That Tin,
Thanks for posting a comment.
I just don't see how the comment pertains to my essay.
Marcoen
That Tin,
Thanks for posting a comment.
I just don't see how the comment pertains to my essay.
Marcoen
Dear Marcoen,
I owe you one for insisting on proper "scientific method". Here, a scoring.
All the best,
Chidi
Chidi, Thanks!
Regards, Marcoen
Hi Marcoen,
Based on a recommendation of a common friend, I have just read your intriguing and provocative Essay. I think that the issue that the CMS collaboration anonymously agrees with you (This is the message of your footnote 1) confirms that the way in which sometimes scientists release overstated claims (see also previous claims by the OPERA Collaboration on the neutrinos faster than light) is based on a sort of "politics of making science spectacular". This is not necessarily a wrong issue, as it permits to popularize science and, in turn, to have a better attention and more financial funds from governments. On the other hand, it is also a good think that scientists like you recall people to stay grounded. In any case, I had lots of fun in reading your Essay. Thus, I am going to give you an high score.
Cheers,
Ch.
Christian,
Thanks for the kind words and for rating my essay.
As to the popularization of science: of course I'm not against publications intended to draw the attention of the general public to recent findings. But even these popular articles would have to be written without overstating the conclusions. Else you get the situation that scientists boast about the level of professionalization in their research institutes and distantiate themselves from amateurs, yet in their popular papers they descend to the level of the crackpot, who claims that unicorns exist because he has seen an imprint of a hoof in the woods. That would be hypocrisy.
Best regards,
Marcoen
Dear Marcoen,
I completely agree with your point of view.
Cheers,
Ch.
Marcoen,
It seems our conversation was in the window of what vanished. Did you happen to read my response to your observation of not knowing how to change the current situation in physics, if not, would you like me to restate it?
John,
I haven't had the chance to read your reply. I would be glad if you could repost it.
Marcoen
Marcoen,
I was hoping they hadn't actually lost those posts, as I'd several long ones.
You had said you didn't know how to change the situation in physics and I observed; This is physics! How does change happen? In the gaps. During the phase transitions. As the old saying goes, "Change happens one funeral at a time. "
Since we are a point where it is becoming obvious the current model can't go on much further, before getting laughed off the stage, it's not so much a matter of how to beat it, but what replaces it. Since this is science, you would think a viable alternative would quickly be noticed, but it is obvious there are some very basic assumptions built into the current models and for anyone within physics to really go outside them, would be like stepping out the window of an upper floor. In my original post to you, I offered up my observation about time, covered in my last year's entry; That we are treating time as a vector from past to future as somehow foundational, rather than the physical process by which what is future potential becomes past circumstance. Not only is the narrative effect foundational to science, as measure of duration, but is foundational to civilization, as the basis of history and causal logic. So it is natural for science to assume it as foundational, much as it seemed normal five hundred years ago to assume the sun moving across the sky as obvious.
Now I find most people with any amount of eduction don't much like this concept, because it really does rattle their thinking, but that doesn't disprove it. So it is an example of how small mistakes grow into large issues over time, when not corrected.
I discussed some of these misconceptions further, yesterday, in Israel Perez' entry.
My own entry covers it from other angles.
Now you may not agree with my argument, but it provides an example of just how much completely bottom up revision might be necessary to make sense of the problems.
Regards,
John
John,
Thanks for reposting your reply.
You wrote: "we are a point where it is becoming obvious the current model can't go on much further, before getting laughed off the stage". I think the opposite is the case: with the proclaimed observation of the Higgs boson, for the majority of physicists it has become obvious that they are on the right track with the Standard Model.
A replacement of the Standard Model is only possible by what Lakatos called a "clash between research programs". So not only an alternative theory is required, but also additional results demonstrating theoretical and empirical progression. But like in a clash between street gangs, there are absolutely no rules in such a clash between research programs: I have personally witnessed on dozens - note the plural - of occasions how professional scientists, including the Nobel laureate 't Hooft, have lied, that is, have made up things, in official documents to thwart challenges of the dominant paradigm. They all have what I call the 'quantum attitude': upon observation, that is, with a camera or a microphone in their face, they pose as scientists guided by truth-finding, yet in absence of such observation they are nothing but liars who, in their capacity of reviewers of funding proposals and papers submitted for publication, make up things to prevent the publication and development of views that are critical of the accepted paradigm. And they get away with it scot-free: it is an illusion to think that they will ever be held responsible for such actions in the current system. So absent any experimental result that proves the Standard Model wrong, its hegemony could easily be prolonged for another 1000 years.
Best regards,
Marcoen
Marcoen,
I've just checked for a response and bizarrely my post has vanished! Do let me know if you find it, I didn't keep a copy!
In any case I strongly support your position and case, and may even go a little further about particle physics (I discussed this within my 2011 essay).
I hope I also have a proof about particle structure which has proven robust in the optical and QM and relativistic regimes, deriving a resolution of the EPR paradox in my essay!
Do look and tell me if you think I'm going crazy, of if this may just signal the beginning of the end for outdated doctrine. Ignore the dense abstract, the rave reviews in the blog include; "groundbreaking", "clearly significant", "astonishing", "fantastic job", "wonderful", "remarkable!", "deeply impressed", etc.聽so just perhaps...? Mind you. two 7th places were passed over in the last two years so it may be buried again anyway. All points welcomed.
But this should be about yours, as the original one. Excellent, concise and precise. Good score going on. Very well done.
Best wishes
Peter
Dear Marcoen,
I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.
Regards and good luck in the contest,
Sreenath BN.
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827
Dear Marcoen,
Your, nicely argued, article is an eye opener to those who believe in the propaganda that the mass of the particle found by CERN would correspond with that of the Higg's particle and hence the particle found by them is indeed the Higg's particle. This declaration is rightly challenged by you. I hope the truth persists ultimately. Please, go through my article and post your comments on it in my thread. (http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827).
Best of luck,
Sreenath
Dear Marcoen,
I had previously read and rated your essay without commenting since I was in virtual total agreement and you were right on target. But perhaps it helps to still state this all the same at least for encouragement.
What brought me here now was the brilliant exchanges with Chidi Idika. That was the work of a well-meaning objective critic which is what this forum needs more than flattery of one's work.
I would love to benefit from your criticism even if you don't score my essay. Mine though may be more philosophical than hard core math or physics. The nature of space I think supersedes the claims of finding the Higg's boson or what do you think?
Following additional insights gained from interacting with FQXi community members, I wrote on my blog a judgement in the case of Atomistic Enterprises Inc. vs. Plato & Ors delivered on Jul. 28, 2013 @ 11:39 GMT.
Best regards,
Akinbo
Marcoen,
The point you make is one that needs to be repeated frequently, but it does so because the process of intellectual editing is essential to gaining any real grasp of a reality which bombards us with more information in a moment, then we will ever comprehend in a lifetime. It is reductionism of the reductionisms. Frequently I come across people who think only the last few decimals need to be measured, of a reality that is been conquered by human reason, when the opposite is true; The more we know, the more we know we don't know. I think in the current development of our social and technological functions, we are mimicking processes biology was evolving hundreds of millions of years ago.
Just as a very minor example of how we really don't consider what we think, take the basic mathematical function of addition; If you actually add two objects together, you have one larger object. So when you say 2+3=5, what you are really saying is that adding a set of two objects to set of three objects, gives you a set of five objects. I think ignoring this basic reality causes significant intellectual distortions, in that we don't appreciate how whole objects arise from multiple inputs. We always think something is best understood in terms of its parts, yet its parts are unexplainable outside of their context. The parts of your body add up to a whole that gives meaning and context to those parts, in a way they do not have in isolation.
In physics, this view is pervasive. We treat quanta as discrete units, yet it becomes a big mystery when they become "entangled" and start acting as one over larger areas than we can explain when everything must be point particles on a fundamental level.
Not to mention how this leads to atomized cultures and the resulting short term thinking, but that is looking at the ever larger picture and it's hard enough to get even those who are paid to be logical to think through the consequences of their assumptions.
Regards,
John Merryman
Dear Sreenath,
Thanks for your kind words.
The upcoming days I have scheduled some time to read other essays, so I'll read and rate your essay one of these days.
Best regards,
Marcoen
Dear Akinbo,
Thanks for your encouraging words and for rating my essay.
One of the upcoming days I'll read and rate your essay.
Best regards,
Marcoen
John,
Thanks for commenting on my essay.
I completely agree with you that science has gone off on a tangent. The community has become too strongly compartmentalized, that is, has become divided into sections that are entirely focused at excessively narrow research topics. But I wouldn't know how to change that.
Best regards,
Marcoen
Marcoen,
This is physics! Ask yourself; how, where and when does change usually happen? It happens in the breaks, the phase transitions. As the old saying goes, "Change happens one funeral at a time."
So then ask yourself; How do we know when such a break is going to happen and what should we do to prepare for it? As I've been saying, you know you are at the top of the wave when it's mostly foam and bubbles and no more upward momentum. I think that about describes the state of physics today. So the question then is to figure out how to prepare for what happens when this structure really does start to crumble and that would be to have another model that answers the issues more effectively. Now that may seem obvious, but it would seem that if there were such a model, this being science, everyone would quickly be talking about it anyway, but that would only be true if it in some way fit into any of the various schools of thought currently accepted. If it is outside that range, it would be like stepping out a window for anyone trained within the schools to consider it. Not only would no one follow them, and they would not only lose the support of the community, but also the value of what they had been taught.
If, on the other hand, the real problem is so fundamental to the model, eventually these structures will crumble to the ground and they will have to start from the ground up anyway. Given that, there is a strong political impulse to keep supporting and fixing old models.
Now obviously I am leading up to the issue I keep raising, but only because it really is foundational, not only to physics models, but to the rational thought process. It was the topic of my last years entry in the Questioning the Foundations contest
We experience time as a sequence of events, from past to future and physics reduces this to a measure of duration, but the simple physical reality is that it is action creating change that turns potential into actual, ie. future becoming past. For example, the earth isn't moving/existing along a vector from yesterday to tomorrow, rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.
Duration doesn't transcend the present, but is the activity occurring between events, like the wave cycling between peaks.
In my this years entry I'm arguing it further. That reality is a dichotomy of energy and information, in which energy manifests information and information defines energy. Since energy is conserved, in order to create new information, old information has to be erased, thus giving rise to the "arrow of time."
Now can you see how much of a problem this poses, not only for many complex physics models, but to our very notion of reality? Consider that both narrative and cause and effect, linear logic are based on this sequential perspective of time and they are the main pillars of what creates human civilization, so while it seems normal to me, having thought about it for years, I find it really throws a monkey wrench into most people's ways of thinking and they react negatively to it, even if they don't have an argument against it. It would be like telling the average person of 500 years ago that the earth is just a small planet circling its local star. Consider we still, today, see the sun as moving across the sky.
Now I can go on about this idea, but it may have tripped some circuit breakers in your thinking, so the point I'm making to you, is that it is this sort of paradigm breaking that is required and sitting around a physics classroom discussing the various models of black holes, or multiverses, or string theories, is not going to lead to that sort of outside the box thinking.
So it is a matter of waiting until the ideas emanating from the physics community become so outrageous that the larger society begins to question whether they are worth the cost. Then really new ideas will have an opportunity.
Regards,
John Merryman
PS, I'm always willing to discuss it further, in fact, recently posted a thumbnail sketch at the bottom of Carlos Rovelli's thread.
Dear Marcoen,
Just to say thank you for that exchange at my blog. Its important to me. And I will appreciate to know if or when you read my concluding post.
All the best,
Chidi