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

Dear Marcoen,

I thank you for rating my essay and in turn I have given you a high rating.

Bet regards,

Sreenath

Dear Marcoen,

You raise some good points that should really be said more often. Particle physicists don't observe particles, they find evidence that there were particles in a particular energy state. The notion of a theory's "predictive power", which you take issue with here, is something that has been blown out of proportion, as physicists often take such confirmations as proof of what they were looking for. If A then B. B, therefore A. This doesn't logically follow.

However, there's really more to it than that, which I was hoping you would have commented on in your essay. A theory, such as the Higgs mechanism, is supposed to have predictive power if it predicts something novel, which hasn't been observed yet, and there's no other real contender that anyone can think of. In that case, physicists find it acceptable to infer A from the observation of B. This was the case with the CMB, for instance, as with most of the Standard Model. So I was hoping you would say something about what else that observed peak could have been. I might have missed that in your essay, and if I did, I'm sorry. But if not, could you say something about that here? What would you have the 125 GeV peak produced by, if not the Higgs? I imagine there are other candidates, but haven't looked into the problem myself.

I look forward to your answer.

All the best,

Daryl

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    Marcoen,

    I have wondered if epicycles would have lasted 1500 years if the Dark Ages hadn't occurred.

    I think though, that outside of HEP, there are alot of issues that are not being easily swept under the rug, along with some that are overlooked, but will not look well when considered critically. If a system cannot continue to support fresh energy and input, then that energy will start to react to it, rather then support it. I think you will see a great deal of questioning by the younger members of the community, because they are not going to spend their careers chasing theories that cannot be furthered. Rather than prove themselves by finding holes in theory to patch, they will start finding holes to dissect the model, pulling everything apart, not overlooking the niggling problems. The pendulum starts to swing the other direction. We are just in that plateau between going up and starting back down. Things are just faster paced then they have ever been and things that seemed impregnable will suddenly look delusional. It may well take a few years, if not another decade to really take hold, but it is coming to a point. There is the politics of physics and there is the physics of politics.

    Regards,

    john

    John,

    You wrote: "I think you will see a great deal of questioning by the younger members of the community ..."

    I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. As Ed Prugovecki already noted in 1993, the reason for the dominance of the Standard Model is not scientific but social. One of the crucial points is that conformity is systematically rewarded at universities, and critical appraisals of the status quo systematically discouraged: this way the professional attitude of the young physicists is shaped, so that those graduating from universities are, as Prugovecki put it, "physicists with a strong predisposition to conform". Prugovecki wrote that 20 years ago, I think it's still true today.

    Best regards,

    Marcoen

    PS: the above is about general tendencies, and we must be careful to not generalize this: there are always individual exceptions.

    Marcoen,

    I come from a long line of farmers in a fairly wealthy area, around Baltimore Maryland. Now we are mostly into horseracing. To say that moral "flexibility" is part of the culture of racing would be putting it mildly. Because we have been at it so long though, there is this deeper understanding of it in fairly complex terms, to where it is not so much a good/bad issue, but as simply a character health issue. Just as people and all forms of life, can be varying degrees of healthy and unhealthy for any number of reasons, so can people be morally weak. corrupted, amoral, etc. in a wide range of fashions.

    Because I found it so pervasive, I early on decided that it really didn't matter to me to be successful, as much as it mattered to be true to what I felt was right. Consequently I've mostly spent my time working with the horses and within the family, while trying to understand where the larger society is headed. Here is an essay I wrote a couple of years ago, laying out some of my conclusions.

    Now there is an old(apparently very old) African saying, that; "If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go with a group." So much of the corruption today, in all of society, is simply due to people doing whatever it takes to get ahead, ie. to go alone. Now as you point out in physics, it is the opposite, conforming to the model at whatever the cost, but the result is the same; Short term thinking eventually meets up with the long term and the bubble pops.

    The fact is that at the level of social movement we are discussing, 20 years is little more than an eye-blink. There are theological models which have been building for millennia and economic models that have been building for centuries. That doesn't mean their built in fallacies will never catch up with them. When I was young, it was assumed the conflict between capitalism and communism would go on until they went to war. Yet the built in fallacies of communism, which was also an over-reliance on conformism, caught up with it before the fallacies of capitalism have caught up with it, yet that doesn't look too far off, now.

    So, yes, those being trained in the mold find it confining and this is good, as long as they truly believe in where it is going, but when disbelief sets in, this confinement then becomes unstable pressure and like a rocket that starts to wobble, will actually be a force against the model.

    Regards,

    John

    John,

    "those being trained in the mold find it confining and this is good, as long as they truly believe in where it is going, but when disbelief sets in, this confinement then becomes unstable pressure and like a rocket that starts to wobble, will actually be a force against the model."

    Nicely put. I hope that you're right. I'm not against the hegemony of the Standard Model per se - there will always be some dominant paradigm - but I'm fór an open scientific discourse on the foundations of physics. See also my recent paper.

    Best regards,

    Marcoen.

    Peter,

    Thanks for the kind words.

    I'll have a look at your essay on short time notice. By the way, I do not take up a position about your essay on the evidence of "rave reviews", nor on the evidence of results of other essays in earlier contests.

    Best regards,

    Marcoen

    Hi Daryl,

    Thanks for posting your comments.

    Indeed, I take issue with the fact that the claim of the CMS collaboration goes against elementary logic: it's a fallacy. It doesn't matter that the Higgs is the only contender at this moment: it remains a fallacy. You cannot say: these are traces of a Higgs boson, therefore the Higgs boson exists. Then you're assuming what has to be proven (it's a circular reasoning).

    You are correct in your statement that I haven't said anything about what else that observed peak could have been. My essay is purely critical: I only question the conclusion of the CMS collaboration that the Higgs boson has been observed. So to provide somewhat of an answer to your question, I would say: the Higgs boson is currently the best possible explanation for the observed peak(s). But then we're talking about an 'explanation', not about an 'observation'. Big difference. If it's the best possible explanation, then it still might be the case that we find a better explanation at a later time. But if it's an observation, then that's final: then the Higgs boson exists, period. Then there is no other explanation for the observed peak(s). And in my opinion, they cannot make that claim.

    Best regards,

    Marcoen

    Hmm... but we can only ever inductively infer the causes of the things we observe. We observe observables, not beables. That's the nature of science. Our inferences can never be proven, only falsified. That's why we look for as many ways of confirming our inferences as possible. I just don't understand: do you mean to take issue with the scientific method in general? Because if you do, you've got grounds to do so: as you said, A==>B does not mean observing B proves A. What if A=/=>C and we also observe C? There's got to be some A' that's compatible with both B and C.

    But instead of hypothesis confirmation, what would you do? I really don't mean to sound negative. Maybe I've got this wrong somewhere...

    Marcoen,

    Ack! Not being focused on success, I'm pretty cheap when it come to sourcing information. I suspect most of the $40 would go to springer anyway.

    I have to say though, as I pointed out, I tend to see such moral and political issues more in terms of the underlaying physics, than the emotional heat they generate.

    Regards,

    John

    Hi Daryl,

    Your "we observe observables, not beables" says it all: my point exactly. I cannot fathom why the top brass in physics thinks that they can go against such a basic principle.

    I do not take issue with the scientific method in general: my essay is purely about the wordings in which the results are expressed. The devil is in the details - a change of just one term can put results in an entirely different perspective.

    For me science is in the first place about testing rigorous speculation. So I'm all for hypothesis confirmation.

    I see that our thoughts on the matter are on par.

    Best regards,

    Marcoen

    John,

    I'm not allowed to post the paper on the internet. But I could send you the paper in a reply to an e-mail to my address in the essay.

    Best regards,

    Marcoen

    PS: all of the $40 goes to Springer ...

    Dear Marcoen,

    Thank you for clarifying, and sorry if I sounded obtuse. Agreed! People should not communicate--either amongst themselves or to the general public--using words that they know misrepresent their actual results.

    All the best,

    Daryl

    Marcoen,

    Will do.

    "all of the $40 goes to Springer ..."

    You are the fuel to their rocket.

    Did you happen to read the essay I linked on the 4th? It lays out the essential fallacy of capitalism, which is that money is a contract that we treat as a commodity.

    Regards,

    John

    Marcoen,

    Good. Thank you. the quotes were to tempt you to read it. The past essays are precursers which build the foundations of the ontology, never originally about QM, and only testing the model on QM exposed a coherent alternative description was possible deriving the SR postulates.

    To answer the question in my blog, yes, I suppose to most people a fundamental new view is needed, dropping a number of hidden foundational assumptions. It's only surprising at first due to unfamiliarity. As it makes all the anomalies and paradoxes evaporate one by one it becomes ever simpler.

    I reply more fully on my blog in case you wish to explore this.

    Thank you and best wishes for the final cut.

    Peter

    John,

    I haven't had the time yet to read the essay on capitalism, but I hope that soon I can read it.

    Earlier you mentioned that the main fallacy of communism was the reliance on conformity. I think another failure of communism is that it does not allow personal possessions. Precisely because of that people alienated from the system: nothing is theirs. At least that is how I see it. Marx proposed this as a solution to the problem of the contrast between the "haves" and the "have-nots". On paper it looked good, but he didn't account for the emotions (feelings) of people.

    Best regards,

    Marcoen

    Hi Marcoen,

    Although I'm not a physicist, I agree with you and have already rated your essay.

    Moreover, my research has led me to believe that, so far, all we have done in physics is related to the *numeric* computations associated with the 'natural' phenomena. What I mean by this is that if, as I'm led to hypothesize, the reality is not of numeric, or spatial origin, but of structural one (in a very specific sense), then the numeric characteristics cannot be taken too seriously, since they capture one (non-structural) side of reality.

    Also I'm led to believe, for example, that not the "particles" themselves but the events which are currently seen as "interactions" are the more fundamental units of physical reality, where the "particles" are just various processes linking them.

    Good luck in the contest!

      By the way, if you are interested, please participate in

      https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_a_solid_experimental_support_for_the_general_assumption_in_Feynman_diagrams_that_every_actual_particle_interaction_is_described_by_a_vertex_of_degree_3