The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics

[sjw]

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

Ghs

At some point in human history it would be good if philosophers of your caliber would become interested in such matters. Particularly given the rather stunning halt to progress in theoretical physics after the Copenhagen interpretation came on the scene. Not that such is your duty here.

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

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

Ghs

At some point in human history it would be good if philosophers of your caliber would become interested in such matters. Particularly given the rather stunning halt to progress in theoretical physics after the Copenhagen interpretation came on the scene. Not that such is your duty here.

Shayne

Copenhagen was stated prior to 1926. There has been much progress since. The high point of confirmed physics is the standard model of particles and fields which was established in the 1960's and 1970's. The problem has been in the area of String Theory and Branes. These theories assert too much and empirical support for them has been rather thin.

The notion that world ended with the Copenhagen Doctrine of Bohr and his associates is at the very least an overstatement and at the most a mis-statement.

The theory of general relativity has become the cutting torch for cosmology and has enjoyed much corroberation since the technology for measuring red shift has improved. General Relativity put a GPS transponder in your car and cell phone.

The work of J.S.Bell in investigating entanglement, an issue raised between Bohr and Einstein, and stated in the EPR paper is definitely progress, and brilliant progress at that. In the last 20 or 25 years advances in physics has hit a bit of a stymie. What needs to happen is for experimental physics to get ahead of theoretical physics and lead the way.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[sjw]

Copenhagen was stated prior to 1926. There has been much progress since.

Yes, I'm sure it took some time for the irrationality that was planted to fully bloom. And obviously an idea as such can't stop progress, there is still the possibility of individual heroism, it just becomes more and more difficult as institutions measure people in terms of their allegiance to irrationality.

The theory of general relativity has become the cutting torch for cosmology and has enjoyed much corroberation since the technology for measuring red shift has improved. General Relativity put a GPS transponder in your car and cell phone.

Applications of relativity are of course not relevant to my point.

The work of J.S.Bell in investigating entanglement, an issue raised between Bohr and Einstein, and stated in the EPR paper is definitely progress, and brilliant progress at that. In the last 20 or 25 years advances in physics has hit a bit of a stymie. What needs to happen is for experimental physics to get ahead of theoretical physics and lead the way.

I think you should demonstrate for us how abandoning causality helps physics instead of asserting that experimentalists just need to work harder. I think they're not the problem.

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

Copenhagen was stated prior to 1926. There has been much progress since.

Yes, I'm sure it took some time for the irrationality that was planted to fully bloom. And obviously an idea as such can't stop progress, there is still the possibility of individual heroism, it just becomes more and more difficult as institutions measure people in terms of their allegiance to irrationality.

The theory of general relativity has become the cutting torch for cosmology and has enjoyed much corroberation since the technology for measuring red shift has improved. General Relativity put a GPS transponder in your car and cell phone.

Applications of relativity are of course not relevant to my point.

The work of J.S.Bell in investigating entanglement, an issue raised between Bohr and Einstein, and stated in the EPR paper is definitely progress, and brilliant progress at that. In the last 20 or 25 years advances in physics has hit a bit of a stymie. What needs to happen is for experimental physics to get ahead of theoretical physics and lead the way.

I think you should demonstrate for us how abandoning causality helps physics instead of asserting that experimentalists just need to work harder. I think they're not the problem.

Shayne

It depends what you mean by causality. If you mean some kind of hard determinism, the evidence is against that.

Here is how you find out if physics is healthy: look to see if applications (some based on new principles) are coming out of the pipeline. Look to see if the theory is raising at least as many questions as it is answering. Applied and experimental physics are alive and well. The theory is in a kind of a bind, but the theory was in a bind at the end of the 19th century also since it could not handle radiation properly (cf "ultra-violet disaster"). Max Planck made the breakthrough by inventing the kind of physics you like the least, quantum theory. Hard problems lead to progress.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited August 24, 2010 by BaalChatzaf

[sjw]

I think you should demonstrate for us how abandoning causality helps physics instead of asserting that experimentalists just need to work harder. I think they're not the problem.

It depends what you mean by causality. If you mean some kind of hard determinism, the evidence is against that.

I'm willing to let you define and defend what you mean by causality. What I mean by it is local determinism, like what Einstein advocated. I think his argument was just fine. I do not accept an explanation that we can twiddle with reality at one point and then through no means some other distantly and unconnected part of reality gets twiddled.

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

I think you should demonstrate for us how abandoning causality helps physics instead of asserting that experimentalists just need to work harder. I think they're not the problem.

It depends what you mean by causality. If you mean some kind of hard determinism, the evidence is against that.

I'm willing to let you define and defend what you mean by causality. What I mean by it is local determinism, like what Einstein advocated. I think his argument was just fine. I do not accept an explanation that we can twiddle with reality at one point and then through no means some other distantly and unconnected part of reality gets twiddled.

Shayne

By "no means" or by means not presently understood? J.S.Bell and the experimentalists who falsified his inequalities conditioned on the existence of "hidden variables" opened up the door the Big Closet of Unanswered Questions.

Please keep in mind that for ages action at a distance was rejected is irrational, only contact actions were understood. That is until Newton assumed that is how gravitation works. By what means does one body exert a force through the vacuum of space upon another? Good question. But there is no doubt that something like that is happening.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[sjw]

Please keep in mind that for ages action at a distance was rejected is irrational, only contact actions were understood. That is until Newton assumed that is how gravitation works. By what means does one body exert a force through the vacuum of space upon another? Good question. But there is no doubt that something like that is happening.

Gravity is not only a local effect based on local field density, but it and similar effects are demonstrably present throughout the range of human experience. For example, static charges were known at the time in some terms and it could have easily been known that "action at a distance" is not irrational. Magnets were likewise known to people an no one could have seriously clung to "action at a distance is irrational" who was at all familiar with their world. So you are positing positively irrational people holding irrational premises and comparing that to this issue, which is itself positively irrational.

I lose interest in hearing your justifications for your irrationality. Explain how you can miss something so obvious as what I just pointed out.

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

Please keep in mind that for ages action at a distance was rejected is irrational, only contact actions were understood. That is until Newton assumed that is how gravitation works. By what means does one body exert a force through the vacuum of space upon another? Good question. But there is no doubt that something like that is happening.

Gravity is not only a local effect based on local field density, but it and similar effects are demonstrably present throughout the range of human experience. For example, static charges were known at the time in some terms and it could have easily been known that "action at a distance" is not irrational. Magnets were likewise known to people an no one could have seriously clung to "action at a distance is irrational" who was at all familiar with their world. So you are positing positively irrational people holding irrational premises and comparing that to this issue, which is itself positively irrational.

I lose interest in hearing your justifications for your irrationality. Explain how you can miss something so obvious as what I just pointed out.

Shayne

The "obvious" things you point out are either wrong or misstated.

Your problem is you give priority to philosophy, rather than facts.

Facts Rule. Theories and Principles Serve (sometimes).

One well placed contrary fact will send your philosophy crashing to the ground. That is why I love counter-examples. They are so fatal.

I have some advice for you: check your premises.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[sjw]

The "obvious" things you point out are either wrong or misstated.

Your problem is you give priority to philosophy, rather than facts.

Facts Rule. Theories and Principles Serve (sometimes).

One well placed contrary fact will send your philosophy crashing to the ground. That is why I love counter-examples. They are so fatal.

I have some advice for you: check your premises.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Oh you're just a lot of puffery. All hot air about nothing. That's your philosophy. Otherwise you'd point to my error you wouldn't just huff and puff that there's an error.

Shayne

[Brant Gaede]

Please keep in mind that for ages action at a distance was rejected is irrational, only contact actions were understood. That is until Newton assumed that is how gravitation works. By what means does one body exert a force through the vacuum of space upon another? Good question. But there is no doubt that something like that is happening.

Gravity is not only a local effect based on local field density, but it and similar effects are demonstrably present throughout the range of human experience. For example, static charges were known at the time in some terms and it could have easily been known that "action at a distance" is not irrational. Magnets were likewise known to people an no one could have seriously clung to "action at a distance is irrational" who was at all familiar with their world. So you are positing positively irrational people holding irrational premises and comparing that to this issue, which is itself positively irrational.

I lose interest in hearing your justifications for your irrationality. Explain how you can miss something so obvious as what I just pointed out.

I know the answer, but it's a bad, unproductive conversation you are trolling for.

--Brant

[sjw]

The work of J.S.Bell in investigating entanglement, an issue raised between Bohr and Einstein, and stated in the EPR paper is definitely progress, and brilliant progress at that.

It should be stated that the entirety of progress in physics constituted an expansion and explanation of all human knowledge that preceded it. For all of human history up to this point, local causality explained everything. And all of the sudden, some obscure math and experiment comes up, and we're just supposed to swallow that the fundamental nature of physical reality is completely the opposite.

No thanks. The experiment itself must be questioned.

Shayne

[sjw]

I know the answer, but it's a bad, unproductive conversation you are trolling for.

--Brant

I'm not trolling, I'm curious. But the curiosity is probably futile, so you are probably right, at least in effect.

Shayne

[Dragonfly]

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.

The point is that the minority who has such nonsensical ideas is a very small minority. In every discipline you can find such confused individuals with foolish ideas if you look long enough, but that's chasing straw men, those people are not in any way representative for the whole field, that would be Peikovian cherry-picking. It does even happen that some of such people once were competent or even brilliant scientists, who later in life started to lose their touch if they weren't becoming demented.

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.

No, fundamental physical research does have implications for what is commonly considered to be the domain of philosophy. So it's for example physics that has shown that there is no such thing as an absolute time that is the same for anyone (no doubt in the course of the centuries philosophers have deliberated about the meaning of time, but they would never have been able to derive that result) and that reality is quite different from the naive view of philosophers without a scientific background.

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.

No one will dispute that philosophy and physical sciences were once one single discipline. But once the scientific revolution was underway, the gap between the people who studied nature with the scientific method and empirical research, and the philosophers who remained deliberating in their armchairs, became wider and wider.

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.

Rand herself may have been rather cautious in that regard, but there is little doubt that she sanctioned Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels, in which he made several nonsensical attacks on specific mathematical and physical theories. Peikoff's and Harriman's scientific bloopers in Peikoff's DIM lectures I've already documented in an earlier post.

[Dragonfly]

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.

So if it's so obvious, you no doubt can explain to us what really happens and why we get those counterintuitive experimental results.

[Dragonfly]

At some point in human history it would be good if philosophers of your caliber would become interested in such matters. Particularly given the rather stunning halt to progress in theoretical physics after the Copenhagen interpretation came on the scene. Not that such is your duty here.

Stunning halt? That period has been one of the most successful developments in physics. Nuclear physics, atomic physics, solid state physics, chemistry, they all started to flourish thanks to QM and the Copenhagen interpretation. The computer on which you're working wouldn't exist without the work of those QM theorists, neither would lasers, CD's, DVD's, microelectronics, MRI, NMR, electron microscopes. QM gave the solution to the riddle of superconductivity and superfluidity. Ehm, by the way... what has philosophy produced during that same period?

[sjw]

Stunning halt? That period has been one of the most successful developments in physics. Nuclear physics, atomic physics, solid state physics, chemistry, they all started to flourish thanks to QM and the Copenhagen interpretation. The computer on which you're working wouldn't exist without the work of those QM theorists, neither would lasers, CD's, DVD's, microelectronics, MRI, NMR, electron microscopes. QM gave the solution to the riddle of superconductivity and superfluidity. Ehm, by the way... what has philosophy produced during that same period?

Hmmmm, where is the rolleyes emoticon, hmmm, that's too smilely... Nope, none of those emoticons are cutting it.

[sjw]

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.

So if it's so obvious, you no doubt can explain to us what really happens and why we get those counterintuitive experimental results.

No doubt.

[Dragonfly]

No doubt.

Well, go ahead then. Wouldn't you like to enlighten us?

[Brant Gaede]

No, fundamental physical research does have implications for what is commonly considered to be the domain of philosophy. So it's for example physics that has shown that there is no such thing as an absolute time that is the same for anyone (no doubt in the course of the centuries philosophers have deliberated about the meaning of time, but they would never have been able to derive that result) and that reality is quite different from the naive view of philosophers without a scientific background.

If the speed of light is invariant and time is a measurement of motion then time is invariant relative to the speed of light which represents motion?

If the speed of light is X then everything else is -X?

--Brant

Edited August 24, 2010 by Brant Gaede

[sjw]

No, fundamental physical research does have implications for what is commonly considered to be the domain of philosophy. So it's for example physics that has shown that there is no such thing as an absolute time that is the same for anyone (no doubt in the course of the centuries philosophers have deliberated about the meaning of time, but they would never have been able to derive that result) and that reality is quite different from the naive view of philosophers without a scientific background.

If the speed of light is invariant and time is a measurement of motion then time is invariant relative to the speed of light which represents motion?

--Brant

Relativity might seem counterintuitive, but when you consider where you get your intuition from and consider what relativity means, you realize that it doesn't contradict any of your common experience at all, it merely goes beyond what you can perceive, and by doing so, explains a vast range of phenomena that you do perceive.

This "spooky action at a distance" thing is in no way similar to relativity.

Shayne

[sjw]

No doubt.

Well, go ahead then. Wouldn't you like to enlighten us?

My crackpot theories are only tangentially relevant. Besides, you don't want to know, you want to believe. Who am I to take that away from you? It would be like telling a little child the truth about Santa Claus.

Shayne

[Dragonfly]

If the speed of light is invariant and time is a measurement of motion then time is invariant relative to the speed of light which represents motion?

From the invariance of the speed of light follows the relativity of time. See for example Einstein's famous article from 1905.

[Dragonfly]

My crackpot theories are only tangentially relevant. Besides, you don't want to know, you want to believe. Who am I to take that away from you? It would be like telling a little child the truth about Santa Claus.

How predictable. Do you really think that anyone will fall for that lame excuse?

[George H. Smith]

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.

The point is that the minority who has such nonsensical ideas is a very small minority. In every discipline you can find such confused individuals with foolish ideas if you look long enough, but that's chasing straw men, those people are not in any way representative for the whole field, that would be Peikovian cherry-picking. It does even happen that some of such people once were competent or even brilliant scientists, who later in life started to lose their touch if they weren't becoming demented.

The point has nothing to do with whether physicists who make nonsensical metaphysical claims are a "very small minority." We do not ascertain the truth by counting heads. The point is that an expertise in physics is no guarantee that a physicist will reach justified philosophical conclusions. I don't need to consult the majority of physicists in order to identify flawed philosophical reasoning.

Ghs: 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.

No, fundamental physical research does have implications for what is commonly considered to be the domain of philosophy.

I never denied this. But if most physicists claim, say, that QM proves metaphysical indeterminism (a claim that other physicists have denied), I am not required to click my heels together, salute, and say, "Sir, yes, Sir!"

So it's for example physics that has shown that there is no such thing as an absolute time that is the same for anyone (no doubt in the course of the centuries philosophers have deliberated about the meaning of time, but they would never have been able to derive that result) and that reality is quite different from the naive view of philosophers without a scientific background.

Philosophers debated the nature of time for many centuries. It was Newtonian science that supposedly established the absolute nature of time. And even after Newton, Leibniz criticized the Newtonian conception, claiming that both time and space are relational. (See his famous correspondence with the Newtonian Samuel Clarke.)

I am not claiming that philosophers anticipated Einstein. But a case can be made that the mistake of many philosophers was their uncritical acceptance of the philosophical conclusions (or assumptions, in some cases) of Newtonian science. We might learn from this lesson.

Ghs: 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.

Rand herself may have been rather cautious in that regard, but there is little doubt that she sanctioned Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels, in which he made several nonsensical attacks on specific mathematical and physical theories. Peikoff's and Harriman's scientific bloopers in Peikoff's DIM lectures I've already documented in an earlier post.

The problems with Peikoff's DIM hypothesis run far deeper than errors of scientific fact. His simplistic approach is vulnerable to a number of philosophical and historical objections.

Ghs

[sjw]

If the speed of light is invariant and time is a measurement of motion then time is invariant relative to the speed of light which represents motion?

From the invariance of the speed of light follows the relativity of time. See for example Einstein's famous article from 1905.

You don't know which way the cause and effect flows, because you don't believe in cause and effect anyway.