Ellen

[BaalChatzaf]

See -no communication theorem- on Wikipedia. Quantum Entanglement cannot be used as a kind of faster than light Morse Lamp. In that sense, the falsification of Bell's Inequalities does not collide with relativity theory.

See the lengthy comments by "GoodElf" following the PhysOrgNews article Shayne linked to in post #884. Click for the article. I can't link directly to individual comments. GoodElf's start about halfway down the queue on June 18, 2008.

Ellen

Thank you for the reference. I found GoodElf's piece. Still there is no evidence that information can be transmitted FTL. All that can be done is to change one random piece of crap into another. To get information one must actually correlate both ends of the transmission and that can only be done sub-light.

There is no doubt that quantum entanglement is weird stuff but still it does not constitute either super light speed transmission of either energy or information. Somewhat more troubling is the seeming super light speed transmission which occurs in some kinds of quantum tunneling.

See the experiments done by Nimtz. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light; go to the section on tunneling). They have raised both questions and hackles. Strange cunundrums such as those raised by Nimtz are clear indications that physics is anything but cut and dried.

There is a grand old gentleman, Avner Shimoney, who is BOTH a Ph.D physicist and a Ph.D in philosophy who explained the situation. Shimoney is the physicist who convinced groups on both sides of the Atlantic to look in experimental verification or falsification of Bell's Inequalities. So he is the grandfather (or godfather) of the entanglement experiments. He explained that using quantum correlation of entangle particles at a distance does not transmit information or energy. So do not look for Star Trek transporters or faster than light telegraphy any time soon.

Einstein's two relativity theories are still intact.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[tjohnson]

Two questions.

1. Was there ever a time in the history of physics when there wasn't controversy about some theories?

2 Will there ever be a time when there isn't?

Also, theories or "laws" do not hold without exception, there are always some limits to their applicability. This does not mean they are wrong or "false", merely limited, and when new data emerges then new theories do as well. I think this may be what is meant by 'contextually certain'.

[Mike Hardy]

The most interesting part of this discussion was my friend's observation that the competition for research grants in universities often stifles the development of dissenting theories. I was curious whether anyone on OL has some thoughts on this topic.

Ghs

A bit of a change of subject, but recently I've had occasion to think about some ways in which incentive structures in universities stifle the development of teaching a subject to those not majoring in it.

[George H. Smith]

As I have repeatedly stated before, including on a previous thread about indeterminism, I have no quarrel with the experimental findings of physicists or of any other scientists.

That's only because you haven't looked at some of these experiments in detail. What do you think of an experiment that "demonstrates" instantaneous action at a distance separated by 18km? In other words, an event instantaneously (no real apparatus can actually measure instantaneous, they measure many times the speed of light) allegedly causes another event 18km away. Physicists say this with a straight face followed by the qualification "oh, but you can't actually transmit any information using these events." Right.

You may be right, but I try not to get embroiled in disputes over empirical matters that I don't know anything about.

Ghs

[Ellen Stuttle]

Thank you for the reference [in my post#893].. I found GoodElf's piece. Still there is no evidence that information can be transmitted FTL. All that can be done is to change one random piece of crap into another. To get information one must actually correlate both ends of the transmission and that can only be done sub-light.

Did you read GoodElf's subsequent comments? (I'll assume for convenience that "GoodElf" is a "he.") I gather that he's a classicist adopting the de Broglie matter wave approach as his basic frame. I found the long post on 6/20/08 espistemologically fascinating.

In it is this:

It is the quantum "theory" that is being extended "ad hoc" in order to incorporate new developments in the understanding of quantum phase.... related to de Broglie Matter Wave "interferences" and their link to the mysterious property of "mass"... the one property that all currently accepted theory has failed to provide a definitive answer.

Grammatically mangled, but...What say you about the meaning of "mass"?

If we take as the meaning of "mass" "that property of matter which confers inertia" and if take as the meaning of "inertia" the obeyance of Newton's first law -- *except* that there aren't really any straight lines nor states of absolute rest -- what are we talking about in speaking of "mass"? I've wondered about this for a long time.

As to "chang[ing] one random piece of crap into another," I think that what's being suggested by GoodElf's 6/18/10 post is that there's no need for "information" being transmitted. A "random piece of crap" will do just fine if periods of relative pulse versus not-pulse can be achieved. An analogy I thought of -- which might or might not suit the purpose (I'm inquiring) -- is that of the static on a radio station after the broadcast has gone off the air. A Morse Code effect could be produced by turning the radio on and off, with no need of any music being transmitted. (I speak of "music," since the only occasions on which I listen to radio are for the late-night classical music.) Thing is, to analogize to communicating via "quantum entanglement," one would need another "radio" which registered predictably correlated periods of static/quiet, but one wouldn't need any content in the static periods. Or that's the idea I'm getting from GoodElf's suggestion.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

when new data emerges then new theories do as well. I think this may be what is meant by 'contextually certain'.

That's "basically" (an elastic term) what I think too. I.e., that "contextually certain" is standard-issue scientific skepticism wearing a mask.

Ellen

[BaalChatzaf]

Grammatically mangled, but...What say you about the meaning of "mass"?

According to the standard model the reason why some particles have mass is that they interact with the Higgs Field. That is why the Higgs Boson is currently the Holy Grail of particle physics. Finding it will explain why some particles haves mass and presumably why some particles do not. If it turns out the Higgs Boson does not exist then it is back to square one for particle physics.

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson_field

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited August 24, 2010 by BaalChatzaf