apologies for the anonymous tag on the previous post. Thought I was logged in while commenting.
Demolishing prejudices to get to the foundations by Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli
apologies for the anonymous tag on the previous post. Thought I was logged in while commenting.
Dear Mr. Cameron,
thanks for writing.
However, I find your (long) comments confusing and I think that they are based on several misunderstandings. It so seems that you have not quite got the main theses of my essay, yet they are childish simple.
I will try to make my argument almost trivial: what I propose is to reach the foundation through successive experimental (i.e. full of empirical content) falsifications. Obviously this allows only to rule out things, but it's the price one has to pay. We acquire new empirical content by removing assumption that we empirically falsify.
I hope this is clearer.
I just finish to read your essay, trying to figure out whether I could find there the answers to these misunderstandings on the empirical content, but I didn't. I will comment on the contents of your essay on the dedicate thread, though.
All the best,
FLavio
Dear Gary,
thanks for the very kind words. I think we agree on many points, judging from your comments. I have your essay on my reading list, and I will comment and rate it soon.
I wish you the best of luck!
Flavio
Dear Flavio,
Thank you for the courtesy of your reply. My apologies for not being able to communicate my understanding clearly to you. Given that it arises from the mind of and old man, possibilities exist beyond nuance of a young horizon.
Your main theses are imo as you say, childish simple. They have been in my understanding for the greater portion of my life. My sense is that your essay addresses not what is requested by the organizers regarding fundamental in the physical world, but rather a commonly understood procedure for approaching the problem. It says little or nothing about the fundamental itself.
There is weakness in your physics as well, for instance in treatment of non-local entanglement. Inverse square potentials are odd beasts, poorly understood and very important. They correspond to the forces which can do no work, due to the fact that the resulting motion is perpendicular to the direction of the force. They communicate no energy/information. However that can communicate phase, not a single measurement observable. They are your non-local potentials - centrifugal, Coriolis, chiral, three-body, vector Lorentz of the quantum Hall and Aharonov-Bohm effects,... they cannot be shielded.
There are many other points in the essay which might benefit from some further insight, however I'm curious to see what might be learned from your comments on the thread of Michaele and I, am taking a look there now.
Dear Mr. Cameron,
thank you for your kind reply.
I am sorry that you think that you think that my essay "says little or nothing about the fundamental itself". I don't think this is true since, I have clearly stated a process to get to the foundamental constraints, that are the most fundamental (empirically meaningful) thing that we can reach within the current metodology. It might seem surely frustrating, yet I think it is a more reasonable solution than most of the naive thought of most of physicicsts concerning fundamental entities and their simple interactions.
About the alleged weakness in my physics, I am not sure what you mean. I never talked of "non-local entanglement", but I maintain that there is a condition, mathematically well defined, that is violated by quantum entanglement. This condition is usually referred to as "local realism" and I think the name is well given, beacuse it has some intutive connection both with reality and locality, but not quite possible to disengage.
All good wishes,
Flavio
Dear Flavio and Chiara,
I like your attempt to separate "formulable theories" from "physical theories" by means of the latter's empirical contents. To distinguish between philosophy and natural science, empirism is necessarily needed. Your attempt of turning the limits of science into a science of limits seems quite obvious for me, since every limit demarcates a distinction and all we have for our scientific endeavor is to make certain reasonable distinctions, hopefully reflecting the distinctions nature does make itself.
I would be interested in how you see the empirical content of the MWI (many-worlds interpretation). By which criteria could one distinguish between the wave function being a physically real entity or being merely a mental construct? Since the MWI facilitates a framework of continous branching of such a wave function and therefore reflects a distinction-process (and moreover is considered as physically realistic, albeit residing in some Hilbert-space), it distincts itself from, say, the Copenhagen interpretation by defining what should be considered as reasonably being 'real' and what not. Since the MWI says that particles are not real, but merely an observer-dependent impression due to decoherence and the Copenhagen interpretation says that physics is not about how the world is, but merely about what we can reasonably say about it - the question seems to boil down for me to properly determine what should be reasonable at all.
Do you think that nature can reasonably be defined as behaving consistently in a logical sense, so that we can progress with finding further fundamental constraints (as opposed to merely practical constraints) and build further theories upon them that always have some empirical content? If this would be the case one should be able to distinguish empirically between the MWI and for example the Copenhagen interpretation. Is there any hint that such a distinction can be made, other than merely looking for some inconsistencies in the lines of arguments for or against one of these interpretations?
At this essay (https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3096) I gave a justification for why I think the MWI might be logically inconsistent. Even if one assumes that an observer's measurement outcome must have been fixed in the past by some initial conditions or simply by the strictly deterministic formalism itself, the Everett interpretation seems to me to shift the problem of an observer into the timeless state of a global wave function. From a bird's view, however, such a global wave function would look (at least for me) as if its branching does increase in one direction, revealing that it is nonetheless bound to some global time. Even if such a wave function contains a non-denumerable 'number' of branches at a distinct point, the assumption of some initial conditions for a specific observer to observe a predetermined measurement result seems to imply for me that these initial conditions had to be infinitely fine-tuned, since there are measurement situations where a result is a superposition of infinitely many possibilities.
Since this contest is an excellent opportunity to ask a professional, I would be happy if you would be able to say how you evaluate the assumption of a psi-ontic global wave function. My impression is that the Everett interpretation rests on the main assumption that this wave function is a real instant of a mathematically infinitely precise working mechanism - a 'mechanism' that needs no time for establishing this precission. In this sense it is a well-defined mathematical object and I ask myself again how to distinguish empirically between such a mathematical object being ontologically real or not.
These questions seem to be important for me, because they touch another important question, namely what should reasonably considered not only as being true in theoretical physics, but moreover whether or not it should be reasonable to assume at all such a concept like 'truth' to be necessarily linked with the behaviour of nature. I think it must be so, and in my own essay I make the case for it. If you like to read and comment on it, I would be glad, since as I outlined in my essay, I think that the quest for some fundamental truth is not a senseless one, but directly touches the heart of science and philosophy. The main point in my essay is, if there is no such 'thing' as fundamental truth (within and about reality), then we have the problem that we never can find out its fundamental absence and in that case I would see no reason why your attempt of an FC-based science should necessarily further produce unambigous FC's. Of couse, it can, but not due to some fundamental truth nature follows, but merely because nature would then be irrational and we couldn't recognize it. So what I describe in my essay boils down to two opposing viewpoints, either one believes in some fundamental truths, or one believes in some fundamental delusions, the latter eventually and unreasonably well suited to camouflage its inextricably paradoxical nature.
I'm in hope for your comments on these issues.
Best wishes,
Stefan Weckbach
Dear Flavio,
I was enticed by your title but disappointed to find your philosophical objections to reductionism. While the particle physics community is VERY presumptuous of their 'dominant' role, it is not because of reductionism.
In fact, reductionism has not proposed a single theoretical development since the mid-80s (other than my own work https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3092 ). The preon approach to reducing the number of fundamental particles was cast aside due to its inability to find a foundational theorem.
The particle physics community suffers from the Gell-Mann syndrome. This is evident in Sabine Hossenfelder's paper, where she argues (feebly) in favor of renormalization, rather than seek to replace it. Specifically, EVERY particle theory advanced for 30-some years has HAD to propose a New Fundamental particle, or several, as Gell-Mann did. (This is actually a requirement enforced by most publishers, to feed the collider community things to disprove!)
But the algebraic group formed by quarks and fermions is (can be formulated to be) Closed. This has nearly been proven empirically by the Higgs discovery.
As such, while we agree that a "philosophical prejudice" must be broken down for real progress to be made, I am certain that your advice is off-target.
Hopefully this contest will help remove the existing prejudices in the field.
I note that academia as a whole is rather biased against innovation, and rarely accepts new ideas from outside its clique. This contest favors works from academia that would otherwise not be funded... a waste of effort?
Best regards,
Wayne Lundberg
p.s. This contest is rather badly biased in its rules, which favor people in large academic institutions over innovators. That is quite evident in the results thus far, and in the fact that it rewards only philosophical writing. It remains to be seen whether it helps get superior ideas reviewed.
Dear Flavio and Chiara,
thank you for sharing your excellent essay, which I really appreciated! From the reading of it I can deduce that we share basic ideas and we see many problems from the same perspective, even if the methodology and the expository method we used are different. In particular, your contribution is much more detailed and informed on the scientific and epistemological literature and demonstrates first-hand knowledge in quantum mechanics. Thus, I think that your paper definitely deserves the consideration it has gained within the community and the public of the contest, to which I join with a very high evaluation.
My best wishes for everything,
Giovanni
Dear Lundberg,
to be honest, I am not sure what the main poin of the criticism is. You are upset because of my critique of reductionism, that is in fact merely a more open minded position, an agnostic position towards reductionisim; anyway my doubts are argued on a reasonable number of historical examples from the literature. You write: "As such, while we agree that a "philosophical prejudice" must be broken down for real progress to be made, I am certain that your advice is off-target." Why is so? Because I have started saying that we do not necessarily need reductionism as a starting point for fundamental reaserch?
For what concern the rest of your comments on how "academia as a whole is rather biased against innovation, and rarely accepts new ideas from outside its clique" and furthermore "This contest is rather badly biased in its rules, which favor people in large academic institutions over innovators." I don't know why did you think it was approrpriate to post this under my essay, unless you are accusing me of being part of this allaged clique, for some reason.
You finish your outburst stessing that this bias "is quite evident in the results thus far, and in the fact that it rewards only philosophical writing".
Regarding this, I just want you to remind you of the guidelines of the contest; they give an easy answer to your concerns about 'philosophical writing': "This contest does not ask for new proposals about what some "fundamental" constituents of the universe are. Rather, it addresses what "fundamental" means,[...] While this topic is broad, successful essays will not use this breadth as an excuse to shoehorn in the author's pet topic, but will rather keep as their central focus the theme of the contest.
All the best,
Flavio
Dear Giovanni,
thanks so much for your kind words of appreciation.
As I wrote in the comment below your essay, I liked yours too.
Best of luck!
Flavio
Dear Flavio,
Looking back thru our thread...
"I just finish to read your essay, trying to figure out whether I could find there the answers to these misunderstandings on the empirical content, but I didn't. I will comment on the contents of your essay on the dedicate thread, though."
If you have intent to follow up on this, you might find it easy and expedient to check out this brief thread on renormalization in the Linkedin quantum physics group.
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1892648/1892648-6368178828442890243?midToken=AQGj9NsuXko5pw&trk=eml-b2_anet_digest_of_digests-hero-12-view~discussion&trkEmail=eml-b2_anet_digest_of_digests-hero-12-view~discussion-null-otwg3~jdlyv0eh~d5-null-communities~group~discussion&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Aemail_b2_anet_digest_of_digests%3BN95EpJmZQRi3L5YoO7TdpA%3D%3D
Dear Flavio,
wow, this is a great essay!
"At a naive stage of observation, our intuitive experience leads to the conviction that concepts the likes of determinism, absolute simultaneity, local realism, conservation laws (e.g. of parity) were a priori assumptions of scientific investigation. What it turns out, however, is that there is in principle no reason to pre-assume anything like that: they are mere "philosophical prejudices"."
I couldn't agree more. I've been holding this view for a long time, but you here express it, and argue for it, in a brillant way that I've never seen it before. Relating it to Popper, and illustrating it by example of quantum mechanics and biophysics (!) is really an excellent way to explain it.
There is another aspect to this insight that I'd love to discuss with you at some point. Namely, I think that it is just *a lot of fun* to "demolish philosophical prejudices" and to find that nature is different from what we thought in surprising and fascinating ways. I'm really wondering why large numbers of physicists and, in particular, philosophers devote their lives to finding a way to go back to the old prejudices (e.g. trying to build a naively realist interpretation of QM etc.). What do they find so attractive about that?
Anyways - congrats for a great essay!
Markus
Flavio, Chiara,
You raise some important issues, which could be considered in other fields as well.
Cosmology, for instance, has totally ignored Popperism, as any gap between theory and observation is filled with some enormous new force of nature and all non-cosmologists assume some great discovery has been made, not that any underlaying theory has been falsified.
Before Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy there was a patch incorporated into the original assumption of an expanding universe, when it was discovered the redshift of all those distant galaxies were directly proportional to distance and this created the effect that we appear to be at the center of this expansion. So then it was argued that it wasn't simply an expansion within space, but of space, based on the premise of Spacetime. Which totally overlooks the essential fact of GR, that the speed of light will always be measured as a Constant. If light is taking longer to cross an expanding cosmos, in order to be redshifted, obviously it is not Constant to the ruler of that frame. Two metrics of space are being assumed from the same intergalactic light. A stable one, based on the speed of that light, as well as an expanding one, based on the spectrum. Since C is treated as the denominator, even the cosmologists must instinctively sense the theory is nonsense.
Now we are at the center of our view of the universe, so an optical effect might be well worth considering. If this effect compounds on itself, it would explain the parabolically increasing rate of redshift, without need for Dark Energy. Also beyond the point all radiation is shifted off the visible spectrum, we would still be getting it in the radio spectrum, thus the CMBR. Which would be the solution to Olber's paradox.
As for philosophical prejudices built into our models, the issue of time is of primary concern. While we experience reality as flashes of cognition and so think of time as the point of the present, "flowing" past to future, which physics does codify as measures of duration, between events, it is actually change turning future to past. As in tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
This makes time an effect of action, much like temperature. Duration is the state of the present, as events coalesce and dissolve.
The real reason time is asymmetric is because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both. There is no underlaying dimension, as past and future do not physically exist. Energy is "conserved," because it is always and only present.
Good luck on your endeavors and pray your generation of scientists do spend too much of your careers chasing the chimeras of prior generations.
Regards,
John B. Merryman
Do NOT spend....
Dear John, Flavio, Chiara,...
love the way dialogs evolve in the fqxi competition/collaboration format.
Came back to 'Demolishing Prejudices' to reply to a different thread and got caught by 'Do NOT spend...'. Being closely related to oppositional defiant disorders, i was immediately in.
takedown of cosmology and inflation is excellent, thank you. That it leads to classifying redshift, accelerating expansion, anomalous radial dependence of galactic rotation,... as 'optical effects' gives a nice little perspective shift. Suggests to me that until we understand how quantum gravity is related to the photon the 'Do NOT spend...' injunction is well advised.
staying with the optical effect for a moment, in particular to have an understanding of what goes on in the near field at the Planck length in photon emission and absorption seems essential in quantum gravity.
I like what is said about time, that it emerges from 'action', or more precisely from inter-actions. Pauli vacuum wavefunction is that of the geometric objects of 3d space - point, line, plane, and volume elements of geometric interpretation of Clifford algebra. No time there.
Interaction of two wavefunctions can be modeled by geometric product of Clifford algebra - sum of inner (dimension lowering) and outer (raising) products. Inter-action generates the 4D Dirac algebra of flat Minkowski spacetime. Time emerges from interactions of the enigmatic unobservable wavefunction.
Peter,
I'll have to read your entry when I get back from work. I did address Dark Matter as well in my own entry. That possibly gravity is the entire spectrum of wave collapse, starting with the photon effect, so that mass is more an effect of gravity, then that gravity is a property of mass. So the Dark Matter effect is due to it extending throughout the radio and light spectrum.
Think of galaxies as cosmic convection cycles and mass is precipitating inward, as radiation expands out.
I could take this relationship much further, such as society being the dichotomy of social and biological energies expanding out, as cultural, political and civil structures contract inward. Remember we evolved entirely within this thermodynamic environment and so it makes sense to consider it might also permeate every aspect of our existence.
Dear Flavio,
I see two points in your most recent reply,
the first asserting the most physicists are naive regarding fundamental entities and their 'simple' interactions, and that what is truly fundamental as revealed by your philosophical musings is 'constraints', and
the second opting for the philosopher's 'realism' rather than exploring the underlying physics.
regarding the first, imo it is a gross simplification of the creative process by which the physicist explores meaning in the physical world, and find the manner in which you present it superficial and alien to my own process of discovery and the physics it has revealed.
regarding the second, my objection is to using the phrase 'violation of local realism' to describe non-locality. This abuse of the language has its origins in a combination of both historical and present day ignorance regarding the wavefunction and its interactions, as made clear by the persistence of point particle models in the world of the physicist and the proliferation of wavefunction interpretations in the philosopher's world. There is no violation of reality, of realism, no violation of causality, of special relativity. There is only a property of the wavefunction that is not clearly understood.
Just as the phrase 'gauge' has been unfortunately substituted for 'phase' in QM, thereby obscuring the foundations of gauge theory and gauge invariance for the beginner and placing a fundamental constraint on the specialist's prejudices
So has the conceptual prejudice 'violation of local realism' that you toss about so carelessly been substituted for 'single-measurement unobservability of quantum phase'. There is no violation of realism, local or non-local, just unfortunate choices of words. In physics this is not so unfortunate, in philosophy a damaging prejudice.
still haven't seen your comment on my essay page, curious regarding what you do and don't understand, what i might learn from what you have to say.
Flavio,
I thank you for your philosophical views. Such things do interest me.
My main point is that while you argue (very articulately) against reductionism -as a philosophy- the main proponents of such activities, meaning fellow particle theorists, aren't actually practicing it. Thus any aversion to a 'haughty' philosophical attitude toward other "approaches" which work well (perhaps better in some physical sciences) is SHARED. To be sure, any such philosophy is not well-founded, as the quantum state algebra 'averages out' long before one reaches a macroscopic scale.
In reality only the preon algebra is a _mathematical_ reduction from QCD. Few pursue this simplifying 'reductionist' algebra (notably Kaufmann, Smolin, Bilson-Thompson and Markopoulou). I of course learned of this studying combinatorial algebra, and have never really pursued the subject due to its being considered "reductionist".
Perhaps I am distinguishing between the sub-classes of "reductionism" which you cite. The subject is rather new look at things, although clearly I favor mathematical reductionism. I ascribe to the approach that a theory well-founded in mathematical formalism, as WELL AS equally non-disproven by experimental observations, both particle and astrophysical, exists.
The hard question then becomes 'what is the observable difference?', but that is certainly not a topic for this forum.
As one looks to enumerating the aspects of a theory which are fundamental, well, that is a topic for this forum. In fact several essays attempt address this issue. I wrote my essay to address that, as well as show mathematical examples which pass the requisite fundamental criteria.
{Noting again that causality is chief among them, which btw does not auger well for most attempts at finding a 'better' particle theory}
In fact, I would more clearly categorize my work, if you must, as "Constructivist".
The main thrust of the essay was to show a "mathematical architecture" exists which meets all the criteria for representing 'What is "that which is" fundamental." Thus I emphasize the many connections to well-known theoretical work. As do several other essays, all of whom I hope would be of interest to you. After all, I doubt that they would recognize many of the traits of (the broader meaning of reductionism) in their work.
Any of my comments about the FQXi RoE are merely an aside brought to mind by my effort to understand how 'purely philosophical thinking about approaches taken to address fundamental questions' mix with 'current questions actually being addressed by insights into' the same problem. Their scoring system includes both in some proportion. This has zero to do with you, but I did, after all, once ask them to return to more fundamental questions. I tend to favor that aspect of the conversation but attempted, badly, to explain my concerns about how your perceptive academic view tends to (distract or detract from??) much good valid work due to a categorization issue. No matter, and forgive me any inappropriate asides.
I really appreciate your point of view and plan to continue reading many others, and build the FQXi community, because I find it to be a rather interesting venue for discussions with peers. ...in hopes of it being productive in terms of collaborative thinking.
Best regards,
Wayne
Dear Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli,
I read with interest your views in, 3.1 Foundations of quantum mechanics.
QM claims that an electron can be both spin-up and spin-down at the same time. In my conceptual physics Essay on Electron Spin, I have proved that this is not true. Please read: https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3145 or https://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Rajpal_1306.0141v3.pdf
Kamal Rajpal