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Eric Charles-2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Speaking as a federal employee.... I encounter appeals to authority almost constantly in situations where the thing appealed to lacks the authority claimed. It is amazing to watch the reactions when someone says "We are going to do X because so-and-so says we are going to do X," and the whole room nods except for me. Then I calmly reply that so-and-so lacks the authority to make that decision. It gets especially awkward when I show Code of Federal Regulation (CFR) to support my assertion that we are going to do things differently. CFR has actual authority. I'm also the kind of asshole that makes a senior executive put in writing when they are granting an exception, when the CFR allows exceptions to be granted by senior executives, and won't accept a subordinate making the same move because, again, they explicitly lack that authority..... point being... lots of people make appeals to authority in situations where the thing they are appealing to lacks the authority they want.... but that still counts an "appeal to authority."

As an academic, my fascination with authority mostly revolved around graduation ceremonies. At Penn State Altoona, we always had an emissary from the board of trustees, who would travel to our campus with an oversized magical amulet that he gives to the Chancellor, thereby vesting in her the power of the board to grant degrees. I'm not joking, the magical ceremony can be seen in this video starting at 51:45. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dYPPptGYC8

Groups of students are asked to stand, then the Chancellor states: "Through the power vested in me by the Board of Trustees of The Pennsylvania State University I now bestow upon each of you your respective degree."

This is necessary, presumably, because only the board of trustees has the power to grant degrees... and should a drunk hobo accidentally wander into a board of trustees meeting, they are fully within their authority to grant him a Ph.D. in Drunkology from Penn State. Should they agree to do so, it is done, regardless of any objections that might be lodged later.

I often thought about asking someone to attend the Altoona graduation ceremony, stand up every time that was about to happen, and then file a suit arguing that they had been officially granted a degree via the power of the Board of Trustees. (See also, the excellent book "How to do things with words".) It would have been so easy to rephrase the stock-statement to avoid such an issue... but they have still not changed it.

[hidden email]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 10:13 AM Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

I actually find most of those explanations weak, given that, according to Feynmann, no one understands quantum mechanics. How does an appeal to authority work when you appeal to an authority that does not understand and cannot explain? How does one don the attributes of experts who do not understand or explain their expertise? Where are the solid foundations of quantum mechanics?

I suppose it could all be pro forma in that none of the participants understand that there is no there there to which one could appeal, so the appeal becomes nothing but a ritual motion with "quantum woo" taking the place of whichever holiest holy worked last week.

But maybe it's exactly the inexplicability which is the secret sauce, that there is something ineffable about the quantum physics.

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 9:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email]> wrote:
OK. So, maybe y'all have collectively provided an answer. The reason(s) people invoke quantum woo so *often* is because it serves several (perhaps conflatable and ambiguous) purposes.

In order of appearance in the thread:
1) justificationist appeals to authority
2) donning attributes others (seem to) have but you don't
3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations
4) power (both social and individual)
5) evocation of the shaman/oracle archetype

Note, I'm not including ordinary physics, only woo, because that's what irritated me enough to stop reading "Ignorance" for so long. Firestein has lots of other riffs and hooks and it was childish of me to react that way ... but I can't help it. The woo is killing me. By contrast, imagining (and ruling out) an "airfoil" around pond scum in relation to the Purcell paper was NOT irritating at all. Invocations of actual physics are fine. Invocations of mysterious stuff just because it's mysterious flips my triggers.

Speaking of the Purcell paper, this popped off the queue this morning:

New Clues To ALS And Alzheimer's From Physics
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/888687912/new-clues-to-als-and-alzheimers-from-physics

I'm embarrassed that I didn't notice it sooner.

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gepr

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by Stephen Guerin-5

EricS said it well enough, I think, quoted below for easy cf. I'll try to restate including a comment Firestein makes on Darwinism. The point is a kind of hindsight fallacy, where prior to the shift, we were confused and argumentative and after the shift we are (mostly) in consensus. That shift, if relatively modern so that documents exist, brings 2 things: 1) foundation that we can simply/thinly accept as true without arguing our lips off and 2) transparency - *if* we need to reconstruct the foundation from "first principles", we have people/documents we can use to do so [α]. Obviously, an at-will-reconstructable foundation is more founded than an assumed to be solid foundation.

Re Darwin, Firestein says: "As a quick sidelight this explains modern biology's debt to Darwin. You often hear that contemporary biology could not exist without the explanatory power of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. But it is rarely made clear why this must be the case. Do physicians, for example, really have to believe in evolution to treat sick people? They do, at least implicitly, because the use of model systems to study more complicated ones relies on the relatedness of all biological organisms, us included. It is the process of evolution, the mechanisms of genetic inheritance and occasional mutation, that have conserved the genes responsible for making the proteins that confer electrical activity on neurons, as well as those that make kidneys and livers, and hearts and lungs work they way they do. If that were not the case, then we couldn't study these things in worms, flies, rats, mice, or monkeys and believe that it would have relevance to humans. There would be no drugs, no surgical procedures, no treatments, and no diagnostic tests. All of these have been developed using model systems ranging from cell sin culture dishes to rodents to primates. No evolution, no model systems, no progress."

Obviously, he takes some liberties there. It is a book [ptouie] after all, not a paper. I hope people won't go ranting off into the void because of them. But the gist is good. Now, to move toward your position, *IF* you allow for both Darwinism *and* your phenomenal path integral (regardless of mechanism), then you could argue that the addition of that purely physical principle to evolution facilitates EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes above. [α] I.e. adding this extra component to the description of living systems may (HELP) get us from small problems (vortices) to large problems (cultural evolution). Of course, if you insist on denigrating and devaluing evolution, as you seem to want to do, then I'll abandon you to stew in your own juices. >8^D

How was that? Will you buy me a pint? Or jeer at me from a distance?

[α][δ] I'm reminded of the recent experiments contradicting (but not fully falsifying) pilot wave theory.

[β] Sideline to this supercool result that popped off my queue the other day:
A continuous reaction network that produces RNA precursors
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13267

[δ] Jon has convinced me to expand my list of footnote symbols!

On 7/7/20 9:39 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> When people I run across talk about how they wish their work were more like the work they think goes on in physics, they often invoke work that has been settled for so long that we take it as very reliable, but that was still unknown recently enough that we can remember the difference. That is the subset selected by survival. But I never hear them saying they wish their work were more like string theory. I imagine that, if they knew what the endless churning around string theory were like for the people involved (the string theorists, and against them people like Peter Woit (sp?), Smolin (though less seriously), Sabine Hossenfelder, or other critics who try to address substance), they would say that their work is already much too much the same as all that, and they wish it were less so.

On 7/8/20 9:34 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> Of the 5, I think I align with reason #3. Can you unpack a little more what you mean by it?
>
> * Extra points if you explain with a steelman of my paradigm shift :-)
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> *3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations*

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gepr

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Damnit. That 2nd α should have been a β. Stupid brain.

On 7/8/20 10:44 AM, ∄ uǝlƃ wrote:
> EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes above. [α] [...]
>
> [β] Sideline to this supercool result that popped off my queue the other day:
> A continuous reaction network that produces RNA precursors
> https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13267

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thompnickson2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by gepr

What a minute. I am lost. Who is devaluing evolution? And when they are devaluing it, are the devaluing evolution as a phenomenon (adapted phylogenic descent, or some other systematic form of change), or are they devaluing natural selection as a process by which that change is thought to come about?

If too much water has flowed over the damn, feel free to ignore this.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of ? u?l?
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 11:44 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

EricS said it well enough, I think, quoted below for easy cf. I'll try to restate including a comment Firestein makes on Darwinism. The point is a kind of hindsight fallacy, where prior to the shift, we were confused and argumentative and after the shift we are (mostly) in consensus. That shift, if relatively modern so that documents exist, brings 2 things: 1) foundation that we can simply/thinly accept as true without arguing our lips off and 2) transparency - *if* we need to reconstruct the foundation from "first principles", we have people/documents we can use to do so [α]. Obviously, an at-will-reconstructable foundation is more founded than an assumed to be solid foundation.

Re Darwin, Firestein says: "As a quick sidelight this explains modern biology's debt to Darwin. You often hear that contemporary biology could not exist without the explanatory power of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. But it is rarely made clear why this must be the case. Do physicians, for example, really have to believe in evolution to treat sick people? They do, at least implicitly, because the use of model systems to study more complicated ones relies on the relatedness of all biological organisms, us included. It is the process of evolution, the mechanisms of genetic inheritance and occasional mutation, that have conserved the genes responsible for making the proteins that confer electrical activity on neurons, as well as those that make kidneys and livers, and hearts and lungs work they way they do. If that were not the case, then we couldn't study these things in worms, flies, rats, mice, or monkeys and believe that it would have relevance to humans. There would be no drugs, no surgical procedures, no treatments, and no diagnostic tests. All of these have been developed using model systems ranging from cell sin culture dishes to rodents to primates. No evolution, no model systems, no progress."

Obviously, he takes some liberties there. It is a book [ptouie] after all, not a paper. I hope people won't go ranting off into the void because of them. But the gist is good. Now, to move toward your position, *IF* you allow for both Darwinism *and* your phenomenal path integral (regardless of mechanism), then you could argue that the addition of that purely physical principle to evolution facilitates EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes above. [α] I.e. adding this extra component to the description of living systems may (HELP) get us from small problems (vortices) to large problems (cultural evolution). Of course, if you insist on denigrating and devaluing evolution, as you seem to want to do, then I'll abandon you to stew in your own juices. >8^D

How was that? Will you buy me a pint? Or jeer at me from a distance?

[α][δ] I'm reminded of the recent experiments contradicting (but not fully falsifying) pilot wave theory.

[β] Sideline to this supercool result that popped off my queue the other day:
A continuous reaction network that produces RNA precursors
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13267

[δ] Jon has convinced me to expand my list of footnote symbols!

On 7/7/20 9:39 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> When people I run across talk about how they wish their work were more like the work they think goes on in physics, they often invoke work that has been settled for so long that we take it as very reliable, but that was still unknown recently enough that we can remember the difference. That is the subset selected by survival. But I never hear them saying they wish their work were more like string theory. I imagine that, if they knew what the endless churning around string theory were like for the people involved (the string theorists, and against them people like Peter Woit (sp?), Smolin (though less seriously), Sabine Hossenfelder, or other critics who try to address substance), they would say that their work is already much too much the same as all that, and they wish it were less so.

On 7/8/20 9:34 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:

> Of the 5, I think I align with reason #3. Can you unpack a little more
> what you mean by it?
>
> * Extra points if you explain with a steelman of my paradigm shift :-)
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> *3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid
> foundations*

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David Eric Smith

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

Ha! 2-factor authentication!

As an academic, my fascination with authority mostly revolved around graduation ceremonies. At Penn State Altoona, we always had an emissary from the board of trustees, who would travel to our campus with an oversized magical amulet that he gives to the Chancellor, thereby vesting in her the power of the board to grant degrees. I'm not joking, the magical ceremony can be seen in this video starting at 51:45. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dYPPptGYC8

Something you know, + something you have.

What’s past _has_ been prologue, all along.

David Eric Smith

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2

Roger but also Jon,

It is neat that this question can be so simply posed, and can be answered in a way that isn’t trivial but is also hard to disagree with.

Where are the solid foundations of quantum mechanics?

I would characterize my own position in nearly identical terms to those Jon used, or that he invokes from Bethe. The solid foundation is the mathematical formulation of the theory (+ the recipe-book explanations of how to do and read off the measurements that the math is supposed to predict).

I am in this conversation in a different venue, about whether “interpretations of quantum mechanics” even is anything. The crux seems to be that there isn’t anything in quantum mechanics one can say is “wrong”. The best an honest person can say is “I don’t like it”. By “honest” here, I am being denigrating toward most of the people who work in interpretations, every one of whom is smarter and more patient and thoughtful than I am. But I hold up against them Weinberg, who is “honest” in the sense I mean, at least as I view him. I think we circulated this before on the list:

http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

The thing that I think captures this ideally is Weinberg’s quote below the caricature of Schroedinger, around p.4, where he says “But the vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling, and like many other physicists I would prefer a single history”. Nietzche had a criticism, I think of Kant, that “Kant formulates the common man’s positions in terms that will confound the common man”, and much of the conversation about interpretations delivers as sophist in that sense to me. Weinberg won’t let himself dress something up in the hope of obscuring, with fancy constructions, the truth that he doesn’t have a real objection. So he just admits that not liking it is the most he can offer.

I am unable to understand claims that there is a substantive place for “interpretation” (such as made on the Stanford Encyclopedia https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/ , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/), because the areas of work that I can follow all seem to me to fall into the following categories:

1. Computation approaches _within_ quantum mechanics — specifically regarding decoherence — that remove the need for “measurement” as a primitive concept, and seek to derive everything we have associated with measurement as epiphenomenal. Wikiledia says somewhere that Zurek used to argue essentially this position; I don’t know where he is on that now;

2. Commitments that may not be in QM now, but are eligible to become part of it if they can make falsifiable claims that can eventually be nailed down (Bohm and pilot waves, for example).

The Stanford encyclopedia has some verbiage that including decoherence makes the “problem of measurement” even more pressing, but I read it and it doesn’t make any sense to me.

Everything else seems to me to be about liking or not liking, but not about what is or isn’t the most-true description we know how to formulate.

Of course to do this properly, I would need to (first) be somebody else smarter than I am, and (second) drop whatever else I am doing and read all this literature full-time, and (third) be 30 years younger so that I could read all the literature within the remainder of my lifetime. So not an option, on all three counts.

But, to circle back to the start: the reason I say Roger’s focus of the question is “interesting” is that, to me, it is not clear that the likability of a scientific construct is relevant to the solidity of its foundation. To our ability to use it gracefully, or to explore and extend it, yes. But not to our assessment of how solid it is, relative to other positions of which we ask a similar question.

Eric

I suppose it could all be pro forma in that none of the participants understand that there is no there there to which one could appeal, so the appeal becomes nothing but a ritual motion with "quantum woo" taking the place of whichever holiest holy worked last week.

But maybe it's exactly the inexplicability which is the secret sauce, that there is something ineffable about the quantum physics.

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 9:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email]> wrote:
OK. So, maybe y'all have collectively provided an answer. The reason(s) people invoke quantum woo so *often* is because it serves several (perhaps conflatable and ambiguous) purposes.

In order of appearance in the thread:
1) justificationist appeals to authority
2) donning attributes others (seem to) have but you don't
3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations
4) power (both social and individual)
5) evocation of the shaman/oracle archetype

Note, I'm not including ordinary physics, only woo, because that's what irritated me enough to stop reading "Ignorance" for so long. Firestein has lots of other riffs and hooks and it was childish of me to react that way ... but I can't help it. The woo is killing me. By contrast, imagining (and ruling out) an "airfoil" around pond scum in relation to the Purcell paper was NOT irritating at all. Invocations of actual physics are fine. Invocations of mysterious stuff just because it's mysterious flips my triggers.

Speaking of the Purcell paper, this popped off the queue this morning:

New Clues To ALS And Alzheimer's From Physics
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/888687912/new-clues-to-als-and-alzheimers-from-physics

I'm embarrassed that I didn't notice it sooner.

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Stephen Guerin-5

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by gepr

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 11:44 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email]> wrote:

your phenomenal path integral (regardless of mechanism), then you could argue that the addition of that purely physical principle to evolution facilitates EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes above.

How was that? Will you buy me a pint? Or jeer at me from a distance?

I asked for a steel man worthy of "3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations"

I see at best a rough straw man with only trace metals. ;-p Feynman Path Integral is shadow on a cave struggling for solid foundation. Steel man requires at least statement of explanatory mechanism in your words, the role of duals and the distributed property of life (and probably cognition, consciousness and evolution)

Either way I'll buy you a pint :-)

gepr

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Ha! Fair enough. I'm an algebraic learner. And that means I'd need some sort of write-up from you in order to repeat back whatever it is you're saying. You should write it up!

On 7/8/20 6:51 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> I asked for a steel man worthy of "3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations"
>
> I see at best a rough straw man with only trace metals. ;-p Feynman Path Integral is shadow on a cave struggling for solid foundation. Steel man requires at least statement of explanatory mechanism in your words, the role of duals and the distributed property of life (and probably cognition, consciousness and evolution)
>
> Either way I'll buy you a pint :-)

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Frank Wimberly-2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Hi Nick,

You are the first person I ever heard use the expression "physics envy". Putting together three things:

a) My claim that "laypersons" feel qualified to offer opinions about psychological claims but not about physics.

b) When people invoke "quantum" woo they often mention the slit experiment where a photon can go through each of two slits simultaneously. This counterintuitive idea puzzles non-physicists, and apparently physicists too.

c) Your account of radical behaviorism also involves non-intuitive concepts such as the claim that people infer their feelings from their own behavior rather than experiencing them qua feelings

Do you think that your (and others') atttraction to behaviorism arises from an envy of physicists' ability to surprise people with non-intuitive claims?

Sorry for any mis-characterization of your position.

Frank

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On Wed, Jul 8, 2020, 1:43 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

What a minute. I am lost. Who is devaluing evolution? And when they are devaluing it, are the devaluing evolution as a phenomenon (adapted phylogenic descent, or some other systematic form of change), or are they devaluing natural selection as a process by which that change is thought to come about?

If too much water has flowed over the damn, feel free to ignore this.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of ? u?l?
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 11:44 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

EricS said it well enough, I think, quoted below for easy cf. I'll try to restate including a comment Firestein makes on Darwinism. The point is a kind of hindsight fallacy, where prior to the shift, we were confused and argumentative and after the shift we are (mostly) in consensus. That shift, if relatively modern so that documents exist, brings 2 things: 1) foundation that we can simply/thinly accept as true without arguing our lips off and 2) transparency - *if* we need to reconstruct the foundation from "first principles", we have people/documents we can use to do so [α]. Obviously, an at-will-reconstructable foundation is more founded than an assumed to be solid foundation.

Re Darwin, Firestein says: "As a quick sidelight this explains modern biology's debt to Darwin. You often hear that contemporary biology could not exist without the explanatory power of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. But it is rarely made clear why this must be the case. Do physicians, for example, really have to believe in evolution to treat sick people? They do, at least implicitly, because the use of model systems to study more complicated ones relies on the relatedness of all biological organisms, us included. It is the process of evolution, the mechanisms of genetic inheritance and occasional mutation, that have conserved the genes responsible for making the proteins that confer electrical activity on neurons, as well as those that make kidneys and livers, and hearts and lungs work they way they do. If that were not the case, then we couldn't study these things in worms, flies, rats, mice, or monkeys and believe that it would have relevance to humans. There would be no drugs, no surgical procedures, no treatments, and no diagnostic tests. All of these have been developed using model systems ranging from cell sin culture dishes to rodents to primates. No evolution, no model systems, no progress."

Obviously, he takes some liberties there. It is a book [ptouie] after all, not a paper. I hope people won't go ranting off into the void because of them. But the gist is good. Now, to move toward your position, *IF* you allow for both Darwinism *and* your phenomenal path integral (regardless of mechanism), then you could argue that the addition of that purely physical principle to evolution facilitates EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes above. [α] I.e. adding this extra component to the description of living systems may (HELP) get us from small problems (vortices) to large problems (cultural evolution). Of course, if you insist on denigrating and devaluing evolution, as you seem to want to do, then I'll abandon you to stew in your own juices. >8^D

How was that? Will you buy me a pint? Or jeer at me from a distance?

[α][δ] I'm reminded of the recent experiments contradicting (but not fully falsifying) pilot wave theory.

[β] Sideline to this supercool result that popped off my queue the other day:
A continuous reaction network that produces RNA precursors
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13267

[δ] Jon has convinced me to expand my list of footnote symbols!

On 7/7/20 9:39 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> When people I run across talk about how they wish their work were more like the work they think goes on in physics, they often invoke work that has been settled for so long that we take it as very reliable, but that was still unknown recently enough that we can remember the difference. That is the subset selected by survival. But I never hear them saying they wish their work were more like string theory. I imagine that, if they knew what the endless churning around string theory were like for the people involved (the string theorists, and against them people like Peter Woit (sp?), Smolin (though less seriously), Sabine Hossenfelder, or other critics who try to address substance), they would say that their work is already much too much the same as all that, and they wish it were less so.

On 7/8/20 9:34 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> Of the 5, I think I align with reason #3. Can you unpack a little more
> what you mean by it?
>
> * Extra points if you explain with a steelman of my paradigm shift :-)
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> *3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid
> foundations*

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thompnickson2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Hi, Frank,

My original reference to “physics envy” was little more than a joke, and, as such, has had too much of a run, already. The Wikipedia Entry ought to put it to bed. I have noted in my career, perhaps, some vague snottiness directed upward in the hierarchy of reduction – from physicists to biologists, from biologists to psychologists, from psychologists to sociologists, etc, which has led many in these disciplines to look down for places to put their feet. It was for this reason that Hywel’s extensive use of psychological concepts in his explications of particle physics gave me such pleasure. “So, Hywel, “ I would say. “Psychology is the Queen of the Sciences?” I do miss him. I always thought his “Math is OK; it’s better to know what you are doing.” Was warding off Math Envy.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, July 9, 2020 1:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Hi Nick,

You are the first person I ever heard use the expression "physics envy". Putting together three things:

a) My claim that "laypersons" feel qualified to offer opinions about psychological claims but not about physics.

c) Your account of radical behaviorism also involves non-intuitive concepts such as the claim that people infer their feelings from their own behavior rather than experiencing them qua feelings

Do you think that your (and others') atttraction to behaviorism arises from an envy of physicists' ability to surprise people with non-intuitive claims?

Sorry for any mis-characterization of your position.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020, 1:43 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

What a minute. I am lost. Who is devaluing evolution? And when they are devaluing it, are the devaluing evolution as a phenomenon (adapted phylogenic descent, or some other systematic form of change), or are they devaluing natural selection as a process by which that change is thought to come about?

If too much water has flowed over the damn, feel free to ignore this.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of ? u?l?
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 11:44 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

EricS said it well enough, I think, quoted below for easy cf. I'll try to restate including a comment Firestein makes on Darwinism. The point is a kind of hindsight fallacy, where prior to the shift, we were confused and argumentative and after the shift we are (mostly) in consensus. That shift, if relatively modern so that documents exist, brings 2 things: 1) foundation that we can simply/thinly accept as true without arguing our lips off and 2) transparency - *if* we need to reconstruct the foundation from "first principles", we have people/documents we can use to do so [α]. Obviously, an at-will-reconstructable foundation is more founded than an assumed to be solid foundation.

Re Darwin, Firestein says: "As a quick sidelight this explains modern biology's debt to Darwin. You often hear that contemporary biology could not exist without the explanatory power of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. But it is rarely made clear why this must be the case. Do physicians, for example, really have to believe in evolution to treat sick people? They do, at least implicitly, because the use of model systems to study more complicated ones relies on the relatedness of all biological organisms, us included. It is the process of evolution, the mechanisms of genetic inheritance and occasional mutation, that have conserved the genes responsible for making the proteins that confer electrical activity on neurons, as well as those that make kidneys and livers, and hearts and lungs work they way they do. If that were not the case, then we couldn't study these things in worms, flies, rats, mice, or monkeys and believe that it would have relevance to humans. There would be no drugs, no surgical procedures, no treatments, and no diagnostic tests. All of these have been developed using model systems ranging from cell sin culture dishes to rodents to primates. No evolution, no model systems, no progress."

Obviously, he takes some liberties there. It is a book [ptouie] after all, not a paper. I hope people won't go ranting off into the void because of them. But the gist is good. Now, to move toward your position, *IF* you allow for both Darwinism *and* your phenomenal path integral (regardless of mechanism), then you could argue that the addition of that purely physical principle to evolution facilitates EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes above. [α] I.e. adding this extra component to the description of living systems may (HELP) get us from small problems (vortices) to large problems (cultural evolution). Of course, if you insist on denigrating and devaluing evolution, as you seem to want to do, then I'll abandon you to stew in your own juices. >8^D

How was that? Will you buy me a pint? Or jeer at me from a distance?

[α][δ] I'm reminded of the recent experiments contradicting (but not fully falsifying) pilot wave theory.

[β] Sideline to this supercool result that popped off my queue the other day:
A continuous reaction network that produces RNA precursors
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13267

[δ] Jon has convinced me to expand my list of footnote symbols!

On 7/7/20 9:39 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> When people I run across talk about how they wish their work were more like the work they think goes on in physics, they often invoke work that has been settled for so long that we take it as very reliable, but that was still unknown recently enough that we can remember the difference. That is the subset selected by survival. But I never hear them saying they wish their work were more like string theory. I imagine that, if they knew what the endless churning around string theory were like for the people involved (the string theorists, and against them people like Peter Woit (sp?), Smolin (though less seriously), Sabine Hossenfelder, or other critics who try to address substance), they would say that their work is already much too much the same as all that, and they wish it were less so.

On 7/8/20 9:34 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:

> Of the 5, I think I align with reason #3. Can you unpack a little more
> what you mean by it?
>
> * Extra points if you explain with a steelman of my paradigm shift :-)
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> *3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid
> foundations*

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jon zingale

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

I take it from the Wikipedia entry that *physics envy* is a second-order
*math envy*. I often got the impression from Hywel that he was a radical
empiricist. More extreme than Gisin, Hywel did not only reject the reals but
also the integers. Hywel's reasoning (which makes a weird kind of sense to
me) was the reasoning of approximations and measurement, always emphasizing
phenomena first and theory second. Not only would I say he was warding off
(our) *math envy*, but also that he was reminding us that all convenient
assumptions (such as conservation laws) must ultimately stand before what
can be known through measurement. His physics would not be the target of the
envy described by the Wikipedia article in that his physics was the master
of its mathematics, not the reverse. A truly remarkable human being!

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Frank Wimberly-2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

He said that the number 1 does not exist. I asked him how many biological mothers he had.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 2:48 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

I take it from the Wikipedia entry that *physics envy* is a second-order
*math envy*. I often got the impression from Hywel that he was a radical
empiricist. More extreme than Gisin, Hywel did not only reject the reals but
also the integers. Hywel's reasoning (which makes a weird kind of sense to
me) was the reasoning of approximations and measurement, always emphasizing
phenomena first and theory second. Not only would I say he was warding off
(our) *math envy*, but also that he was reminding us that all convenient
assumptions (such as conservation laws) must ultimately stand before what
can be known through measurement. His physics would not be the target of the
envy described by the Wikipedia article in that his physics was the master
of its mathematics, not the reverse. A truly remarkable human being!

--
Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

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Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

Eric Charles-2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

" Do you think that your (and others') atttraction to behaviorism arises from an envy of physicists' ability to surprise people with non-intuitive claims?"

Now THAT'S a great question!

One of intellectual life's great challenges is distinguishing between things that are unintuitive because they are wrong, things that are unintuitive because they are being explained poorly, and things that are unintuitive merely because our intuition sucks. :- )

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

[hidden email]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 3:13 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Nick,

You are the first person I ever heard use the expression "physics envy". Putting together three things:

a) My claim that "laypersons" feel qualified to offer opinions about psychological claims but not about physics.

b) When people invoke "quantum" woo they often mention the slit experiment where a photon can go through each of two slits simultaneously. This counterintuitive idea puzzles non-physicists, and apparently physicists too.

c) Your account of radical behaviorism also involves non-intuitive concepts such as the claim that people infer their feelings from their own behavior rather than experiencing them qua feelings

Do you think that your (and others') atttraction to behaviorism arises from an envy of physicists' ability to surprise people with non-intuitive claims?

Sorry for any mis-characterization of your position.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020, 1:43 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:
What a minute. I am lost. Who is devaluing evolution? And when they are devaluing it, are the devaluing evolution as a phenomenon (adapted phylogenic descent, or some other systematic form of change), or are they devaluing natural selection as a process by which that change is thought to come about?

If too much water has flowed over the damn, feel free to ignore this.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of ? u?l?
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 11:44 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

EricS said it well enough, I think, quoted below for easy cf. I'll try to restate including a comment Firestein makes on Darwinism. The point is a kind of hindsight fallacy, where prior to the shift, we were confused and argumentative and after the shift we are (mostly) in consensus. That shift, if relatively modern so that documents exist, brings 2 things: 1) foundation that we can simply/thinly accept as true without arguing our lips off and 2) transparency - *if* we need to reconstruct the foundation from "first principles", we have people/documents we can use to do so [α]. Obviously, an at-will-reconstructable foundation is more founded than an assumed to be solid foundation.

Re Darwin, Firestein says: "As a quick sidelight this explains modern biology's debt to Darwin. You often hear that contemporary biology could not exist without the explanatory power of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. But it is rarely made clear why this must be the case. Do physicians, for example, really have to believe in evolution to treat sick people? They do, at least implicitly, because the use of model systems to study more complicated ones relies on the relatedness of all biological organisms, us included. It is the process of evolution, the mechanisms of genetic inheritance and occasional mutation, that have conserved the genes responsible for making the proteins that confer electrical activity on neurons, as well as those that make kidneys and livers, and hearts and lungs work they way they do. If that were not the case, then we couldn't study these things in worms, flies, rats, mice, or monkeys and believe that it would have relevance to humans. There would be no drugs, no surgical procedures, no treatments, and no diagnostic tests. All of these have been developed using model systems ranging from cell sin culture dishes to rodents to primates. No evolution, no model systems, no progress."

Obviously, he takes some liberties there. It is a book [ptouie] after all, not a paper. I hope people won't go ranting off into the void because of them. But the gist is good. Now, to move toward your position, *IF* you allow for both Darwinism *and* your phenomenal path integral (regardless of mechanism), then you could argue that the addition of that purely physical principle to evolution facilitates EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes above. [α] I.e. adding this extra component to the description of living systems may (HELP) get us from small problems (vortices) to large problems (cultural evolution). Of course, if you insist on denigrating and devaluing evolution, as you seem to want to do, then I'll abandon you to stew in your own juices. >8^D

How was that? Will you buy me a pint? Or jeer at me from a distance?

[α][δ] I'm reminded of the recent experiments contradicting (but not fully falsifying) pilot wave theory.

[β] Sideline to this supercool result that popped off my queue the other day:
A continuous reaction network that produces RNA precursors
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13267

[δ] Jon has convinced me to expand my list of footnote symbols!

On 7/7/20 9:39 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> When people I run across talk about how they wish their work were more like the work they think goes on in physics, they often invoke work that has been settled for so long that we take it as very reliable, but that was still unknown recently enough that we can remember the difference. That is the subset selected by survival. But I never hear them saying they wish their work were more like string theory. I imagine that, if they knew what the endless churning around string theory were like for the people involved (the string theorists, and against them people like Peter Woit (sp?), Smolin (though less seriously), Sabine Hossenfelder, or other critics who try to address substance), they would say that their work is already much too much the same as all that, and they wish it were less so.

On 7/8/20 9:34 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> Of the 5, I think I align with reason #3. Can you unpack a little more
> what you mean by it?
>
> * Extra points if you explain with a steelman of my paradigm shift :-)
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> *3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid
> foundations*

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Steve Smith

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Eric wrote:

> " Do you think that your (and others') atttraction to behaviorism
> arises from an envy of physicists' ability to surprise people with
> non-intuitive claims?"
>
> Now THAT'S a great question!
>
> One of intellectual life's great challenges is distinguishing between
> things that are unintuitive because they are wrong, things that are
> unintuitive because they are being explained poorly, and things that
> are unintuitive merely because our intuition sucks. :- )

And I would add "unintuitive because our experience has not
tuned/trained us to recognize/appreciate/intuit the reality presented".

Mary was reading out loud from a David Stendall-Wrath collection of
essays a few weeks ago and he (apparently) stated (my paraphrase?):

"Truth is what the intellect experiences when it apprehends reality;
Beauty is what the spirit experiences when it apprehends reality".

- Steve

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Steve Smith

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

correction: David_Steindl-Rast

Mary was reading out loud from  a David Stendall-Wrath collection of
essays a few weeks ago and he (apparently) stated (my paraphrase?):

"Truth is what the intellect experiences when it apprehends reality; 
Beauty is what the spirit experiences when it apprehends reality".

- Steve



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Roger Critchlow-2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

To Jon and EricS --

I used to think I could finesse the problem by simply letting the physics be the mathematics. No particle, no wave, no worry, just follow the differential equation, or the group of the symmetries of its solutions, it doesn't matter what it really is as long as you have a way to compute the results of observations. And I do think it is perfectly reasonable to ignore the problem for reasons of interest or time management.

But Physicists have been explaining how stuff works for a long time, for generally accepted definitions of explain and stuff. Many explanations turned out to be wrong, some of the stuff turned out to not actually be stuff after all, but all the explanations were about how stuff worked. Mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics all wonderful explanations of how stuff works, suitable for sharing with intelligent friends over pizza and leaving the friends with a better understanding of how stuff works.

Quantum mechanics broke that streak of stuff explaining. The wave functions which are solutions to Schrödinger's equations are not waves of any kind of stuff that anyone has explained, which is what I took Feynmann to be saying. Physics changed at that point from how stuff works to how physicists work. You can say it doesn't bother you, but it did and does bother a lot of people.

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:48 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger but also Jon,

It is neat that this question can be so simply posed, and can be answered in a way that isn’t trivial but is also hard to disagree with.

Where are the solid foundations of quantum mechanics?

I would characterize my own position in nearly identical terms to those Jon used, or that he invokes from Bethe. The solid foundation is the mathematical formulation of the theory (+ the recipe-book explanations of how to do and read off the measurements that the math is supposed to predict).

I am in this conversation in a different venue, about whether “interpretations of quantum mechanics” even is anything. The crux seems to be that there isn’t anything in quantum mechanics one can say is “wrong”. The best an honest person can say is “I don’t like it”. By “honest” here, I am being denigrating toward most of the people who work in interpretations, every one of whom is smarter and more patient and thoughtful than I am. But I hold up against them Weinberg, who is “honest” in the sense I mean, at least as I view him. I think we circulated this before on the list:

http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

The thing that I think captures this ideally is Weinberg’s quote below the caricature of Schroedinger, around p.4, where he says “But the vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling, and like many other physicists I would prefer a single history”. Nietzche had a criticism, I think of Kant, that “Kant formulates the common man’s positions in terms that will confound the common man”, and much of the conversation about interpretations delivers as sophist in that sense to me. Weinberg won’t let himself dress something up in the hope of obscuring, with fancy constructions, the truth that he doesn’t have a real objection. So he just admits that not liking it is the most he can offer.

I am unable to understand claims that there is a substantive place for “interpretation” (such as made on the Stanford Encyclopedia https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/ , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/), because the areas of work that I can follow all seem to me to fall into the following categories:
1. Computation approaches _within_ quantum mechanics — specifically regarding decoherence — that remove the need for “measurement” as a primitive concept, and seek to derive everything we have associated with measurement as epiphenomenal. Wikiledia says somewhere that Zurek used to argue essentially this position; I don’t know where he is on that now;
2. Commitments that may not be in QM now, but are eligible to become part of it if they can make falsifiable claims that can eventually be nailed down (Bohm and pilot waves, for example).

The Stanford encyclopedia has some verbiage that including decoherence makes the “problem of measurement” even more pressing, but I read it and it doesn’t make any sense to me.

Everything else seems to me to be about liking or not liking, but not about what is or isn’t the most-true description we know how to formulate.

Of course to do this properly, I would need to (first) be somebody else smarter than I am, and (second) drop whatever else I am doing and read all this literature full-time, and (third) be 30 years younger so that I could read all the literature within the remainder of my lifetime. So not an option, on all three counts.

But, to circle back to the start: the reason I say Roger’s focus of the question is “interesting” is that, to me, it is not clear that the likability of a scientific construct is relevant to the solidity of its foundation. To our ability to use it gracefully, or to explore and extend it, yes. But not to our assessment of how solid it is, relative to other positions of which we ask a similar question.

Eric

I suppose it could all be pro forma in that none of the participants understand that there is no there there to which one could appeal, so the appeal becomes nothing but a ritual motion with "quantum woo" taking the place of whichever holiest holy worked last week.

But maybe it's exactly the inexplicability which is the secret sauce, that there is something ineffable about the quantum physics.

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 9:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email]> wrote:
OK. So, maybe y'all have collectively provided an answer. The reason(s) people invoke quantum woo so *often* is because it serves several (perhaps conflatable and ambiguous) purposes.

In order of appearance in the thread:
1) justificationist appeals to authority
2) donning attributes others (seem to) have but you don't
3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations
4) power (both social and individual)
5) evocation of the shaman/oracle archetype

Note, I'm not including ordinary physics, only woo, because that's what irritated me enough to stop reading "Ignorance" for so long. Firestein has lots of other riffs and hooks and it was childish of me to react that way ... but I can't help it. The woo is killing me. By contrast, imagining (and ruling out) an "airfoil" around pond scum in relation to the Purcell paper was NOT irritating at all. Invocations of actual physics are fine. Invocations of mysterious stuff just because it's mysterious flips my triggers.

Speaking of the Purcell paper, this popped off the queue this morning:

New Clues To ALS And Alzheimer's From Physics
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/888687912/new-clues-to-als-and-alzheimers-from-physics

I'm embarrassed that I didn't notice it sooner.

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thompnickson2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Roger,

I think this letter is a FRIAM Hall of Famer.

My own thoughts on reading it go back the relation between hypothetical constructs and intervening variables, and my suspicion is that QM strips a lot of physics of its “surplus meaning”. I won’t review all that now because I am not sure these thoughts are even relevant.

Thanks for your post.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2020 8:57 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

To Jon and EricS --

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:48 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger but also Jon,

It is neat that this question can be so simply posed, and can be answered in a way that isn’t trivial but is also hard to disagree with.

Where are the solid foundations of quantum mechanics?

I would characterize my own position in nearly identical terms to those Jon used, or that he invokes from Bethe. The solid foundation is the mathematical formulation of the theory (+ the recipe-book explanations of how to do and read off the measurements that the math is supposed to predict).

I am in this conversation in a different venue, about whether “interpretations of quantum mechanics” even is anything. The crux seems to be that there isn’t anything in quantum mechanics one can say is “wrong”. The best an honest person can say is “I don’t like it”. By “honest” here, I am being denigrating toward most of the people who work in interpretations, every one of whom is smarter and more patient and thoughtful than I am. But I hold up against them Weinberg, who is “honest” in the sense I mean, at least as I view him. I think we circulated this before on the list:

http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

The thing that I think captures this ideally is Weinberg’s quote below the caricature of Schroedinger, around p.4, where he says “But the vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling, and like many other physicists I would prefer a single history”. Nietzche had a criticism, I think of Kant, that “Kant formulates the common man’s positions in terms that will confound the common man”, and much of the conversation about interpretations delivers as sophist in that sense to me. Weinberg won’t let himself dress something up in the hope of obscuring, with fancy constructions, the truth that he doesn’t have a real objection. So he just admits that not liking it is the most he can offer.

I am unable to understand claims that there is a substantive place for “interpretation” (such as made on the Stanford Encyclopedia https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/ , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/), because the areas of work that I can follow all seem to me to fall into the following categories:
1. Computation approaches _within_ quantum mechanics — specifically regarding decoherence — that remove the need for “measurement” as a primitive concept, and seek to derive everything we have associated with measurement as epiphenomenal. Wikiledia says somewhere that Zurek used to argue essentially this position; I don’t know where he is on that now;
2. Commitments that may not be in QM now, but are eligible to become part of it if they can make falsifiable claims that can eventually be nailed down (Bohm and pilot waves, for example).

The Stanford encyclopedia has some verbiage that including decoherence makes the “problem of measurement” even more pressing, but I read it and it doesn’t make any sense to me.

Everything else seems to me to be about liking or not liking, but not about what is or isn’t the most-true description we know how to formulate.

Of course to do this properly, I would need to (first) be somebody else smarter than I am, and (second) drop whatever else I am doing and read all this literature full-time, and (third) be 30 years younger so that I could read all the literature within the remainder of my lifetime. So not an option, on all three counts.

But, to circle back to the start: the reason I say Roger’s focus of the question is “interesting” is that, to me, it is not clear that the likability of a scientific construct is relevant to the solidity of its foundation. To our ability to use it gracefully, or to explore and extend it, yes. But not to our assessment of how solid it is, relative to other positions of which we ask a similar question.

Eric

I suppose it could all be pro forma in that none of the participants understand that there is no there there to which one could appeal, so the appeal becomes nothing but a ritual motion with "quantum woo" taking the place of whichever holiest holy worked last week.

But maybe it's exactly the inexplicability which is the secret sauce, that there is something ineffable about the quantum physics.

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 9:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email]> wrote:
OK. So, maybe y'all have collectively provided an answer. The reason(s) people invoke quantum woo so *often* is because it serves several (perhaps conflatable and ambiguous) purposes.

In order of appearance in the thread:
1) justificationist appeals to authority
2) donning attributes others (seem to) have but you don't
3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations
4) power (both social and individual)
5) evocation of the shaman/oracle archetype

Note, I'm not including ordinary physics, only woo, because that's what irritated me enough to stop reading "Ignorance" for so long. Firestein has lots of other riffs and hooks and it was childish of me to react that way ... but I can't help it. The woo is killing me. By contrast, imagining (and ruling out) an "airfoil" around pond scum in relation to the Purcell paper was NOT irritating at all. Invocations of actual physics are fine. Invocations of mysterious stuff just because it's mysterious flips my triggers.

Speaking of the Purcell paper, this popped off the queue this morning:

New Clues To ALS And Alzheimer's From Physics
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/888687912/new-clues-to-als-and-alzheimers-from-physics

I'm embarrassed that I didn't notice it sooner.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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jon zingale

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2

Roger,

I feel that you may be allowing the authority of *how you imagine other
really important thinkers to be mystified* to mystify you. There was no
reason for the ancient greeks to assume that all geometry must be given
by compass and straight-edge, similarly, there is no reason for natural
philosophers to assume that all matter be given by the points and waves
of the greeks. Euclid begins with assumptions of what properties
constitute points and lines, and these ideas continued to be
appropriated (by natural philosophers) and baked into physical theories
in the nearly 2500 years that followed. For many purposes, this
appropriation and application serve just fine. With each success,
positive returns helped to constrain the conceptual toolset until the
dogma of these particular characterizations of point and wave became an
indisputable doctrine.

From my perspective, doctrines of this type culminate in 20th-century
set theoretic thinking and finally became dislodged as richer frameworks
(where the notion of a point is not taken for granted as being Euclid's,
say) arose like those in non-standard analysis or synthetic differential
geometry. To me, that there is still so much mystification around this
topic is a vestige of indoctrinated thinking. That electrons are things
with their own properties doesn't surprise me. Every time I use one of
Euclid's points to describe nature, I assume I am also (as you put it)
*ignoring the problem* and *just following the differential equation.*

Jon

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thompnickson2

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Jon, Roger,

I would be a fool to say that I am certain what an explanation Is. But my instincts tell me that an equation, by itself, is never an explanation. What follows from that assertion, that a mathematical model is never a model. Hmmmm! May be too strong.

FWTW

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2020 11:00 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Roger,

I feel that you may be allowing the authority of *how you imagine other really important thinkers to be mystified* to mystify you. There was no reason for the ancient greeks to assume that all geometry must be given by compass and straight-edge, similarly, there is no reason for natural philosophers to assume that all matter be given by the points and waves of the greeks. Euclid begins with assumptions of what properties constitute points and lines, and these ideas continued to be appropriated (by natural philosophers) and baked into physical theories in the nearly 2500 years that followed. For many purposes, this appropriation and application serve just fine. With each success, positive returns helped to constrain the conceptual toolset until the dogma of these particular characterizations of point and wave became an indisputable doctrine.

From my perspective, doctrines of this type culminate in 20th-century set theoretic thinking and finally became dislodged as richer frameworks (where the notion of a point is not taken for granted as being Euclid's,
say) arose like those in non-standard analysis or synthetic differential geometry. To me, that there is still so much mystification around this topic is a vestige of indoctrinated thinking. That electrons are things with their own properties doesn't surprise me. Every time I use one of Euclid's points to describe nature, I assume I am also (as you put it) *ignoring the problem* and *just following the differential equation.*

Jon

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jon zingale

Re: invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Nick,

It has been said that Newton's mechanics "explain nothing and describe
everything", where Leibniz's monads "explain everything and describe
nothing". With regards to Newton, this position seems a bit strong to me.
His *description* of falling bodies describes (in a forward direction, say)
by assuming the geometry of the greeks and tracing the paths of bodies. With
a beer or two in me, I could argue that his *explanation* of falling bodies
explains (in the reverse direction) by comparing the trajectory of his
falling body to the trajectory of our own Earth and moon and then claim that
this is *because* Earths and moons are like Euclid's point and connected by
Euclid's line. Is this just bad thinking?

Jon

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