Unsolved Problems in Psychology

[John Kennison]

Yes, I agree with this defense of the concept of universal gravitation. It may seem strange to say that objects can instantaneously exert a force on a distant object but it enables us to explain and accurately predict motions.

I have in mind a different type of criticism of Newton's laws of motion, that apparently wasn't made but could have been. The criticism would go as follows: "The laws depend on the notion of force. Since forces are inferred by observing motions, why don't we do away with this extraneous idea and simply talk about motion. Moreover forces are not only pure fictions, they are wonderful fudge factors that explain away the many examples of how the laws of motion fail to describe the actual motion we see in the real world. For example, one of the laws says an object in motion tends to keep moving at the same speed and in the same direction. But this isn't true –a ball rolling on the ground tends to slow down and eventually stop".

A disciple of Newton might reply, "The ball only slows down because a force is acting on it, in fact the ground exerts a frictional force that accounts for the slowing down".  

To which the critic might say, "Yeah and I suppose the frictional force is calculated as the precise amount needed to account for the discrepancy with the law about staying in motion. Similarly, an iron object which is at rest will suddenly start to move when a magnet is placed nearby, thus violating another 'law' of motion. I suppose you will have to postulate a 'magnetic force' to account for this discrepancy. Mark my words, if we are ever to have a good theory of motion, we will have to do away with fictional concepts such as force."

But of course the concept of force, along with a few provisions about calculating gravitational, frictional and magnetic forces, makes it possible to state an amazingly predictive theory about a wide range of motions. We are willing to accept the fictional notion of force because it leads to a theory that can be verified empirically.

I remember a conversation, decades ago, with a psychologist who was attacking Freud for using "mystical" notions such as the ego, the id, libido etc. The psychologist felt his subject needed to eliminate mystical concepts and express everything in terms of "concrete" concepts such as foot-pounds, voltages and decibels. After the conversation ended, it occurred to me that the problem with Freud was not that he invented fictional notions but that the resulting theory did not have anything close to the predictive ability of Newton's theory. I wished I had said, "You seem willing to accept the fictions of physics, but not to accept any fictions for psychology."  

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Bruce Sherwood [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 6:13 PM
To: [hidden email]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology

Newton famously said about action at a distance, "I frame no
hypotheses". I take this to mean something like the following:

"I completely agree with you that I haven't explained gravity. Rather
I've shown that observations are consistent with the radical notion
that all matter attracts all other matter, here and in the heavens,
made quantitative by a one-over-r-squared force 'law'. On this basis I
have shown that the orbits of the planets and the behavior of the
tides and the fall of an apple, previously seen as completely
different phenomena, are 'explainable' within one single framework.

I propose that we provisionally abandon the search for an
'explanation' of gravity, which looks fruitless for now, and instead
concentrate on working out the consequences of the new framework.
Let's leave it as a task for future scientists to try to understand at
a deeper level than 'action-at-a-distance' what the real character of
gravity is. There has been altogether too much speculation, such as
maybe angels push the planets around. Let's get on with studying what
we can."

I think Newton doesn't get nearly enough credit for this radical
standpoint, which made it possible to go forward. And of course we
know that eventually Einstein found a deep 'explanation' for gravity
in terms of the effects that matter has on space itself. There are
hints in the current string theory community of even deeper insights
into the nature of gravity.

Bruce

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:
> John, I like your gravity question. If this were Google+, I'd click its +1
> button.  My wife, who studies these things, says that one of the
> fiercest contemporary criticisms of Newton's theories was that they depended
> on a mysterious (magical?) action at a distance.
>
> -- Russ Abbott

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[lrudolph]

I like John Archibald Wheeler's brief description of the situation
(which appears in print as marginalia in his book _Gravity_ with
Misner and Thorne):  "Matter tells space how to curve.  Space tells
matter how to move."

Agent-based modeling (with message-passing, even!), you might say.

> Bruce,
>
> Did not Einstein put "action at a distance" wrt gravity to rest with his
> general theory? Did he not theorize that gravity is a force that curves
> space-time nearby rather than acting on other masses at a distance?
>
> Just askin'
> Grant


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Bruce Sherwood]

To Nick: By the word "gravity" what a physicist means is merely "that
kind of interaction that masses have with each other, mediated by the
effects mass has on space".

The word is useful, because there are four known kinds of
"interactions": gravitational, electromagnetic, "weak" (the
interaction responsible for example for the instability of the
neutron, which when outside of a nucleus spontaneously decays into a
proton, an electron, and an antineutrino), and "strong" or "nuclear"
(the non-electromagnetic interaction among protons and neutrons in the
nucleus which binds them together despite the electric repulsion
between the protons). After these four kinds of interaction were
identified in mid-20th-century, a framework was discovered within
which the electromagnetic interaction and the weak interaction are
seen to be different manifestations of the same underlying type of
interaction, mediated by the exchange of photons (electromagnetism)
and "vector bosons" (the weak interaction). Then a bit later it was
discovered that the "electroweak" interaction could be unified with
the "strong" or "nuclear" interaction. This unification is called the
Standard Model. There are strenuous efforts to find some way to unify
the Standard Model with gravitational interactions.

So there's nothing mystical about "gravity" -- it's just a useful word
for distinguishing a type of interaction that is very different from
the other kinds. At the same time, it's silly to teach young children
that things fall "due to gravity". That's a tautology.

A comment on the contemporary physics concept of "interaction"
(something we deal with in some detail in the first chapter of our
intro physics textbook): Following the deep insights of Galileo and
Newton, we expect an object to move with constant (vector) velocity
(constant speed and constant direction, with no motion at all being a
special case of constant speed) except to the extent that there are
interactions with other objects. We in fact observe that when objects
are isolated from other objects, they do tend to move with constant
velocity (in the case of gravitational interactions you may have to
get quite far away from other objects to see this).

This gives us a rule for identifying when an interaction occurs: look
for a change of speed and/or direction. If you see such a change, look
for objects that might be responsible. This interaction-identification
rule gets broadened to include as evidence of interaction any change
in an object, such as a change of temperature. To put it succinctly,
change we take as evidence of interaction.

And a subrule: If you see no change in a situation where change is
expected, that is indirect evidence for additional interactions that
you might have failed to account for. As an example, consider a book
lying on a table. Because there is a gravitational interaction between
the book and the massive Earth, one expects the book to fall toward
the Earth. That it doesn't fall is evidence for some additional kind
of interaction, in this case the electric interaction between atoms in
the bottom surface of the book and the top surface of the table. As
another example, we observe that the speed of an object sliding along
the floor decreases, and we therefore suspect an interaction, and we
notice contact between atoms in the object and atoms in the floor and
infer that there is an interaction between these atoms.

Having established a way to identify interactions, the next step is to
seek ways to quantify the amount of interaction, with it being
implicit that we expect more interaction to cause more change
("constant velocity except to the extent that...."). Examples of such
quantification are Newton's gravitational force law and Coulomb's
electric force law. The "Newtonian Synthesis" then relates
quantitatively the amount of interaction ("force") to the amount of
observed change (change in speed, change in direction).

Note carefully that this is not circular reasoning, though it is
sometimes characterized as such. Relative positions, amount of mass,
amount of electric charge, are used to predict amount of interaction,
and amount of interaction is used to predict something about entities
that are very different, such as speed and direction of motion.
Newton's famous equation "rate of change of momentum is equal to net
force" (dp/dt = F_net, alas bowdlerized in most intro physics courses
to the far less powerful form F = ma, a form Newton never used), is
powerful precisely because it relates two quantities that are utterly
different in their ontology.

To take a specific example, consider two electrically charged
electrons repelling each other. Coulomb's force law is written in
terms of the electric charge of the electrons and their relative
positions and says absolutely nothing about mass or motion. The effect
of the electric interaction is written in terms of electron mass and
velocity. In the equation dp/dt = F_net, the equal sign can be deeply
misleading. These quantities dp/dt and F_net are not the same entities
but completely different. It was a deep insight on Newton's part to
see that they were nevertheless connected causally.

I can offer some additional insight into the issue of "action at a
distance". For Newton and his contemporaries, the problem was its
mysticism. For Einstein the problem was much more concrete: action at
a distance is inconsistent with Special Relativity, and the limitation
that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed
of light. Newton's (gravitational) and Coulomb's (electric)
one-over-r-squared force laws do not contain time in their algebraic
statements and therefore must be wrong, since they imply immediate
effects at large distances. The fundamental concept that addresses
these issues is the concept of "field", first introduced by Faraday,
then broadened and deepened by Maxwell, Einstein, and the many
mid-20th-century physicists who created "quantum field theory".

The basic idea is that charged particles surround themselves with a
web of interaction called a "field", and other charged particles that
wander into this web are affected by the field. Similarly, masses
surround themselves with a gravitational field, which affects other
masses that wander into the region. If the "sources" of the field
(charged particles or masses) move, there is a delay or retardation
before distant locations experience a change in the value of the field
at that location. So in a sense there is no action at a distance.
Rather objects create fields, and another object interacts with the
value of the field at the second object's location, NOT with the
source object directly.

For an introduction to the field concept, I can offer two videos. The
first is a talk I gave to Santa Fe city government people motivated by
the fact that public meetings on the citing of cell phone towers
showed that even technically educated people often have no real
concept of what an electromagnetic "field" is, and are accordingly
fearful of such fields. You can see my talk "Electric Fields, Cell
Towers, and Wi-Fi" on my home page,

   http://www4.ncsu.edu/~basherwo

Another source of insight is a lecture given by Ruth Chabay from the
electromagnetism section of our physics course, "The Reality of
Electric Field", Chapter 14, Lecture 4b, in this series of videos:

   http://courses.ncsu.edu/py582/common/podcasts/

Here she engages students in a thought experiment outlined in our
textbook in which one sees retardation effects that show that the
field is in some sense "real", not just a useful computational tool.
You might also find interesting her lectures on mechanics:

   http://courses.ncsu.edu/py581/common/podcasts/

In these mechanics lectures, Chapter 1 Lecture 2 deals with the
concept "interactions".

Bruce

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks Bruce

This obviously will require careful study.  I will try to respond when I get
to the Other Side and have had a few days to get used to living in The Bog.

Nick

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Bruce Sherwood
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2012 8:52 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology

To Nick: By the word "gravity" what a physicist means is merely "that kind
of interaction that masses have with each other, mediated by the effects
mass has on space".

The word is useful, because there are four known kinds of
"interactions": gravitational, electromagnetic, "weak" (the interaction
responsible for example for the instability of the neutron, which when
outside of a nucleus spontaneously decays into a proton, an electron, and an
antineutrino), and "strong" or "nuclear"
(the non-electromagnetic interaction among protons and neutrons in the
nucleus which binds them together despite the electric repulsion between the
protons). After these four kinds of interaction were identified in
mid-20th-century, a framework was discovered within which the
electromagnetic interaction and the weak interaction are seen to be
different manifestations of the same underlying type of interaction,
mediated by the exchange of photons (electromagnetism) and "vector bosons"
(the weak interaction). Then a bit later it was discovered that the
"electroweak" interaction could be unified with the "strong" or "nuclear"
interaction. This unification is called the Standard Model. There are
strenuous efforts to find some way to unify the Standard Model with
gravitational interactions.

So there's nothing mystical about "gravity" -- it's just a useful word for
distinguishing a type of interaction that is very different from the other
kinds. At the same time, it's silly to teach young children that things fall
"due to gravity". That's a tautology.

A comment on the contemporary physics concept of "interaction"
(something we deal with in some detail in the first chapter of our intro
physics textbook): Following the deep insights of Galileo and Newton, we
expect an object to move with constant (vector) velocity (constant speed and
constant direction, with no motion at all being a special case of constant
speed) except to the extent that there are interactions with other objects.
We in fact observe that when objects are isolated from other objects, they
do tend to move with constant velocity (in the case of gravitational
interactions you may have to get quite far away from other objects to see
this).

This gives us a rule for identifying when an interaction occurs: look for a
change of speed and/or direction. If you see such a change, look for objects
that might be responsible. This interaction-identification rule gets
broadened to include as evidence of interaction any change in an object,
such as a change of temperature. To put it succinctly, change we take as
evidence of interaction.

And a subrule: If you see no change in a situation where change is expected,
that is indirect evidence for additional interactions that you might have
failed to account for. As an example, consider a book lying on a table.
Because there is a gravitational interaction between the book and the
massive Earth, one expects the book to fall toward the Earth. That it
doesn't fall is evidence for some additional kind of interaction, in this
case the electric interaction between atoms in the bottom surface of the
book and the top surface of the table. As another example, we observe that
the speed of an object sliding along the floor decreases, and we therefore
suspect an interaction, and we notice contact between atoms in the object
and atoms in the floor and infer that there is an interaction between these
atoms.

Having established a way to identify interactions, the next step is to seek
ways to quantify the amount of interaction, with it being implicit that we
expect more interaction to cause more change ("constant velocity except to
the extent that...."). Examples of such quantification are Newton's
gravitational force law and Coulomb's electric force law. The "Newtonian
Synthesis" then relates quantitatively the amount of interaction ("force")
to the amount of observed change (change in speed, change in direction).

Note carefully that this is not circular reasoning, though it is sometimes
characterized as such. Relative positions, amount of mass, amount of
electric charge, are used to predict amount of interaction, and amount of
interaction is used to predict something about entities that are very
different, such as speed and direction of motion.
Newton's famous equation "rate of change of momentum is equal to net force"
(dp/dt = F_net, alas bowdlerized in most intro physics courses to the far
less powerful form F = ma, a form Newton never used), is powerful precisely
because it relates two quantities that are utterly different in their
ontology.

To take a specific example, consider two electrically charged electrons
repelling each other. Coulomb's force law is written in terms of the
electric charge of the electrons and their relative positions and says
absolutely nothing about mass or motion. The effect of the electric
interaction is written in terms of electron mass and velocity. In the
equation dp/dt = F_net, the equal sign can be deeply misleading. These
quantities dp/dt and F_net are not the same entities but completely
different. It was a deep insight on Newton's part to see that they were
nevertheless connected causally.

I can offer some additional insight into the issue of "action at a
distance". For Newton and his contemporaries, the problem was its mysticism.
For Einstein the problem was much more concrete: action at a distance is
inconsistent with Special Relativity, and the limitation that nothing, not
even information, can travel faster than the speed of light. Newton's
(gravitational) and Coulomb's (electric) one-over-r-squared force laws do
not contain time in their algebraic statements and therefore must be wrong,
since they imply immediate effects at large distances. The fundamental
concept that addresses these issues is the concept of "field", first
introduced by Faraday, then broadened and deepened by Maxwell, Einstein, and
the many mid-20th-century physicists who created "quantum field theory".

The basic idea is that charged particles surround themselves with a web of
interaction called a "field", and other charged particles that wander into
this web are affected by the field. Similarly, masses surround themselves
with a gravitational field, which affects other masses that wander into the
region. If the "sources" of the field (charged particles or masses) move,
there is a delay or retardation before distant locations experience a change
in the value of the field at that location. So in a sense there is no action
at a distance.
Rather objects create fields, and another object interacts with the value of
the field at the second object's location, NOT with the source object
directly.

For an introduction to the field concept, I can offer two videos. The first
is a talk I gave to Santa Fe city government people motivated by the fact
that public meetings on the citing of cell phone towers showed that even
technically educated people often have no real concept of what an
electromagnetic "field" is, and are accordingly fearful of such fields. You
can see my talk "Electric Fields, Cell Towers, and Wi-Fi" on my home page,

   http://www4.ncsu.edu/~basherwo

Another source of insight is a lecture given by Ruth Chabay from the
electromagnetism section of our physics course, "The Reality of Electric
Field", Chapter 14, Lecture 4b, in this series of videos:

   http://courses.ncsu.edu/py582/common/podcasts/

Here she engages students in a thought experiment outlined in our textbook
in which one sees retardation effects that show that the field is in some
sense "real", not just a useful computational tool.
You might also find interesting her lectures on mechanics:

   http://courses.ncsu.edu/py581/common/podcasts/

In these mechanics lectures, Chapter 1 Lecture 2 deals with the concept
"interactions".

Bruce

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives,
unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Owen Densmore]

Bruce: Wow, very nice!  A+

I was about to mention that although the impact mass has on spacetime gives a means for understanding gravity, it was outside of the interaction model of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics.  In the SM, force arises from an interchange particle exchange:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interactions

In the conceptual model of fundamental interactions, matter consists of fermions, which carry properties called charges andspin ±¹⁄₂ (intrinsic angular momentum ±^ħ⁄₂, where ħ is the reduced Planck constant). They attract or repel each other by exchanging bosons.

Unfortunately, the unification of gravity with the rest requires a graviton that has not yet been observed.

Merging general relativity and quantum mechanics (or quantum field theory) into a more general theory of quantum gravity is an area of active research. It is hypothesized that gravitation is mediated by a massless spin-2 particle called the graviton.

BUT the question is: do we have any bounds on the requirements of observing such a critter?  In a way, this would render General Relativity to a position to Newtonian physics, one in which has a still more fundamental underpinning.

   -- Owen

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Bruce Sherwood <[hidden email]> wrote:

To Nick: By the word "gravity" what a physicist means is merely "that
kind of interaction that masses have with each other, mediated by the
effects mass has on space".

The word is useful, because there are four known kinds of
"interactions": gravitational, electromagnetic, "weak" (the
interaction responsible for example for the instability of the
neutron, which when outside of a nucleus spontaneously decays into a
proton, an electron, and an antineutrino), and "strong" or "nuclear"
(the non-electromagnetic interaction among protons and neutrons in the
nucleus which binds them together despite the electric repulsion
between the protons). After these four kinds of interaction were
identified in mid-20th-century, a framework was discovered within
which the electromagnetic interaction and the weak interaction are
seen to be different manifestations of the same underlying type of
interaction, mediated by the exchange of photons (electromagnetism)
and "vector bosons" (the weak interaction). Then a bit later it was
discovered that the "electroweak" interaction could be unified with
the "strong" or "nuclear" interaction. This unification is called the
Standard Model. There are strenuous efforts to find some way to unify
the Standard Model with gravitational interactions.

So there's nothing mystical about "gravity" -- it's just a useful word
for distinguishing a type of interaction that is very different from
the other kinds. At the same time, it's silly to teach young children
that things fall "due to gravity". That's a tautology.

A comment on the contemporary physics concept of "interaction"
(something we deal with in some detail in the first chapter of our
intro physics textbook): Following the deep insights of Galileo and
Newton, we expect an object to move with constant (vector) velocity
(constant speed and constant direction, with no motion at all being a
special case of constant speed) except to the extent that there are
interactions with other objects. We in fact observe that when objects
are isolated from other objects, they do tend to move with constant
velocity (in the case of gravitational interactions you may have to
get quite far away from other objects to see this).

This gives us a rule for identifying when an interaction occurs: look
for a change of speed and/or direction. If you see such a change, look
for objects that might be responsible. This interaction-identification
rule gets broadened to include as evidence of interaction any change
in an object, such as a change of temperature. To put it succinctly,
change we take as evidence of interaction.

And a subrule: If you see no change in a situation where change is
expected, that is indirect evidence for additional interactions that
you might have failed to account for. As an example, consider a book
lying on a table. Because there is a gravitational interaction between
the book and the massive Earth, one expects the book to fall toward
the Earth. That it doesn't fall is evidence for some additional kind
of interaction, in this case the electric interaction between atoms in
the bottom surface of the book and the top surface of the table. As
another example, we observe that the speed of an object sliding along
the floor decreases, and we therefore suspect an interaction, and we
notice contact between atoms in the object and atoms in the floor and
infer that there is an interaction between these atoms.

Having established a way to identify interactions, the next step is to
seek ways to quantify the amount of interaction, with it being
implicit that we expect more interaction to cause more change
("constant velocity except to the extent that...."). Examples of such
quantification are Newton's gravitational force law and Coulomb's
electric force law. The "Newtonian Synthesis" then relates
quantitatively the amount of interaction ("force") to the amount of
observed change (change in speed, change in direction).

Note carefully that this is not circular reasoning, though it is
sometimes characterized as such. Relative positions, amount of mass,
amount of electric charge, are used to predict amount of interaction,
and amount of interaction is used to predict something about entities
that are very different, such as speed and direction of motion.
Newton's famous equation "rate of change of momentum is equal to net
force" (dp/dt = F_net, alas bowdlerized in most intro physics courses
to the far less powerful form F = ma, a form Newton never used), is
powerful precisely because it relates two quantities that are utterly
different in their ontology.

To take a specific example, consider two electrically charged
electrons repelling each other. Coulomb's force law is written in
terms of the electric charge of the electrons and their relative
positions and says absolutely nothing about mass or motion. The effect
of the electric interaction is written in terms of electron mass and
velocity. In the equation dp/dt = F_net, the equal sign can be deeply
misleading. These quantities dp/dt and F_net are not the same entities
but completely different. It was a deep insight on Newton's part to
see that they were nevertheless connected causally.

I can offer some additional insight into the issue of "action at a
distance". For Newton and his contemporaries, the problem was its
mysticism. For Einstein the problem was much more concrete: action at
a distance is inconsistent with Special Relativity, and the limitation
that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed
of light. Newton's (gravitational) and Coulomb's (electric)
one-over-r-squared force laws do not contain time in their algebraic
statements and therefore must be wrong, since they imply immediate
effects at large distances. The fundamental concept that addresses
these issues is the concept of "field", first introduced by Faraday,
then broadened and deepened by Maxwell, Einstein, and the many
mid-20th-century physicists who created "quantum field theory".

The basic idea is that charged particles surround themselves with a
web of interaction called a "field", and other charged particles that
wander into this web are affected by the field. Similarly, masses
surround themselves with a gravitational field, which affects other
masses that wander into the region. If the "sources" of the field
(charged particles or masses) move, there is a delay or retardation
before distant locations experience a change in the value of the field
at that location. So in a sense there is no action at a distance.
Rather objects create fields, and another object interacts with the
value of the field at the second object's location, NOT with the
source object directly.

For an introduction to the field concept, I can offer two videos. The
first is a talk I gave to Santa Fe city government people motivated by
the fact that public meetings on the citing of cell phone towers
showed that even technically educated people often have no real
concept of what an electromagnetic "field" is, and are accordingly
fearful of such fields. You can see my talk "Electric Fields, Cell
Towers, and Wi-Fi" on my home page,

  http://www4.ncsu.edu/~basherwo

Another source of insight is a lecture given by Ruth Chabay from the
electromagnetism section of our physics course, "The Reality of
Electric Field", Chapter 14, Lecture 4b, in this series of videos:

  http://courses.ncsu.edu/py582/common/podcasts/

Here she engages students in a thought experiment outlined in our
textbook in which one sees retardation effects that show that the
field is in some sense "real", not just a useful computational tool.
You might also find interesting her lectures on mechanics:

  http://courses.ncsu.edu/py581/common/podcasts/

In these mechanics lectures, Chapter 1 Lecture 2 deals with the
concept "interactions".

Bruce

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[John Kennison]

Nick,

In college, I majored in Math and minored in Physics. My guess is that your points about how warped space is presented are basically right but obviously Bruce can respond much more authoritatively.  

On magical thinking, I think that before scientists can start testing out hypotheses, they need to set up a vocabulary in which to state these hypotheses. One approach to geometry uses Euclid's vocabulary of point, line, angle and distance. Euclidean geometry is a mathematical theory, with axioms and logical consequences, expressed in this vocabulary. To see if this is of any help in navigating the physical world, we have to say precisely what we mean when we talk about points, lines, angles and distances in the physical world. Once we do that, we can begin to test to see if the conclusions of Euclidean geometry are true in the physical world.

In some sense, before we start talking abstractly about geometric points, it would be nice if we first stated precisely what concrete evidence will be taken as specifying, say, a point in the physical world. But it doesn't seem easy to do this until we have first done some substantial analysis about how points etc. would behave if they existed. During the period when we are still experimenting with a new vocabulary, it may seem like we are dealing in magic, but that vocabulary, suitably refined, may eventually revolutionize how we think about the concrete situations we are trying to understand.  

---John

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nicholas  Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2012 12:34 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology

John,  I haven't yet digested Bruce's comments above, nor entirely what you have written here, but I want to clarify one point.



When somebody speaks of space being warped one has in mind one of those diagrams where the Cartesian coordinates are bent, right?  In other words, we are using our pre-Einsteinian worldview as a frame of reference to describe the Einsteinian world.  But the Cartesian world has no reality, right?  It’s a figment.  Bent IS straight.  I suppose one could say that Cartesian space is the space that would be there if there were nothing in it, or if mega world and the micro-world were organized as the meta-world we humans live in is organized.



I don't know where this leaves us with the underlying question of the role, if any,  of "magical" thinking in science.  Is Psychology in trouble because it uses magical thinking, or is it in trouble because it uses bad magic? I want to think about these questions as a review these posts.  I will be in touch when I get back to Massachusetts.



Thanks, everybody.



Nick





-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2012 4:59 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology







Yes, I agree with this defense of the concept of universal gravitation. It may seem strange to say that objects can instantaneously exert a force on a distant object but it enables us to explain and accurately predict motions.



I have in mind a different type of criticism of Newton's laws of motion, that apparently wasn't made but could have been. The criticism would go as follows: "The laws depend on the notion of force. Since forces are inferred by observing motions, why don't we do away with this extraneous idea and simply talk about motion. Moreover forces are not only pure fictions, they are wonderful fudge factors that explain away the many examples of how the laws of motion fail to describe the actual motion we see in the real world. For example, one of the laws says an object in motion tends to keep moving at the same speed and in the same direction. But this isn't true –a ball rolling on the ground tends to slow down and eventually stop".



A disciple of Newton might reply, "The ball only slows down because a force is acting on it, in fact the ground exerts a frictional force that accounts for the slowing down".



To which the critic might say, "Yeah and I suppose the frictional force is calculated as the precise amount needed to account for the discrepancy with the law about staying in motion. Similarly, an iron object which is at rest will suddenly start to move when a magnet is placed nearby, thus violating another 'law' of motion. I suppose you will have to postulate a 'magnetic force' to account for this discrepancy. Mark my words, if we are ever to have a good theory of motion, we will have to do away with fictional concepts such as force."



But of course the concept of force, along with a few provisions about calculating gravitational, frictional and magnetic forces, makes it possible to state an amazingly predictive theory about a wide range of motions. We are willing to accept the fictional notion of force because it leads to a theory that can be verified empirically.



I remember a conversation, decades ago, with a psychologist who was attacking Freud for using "mystical" notions such as the ego, the id, libido etc. The psychologist felt his subject needed to eliminate mystical concepts and express everything in terms of "concrete" concepts such as foot-pounds, voltages and decibels. After the conversation ended, it occurred to me that the problem with Freud was not that he invented fictional notions but that the resulting theory did not have anything close to the predictive ability of Newton's theory. I wished I had said, "You seem willing to accept the fictions of physics, but not to accept any fictions for psychology."



________________________________________

From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Bruce Sherwood [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 6:13 PM

To: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology



Newton famously said about action at a distance, "I frame no hypotheses". I take this to mean something like the following:



"I completely agree with you that I haven't explained gravity. Rather I've shown that observations are consistent with the radical notion that all matter attracts all other matter, here and in the heavens, made quantitative by a one-over-r-squared force 'law'. On this basis I have shown that the orbits of the planets and the behavior of the tides and the fall of an apple, previously seen as completely different phenomena, are 'explainable' within one single framework.



I propose that we provisionally abandon the search for an 'explanation' of gravity, which looks fruitless for now, and instead concentrate on working out the consequences of the new framework.

Let's leave it as a task for future scientists to try to understand at a deeper level than 'action-at-a-distance' what the real character of gravity is. There has been altogether too much speculation, such as maybe angels push the planets around. Let's get on with studying what we can."



I think Newton doesn't get nearly enough credit for this radical standpoint, which made it possible to go forward. And of course we know that eventually Einstein found a deep 'explanation' for gravity in terms of the effects that matter has on space itself. There are hints in the current string theory community of even deeper insights into the nature of gravity.



Bruce



On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:

> John, I like your gravity question. If this were Google+, I'd click

> its +1 button.  My wife, who studies these things, says that one of

> the fiercest contemporary criticisms of Newton's theories was that

> they depended on a mysterious (magical?) action at a distance.

>

> -- Russ Abbott



============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org



============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Bruce Sherwood]

Thanks, Owen. Yes, it is indeed the case that in the modern
perspective of quantum field theory, forces are replaced by the
interchange of ("virtual") particles. I didn't want to make my
comments unnecessarily complicated by talking about this aspect of
field theory, but you're right.

I'd like to mention an amusing aspect of the contemporary physicist
concept "interaction". There are two ways to blast through a cement
wall. The crude, inelegant way is to throw lots of material at high
speed at the wall, and depend on the rather strong electric
interactions between the projectile and the wall to break through.
Clumsy. Inelegant. Crude.

The elegant way to get through the wall is to throw neutrinos at the
wall, and they go right through. Neutrinos have no charge, so they do
not undergo electric interactions. They are in a family ("leptons",
which includes electrons) that does not participate in the
strong/nuclear interaction that protons and neutrons engage in.
Gravity is intrinsically an extremely weak interaction: note that you
can hold a book in your hand, exerting upward electric interatomic
interactions and easily counteract the downward effects of the entire
massive Earth! In fact, the electric repulsion between two protons is
10 to the 40th bigger than their gravitational attraction!!!

That leaves only the "weak" interactions that neutrinos engage in, and
like gravity, these interactions are very weak, so weak that almost
all neutrinos coming from the Sun (produced in fusion reactions in the
Sun) pass right through the Earth without interacting at all. Result:
while cannonballs get through the wall by interacting very strongly
with the wall, neutrinos sneak elegantly through the wall by NOT
interacting.

I highly recommend John Updike's splendid little poem on the subject:

   http://www.phys.psu.edu/~cowen/poetry/cosmic-gall.html

Bruce

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Bruce: Wow, very nice!  A+
>
> I was about to mention that although the impact mass has on spacetime gives
> a means for understanding gravity, it was outside of the interaction model
> of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics.  In the SM, force
> arises from an interchange particle exchange:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interactions
> In the conceptual model of fundamental interactions, matter consists
> of fermions, which
> carry properties called charges andspin ±1⁄2 (intrinsic angular
> momentum ±ħ⁄2, where ħ is the reduced Planck constant). They attract or
> repel each other by exchanging bosons.
>
>
> Unfortunately, the unification of gravity with the rest requires a graviton
> that has not yet been observed.
>
> Merging general relativity and quantum mechanics (or quantum field theory)
> into a more general theory of quantum gravity is an area of active research.
> It is hypothesized that gravitation is mediated by a massless spin-2
> particle called the graviton.
>
>
> BUT the question is: do we have any bounds on the requirements of observing
> such a critter?  In a way, this would render General Relativity to a
> position to Newtonian physics, one in which has a still more fundamental
> underpinning.
>
>    -- Owen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Eric Charles]

I don't think this posted before, apologies if it is a duplicate:

I'm pretty sure the cause of this physics tangent was my assertion that psychology is no worse off than any of the hard sciences in the "unsolved problems" department. Hence, if we think physicists and chemists and biologists have solved scientific problems, then psychologists have done so as well. In any of these sciences you can push to the point of the unknown, but you need to wade through a lot of well established stuff to get there.

One big problem for psychology as a field is that psychologists still have massive physics envy, while not seeming to have any idea how physics actually works. This is much like the young girl who hates social functions and public scrutiny, but desperately wants to be a princess; she has bought the storybook/kids vision of princesshood, and has no idea what the job is really like. There is plenty of work in psychology that has answered questions through the scientific process as definitively as any other field. There are also constructs that could probably be done away with. There are also unknowns. That is the normal state of a well functioning science.

That's my assertion at least.

Eric

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Jochen Fromm-5]

Hi Nick,

I went to the library today and picked up a standard textbook
about psychology (Drew Westen, "Psychology", Wiley, 2002).
Then I selected the most interesting questions from
all the central questions I found. Which are already
answered and which are largely unsolved?

A) (neuroscience) The brain-behavior relationship
To what extend can we understand psychological
processes by events in the brain? To what extend
can we understand them without references to events
in the brain?

B) (social psychology) The individual-group relationship
To what extend does behavior depend on the groups
of which people are a part? To what extend can we
understand it in isolation?

C) (philosophy) The mind-body relationship
If thought and matter are fundamentally different,
how can they have anything to do with one another,
and how can they interact at all?

D) (biology) The nature-nature relationship
To what extend are perceptual processes born or
learned? Is our knowledge of the world stamped into
us or woven together by us? How does emotion
guide behavior in adaptive ways?

There is also the famous hard problem - can we
understand subjective experience - and the
other basic psychology questions like
"what are the basic elements of personality"
(how do we define personality, to what extend
is it stable over time and across situations, etc.).

What do you think is the most interesting
unsolved problem or question? Which is
perhaps best suited for new forms of
modeling (say ABM or NKS models) ?

Jochen


Am 17.05.2012 02:37, schrieb Nicholas Thompson:
> Here's a game we could play for a while, and see where we get: You
> state a problem in psychology, and I will try to tell you whether it
> has been solved or not.


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Carl Tollander]

If you're going to talk about the brain, you need to pause slightly
before you say it,
then turn your head a degree or two, lift your chin slightly, look nobly
into the distance,
and say it in quotes.      "the brain".     Suddenly someone stands, we
all raise our glasses,
and they say, "Gentlemen, The Brain!",   and we all go "The Brain!"
,"here, here!".

So, there's a lot of reverence for,     "the brain"    in terms of
talking about behavior.
As I chug along and think about things like learning and making music,
there's some
concern that many of the things I care about these days happen as    
"the brain" outsources
to other plexi, and how those plexi outsource on out from, say
the brachial plexus to (say) the wrists.    I don't think we really have
a good handle on how
this happens, whether it's a developmental thing or whether it is
something that it is reasonable to
think that     "the brain"     'does'.

On 5/30/12 4:24 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:

>
> Hi Nick,
>
> I went to the library today and picked up a standard textbook
> about psychology (Drew Westen, "Psychology", Wiley, 2002).
> Then I selected the most interesting questions from
> all the central questions I found. Which are already
> answered and which are largely unsolved?
>
> A) (neuroscience) The brain-behavior relationship
> To what extend can we understand psychological
> processes by events in the brain? To what extend
> can we understand them without references to events
> in the brain?
>
> B) (social psychology) The individual-group relationship
> To what extend does behavior depend on the groups
> of which people are a part? To what extend can we
> understand it in isolation?
>
> C) (philosophy) The mind-body relationship
> If thought and matter are fundamentally different,
> how can they have anything to do with one another,
> and how can they interact at all?
>
> D) (biology) The nature-nature relationship
> To what extend are perceptual processes born or
> learned? Is our knowledge of the world stamped into
> us or woven together by us? How does emotion
> guide behavior in adaptive ways?
>
> There is also the famous hard problem - can we
> understand subjective experience - and the
> other basic psychology questions like
> "what are the basic elements of personality"
> (how do we define personality, to what extend
> is it stable over time and across situations, etc.).
>
> What do you think is the most interesting
> unsolved problem or question? Which is
> perhaps best suited for new forms of
> modeling (say ABM or NKS models) ?
>
> Jochen
>
>
> Am 17.05.2012 02:37, schrieb Nicholas Thompson:
>> Here's a game we could play for a while, and see where we get: You
>> state a problem in psychology, and I will try to tell you whether it
>> has been solved or not.
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org