Book publishing advice needed

[Frank Wimberly-2]

Brief Memory:  I directed a small group of computational scientists at the PSC including 2 or 3 quantum chemists.  We were discussing the slit experiment and I said, "That's impossible".  The said "If it weren't true your computer wouldn't work."  They were equation guys.  That is, they did "ab initio" calculations. 

F

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 11:40 AM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

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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[thompnickson2]

Jon,

I get so caught up in correspondence in the morning that it's pushing one
oclock and I have not had breakfast yet.  

Little as I know about Newton, I do think Newton's mechanics is a model, and
a rich one at that.  
"F=ma" is not a model.  

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 Jon Zingale
Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2020 11:40 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 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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[jon zingale]

Nick,

I agree with you that F = ma is not a model, but an equivalence relation.
A coherent mapping from a theory, in the sense of a systematically organized
collection of knowledge, to a thing, is a model of the thing.

Jon



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[Roger Critchlow-2]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 12:34 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

[...]
Though it might take some digging to find, there was an entertaining lecture
given by Hans Bethe (in what looks like a nursing home) on quantum
mechanics. He departs from the main thread of the lecture at one point to go
on a diatribe about how bad-faith actors continue to mystify what he sees to
be directly calculable[ϡ]. It seems important to me to not confuse an
inability to understand some phenomena for a lack of imagination.

[...]

ϡ) The video once lived here: http://bethe.cornell.edu/video1_small.html but
alas I cannot find another source. Here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oggC_xhkdJA Bethe talks briefly about the
wave-particle controversy and he talks about the controversy in terms of
power and authority.

The Bethe videos are linked on the front page of https://bethe.cornell.edu and they're very good.

I especially liked the derivation of the uncertainty principle through the limitations on representing a free particle with a fourier series, done with no math worth mentioning.  8:06 in video 3.

-- rec --

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[David Eric Smith]

Roger, hi,

Trying to figure out how to usefully reply to what you have below.

I’m not sure what you believe I am saying, but let me try the following.  You wrote: 

..., it doesn't matter what it really is

I have no idea what I am supposed to do with the above sequence of words.  Sure, English allows you to put them together.  But if you use them or don’t use them, it has no effect on what I know to do next, about anything.

If you write me a long scholastic discourse on whether the true nature of God is Love or something else, English allows you to put those words together too.  But no matter how strongly you believe your saying that should make it self-evident to me that it “means” something, I don’t know how to take on whatever state of mind you think I should be taking on, as “seeing” a “meaning” in it.  

I can go into some other direction, about what to try to do with words like “really is” in science, but then we’re off in some other domain of analysis of language, cognition, behavior, or whatever.  I think if we go in that direction, the philosophers take that as a bad-faith response, refusing to engage with whatever they want to engage in but not admitting the refusal, sort of like “All lives matter” was a refusal to acknowledge the complaint expressed in “Black lives matter” without accepting responsibility for the refusal and thus an act of bad faith.  But I don’t mean bad faith toward the philosophers; I just don’t know how to play along with their wording that wouldn’t be engaging in a language game.

I remember a good conversation with Jim Hartle maybe a year ago (or two), where I wanted to ask him some questions about the use of decoherent histories in cosmology.  I forget exactly what I asked him, but before trying to answer, he asked me as a clarifying question: “do you mean, `in the math’, or `really’?”  I told him that, if we weren’t referring to what was in the math, I would know what it meant to ask about “really”, at which point his face relaxed and he understood it would be possible to have a conversation, and he went on to provide a wonderful answer to whatever I had been asking.  It had something to do with the fact that the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary initial condition for a “wave function of the universe” had the effect of providing a certain kind of hydrodynamic variable as the macroscopic coarse graining without having to fine-tune something.  

Anyway, 

Eric

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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[David Eric Smith]

Nick wrote:

> "F=ma" is not a model.  

I worked under a professor, for many years, at U.T. Austin, helping him design an intro-to-modern-physics course for the liberal arts honors major.  It was a very successful coarse, producing many students who remained in humanities or literature and had a strong conceptual understanding of what the scientists were doing, and each year a few others who transferred into science or math, and who now have much more secure academic positions than will ever be available to someone like me.

The professor (also named Austin), used to introduce this law by saying its important commitment was the possibility to divide an object from an external world.  That there could be unlimited complexity in what aspects of the external world went into the F, compatible with the fact that only one aspect of the object, encapsulated in m, and one aspect of the object’s embedding in the world, encapsulated in a, would govern the response.

Sometime later we would do general relativity, mentioning that Galileo had already presaged a certain delicacy in the Newton construction, when for gravity we could write F = mg, and cancel the m from both sides.  So sometimes one cuts the object and the external world between ma and F, and other times one just does geometry, as in Galileo’s a = g.

Of course, I don’t know what makes something “a model” or “not a model” in the lexicon you prefer to use to speak carefully, but I thought that this professor’s way of introducing the idea to the students was quite nice; much better than just starting with ladders against walls and computing forces and frictions and so forth, as would have been done within the physics major.

Eric

>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> [hidden email]
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,eu2DD2gUBQd-iyzghwWuCIXVbwZuY1spgCdeU3Il-EpmUqkwLmMilqDIInwtHvtt7kw0v0Gubo0iXXF-YwTGquwDLw8FxOLAmpmXFF85K2uSDGOC3w8vug,,&typo=1
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
> Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2020 11:40 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 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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[jon zingale]

Roger,

Thanks for finding the lectures, it appears that the url location wasn't too
far from where it had been. Now that I am watching it again, it is this
third lecture you highlight that I was thinking of.

Jon



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[Roger Critchlow-2]

Jon --

Can you clarify where you heard:

He departs from the main thread of the lecture at one point to go
on a diatribe about how bad-faith actors continue to mystify what he sees to
be directly calculable[ϡ]. It seems important to me to not confuse an
inability to understand some phenomena for a lack of imagination.

He says that "Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger did a disservice to people by putting the uncertainty principle so high in their discussions" and that led to philosophers proclaiming that everything is uncertain.  But there are no bad faith actors there, it's just typical science journalism, trolling for the juiciest clickbait.

He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom.   

Which is what I thought Feynman meant by:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Here's the lecture (https://youtu.be/41Jc75tQcB0?t=77) that contains this statement, which is the point which the lecture is constructed to drive home.  And here's where he asks what's really happening?  https://youtu.be/41Jc75tQcB0?t=2813  And answers exactly the same as Bethe, there is no machinery which explains this, we can only compute the result, we have no mechanism for the result, only a description.

Looking back, I think I bollixed my explanation.  I'm still perfectly happy to let the math do the work, I don't seek any further interpretations of "How can it be that way?"  

-- rec --

 

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 9:22 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,

Thanks for finding the lectures, it appears that the url location wasn't too
far from where it had been. Now that I am watching it again, it is this
third lecture you highlight that I was thinking of.

Jon



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[jon zingale]

Roger,

I wish to clarify what I believe our positions to be. Your position is
that Richard Feynman claims that no one understands quantum mechanics
and that you believe him. I am claiming that misunderstanding photons
has its origins in demanding that photons be greek waves or particles
and that this perspective is reminiscent of the classical problems of
compass and straight-edge geometry.

you write:
"...and that led to philosophers proclaiming that everything is
uncertain. But there are no bad faith actors there, it's just typical
science journalism, trolling for the juiciest clickbait."

Our discussion arose in the context of 'quantum woo', advocates and
discontents. From my perspective, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'philosophers' claim that *the uncertainty of everything* is
justified by Heisenberg. Additionally, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'journalists' unfaithfully invoke Heisenberg so as to produce
clickbait. I gather from your comment that with more discussion you
perhaps may agree, to some extent?

In one sense, I interpret Bethe as speaking about the lack of
uncertainty associated with macroscopic events as a rebuttal to the
flights of fancy, the 'quantum woo' espoused by first-year physics
students. However, further analysis of my interpretation perhaps cannot
be certain. In another sense, and intended with less cheek, I interpret
Bethe as highlighting the fact that the point metaphor diverges for the
very small. Heisenberg uncertainty is a claim about how well we can
approximate an object of inquiry with a particle, ie. treat the object
as a dynamical Euclidean point. We can treat a pea or the moon
accurately in this way, but we cannot treat an electron accurately in
this way.

you write:
1) "I especially liked the derivation of the uncertainty principle
through the limitations on representing a free particle with a Fourier
series"

2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."

Bethe speaks to your first point by saying that "this is the best we can
do with bell-shaped curves". In doing so, he is referring to a toolset
and it is only within the scope of a given toolset that the meaning of
uncertainty is defined. Crudely, I interpret the work done by the mixed
efforts of topos theorists and theoretical physicists to be an effort to
flesh out better matching objects, objects which are more like electrons
than Euclid's points are to being like electrons[⏁]. Speaking to your
second point, my hope is that as such a program continues, we will one
day have a metaphor for quantum things that we find as satisfactory as
points are for macroscopic things[⏄].

I suggest that my arrogance in this matter is not the claim that someone
understands quantum mechanics in some universally acceptable way. My
arrogant assertion is that forcing a known-to-be incongruous model is
the wellspring of a perceived paradox and an unjustly disproportionate
production of 'quantum woo'.

Jon

[⏁] It is here that I think we may be seeing a kind of reversal. The
'softer' sciences have had to deal with difficult to describe phenomena
for their entire history, dealing with the fact that their objects of
inquiry are complex and not simply described by points. Maybe what we
are seeing in the efforts to revisit the logical foundations of physical
theory can be interpreted as *soft science envy*.

[⏄] Charles Dodgson once wrote, "How is a raven like a writing desk"?
Sometimes I feel that mathematicians love riddles. One will state the
axioms for a group and another will go off running to find an example
of some object which satisfies those axioms. In QM it seems to me that
phenomena is measured and relationships between these measurements are
stated. Now we go off running to find objects which answer the riddle.



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[Prof David West]

I used to think that computer science / software engineering was abysmally ignorant of its own history, but I am coming to believe that "science" is just as ignorant. (Even worse, believing that science and math began with the Greeks.)

"Quantum woo," "interpretation doesn't matter, just shut up and calculate," etc. etc.

"Spooky action at a distance" — not Einstein critiquing quantum entanglement; no, it was the Cartesian's mocking Newton's theory of gravity. Newton did not disagree: he asserted that the inverse square law worked very nicely indeed — mathematically — but was at a loss to "explain how."  "Hypotheses non fingo, he said.

Similar "explanatory" problems existed for Coulumb's law and with the Biot-Savart law with regard electricity and magnetic fields.

Faraday "visualized" but could not mathematize (he could do algebra but not much else) fields and movement of copper wire through those fields to 'explain' Coulumb et. al. But, it was Maxwell that did the math for Faraday's conceptualization / explanation.

The tension between what the math can describe and what the math 'means' is not new.

What is new; the math has become so esoteric, so incestuous, that it "means" nothing. It is not even a description of 'the world' merely a description of itself.

"Physics Envy" is an epithet that I directed to Anthropology back when I was a grad student. I also have been claiming that computer science/software engineering has been fatally blinded by the same green monster. Actually, I have said that the problem generalized to "formalism," not just physics but physics is always held up as the exemplar of formalism.

I have seen articles about "Physics is Dead" for at least a decade. What they mean is that Physics is no longer 'science' because none of its leading-edge hypothesis are subject to falsification and hence cannot advance to the status of theory. If this is the case, maybe other, younger, sciences should rethink their envy and blind pursuit of abstract formalism.

davew
(The guy insanely jealous of Jon, Frank, Marcus, Glen, et. al. and their mathematical ability and knowledge.)


On Mon, Jul 13, 2020, at 1:26 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:

> Roger,
>
> I wish to clarify what I believe our positions to be. Your position is
> that Richard Feynman claims that no one understands quantum mechanics
> and that you believe him. I am claiming that misunderstanding photons
> has its origins in demanding that photons be greek waves or particles
> and that this perspective is reminiscent of the classical problems of
> compass and straight-edge geometry.
>
> you write:
> "...and that led to philosophers proclaiming that everything is
> uncertain. But there are no bad faith actors there, it's just typical
> science journalism, trolling for the juiciest clickbait."
>
> Our discussion arose in the context of 'quantum woo', advocates and
> discontents. From my perspective, it is an instance of bad faith
> when 'philosophers' claim that *the uncertainty of everything* is
> justified by Heisenberg. Additionally, it is an instance of bad faith
> when 'journalists' unfaithfully invoke Heisenberg so as to produce
> clickbait. I gather from your comment that with more discussion you
> perhaps may agree, to some extent?
>
> In one sense, I interpret Bethe as speaking about the lack of
> uncertainty associated with macroscopic events as a rebuttal to the
> flights of fancy, the 'quantum woo' espoused by first-year physics
> students. However, further analysis of my interpretation perhaps cannot
> be certain. In another sense, and intended with less cheek, I interpret
> Bethe as highlighting the fact that the point metaphor diverges for the
> very small. Heisenberg uncertainty is a claim about how well we can
> approximate an object of inquiry with a particle, ie. treat the object
> as a dynamical Euclidean point. We can treat a pea or the moon
> accurately in this way, but we cannot treat an electron accurately in
> this way.
>
> you write:
> 1) "I especially liked the derivation of the uncertainty principle
> through the limitations on representing a free particle with a Fourier
> series"
>
> 2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
> uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."
>
> Bethe speaks to your first point by saying that "this is the best we can
> do with bell-shaped curves". In doing so, he is referring to a toolset
> and it is only within the scope of a given toolset that the meaning of
> uncertainty is defined. Crudely, I interpret the work done by the mixed
> efforts of topos theorists and theoretical physicists to be an effort to
> flesh out better matching objects, objects which are more like electrons
> than Euclid's points are to being like electrons[⏁]. Speaking to your
> second point, my hope is that as such a program continues, we will one
> day have a metaphor for quantum things that we find as satisfactory as
> points are for macroscopic things[⏄].
>
> I suggest that my arrogance in this matter is not the claim that someone
> understands quantum mechanics in some universally acceptable way. My
> arrogant assertion is that forcing a known-to-be incongruous model is
> the wellspring of a perceived paradox and an unjustly disproportionate
> production of 'quantum woo'.
>
> Jon
>
> [⏁] It is here that I think we may be seeing a kind of reversal. The
> 'softer' sciences have had to deal with difficult to describe phenomena
> for their entire history, dealing with the fact that their objects of
> inquiry are complex and not simply described by points. Maybe what we
> are seeing in the efforts to revisit the logical foundations of physical
> theory can be interpreted as *soft science envy*.
>
> [⏄] Charles Dodgson once wrote, "How is a raven like a writing desk"?
> Sometimes I feel that mathematicians love riddles. One will state the
> axioms for a group and another will go off running to find an example
> of some object which satisfies those axioms. In QM it seems to me that
> phenomena is measured and relationships between these measurements are
> stated. Now we go off running to find objects which answer the riddle.
>
>
>
> --
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>
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[Stephen Guerin-5]

Jon asks: 

[⏄] Charles Dodgson once wrote, "How is a raven like a writing desk"?
Sometimes I feel that mathematicians love riddles. One will state the
axioms for a group and another will go off running to find an example
of some object which satisfies those axioms. In QM it seems to me that
phenomena is measured and relationships between these measurements are
stated. Now we go off running to find objects which answer the riddle.

You are stark raving mad!
https://youtu.be/ipSZYgFVJvI?t=49

Interesting history:  https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-answer-to-the-most-famous-unanswerable-fantasy-ridd-5872014  

 

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[gepr]

There's a lot to respond to. And I don't *think* I really disagree with much of it. But I wanted to point out that I think, at least in the case of science, "ignorant" isn't the right word. I think I prefer "aptly forgetful" ... or "usefully forgetful". We usefully forget dead-end or tortuous [⨂] paths and remember the "least action" paths because it helps us "get on with it". Similarly, all the human factors accompanying, some facilitating, some inhibiting, some completely orthogonal to, the *results* are sliced away to help us "get on with it" ... maybe we could call that "apt abstraction" or somesuch.

The old adage is "standing on the shoulders of giants". But we can think of it in terms of modularity, hierarchy, reduction, and emergence. We temporarily forget/ignore these things because a) we do our best work when we're focused on a task, in the flow/zone, as it were, and b) we tend to BELIEVE in the hermetic closure of the module. I.e. even if we're, at heart, reductionist, working a layer out, a level up, allows us to believe in what we're doing at that layer and facilitates the work.

So, while I don't disagree with your gist below, I think there's some distinction between people who *love* the messy details and people who love the *antiseptic* abstractions. Personally, I seem to move back and forth ... analogous with time-slicing, maybe. I detail-slice, sliding back and forth between the dirty places (Blade Runner) and the clean ones (Star Trek).


[⨂] Yes, "tortuous", NOT "torturous". 8^D

On 7/13/20 8:02 PM, Prof David West wrote:

> I used to think that computer science / software engineering was abysmally ignorant of its own history, but I am coming to believe that "science" is just as ignorant. (Even worse, believing that science and math began with the Greeks.)
>
> "Quantum woo," "interpretation doesn't matter, just shut up and calculate," etc. etc.
>
> "Spooky action at a distance" — not Einstein critiquing quantum entanglement; no, it was the Cartesian's mocking Newton's theory of gravity. Newton did not disagree: he asserted that the inverse square law worked very nicely indeed — mathematically — but was at a loss to "explain how."  "Hypotheses non fingo, he said.
>
> Similar "explanatory" problems existed for Coulumb's law and with the Biot-Savart law with regard electricity and magnetic fields.
>
> Faraday "visualized" but could not mathematize (he could do algebra but not much else) fields and movement of copper wire through those fields to 'explain' Coulumb et. al. But, it was Maxwell that did the math for Faraday's conceptualization / explanation.
>
> The tension between what the math can describe and what the math 'means' is not new.
>
> What is new; the math has become so esoteric, so incestuous, that it "means" nothing. It is not even a description of 'the world' merely a description of itself.
>
> "Physics Envy" is an epithet that I directed to Anthropology back when I was a grad student. I also have been claiming that computer science/software engineering has been fatally blinded by the same green monster. Actually, I have said that the problem generalized to "formalism," not just physics but physics is always held up as the exemplar of formalism.
>
> I have seen articles about "Physics is Dead" for at least a decade. What they mean is that Physics is no longer 'science' because none of its leading-edge hypothesis are subject to falsification and hence cannot advance to the status of theory. If this is the case, maybe other, younger, sciences should rethink their envy and blind pursuit of abstract formalism.

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 3:26 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,

I wish to clarify what I believe our positions to be. Your position is
that Richard Feynman claims that no one understands quantum mechanics
and that you believe him. I am claiming that misunderstanding photons
has its origins in demanding that photons be greek waves or particles
and that this perspective is reminiscent of the classical problems of
compass and straight-edge geometry.

Yes, I believe Richard Feynman as I understand him, and I think he makes his point quite clearly in the lecture.  And I believe Hans Bethe in his 1999 lectures identified the exact same part of quantum mechanics which is not and can not be "understood" in the usual sense of physicists explaining things.

I haven't seen any indication that you understand what I am saying, what Feynman was saying, or what Bethe was saying.  

I don't think your analogy to post-Euclidean geometry has any bearing.  The geometers simply changed the postulates, turned the logic crank, and kept on reasoning about geometries in the same way.  New geometries for a new age, but categorically geometries just like the old one.  The physicists first discovered that their existing categories of explanations were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of their study disappear into wave functions. Wave functions could be manipulated to predict what nature would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show what nature is doing.

you write:
"...and that led to philosophers proclaiming that everything is
uncertain. But there are no bad faith actors there, it's just typical
science journalism, trolling for the juiciest clickbait."

Our discussion arose in the context of 'quantum woo', advocates and
discontents. From my perspective, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'philosophers' claim that *the uncertainty of everything* is
justified by Heisenberg. Additionally, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'journalists' unfaithfully invoke Heisenberg so as to produce
clickbait. I gather from your comment that with more discussion you
perhaps may agree, to some extent?

It would be bad faith if the journalist or philosopher understood quantum mechanics and deliberately misrepresented it.  Misunderstandings are much more common than villains.  Bethe did not accuse anyone of bad faith.

 

In one sense, I interpret Bethe as speaking about the lack of
uncertainty associated with macroscopic events as a rebuttal to the
flights of fancy, the 'quantum woo' espoused by first-year physics
students. However, further analysis of my interpretation perhaps cannot
be certain. In another sense, and intended with less cheek, I interpret
Bethe as highlighting the fact that the point metaphor diverges for the
very small. Heisenberg uncertainty is a claim about how well we can
approximate an object of inquiry with a particle, ie. treat the object
as a dynamical Euclidean point. We can treat a pea or the moon
accurately in this way, but we cannot treat an electron accurately in
this way.

you write:
1) "I especially liked the derivation of the uncertainty principle
through the limitations on representing a free particle with a Fourier
series"

2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."

Bethe speaks to your first point by saying that "this is the best we can
do with bell-shaped curves". In doing so, he is referring to a toolset
and it is only within the scope of a given toolset that the meaning of
uncertainty is defined. Crudely, I interpret the work done by the mixed
efforts of topos theorists and theoretical physicists to be an effort to
flesh out better matching objects, objects which are more like electrons
than Euclid's points are to being like electrons[⏁]. Speaking to your
second point, my hope is that as such a program continues, we will one
day have a metaphor for quantum things that we find as satisfactory as
points are for macroscopic things[⏄].

If we imagine a theory which transcends quantum mechanics as it is currently formulated, then we can imagine some features of quantum mechanics might turn out to be artefacts of the methods we used?  Sure, I can't and won't argue with that proposition.

As long as we're talking about quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, wave functions, basis sets for describing harmonic motion, then Bethe is saying that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a consequence of fourier analysis, which is a neat argument that I should have learned decades ago.

We can talk about what Bethe says, or I can talk about what Bethe says and you can talk about what you imagine the future will say about what Bethe says, it's up to you.

I suggest that my arrogance in this matter is not the claim that someone
understands quantum mechanics in some universally acceptable way. My
arrogant assertion is that forcing a known-to-be incongruous model is
the wellspring of a perceived paradox and an unjustly disproportionate
production of 'quantum woo'.

"forcing a known-to-be incongruous model" is exactly what Schrödinger did, if you remember Bethe's story about the ski holiday where all Sommerfeld's students were laughing at de Broglie's paper, and the result was quantum mechanics.  I guess the invention of quantum mechanics must be a necessary condition for "quantum woo".   

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[jon zingale]

Roger,

There is a lot of mud here to try to sift through, so I will speak to a
couple of things and otherwise move to let this go. The classical problems
of compass and straightedge geometry were blocked by the tools. Namely, the
requirement that these problems be solved by compass and straightedge
implies a demand that these geometric problems have solutions that are constructible
via a finite sequence of quadratic extensions of the field of complex
numbers with rational coefficients[Ơ]. The realization of the inability to
generally trisect an angle, in this way, needed to wait for Gauss and more
lucidly the advent of Galois theory (algebra!). This advance was quite a bit
more than geometers simply changing the postulates and turning a crank. We
both agree that uncertainty is a consequence of Fourier analysis, but I go
(perhaps a bit too boldly) further to say that it is a consequence of
Fourier analysis over a given logical context. It is in this way that I feel
we are relying on Fourier analysis like the greeks were relying on compass
and straightedge.

Without exhuming Bethe and Feynman and then performing some clever
necromancy, I am not sure either of us will be able to have our Marshall
McLuhan-Annie Hall moment. I am content to let those sleeping dogs lie, and
to concede that my decade-old memory of that video came with some extra
emotional charge.

As I have pointed to here on Friam in the past, work done on topos theoretic
foundations of quantum mechanics by people like Chris Isham and Fotini
Markopoulou-Kalamara, are moving the theory forward beyond where Bethe,
Feynman, and others left it. A popular science account of this movement can
be found in Lee Smolin's 'Three Roads to Quantum Gravity'[ƣ], for instance.
Because pressing theorems or demanding others read Phd level papers has the
effect of sucking the air from the room, I make no further demands to
digress. The take-home for me, from reviewing recent work as well as my own
long time interest in topos theory, is that points can often be more subtle
than we give them credit.

Anyway, I wish to take a break and open a window in hopes that a
conversation may grow here again soon.

Jon

[Ơ] Three famous problems that we will investigate will be the squaring the
circle, doubling the cube, and trisecting an angle. see:
http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~may/VIGRE/VIGRE2009/REUPapers/Gao.pdf
or see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straightedge_and_compass_construction

[ƣ] A book I never got to return to Hywel.



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[David Eric Smith]

Hi Roger, Dave, Jon,

Jon’s answers are at a level of technical sophistication and quality I don’t have to offer.  They already subsume and surpass anything I would say below., to the extent that I think I appreciate roughly what they refer to.  I also admit not having been able to justify the time to watch internet videos, much as I would like to, so I haven’t watched Bethe and Feynman lectures (though have read Feynman on this topic at some length over the decades).

But there is a thing it is hard to let go, and which perhaps is not identical to things already said on the thread.  Repeatedly the following fragment appears as an anchor point:

[From Bethe below -- I lost the indent symbols:]

2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."

What I wanted to add was:

Why would anyone expect that an electron in an atom has “an orbit”.  The sentence structure entails that assumption, but why would one make it?  An orbit is an emergent property of “objects” that arise in classical limits, like the wetness of water is an emergent property of a condensed phase of matter.  Sure, one can ask “how wet is a single H2O molecule”, and then defend the sentence on the ground that it doesn’t violate rules of syntax.  But would we do that now?  If not, why would we grant defensibility to sentences that contain word sequences like “the orbit of the electron in an atom”?

I wish I could put my finger on how and why what I think is the same thing can be so differently experienced by people.  I believe the following are sort of to the same point:

From Roger:

The physicists first discovered that their existing categories of explanations were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of their study disappear into wave functions. [btw, I find this a beautiful articulation]. Wave functions could be manipulated to predict what nature would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show what nature is doing.

From Dave:

The tension between what the math can describe and what the math 'means' is not new.

What is new; the math has become so esoteric, so incestuous, that it "means" nothing. It is not even a description of 'the world' merely a description of itself.

I wonder if the way to understand these perceptions links back to Nick’s metaphor monism/mania/madness (in the Italian sense of “sono pazzo per”, said of a crush):

It could be that people never really think “about” “anything”.  What they refer to as “thinking” is just the management of metaphors that point to metaphors which are metaphors of metaphors.  (Nick, embrace your inner category theorist.)  If that is right, then the only thing quantum mechanics can ever be is a metaphor for classical mechanics with some new management rules that use other metaphors to create tension and discomfort, and the classical mechanics is a set of metaphors for something else (greater fleas having lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum).  If that is true of everybody, then it is true of me, too, and the fact that it seems incomplete as a description of my experience is just part of a larger self-delusion.  But it feels too linguistic to me, and not reflective enough of the possible diversity of cognitive or experiential states.

The Bethe fragment above feels familiar to me as an antique language that characterized the ones two generations before me, who reached cognitive adulthood in a world before QM was established, and who in fact had to achieve that establishment climbing up on a Wittgenstein’s ladder of classical mechanics and frequentist probability theory, which they could not then bring themselves to throw away, any more than they could lose the accents of their birth languages even as they became good speakers of languages where they emigrated.  As I think Dave said in some earlier thread (though not in quite these words), the metaphors are Wittgenstein ladders, but that is not the same thing as the places one climbs to on them.  

I _think_ it is different to say that the math is a structured setting within which the mind is offered a way to have new experiences.  Like working as a musician is a setting within which the mind is offered a way to have new experiences of music.  Or being a tennis player, or being a chess competitor, or a crime boss, or emperor of the galaxy.  An electron is not a metaphor for a planet.  An electron is an electron.  But for the word to take on a meaning, and hence the sentence it appears in, we will have to experience some new thoughts.  

I don’t know what it would mean to say that mathematics is “a description of itself”, but I think I am familiar with various practices of doing things with (fairly low-level, applied) mathematics, and having it affect the inventory and process of my mental imagery.  

Dunno.

Eric

On Jul 15, 2020, at 3:14 AM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 3:26 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,

I wish to clarify what I believe our positions to be. Your position is
that Richard Feynman claims that no one understands quantum mechanics
and that you believe him. I am claiming that misunderstanding photons
has its origins in demanding that photons be greek waves or particles
and that this perspective is reminiscent of the classical problems of
compass and straight-edge geometry.

Yes, I believe Richard Feynman as I understand him, and I think he makes his point quite clearly in the lecture.  And I believe Hans Bethe in his 1999 lectures identified the exact same part of quantum mechanics which is not and can not be "understood" in the usual sense of physicists explaining things.

I haven't seen any indication that you understand what I am saying, what Feynman was saying, or what Bethe was saying.  

I don't think your analogy to post-Euclidean geometry has any bearing.  The geometers simply changed the postulates, turned the logic crank, and kept on reasoning about geometries in the same way.  New geometries for a new age, but categorically geometries just like the old one.  The physicists first discovered that their existing categories of explanations were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of their study disappear into wave functions. Wave functions could be manipulated to predict what nature would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show what nature is doing.

you write:
"...and that led to philosophers proclaiming that everything is
uncertain. But there are no bad faith actors there, it's just typical
science journalism, trolling for the juiciest clickbait."

Our discussion arose in the context of 'quantum woo', advocates and
discontents. From my perspective, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'philosophers' claim that *the uncertainty of everything* is
justified by Heisenberg. Additionally, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'journalists' unfaithfully invoke Heisenberg so as to produce
clickbait. I gather from your comment that with more discussion you
perhaps may agree, to some extent?

It would be bad faith if the journalist or philosopher understood quantum mechanics and deliberately misrepresented it.  Misunderstandings are much more common than villains.  Bethe did not accuse anyone of bad faith.

 

In one sense, I interpret Bethe as speaking about the lack of
uncertainty associated with macroscopic events as a rebuttal to the
flights of fancy, the 'quantum woo' espoused by first-year physics
students. However, further analysis of my interpretation perhaps cannot
be certain. In another sense, and intended with less cheek, I interpret
Bethe as highlighting the fact that the point metaphor diverges for the
very small. Heisenberg uncertainty is a claim about how well we can
approximate an object of inquiry with a particle, ie. treat the object
as a dynamical Euclidean point. We can treat a pea or the moon
accurately in this way, but we cannot treat an electron accurately in
this way.

you write:
1) "I especially liked the derivation of the uncertainty principle
through the limitations on representing a free particle with a Fourier
series"

2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."

Bethe speaks to your first point by saying that "this is the best we can
do with bell-shaped curves". In doing so, he is referring to a toolset
and it is only within the scope of a given toolset that the meaning of
uncertainty is defined. Crudely, I interpret the work done by the mixed
efforts of topos theorists and theoretical physicists to be an effort to
flesh out better matching objects, objects which are more like electrons
than Euclid's points are to being like electrons[⏁]. Speaking to your
second point, my hope is that as such a program continues, we will one
day have a metaphor for quantum things that we find as satisfactory as
points are for macroscopic things[⏄].

If we imagine a theory which transcends quantum mechanics as it is currently formulated, then we can imagine some features of quantum mechanics might turn out to be artefacts of the methods we used?  Sure, I can't and won't argue with that proposition.

As long as we're talking about quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, wave functions, basis sets for describing harmonic motion, then Bethe is saying that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a consequence of fourier analysis, which is a neat argument that I should have learned decades ago.

We can talk about what Bethe says, or I can talk about what Bethe says and you can talk about what you imagine the future will say about what Bethe says, it's up to you.

I suggest that my arrogance in this matter is not the claim that someone
understands quantum mechanics in some universally acceptable way. My
arrogant assertion is that forcing a known-to-be incongruous model is
the wellspring of a perceived paradox and an unjustly disproportionate
production of 'quantum woo'.

"forcing a known-to-be incongruous model" is exactly what Schrödinger did, if you remember Bethe's story about the ski holiday where all Sommerfeld's students were laughing at de Broglie's paper, and the result was quantum mechanics.  I guess the invention of quantum mechanics must be a necessary condition for "quantum woo".   

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Eric, Jon

Did you guys know each other at SFI?

On Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 5:31 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Roger, Dave, Jon,

Jon’s answers are at a level of technical sophistication and quality I don’t have to offer.  They already subsume and surpass anything I would say below., to the extent that I think I appreciate roughly what they refer to.  I also admit not having been able to justify the time to watch internet videos, much as I would like to, so I haven’t watched Bethe and Feynman lectures (though have read Feynman on this topic at some length over the decades).

But there is a thing it is hard to let go, and which perhaps is not identical to things already said on the thread.  Repeatedly the following fragment appears as an anchor point:

[From Bethe below -- I lost the indent symbols:]

2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."

What I wanted to add was:

Why would anyone expect that an electron in an atom has “an orbit”.  The sentence structure entails that assumption, but why would one make it?  An orbit is an emergent property of “objects” that arise in classical limits, like the wetness of water is an emergent property of a condensed phase of matter.  Sure, one can ask “how wet is a single H2O molecule”, and then defend the sentence on the ground that it doesn’t violate rules of syntax.  But would we do that now?  If not, why would we grant defensibility to sentences that contain word sequences like “the orbit of the electron in an atom”?

I wish I could put my finger on how and why what I think is the same thing can be so differently experienced by people.  I believe the following are sort of to the same point:

From Roger:

The physicists first discovered that their existing categories of explanations were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of their study disappear into wave functions. [btw, I find this a beautiful articulation]. Wave functions could be manipulated to predict what nature would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show what nature is doing.

From Dave:

The tension between what the math can describe and what the math 'means' is not new.

What is new; the math has become so esoteric, so incestuous, that it "means" nothing. It is not even a description of 'the world' merely a description of itself.

I wonder if the way to understand these perceptions links back to Nick’s metaphor monism/mania/madness (in the Italian sense of “sono pazzo per”, said of a crush):

It could be that people never really think “about” “anything”.  What they refer to as “thinking” is just the management of metaphors that point to metaphors which are metaphors of metaphors.  (Nick, embrace your inner category theorist.)  If that is right, then the only thing quantum mechanics can ever be is a metaphor for classical mechanics with some new management rules that use other metaphors to create tension and discomfort, and the classical mechanics is a set of metaphors for something else (greater fleas having lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum).  If that is true of everybody, then it is true of me, too, and the fact that it seems incomplete as a description of my experience is just part of a larger self-delusion.  But it feels too linguistic to me, and not reflective enough of the possible diversity of cognitive or experiential states.

The Bethe fragment above feels familiar to me as an antique language that characterized the ones two generations before me, who reached cognitive adulthood in a world before QM was established, and who in fact had to achieve that establishment climbing up on a Wittgenstein’s ladder of classical mechanics and frequentist probability theory, which they could not then bring themselves to throw away, any more than they could lose the accents of their birth languages even as they became good speakers of languages where they emigrated.  As I think Dave said in some earlier thread (though not in quite these words), the metaphors are Wittgenstein ladders, but that is not the same thing as the places one climbs to on them.  

I _think_ it is different to say that the math is a structured setting within which the mind is offered a way to have new experiences.  Like working as a musician is a setting within which the mind is offered a way to have new experiences of music.  Or being a tennis player, or being a chess competitor, or a crime boss, or emperor of the galaxy.  An electron is not a metaphor for a planet.  An electron is an electron.  But for the word to take on a meaning, and hence the sentence it appears in, we will have to experience some new thoughts.  

I don’t know what it would mean to say that mathematics is “a description of itself”, but I think I am familiar with various practices of doing things with (fairly low-level, applied) mathematics, and having it affect the inventory and process of my mental imagery.  

Dunno.

Eric

On Jul 15, 2020, at 3:14 AM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 3:26 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,

I wish to clarify what I believe our positions to be. Your position is
that Richard Feynman claims that no one understands quantum mechanics
and that you believe him. I am claiming that misunderstanding photons
has its origins in demanding that photons be greek waves or particles
and that this perspective is reminiscent of the classical problems of
compass and straight-edge geometry.

Yes, I believe Richard Feynman as I understand him, and I think he makes his point quite clearly in the lecture.  And I believe Hans Bethe in his 1999 lectures identified the exact same part of quantum mechanics which is not and can not be "understood" in the usual sense of physicists explaining things.

I haven't seen any indication that you understand what I am saying, what Feynman was saying, or what Bethe was saying.  

I don't think your analogy to post-Euclidean geometry has any bearing.  The geometers simply changed the postulates, turned the logic crank, and kept on reasoning about geometries in the same way.  New geometries for a new age, but categorically geometries just like the old one.  The physicists first discovered that their existing categories of explanations were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of their study disappear into wave functions. Wave functions could be manipulated to predict what nature would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show what nature is doing.

you write:
"...and that led to philosophers proclaiming that everything is
uncertain. But there are no bad faith actors there, it's just typical
science journalism, trolling for the juiciest clickbait."

Our discussion arose in the context of 'quantum woo', advocates and
discontents. From my perspective, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'philosophers' claim that *the uncertainty of everything* is
justified by Heisenberg. Additionally, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'journalists' unfaithfully invoke Heisenberg so as to produce
clickbait. I gather from your comment that with more discussion you
perhaps may agree, to some extent?

It would be bad faith if the journalist or philosopher understood quantum mechanics and deliberately misrepresented it.  Misunderstandings are much more common than villains.  Bethe did not accuse anyone of bad faith.

 

In one sense, I interpret Bethe as speaking about the lack of
uncertainty associated with macroscopic events as a rebuttal to the
flights of fancy, the 'quantum woo' espoused by first-year physics
students. However, further analysis of my interpretation perhaps cannot
be certain. In another sense, and intended with less cheek, I interpret
Bethe as highlighting the fact that the point metaphor diverges for the
very small. Heisenberg uncertainty is a claim about how well we can
approximate an object of inquiry with a particle, ie. treat the object
as a dynamical Euclidean point. We can treat a pea or the moon
accurately in this way, but we cannot treat an electron accurately in
this way.

you write:
1) "I especially liked the derivation of the uncertainty principle
through the limitations on representing a free particle with a Fourier
series"

2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."

Bethe speaks to your first point by saying that "this is the best we can
do with bell-shaped curves". In doing so, he is referring to a toolset
and it is only within the scope of a given toolset that the meaning of
uncertainty is defined. Crudely, I interpret the work done by the mixed
efforts of topos theorists and theoretical physicists to be an effort to
flesh out better matching objects, objects which are more like electrons
than Euclid's points are to being like electrons[⏁]. Speaking to your
second point, my hope is that as such a program continues, we will one
day have a metaphor for quantum things that we find as satisfactory as
points are for macroscopic things[⏄].

If we imagine a theory which transcends quantum mechanics as it is currently formulated, then we can imagine some features of quantum mechanics might turn out to be artefacts of the methods we used?  Sure, I can't and won't argue with that proposition.

As long as we're talking about quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, wave functions, basis sets for describing harmonic motion, then Bethe is saying that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a consequence of fourier analysis, which is a neat argument that I should have learned decades ago.

We can talk about what Bethe says, or I can talk about what Bethe says and you can talk about what you imagine the future will say about what Bethe says, it's up to you.

I suggest that my arrogance in this matter is not the claim that someone
understands quantum mechanics in some universally acceptable way. My
arrogant assertion is that forcing a known-to-be incongruous model is
the wellspring of a perceived paradox and an unjustly disproportionate
production of 'quantum woo'.

"forcing a known-to-be incongruous model" is exactly what Schrödinger did, if you remember Bethe's story about the ski holiday where all Sommerfeld's students were laughing at de Broglie's paper, and the result was quantum mechanics.  I guess the invention of quantum mechanics must be a necessary condition for "quantum woo".   

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[David Eric Smith]

Hi Frank,

No.  Strangely and unfortunately, I have never met Jon in person.

Eric

On Jul 15, 2020, at 9:26 AM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, Jon

Did you guys know each other at SFI?

On Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 5:31 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Roger, Dave, Jon,

Jon’s answers are at a level of technical sophistication and quality I don’t have to offer.  They already subsume and surpass anything I would say below., to the extent that I think I appreciate roughly what they refer to.  I also admit not having been able to justify the time to watch internet videos, much as I would like to, so I haven’t watched Bethe and Feynman lectures (though have read Feynman on this topic at some length over the decades).

But there is a thing it is hard to let go, and which perhaps is not identical to things already said on the thread.  Repeatedly the following fragment appears as an anchor point:

[From Bethe below -- I lost the indent symbols:]

2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."

What I wanted to add was:

Why would anyone expect that an electron in an atom has “an orbit”.  The sentence structure entails that assumption, but why would one make it?  An orbit is an emergent property of “objects” that arise in classical limits, like the wetness of water is an emergent property of a condensed phase of matter.  Sure, one can ask “how wet is a single H2O molecule”, and then defend the sentence on the ground that it doesn’t violate rules of syntax.  But would we do that now?  If not, why would we grant defensibility to sentences that contain word sequences like “the orbit of the electron in an atom”?

I wish I could put my finger on how and why what I think is the same thing can be so differently experienced by people.  I believe the following are sort of to the same point:

From Roger:

The physicists first discovered that their existing categories of explanations were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of their study disappear into wave functions. [btw, I find this a beautiful articulation]. Wave functions could be manipulated to predict what nature would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show what nature is doing.

From Dave:

The tension between what the math can describe and what the math 'means' is not new.

What is new; the math has become so esoteric, so incestuous, that it "means" nothing. It is not even a description of 'the world' merely a description of itself.

I wonder if the way to understand these perceptions links back to Nick’s metaphor monism/mania/madness (in the Italian sense of “sono pazzo per”, said of a crush):

It could be that people never really think “about” “anything”.  What they refer to as “thinking” is just the management of metaphors that point to metaphors which are metaphors of metaphors.  (Nick, embrace your inner category theorist.)  If that is right, then the only thing quantum mechanics can ever be is a metaphor for classical mechanics with some new management rules that use other metaphors to create tension and discomfort, and the classical mechanics is a set of metaphors for something else (greater fleas having lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum).  If that is true of everybody, then it is true of me, too, and the fact that it seems incomplete as a description of my experience is just part of a larger self-delusion.  But it feels too linguistic to me, and not reflective enough of the possible diversity of cognitive or experiential states.

The Bethe fragment above feels familiar to me as an antique language that characterized the ones two generations before me, who reached cognitive adulthood in a world before QM was established, and who in fact had to achieve that establishment climbing up on a Wittgenstein’s ladder of classical mechanics and frequentist probability theory, which they could not then bring themselves to throw away, any more than they could lose the accents of their birth languages even as they became good speakers of languages where they emigrated.  As I think Dave said in some earlier thread (though not in quite these words), the metaphors are Wittgenstein ladders, but that is not the same thing as the places one climbs to on them.  

I _think_ it is different to say that the math is a structured setting within which the mind is offered a way to have new experiences.  Like working as a musician is a setting within which the mind is offered a way to have new experiences of music.  Or being a tennis player, or being a chess competitor, or a crime boss, or emperor of the galaxy.  An electron is not a metaphor for a planet.  An electron is an electron.  But for the word to take on a meaning, and hence the sentence it appears in, we will have to experience some new thoughts.  

I don’t know what it would mean to say that mathematics is “a description of itself”, but I think I am familiar with various practices of doing things with (fairly low-level, applied) mathematics, and having it affect the inventory and process of my mental imagery.  

Dunno.

Eric

On Jul 15, 2020, at 3:14 AM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 3:26 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,

I wish to clarify what I believe our positions to be. Your position is
that Richard Feynman claims that no one understands quantum mechanics
and that you believe him. I am claiming that misunderstanding photons
has its origins in demanding that photons be greek waves or particles
and that this perspective is reminiscent of the classical problems of
compass and straight-edge geometry.

Yes, I believe Richard Feynman as I understand him, and I think he makes his point quite clearly in the lecture.  And I believe Hans Bethe in his 1999 lectures identified the exact same part of quantum mechanics which is not and can not be "understood" in the usual sense of physicists explaining things.

I haven't seen any indication that you understand what I am saying, what Feynman was saying, or what Bethe was saying.  

I don't think your analogy to post-Euclidean geometry has any bearing.  The geometers simply changed the postulates, turned the logic crank, and kept on reasoning about geometries in the same way.  New geometries for a new age, but categorically geometries just like the old one.  The physicists first discovered that their existing categories of explanations were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of their study disappear into wave functions. Wave functions could be manipulated to predict what nature would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show what nature is doing.

you write:
"...and that led to philosophers proclaiming that everything is
uncertain. But there are no bad faith actors there, it's just typical
science journalism, trolling for the juiciest clickbait."

Our discussion arose in the context of 'quantum woo', advocates and
discontents. From my perspective, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'philosophers' claim that *the uncertainty of everything* is
justified by Heisenberg. Additionally, it is an instance of bad faith
when 'journalists' unfaithfully invoke Heisenberg so as to produce
clickbait. I gather from your comment that with more discussion you
perhaps may agree, to some extent?

It would be bad faith if the journalist or philosopher understood quantum mechanics and deliberately misrepresented it.  Misunderstandings are much more common than villains.  Bethe did not accuse anyone of bad faith.

 

In one sense, I interpret Bethe as speaking about the lack of
uncertainty associated with macroscopic events as a rebuttal to the
flights of fancy, the 'quantum woo' espoused by first-year physics
students. However, further analysis of my interpretation perhaps cannot
be certain. In another sense, and intended with less cheek, I interpret
Bethe as highlighting the fact that the point metaphor diverges for the
very small. Heisenberg uncertainty is a claim about how well we can
approximate an object of inquiry with a particle, ie. treat the object
as a dynamical Euclidean point. We can treat a pea or the moon
accurately in this way, but we cannot treat an electron accurately in
this way.

you write:
1) "I especially liked the derivation of the uncertainty principle
through the limitations on representing a free particle with a Fourier
series"

2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."

Bethe speaks to your first point by saying that "this is the best we can
do with bell-shaped curves". In doing so, he is referring to a toolset
and it is only within the scope of a given toolset that the meaning of
uncertainty is defined. Crudely, I interpret the work done by the mixed
efforts of topos theorists and theoretical physicists to be an effort to
flesh out better matching objects, objects which are more like electrons
than Euclid's points are to being like electrons[⏁]. Speaking to your
second point, my hope is that as such a program continues, we will one
day have a metaphor for quantum things that we find as satisfactory as
points are for macroscopic things[⏄].

If we imagine a theory which transcends quantum mechanics as it is currently formulated, then we can imagine some features of quantum mechanics might turn out to be artefacts of the methods we used?  Sure, I can't and won't argue with that proposition.

As long as we're talking about quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, wave functions, basis sets for describing harmonic motion, then Bethe is saying that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a consequence of fourier analysis, which is a neat argument that I should have learned decades ago.

We can talk about what Bethe says, or I can talk about what Bethe says and you can talk about what you imagine the future will say about what Bethe says, it's up to you.

I suggest that my arrogance in this matter is not the claim that someone
understands quantum mechanics in some universally acceptable way. My
arrogant assertion is that forcing a known-to-be incongruous model is
the wellspring of a perceived paradox and an unjustly disproportionate
production of 'quantum woo'.

"forcing a known-to-be incongruous model" is exactly what Schrödinger did, if you remember Bethe's story about the ski holiday where all Sommerfeld's students were laughing at de Broglie's paper, and the result was quantum mechanics.  I guess the invention of quantum mechanics must be a necessary condition for "quantum woo".   

-- rec --

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[jon zingale]

As a hopefully brief addendum to my last post, I mentioned something
about Fourier analysis over different logical contexts, but this is
potentially a misdirection.

Quantum mechanics via traditional Fourier theory, wave equations and the
rest gives certain interpretable results about the very small and these
results are colored by the initial assumptions regarding Coulomb
potentials on spherically symmetric point particles, what it means to
have identical particles, etc. This theory, from my perspective, is a
great theory in that it does an overwhelmingly bang-up job of providing
predictions that have been verified over and over again. To the degree
that we wish to narrowly speak of quantum theory in terms of this
historically dominant and honorable perspective, we will arrive at the
limits we always do regarding what it means to be here or there, with
such and such momentum. We will continue to imagine the objects of our
inquiry as points or waves and ask how our picture is possible.

However, new perspectives are being developed, and these tools are also
available to describe the behavior of the very small and so are part of
quantum theory more broadly defined. Further, they are likely to paint
a picture of the very small from a different perspective than we have
classically come to paint. Before I am blind-folded and lined up against
some wall for flagrant post-modernism, and while for me (a lover of
models great and small) verifiability is just a matter of taste, I also
expect verifiable predictions from any grand scientific theory worthy
of the name.

Jon

ps. Thank you Eric for your contribution regarding the role of metaphor
(for better or worse) in the guiding of scientific inquiry.



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[thompnickson2]

Hi, Doug,

 

I saw you come on and was looking for a chance to get something started.  If you come back, I will try again.  I do want to read your book

 

Nick

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of doug carmichael
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 6:11 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The theory of everything

 

meaningful thoughts, as opposed to evocations, seem to me to require senences.  How would you handle an issue like “The difference between math and dram in understanding each other?” with single words?

 

doug

On Jul 5, 2020, at 4:42 PM, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Not good for me to do this, so let me try to be brief (never a thing I am good at).

 

0.  To repeat myself for the 100th time, of course if one structures conversations around writing down single words (“evolve”, “emergent”, “complexity") and arguing about what they _really_ mean, one can go on forever and happily never settle.  More complete sentences and operational definitions create a much more disappointing landscape, in which one can either reach an understanding, or reach a hard problem of insight for which one lacks a new idea, and either way the conversation does tend to end.  So one reboots with the one-word questions, re-opens the exploration phase, and tries another anneal.

 

On Jul 6, 2020, at 6:03 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

But this is useful. 

To put the question baldly, wtf is natural design, anyway, as a descriptive property.  

 

One can construe the question and its answer in many valid ways, and I only mean to say a specific thing about one of them; not to assert that is is better or only, just that it can be understood.

 

Natural design, interpreted descriptively, or causally, is among other things a distributional concept.  Basic commitments are these:

 

1. There is some sensible way to make a division of objects from environments.  It is not necessary to think of _the_ most naive way one might try to do this, and then fret that there are lots of cases it would get wrong; we have many tools for such divisions, and the ability to think precisely about many distinct kinds of relations.  But suppose there is some such division.  Animals are objects.  They might live on land or they might live in water.

 

2. Because there is a notion of factorability from 1, there are ways to talk about marginal distributions over the factors, and joint distributions over the combinations.  Animals might have lots of forms, which are variable properties _of_ them.  Environments can be described in terms of many properties, and particular classes of environments might have distributions of properties that are concentrated in one region or another of the values the properties can take.  With regard to “being a place to live”, the “land” environments are concentrated over where weight-bearing is a challenge; the water environments are concentrated over where resistance to relative motion is a challenge.

 

3. Starting conditions for some joint distribution on objects and their environments can be different from later conditions for the same pairs.  So animals that have history in one set of settings can find themselves spending more time in other settings.  They are still good at what they were doing before, but not necessarily at what they mostly spend their time doing now.  Scientists can experience this phenomenon too, most especially when they are put into managerial positions.

 

4. One can put forth various null hypotheses for what a joint distribution could be, including the product of marginal distributions drawn from other conditions.  A joint distribution _could_ look like a product of a marginal distribution over tortious-like or elephant-like animals that are good at weight-bearing, with a marginal distribution over deep-water environments where weight-bearing is not a problem to be solved, but surmounting resistance to motion is a problem.  Often we imagine that the starting conditions in 3 have this character.  This is the early output of using something in a new way (the “ex” part of “exaptation”) before selective dynamics has produced the “aptation” part.

 

5. Joint distributions can change with time (evolve in the dynamical systems sense) so that at late times they are different from the products of marginals that were the null model or the starting condition.  One can speak of “information flow” from regularities in the environment (the fact that its distribution is concentrated in one part of the parameter space and not in another), “into” the marginal on the object, reducing some relative entropy for that marginal distribution.  The descendant animals in a population can have attenuated traits good for weight-bearing, relative to the traits expressed by their ancestors, and can have enhanced traits for reducing resistance to relative motion.  The information flow is the same as repeated application of a Bayesian updating rule (see Cosma Shalizi and Andrew Gelman, Electronic Journal of Statistcs, in the appendix somewhere) though I think this result has been known since antiquity).  In that direction, it is the “aptation” of adaptation, exaptation, or whatever.  Of course, events reducing a relative entropy for the environment could also flow the other way.  Phytoplankton can change viscosity, oxygenation, light-penetration, etc., of their environment, and this is what the niche-construction and ecosystem-engineering guys go on about.  There probably is a Bayesian construction for that too.

 

6. Instead of talking about information “flow” from one marginal to the other, one can instead speak of the increase in “mutual information” as the difference of some relative entropy of the joint distribution from relative entropies of the marginals, and can characterize a degree of adaptation through the increase in that mutual information.  Mutual information can increase through either adaptation or environmental modification, so merely its increase does not report on a directionality.  Chris Adami in early papers liked to emphasize the mutual information approach, because it is the correct zeroth-order answer to facile versions of “Shannon information isn’t semantic information”.  Nihat Ay and collaborators have done a lot, instantiated in robotic problems, with notions of information flows.  Probably David Wolpert up at SFI could reel off 400 citations summarizing the leading 1% of activity in the field as of the last 24 hours, if asked.  There are some nice things to say about how to cut up systems and environments, and to talk about how each affects the other, which come out of recent “stochastic thermodynamics”, and which I will get back to trying to write up after I exit this email.  It’s all more or less elementary, though.

 

 

I guess everybody in the list already knows this, so Nick’s question “wtf is natural design” is meant to take up where the above leaves off.  I guess Nick means “after the above trivialities are all acknowledged, then what does the expression _really_ mean”.  But those questions are always hard for me to understand when expressed at the level of 4 words, if one hasn’t first solved as much with the trivialities as one can, and then been more explicit about what is left unsatisfying or unclear.  Those things tend to be in the eye of the beholder, and cannot readily be guessed if there isn’t a starting platform of using the trivialities to their fullest extent.

 

Then, however, I think we encounter Jochen’s and I guess Russ’s point about “everything and nothing” (a point I also routinely make).  The statistical formulation above is enough to show constructively that there is a thing to describe, that it is not tautological and that it can vary in degree, following which we can attach a name to that construction.  But how it is achieved mechanistically can be through endlessly variable relations.  

 

This is the sense in which Darwinism per se was never much of a scientific revolution, and was and unfortunately still is mostly a social revolution of trying to wrestle thoughts about life away from the vitalists.  The scientific advancement, even in Darwin’s work, seems to have been mostly in showing that one could get enough control over the relations for particular classes of cases, to make Bayesian updating a plausibly _useful_ explanation.

 

From there one can branch into sub-categories: how important is individuality and population structure, versus continua, etc.  How much does one get from the substrate (chemistry, code, cognitive events, social norms and institutions?), and what part of the potential for design derives from the substrate and not from the general-purpose filtering problem?

 

But, enough.  

 

Eric

 

 

 

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