The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics

[sjw]

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?

Oh I know exactly how anything I say will be taken by you and that other pseudo-physicist. That's part of why I wouldn't bother saying anything, it'd just devolve in the same pattern as all the above conversations have. You are completely and utterly and hopelessly irrational. It's a folly for me to even converse with either of you.

Shayne

[Brant Gaede]

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?

Oh I know exactly how anything I say will be taken by you and that other pseudo-physicist. That's part of why I wouldn't bother saying anything, it'd just devolve in the same pattern as all the above conversations have. You are completely and utterly and hopelessly irrational. It's a folly for me to even converse with either of you.

If you were just having a conversation with them you wouldn't, but it seems easier for you to attack someone giving an appearance of a religious attitude on your part. That's just the form, not the substance except form has a substance all its own. There are a lot of people who read OL who never post or log in. I don't recall one answer from either regarding cause and effect or the proper nature of a theory only that QM is a theory as opposed to mere observed data. And I recall an answer from on one about whether QM theory is needed as opposed to QM simply being used--that is, if no theory would we still have its alleged beneficence?

--Brant

[kiaer.ts]

\

To know is to predict accurately. To predict accurately is to know.

Says the false prophet of tongues

There is no God of the Tongues that chisels the True Meaning of Words onto tablets of stone. And you certainly are not the Arbiter of the True Meanings of Words.

Pick your definitions. This is a semi-free country.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[BaalChatzaf]

. And I recall an answer from on one about whether QM theory is needed as opposed to QM simply being used--that is, if no theory would we still have its alleged beneficence?

--Brant

The quantum theory of semi-conductors had to be developed before any significant development of transistors could happen. Classical electrodynamics is incapable of describing and predicting the operation of semi-conductor elements. Two of the men on the Bell Lab team that developed the transistor in 1946-1947 where quantum physicists (Brittain and Bardeen). They put their theoretical knowledge to good use.

There is a good book (non-mathematical) describing how and why quantum physics was necessary for the development of electronics in the 20th century. -Quantum Legacy- by Barry Parker. Example: Lasers cannot be understood except in quantum-physical terms.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

I've been looking through a book called The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder. The book is a novelistic-style telling of the history of quantum mechanics.

Here's most of a brief chapter, 35, titled "Are You Telling Me This Could Be Practical? 1989-1991," which describes how Artur Ekert got the idea of using quantum entanglement in code work.

Apropos the discussion of relative funding support for competing interpretations of QM, notice that Gilder relates that as late as 1990 Bell had discouraged students from specializing in the foundations of quantum mechanics on the grounds that "a subject so unfashionable and esoteric could only make them unemployable." I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of percentages of Ph.D.s in QM over the decades since its inception.

The Age of Entanglement

Louisa Gilder

2008

Alfred A. Knopf

35: "Are You Telling Me This Could Be Practical? 1989-1991"

pp. 312-15

[italics in original]

In the library of Oxford's Clarendon Lab sat Artur Ekert, a postdoc [i think she means graduate student] who might have been mistaken for a young Yul Brynner (the famous shiny pate would come later), reading EPR for the first time. Born in Poland of a family from all over Europe, Ekert had known where he wanted to go to college ever since a friend had given him a few papers written in 1985 by Oxford's most brilliant and reclusive physicist, David Deutsch.

"At the time, there were probably two or three people in the world who were interested in quantum computing," Ekert remembered. "David was one of them. And he wrote those few papers which no one actually really read seriously at the time." A quantum process could simulate any classical computation, Paul Benioff showed in 1980. A year later, Feynman read Mermin's article on Bell and famously threw down the gauntlet to computer scientists in his "Simulating Physics with Computers" speech--Bell's inequality shows that only a quantum computer would be able to fully imitate Nature, because only a quantum computer can capture entanglement.

Though the young Feynman had dramatically speeded up the computing in the Manhattan Project (done on cumbersome multipliers and sorters) by using computers working in parallel, it was Deutsch who took the third step toward the quantum computer, describing the undreamed-of computing speed inherent in what he called quantum parallelism (the superposition principle of wave mechanics, in which two waves added together produce a new wave), where many possibilities can be simultaneously explored.

Deutsch was a wispy and fragile-looking man who was awake only at night, rarely left Oxford, and felt that quantum mechanics and, in particular, the quantum computer prove that the universe is constantly splitting into many different worlds. Quantum parallelism meant, to Deutsch, the power of a machine that could compute in all parallel worlds simultaneously. He became an adviser and friend to the sunny, down-to-earth Ekert.

Ekert's hobby was cryptography. "I just liked public-key cryptosystems--I was fascinated by them." In the 1970s, "a lovely piece of number theory" developed by Pierre de Fermat in the seventeenth century had been co-opted by the British Secret Service for cryptography--"a big surprise, said Ekert, laughing, "to many mathematicians who thought the field was so pure it would never be tainted by any practical application." The system, called RSA after the three civilians at M.I.T. who rediscovered it (a few years after the classified version), elegantly solves the problem of the eavesdropper.

An unbreakable code is, after all, only as secure as its key--and the key has to be distributed, by means of a courier or over some line of communication, never fully safe from eavesdropping.

[skipping a description of how RSA staves off the eavesdropper problem]

But, though [RSA was hugely time-consuming to solve using then-existing computers, if] any malicious eavesdropper ever worked out a faster way to factor large numbers, the RSA code would fall apart.

So it happened that Ekert, in the quiet of Clarendon's library, sat back in his chair in shock when he read for the first time the famous EPR definition of "an element of reality": if, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity. "It just clicked in my brain: wow--this is about eavesdropping!" An eavesdropper just wants to learn the value of the code "without in any way disturbing the system." If the code shows traces of prying, then Alice [the sender] and Bob [the receiver] won't use it, and the eavesdropper's work would be in vain.

"Local realism," Ekert realized, "allows you somehow to incorporate the definition of perfect eavesdropping into the formulation." His mind was whirling: "Ha!--but I know it was refuted!" An entangled code would be an un-eavesdroppable code. He leaped up and began to search the Charendon Library for Bell's 1964 paper.

What if Alice and Bob shared a long series of entangled photons?

"If the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequalities are violated" (meaning that Alice and Bob's photons remain entangled), Ekert began to realize, "then there's no chance that the eavesdropper touched the particles on the way." Any prying would destroy the entanglement. The inequality is "like a signature that the particles were not touched."

"I was very happy about it," Ekert remembered, but then he found that, aside from the intellectually fearless Deutsch, "hardly anyone wanted to talk about this; people were just very dismissive about the whole thing."

Then Bell himself arrived to give a speech at Oxford. After the speech, Ekert, overflowing with excitement, came up to Bell and explained his idea, in his likable accent (a combination of several different European languages, including the Queen's English).

Bell stared at the elated young graduate student. He had always firmly discouraged students from delving into the foundations of quantum mechanics; a subject so unfashionable and esoteric could only make them unemployable. He had never expected to hear anything like what Ekert was saying. "Are you telling me that this could be of practical use?" Bell asked.

"I said, 'Yes, I think it can.'

"And he said, 'Well, it's unbelievable.'"

They did not have long to talk. "I was just a student and there were many people who wanted to whisk him away," said Ekert, but Bell left Oxford knowing that a new chapter in the history of entanglement was about to begin.

Edited August 26, 2010 by Ellen Stuttle

[sjw]

My crackpot theories are only tangentially relevant.

Well, I must report that it turns out my particular idea was a crackpot theory. Several years ago reading about EPR I came up with what I thought was an alternative explanation for the apparent non-locality. This thread revived my interest in it, so I looked up a physicist friend and he shot it down pretty handily. (Incidentally, he doesn't buy into the irrationalism in mainstream interpretations of QM either -- fundamentally we are in agreement that there must be a rational, causal explanation, and that the task of physics is to find it).

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

My crackpot theories are only tangentially relevant.

Well, I must report that it turns out my particular idea was a crackpot theory. Several years ago reading about EPR I came up with what I thought was an alternative explanation for the apparent non-locality. This thread revived my interest in it, so I looked up a physicist friend and he shot it down pretty handily. (Incidentally, he doesn't buy into the irrationalism in mainstream interpretations of QM either -- fundamentally we are in agreement that there must be a rational, causal explanation, and that the task of physics is to find it).

Shayne

Be sure to write us about it when you succeed. Forsooth, I will not hold my breath. Bell's Theorem pretty well shoots down the possibility of there being "hidden variables" AND locality. Bohm-DeBroigle is a possibility but that requires a superluminal wave. It is not consistent with the theory of relativity.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited August 25, 2010 by BaalChatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

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. [....]

What are you taking "the Copenhagen interpretation" to mean? Aren't there a number of interpretations loosely lumped as "Copenhagen"? Do you simply mean indeterminist? If so, is it your claim that a specifically indeterminist interpretation is required for all those practical results of QM theory? Or do you mean something narrower, for instance, that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is required?

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

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.

Guess what, I know that. I even heard Steven Weinberg give a very lucid lecture about that, and about the history of the standard model, in Budapest last summer. But it doesn't actually address the question.

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.

Guess what, I know that. I even heard Steven Weinberg give a very lucid lecture about that, and about the history of the standard model, in Budapest last summer. But it doesn't actually address the question.

Ellen

Yes it does. Mass is what the Higgs boson does to some of the other particles. Mass is a manifestation of broken symmetry.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

The Age of Entanglement

Louisa Gilder

2008

Alfred A. Knopf

pp. 327

When people ask, "What's entanglement good for?" Ekert tells a story. James Clerk Maxwell, the greatest theorist of the nineteenth century (who spent his career at Cambridge university, where Ekert now works), was once asked, "What's electricity good for?" Ekert repeats Maxwell's reply: "Well, I do not know but I'm pretty sure that Her Majesty's government will tax it soon."

What might Maxwell think if he could return and see not only the enormity of the usefulness of electricity -- but the magnitude of the revenues which would be collected and the power which would be sought through the taxation and regulation of electricity's production and use?

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Yes it does. Mass is what the Higgs boson does to some of the other particles. Mass is a manifestation of broken symmetry.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Just like it says in Kabbalah, re the broken shards?

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

The Age of Entanglement

Louisa Gilder

2008

Alfred A. Knopf

pp. 328-30

[footnotes, bracketed inserts, ellipsis, and italics in original]

Those of us unburdened by physics graduate degrees are always wanting to know the answers to questions that have no answers--hence Bell's ironic name for his book, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. Consider the question of Rutherford's friend, who had just read of his lectures: "After such reading my mind always fastens on the Proton--I wonder what you have in your head--in your mind's eye--when you think of it. I don't know whether anyone has invented any guts for it." Now, years later, there is a quick, superficial, and correct answer to that question: the "guts" of a proton or neutron are quarks. But Rutherford's friend's question remains essentially unanswered. Is there any way to understand what a quark is? These things are not particles, they are not waves; in some ways they are utterly deterministic, in others, completely random; they always confound instinctive understanding.

"All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the question, 'What are light quanta?' Nowadays every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken." Einstein wrote this to his best friend, Besso, in 1951, four years before he died. Bohr's mind could bend around complementarity, duality, uncertainty, but, still, Rutherford--who was always on Bohr's side in the arguments with Einstein--once thundered at him, "Bohr, my boy, you are too complacent about ignorance."

The great experimental physicist I. I. Rabi described this problem in an interview with Jeremy Bernstein. "There's the miracle of doing something like making an electron-positron pair!* One actually creates a remarkable thing like an electron. It's a marvelous thing. I don't see how it's made. It just appears. It's a kind of materialization--the ghost shows up in reality. There it is. You can calculate how many electrons will be produced, and with what probability. But how was it born? What was it made of? It's this kind of question that, as an experimenter, I would like to see answered.

"The theory doesn't answer the sort of question that led me into physics in the first place.

"I wanted to know what the thing really was."

-

*Matter and antimatter emerging from the energy of a collision.

-

And so, of course, did Bell. He wanted to know not how a particle responds to a "measurement," but what it really is. While still at Stanford in 1964, after writing his paper on the nonlocality of hidden variables, Bell wrote another paper in collaboration with a professor there named Mike Nauenberg. Their paper, "The Moral Aspect of Quantum Mechanics," ends with these resounding paragraphs:

It is easy to imagine a [quantum state, described by a huge Schrödinger equation] for the whole universe, quietly pursuing its linear evolution through all of time and containing somehow all possible worlds. But the usual interpretive axioms of quantum mechanics come into play only when the system interacts with something else, is "observed." For the universe, there

is

nothing else, and quantum mechanics in its traditional form has simply nothing to say.

It gives no way of, indeed no meaning in, picking out from the wave of possibility the single unique thread of history.

These considerations, in our opinion, lead inescapably to the conclusion that quantum mechanics is, at the best, incomplete.*

-

*"This minority view is as old as quantum mechanics itself, so the new theory may be a long time coming....We emphasize not only that our view is that of a minority, but also that current interest in such questions is small. The typical physicist feels that they have long been answered, and that he will fully understand just how if ever he can spare 20 minutes to think about it." (This is Bell's footnote.)

-

We look forward to a new theory which can refer meaningfully to events in a given system without requiring "observation" by another system. The critical test cases requiring this conclusion are systems containing consciousness and the universe as a whole. Actually, the writers share with most physicists a degree of embarrassment at consciousness being dragged into physics, and share the usual feeling that to consider the universe as a whole is at least immodest, if not blasphemous.

However, these are only logical test cases. It seems likely to us that physics will have again adopted a more objective description of nature long before it begins to understand consciousness, and the universe as a whole may well play no central role in this development. It remains a logical possibility that it is the act of consciousness which is ultimately responsible for the reduction of the wave packet [in other words, "the collapse of the wavefunction"]. It is also possible that something like the quantum mechanical state function may continue to play a role, supplemented by variables describing the actual--as distinct from the possible--course of events ("hidden variables") although this approach seems to face severe difficulties in describing separated systems in a sensible way.

What is much more likely is that the new way of seeing things will involve an imaginative leap that will astonish us.

In any case, it seems that the quantum mechanical description will be superceded. In this it is like all theories made by man. But to an unusual extent its ultimate fate is apparent in its internal structure. It carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Edited August 26, 2010 by Ellen Stuttle

[kiaer.ts]

Yes it does. Mass is what the Higgs boson does to some of the other particles. Mass is a manifestation of broken symmetry.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Just like it says in Kabbalah, re the broken shards?

Ellen

Shevirat ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels)

According to Luria, the ten vessels that were originally meant to contain the emanation of God's light were unable to contain that light and were hence either displaced or shattered. As a result of this cosmic catastrophe, the Sefirot, the archetypal values through which the cosmos was created, are shattered and out of place, and the world within which we reside, is composed of the shards of the these broken values. It is significant that for the Kabbalists, only 6 of the 10 Sefirot (from Chesed to Yesod) were fully shattered (Malchut, the final vessel was broken partially). Had all of the vessels, including, Keter, Chochmah, and Binah, been shattered, the universe would have been thrown back into the state of complete and utter chaos, the toho and bohu prior to creation. As it is, the three highest Sefirot, which represent Will, Wisdom, and Understanding, remained intact; only the six Sefirot representing the spiritual, moral, aesthetic and material values were broken, and are, hence, in need of restoration or repair (Tikkun). Nevertheless, the Breaking of the Vessels is a truly cataclysmic event. Will, Wisdom and Understanding remain, but all other values, particularly those embodied in the cultural and symbolic order of mankind, have been shattered. Further, while certain forms (may) remain, their embodiment in matter, is chaotic and confused. The Breaking of the Vessels is, according to the Lurianic Kabbalah, a clearing of the decks, a fresh start, and a challenge to the structures that we equate with our own civilized life. It is, in short, an eruption of chaos into the heart of our spiritual, conceptual, moral and psychological structures.

[BaalChatzaf]

Yes it does. Mass is what the Higgs boson does to some of the other particles. Mass is a manifestation of broken symmetry.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Just like it says in Kabbalah, re the broken shards?

Ellen

Shevirat ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels)

According to Luria, the ten vessels that were originally meant to contain the emanation of God's light were unable to contain that light and were hence either displaced or shattered. As a result of this cosmic catastrophe, the Sefirot, the archetypal values through which the cosmos was created, are shattered and out of place, and the world within which we reside, is composed of the shards of the these broken values. It is significant that for the Kabbalists, only 6 of the 10 Sefirot (from Chesed to Yesod) were fully shattered (Malchut, the final vessel was broken partially). Had all of the vessels, including, Keter, Chochmah, and Binah, been shattered, the universe would have been thrown back into the state of complete and utter chaos, the toho and bohu prior to creation. As it is, the three highest Sefirot, which represent Will, Wisdom, and Understanding, remained intact; only the six Sefirot representing the spiritual, moral, aesthetic and material values were broken, and are, hence, in need of restoration or repair (Tikkun). Nevertheless, the Breaking of the Vessels is a truly cataclysmic event. Will, Wisdom and Understanding remain, but all other values, particularly those embodied in the cultural and symbolic order of mankind, have been shattered. Further, while certain forms (may) remain, their embodiment in matter, is chaotic and confused. The Breaking of the Vessels is, according to the Lurianic Kabbalah, a clearing of the decks, a fresh start, and a challenge to the structures that we equate with our own civilized life. It is, in short, an eruption of chaos into the heart of our spiritual, conceptual, moral and psychological structures.

There were many Kabalists and Orthodox Jews who likened the (so-called) Big Bang to the Breaking of the Vessels. The Big Bang is a misnomer (invented by Fred Hoyle who favored the steady state model) for a sudden expansion of the universe which was condensed into a very small volume. SpaceTime expanded and is still expanding at an accelerating pace.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited August 26, 2010 by BaalChatzaf

[Xray]

This is the place to provide your causal explanations, swj. "Inconsistency" and "acauasality" have no place in Rand's mind, so what prevents you from presenting your case on a forum frequented by many Objectivists?

Isn't it the quality of arguments supported by evidence which counts? So why don't you say: "These are my argumets and here is my supporting evidence. Feel free to test it!", and then sit back and wait what possible opponents come up with? You don't come across to me as being timid, so why don't you just take the plunge?

Why do you care? You aren't an Objectivist. You're just here to pick Objectivism apart.

So this theory of yours is for 'Objectivists only'?

What would you think of someone adhering to a philosophy X who refuses to present his case to a critic on the grounds that the critic is no advocate of that philosophy?

You're just here to pick Objectivism apart.

I'm analyzing it and one can't analyze anything without picking it apart. I have yet to see an Objectivist inviting critics to try picking Objectivis apart to study it in detail and see for themselves if it works.

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

Shayne, I'm afraid it is you who are the believer, not Dragonfly.

Are you projecting into Dragonfly what you fear? To be told the truth about your "Santa Claus", in that he might prove you wrong on substantial issues, pointing out fundamental misunderstandings on your part? DF does have expertise in the fied of quantum physics, so if anyone can correct your possible errors, it is this poster. I think you are well aware of that.

Brant, I'll decide who the real physicists are, not you. Now go back to whatever it was you were assigned to do and stop worrying about what the adults are doing.

You decide, Shayne? Have you already informed the scientific community of your decision?

Spooky, but non the less real, as exhibited by the experiments.

No, as interpreted by physicists using corrupt philosophy as their guide.

"Corrupt philosophy" - you know what that reminds me of? In a German Marxist philosophical dictionary, it was called "philosophically false" (!) to conclude from the entropy law a heat death of the universe. It obviously did not fit into Marxist ideology to visualize such final stage, since it leaves no place anymore for any illusion of a perennial "earthly" paradise on any planets.

Rand was of the same opinion as the Marxits here btw. Reread Dagny's dialogue with Rearden in AS, where she dismisses the prospect of everything "growing cold" in the universe as a mere story ("I never believed that story").

So there seems to be a tendency among ideologists to call "philosphically false" certain physical findings or theories and to claim that the physicists who work in that field have a "corrupt philosophy" ...

Edited August 26, 2010 by Xray

[sjw]

xray <edited out unnecessary epithets>

As I already said, my theory is at present blown out of the water, courtesy of a *rational* physicist. At present I, like everyone else including you and DF, have no rational answer for this class of experiments, which distinctly *indicate* that something unexplainable is going on. They indicate spooky action at a distance. I don't accept that that is what is really happening, because that is a completely incoherent description, but all I can say is that by all I know up to this point, which, importantly, isn't everything, it is *as if* spooky action at a distance is real.

This problem, like all problems before, represents not an impregnable wall of ignorance asserted onto mankind by God or the universe that mankind must be satisfied in wallowing in, but something to be overcome. And it is only to be overcome by trying, and trying certainly leads to failing, as it did in my case and in many cases before. Eventually someone will try and succeed, and then you irrationalists will go find some other area where we are not omniscient to gloat about. While we keep pushing mankind forward, you losers just sit and gloat whenever or wherever we happen to fail, all while living off the benefit of such trying. Such is your nature.

Edited August 26, 2010 by sjw

[sjw]

So there seems to be a tendency among ideologists to call "philosphically false" certain physical findings or theories and to claim that the physicists who work in that field have a "corrupt philosophy" ...

I don't dispute the apparent findings. Physicists like Bell are certainly not corrupt, he didn't like the findings either and wanted to find a way out of them, a way to reconcile them with reason. Bohr on the other hand was corrupt.

Shayne

[kiaer.ts]

So there seems to be a tendency among ideologists to call "philosphically false" certain physical findings or theories and to claim that the physicists who work in that field have a "corrupt philosophy" ...

I don't dispute the apparent findings. Physicists like Bell are certainly not corrupt, he didn't like the findings either and wanted to find a way out of them, a way to reconcile them with reason. Bohr on the other hand was corrupt.

Shayne

Some physicists and many popularizers do have corrupt philosophies. The problem is when so-called Objectivists misapply their own lack of understanding of the issues (claims by Harriman that space can't "bend" because it is a relationship, not an entity) or they accept wholesale the nonsenseical interpretations of the facts of the physicists, and finding the interpretations unpalatable, deny the facts. An example of the latter error is the idea that the wave/particle duality of (sub)atomic scale entities amounts to a reified contradiction. That quantum scale entities can have both wave like and particle like properties is only a contradiction if one holds the incorrigible belief that entities on that scale cannot have both wavelike and particle like properties, presumably because on a macro-scale we do not find entities which have both properties. But this is not a contradiction - it is simply an indication that the premise that entities of a certain scale cannot have both wavelike and particlelike properties is false.

The corrupt physicists, and especially the hack popularizers and would-be mystics, do indeed often pretend that the wave particle duality at the quantum level amounts to the existence of a contradiction. But that analysis is simply false.

If one were to claim that quantum scale entities both did exhibit and did not exhibit wave/particle duality, then there would be a contradiction.

But that is not the claim, and it is bad philosophy to claim that any contradiction exists.

Edited August 26, 2010 by Ted Keer

[sjw]

I somewhat agree with Keer's analysis but: to the extent that it is proposed that matter *is* both a wave and a particle, then that is a contradiction. It is one thing to say that something exhibits particle-like behaviors, it's an entirely different thing to say that it is a particle. However, no real physicists assert this anyway, they all know, or at least the evidence very strongly suggests (we have to be very careful given that QM is something of a conceptual mess right now), that it's not a particle at all. Nor is there a metaphysical need for it to be one.

Further, Harriman's argument from definitions does indeed seem to be missing a point, but the *reason* is because physicists themselves are mis-defining terms. If space is *something* that can be bent, then it is not space at all, but rather some kind of real medium. Perhaps that is his entire point, I don't know the context of the Harriman quote. But it *is* absurd to define space as "empty" or "nothing" and then claim it can be "bent."

Shayne

Edited August 26, 2010 by sjw

[BaalChatzaf]

I somewhat agree with Keer's analysis but: to the extent that it is proposed that matter *is* both a wave and a particle, then that is a contradiction. It is one thing to say that something exhibits particle-like behaviors, it's an entirely different thing to say that it is a particle. However, no real physicists assert this anyway, they all know, or at least the evidence very strongly suggests (we have to be very careful given that QM is something of a conceptual mess right now), that it's not a particle at all. Nor is there a metaphysical need for it to be one.

Further, Harriman's argument from definitions does indeed seem to be missing a point, but the *reason* is because physicists themselves are mis-defining terms. If space is *something* that can be bent, then it is not space at all, but rather some kind of real medium. Perhaps that is his entire point, I don't know the context of the Harriman quote. But it *is* absurd to define space as "empty" or "nothing" and then claim it can be "bent."

Shayne

Wave and Particle are mathematical abstractions. Any extended body is not a particle. The Wave and Particle abstractions make good analogs in a mathematical description of the physical world. What is -really- Down Below is neither a wave nor a particle, but for certain situations the particle description fits well, for other situations the wave description fits well.

Now consider something mundane like a conical shaped paper cup. From one point of view it looks like a circle from another point of view it looks like a triangle. A circle is not a triangle and a triangle is not a circle but these contrary structures both serve to describe the paper cup which is neither a triangle nor a circle.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited August 26, 2010 by BaalChatzaf

[sjw]

Wave and Particle are mathematical abstractions. Any extended body is not a particle. The Wave and Particle abstractions make good analogs in a mathematical description of the physical world. What is -really- Down Below is neither a wave nor a particle, but for certain situations the particle description fits well, for other situations the wave description fits well.

Now consider something mundane like a conical shaped paper cup. From one point of view it looks like a circle from another point of view it looks like a triangle. A circle is not a triangle and a triangle is not a circle but these contrary structures both serve to describe the paper cup which is neither a triangle nor a circle.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Essentially correct. And the problem with most physicists is that they see no need or point in inferring the paper cup from the different points of view, when in fact that is the overarching purpose of physics, or indeed, of any science.

Shayne

[kiaer.ts]

I somewhat agree with Keer's analysis but: to the extent that it is proposed that matter *is* both a wave and a particle, then that is a contradiction. It is one thing to say that something exhibits particle-like behaviors, it's an entirely different thing to say that it is a particle. However, no real physicists assert this anyway, they all know, or at least the evidence very strongly suggests (we have to be very careful given that QM is something of a conceptual mess right now), that it's not a particle at all. Nor is there a metaphysical need for it to be one.

Further, Harriman's argument from definitions does indeed seem to be missing a point, but the *reason* is because physicists themselves are mis-defining terms. If space is *something* that can be bent, then it is not space at all, but rather some kind of real medium. Perhaps that is his entire point, I don't know the context of the Harriman quote. But it *is* absurd to define space as "empty" or "nothing" and then claim it can be "bent."

Shayne

It is a mistake to uncritically assume the notions of wave and particle on the macro-scale and then apply them to the quantum scale as if they translated without distortion. (I am not saying that you are doing this yourself, Shayne.)

It would not strictly be a contradiction even if one were to assert that something on the macro-scale had the properties of particles and waves. Contradiction (rather than, perhaps, contrariness) would only exist if one were, again, to say that a thing both was and was not a particle.

If one considers, say, a billiard ball as representing a particle, and then tries to imagine a quantum-scale particle as if it were a billiard ball, one is smuggling in all sorts of attributes of billiard balls, such as their having tensile strength, discreet smooth surfaces, the ability to be broken into pieces, their ability to have their position and momentum measured accurately without significant distortion of the results caused by that very measurement, and so forth. But that is quite invalid. We cannot attribute these macro-level attributes to entities at that scale. The same applies for waves. The necessary realization is that the attributes of particle-like and wave-like behavior are radically scale dependent. It amounts to the same sort of mistake to call atoms particles in the macro-sense as it would be to say that atoms have solidity or color in the macro-sense. Any attempt to say that wave/particle duality on the subatomic level is a contradiction is based frozen concepts of wave and particle formed at the macro-scale and then improperly imported into a micro-scale context.

Things on that level simply are what they are.

I have only listened to Harriman's freely available lectures. His remarks on line are dismissive one-liners made offhand, with authority as his only argument. He does say, following Rand's entity/attribute/relation ontology, that space is a relationship, and that relations cannot be bent, only entities can. It is a puerile argument based upon his lack of understanding of the difference in senses between space in the sense of geometers and the modern physicists' concept spacetime. Again, we run into the problem of translating phenomena into the context of a scale where conventionally human-scale notions fail to apply. Even following Rand's ontological framework (which I myself use) he is wrong to call space a relation. Locations and distances are relations. One wouldn't talk of a location being bent in any physical sense of the word bent with which I am aware. The proper analogy to the curvature of space is the curvature of a surface. I don't know if we even have a word for it, but concept like spaces and surface may be relational, while the realities themselves are not simple relations in the way location and distance are relations.

[sjw]

Given that you've listened to the lectures Ted and that what you're saying fits in with the modus operandi of most Objectivists I assume you're correct.

If Objectivist physicists want to make themselves useful and to demonstrate how great their philosophy is, then they should take up some of the thorny problems in physics and provide solutions. They shouldn't try to tell people how to think when they themselves haven't demonstrated a particular aptitude for creating thinking. I think Harriman's book is only intended or useful for the already convinced.

[Ellen Stuttle]

As I already said, my theory is at present blown out of the water, courtesy of a *rational* physicist.

Would you be willing to describe the theory (if not on-list than off-list) just in case it might provide a productive lead even though wrong? Wrong theories can turn out to be useful as suggesters of better ones.

Ellen