Friam

The fruits of abduction

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Roger Critchlow-2

The fruits of abduction

From an article by Philip Ball:

The problem is that Born’s rule was not really more than a smart guess — there was no fundamental reason that led Born to propose it. “It was an intuition without a precise justification,” said Adán Cabello, a quantum theorist at the University of Seville in Spain. “But it worked.” And yet for the past 90 years and more, no one has been able to explain why.

Born's rule is that the square of Schrodinger's wave function should be the probability of a quantum particle observation.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-born-rule-has-been-derived-from-simple-physical-principles-20190213/

-- rec --

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lrudolph

Re: The fruits of abduction

> The problem is that Bornâs rule was not really more than a smart guess
> â
>> there was no fundamental reason that led Born to propose it. âIt was
>> an
>> intuition without a precise justification,â said AdÃ¡n Cabello
>> <https://personal.us.es/adan/home.htm>, a quantum theorist at the
>> University of Seville in Spain.

Isn't that what an "Ansatz" is? (A quick Googling suggests maybe not.
But it seems similar to me...)

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Prof David West

Re: The fruits of abduction

and, is an ansatz, more or less, a formalized metaphor?

davew

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019, at 8:40 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

> > The problem is that Bornâs rule was not really more than a smart guess
> > â
> >> there was no fundamental reason that led Born to propose it. âIt was
> >> an
> >> intuition without a precise justification,â said AdÃ¡n Cabello
> >> <https://personal.us.es/adan/home.htm>, a quantum theorist at the
> >> University of Seville in Spain.
>
> Isn't that what an "Ansatz" is? (A quick Googling suggests maybe not.
> But it seems similar to me...)
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

Roger Critchlow-2

Re: The fruits of abduction

I was contrasting abductive reasoning to deductive and inductive reasoning, something that has happened around here before. The point was that one could not deduce Born's rule from accepted premises, not induce it from prior examples. Though maybe it is an induction from prior experience with photon wave functions.

This looks to be a nice presentation of the Bethe ansatz, https://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/9809162.pdf, which appears to be an inspired selection of basis functions for solving a 1-d spin glass. So, no, Born's rule was not an ansatz, but Bethe's ansatz might be an abduction.

-- rec --

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 11:21 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

and, is an ansatz, more or less, a formalized metaphor?

davew

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019, at 8:40 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> > The problem is that Bornâ€™s rule was not really more than a smart guess
> > â€”
> >> there was no fundamental reason that led Born to propose it. â€œIt was
> >> an
> >> intuition without a precise justification,â€ said AdÃ¡n Cabello
> >> <https://personal.us.es/adan/home.htm>, a quantum theorist at the
> >> University of Seville in Spain.
>
> Isn't that what an "Ansatz" is? (A quick Googling suggests maybe not.
> But it seems similar to me...)
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

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Nick Thompson

Re: The fruits of abduction

In reply to this post by Prof David West

Ah, the excluded middle strikes again:

"...was an intuition without a precise justification..."

Who ever said that justification had to be precise?

Can there not be probable justification?

You hear a sharp noise as you are walking in the street and you duck. The chances that that small motion will actually save you from any harm are one in a million, yet, hey!, the cost is minimal and the potential gain is high.

By the way, speaking of ducks, how do you tell if your doctor is a bad doctor.

Well, you ask him a difficult medical question, and if he ducks, he’s a quack.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2019 9:21 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The fruits of abduction

and, is an ansatz, more or less, a formalized metaphor?

davew

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019, at 8:40 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

> > The problem is that Bornâs rule was not really more than a smart

> > guess â

> >> there was no fundamental reason that led Born to propose it. âIt

> >> was an intuition without a precise justification,â said AdÃ¡n

> >> Cabello <https://personal.us.es/adan/home.htm>, a quantum theorist

> >> at the University of Seville in Spain.

> Isn't that what an "Ansatz" is? (A quick Googling suggests maybe not.

> But it seems similar to me...)

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College to unsubscribe

> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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Barry MacKichan

Re: The fruits of abduction

I would say that the author agrees with you on this point. Only if there
are non-precise justifications is the word “precise” needed, i.e.,
not redundant. And everyone knows 😉 there are no redundancies in
scientific articles.

--Barry

On 14 Feb 2019, at 12:10, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Ah, the excluded middle strikes again:
>
>
>
> "...was an intuition without a precise justification..."
>
>
>
> Who ever said that justification had to be precise?
>
>
>
> Can there not be probable justification?
>
>
>
> You hear a sharp noise as you are walking in the street and you duck.
> The chances that that small motion will actually save you from any
> harm are one in a million, yet, hey!, the cost is minimal and the
> potential gain is high.
>
>
>
> By the way, speaking of ducks, how do you tell if your doctor is a bad
> doctor.
>
>
>
> Well, you ask him a difficult medical question, and if he ducks,
> he’s a quack.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>

lrudolph

abduction at the arxiv tonight

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05479

I have not looked at the paper.

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