Demolishing prejudices to get to the foundations by Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli

Dear Flavio Del Santo

Just letting you know that I am making a start on reading of your essay, and hope that you might also take a glance over mine please? I look forward to the sharing of thoughtful opinion. Congratulations on your essay rating as it stands, and best of luck for the contest conclusion.

My essay is titled

"Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin". It stands as a novel test for whether a natural organisational principle can serve a rationale, for emergence of complex systems of physics and cosmology. I will be interested to have my effort judged on both the basis of prospect and of novelty.

Thank you & kind regards

Steven Andresen

Flavio and Chiara,

Certainly we must make clear that searching for the fundamental involves "Demolishing prejudices to get to the foundations." Even the dominate theories like the Big Bang and the Standard Theory must be taken as theories and not override what the process of discovery focuses on as your reductionism and methodology sections point out. As my essay develops I point out the same cautions but not as emphatically as you do. Many times the expectations of looking for habitable exoplanets are constrained by the solar system we know. The Jupiter probe -- I pointed out -- revealed surprises to scientists. Your biophysics sections touched on bio studies that might not have seen the discovery of quantum coherence in warm, wet, turbulent systems such as plants in photosynthesis. Hope you get a chance to check mine out. Your essay rates highly in clearly showing the unencumbered road to fundamentalism.

Jim Hoover

Dear Flavio,

Thank you for reading my essay and commenting. Your invited me to read your essay and compare and contrast. It's difficult for me to summarize in a few words. My last essay, The Nature of Mind, offers nine pages that address the issue of intuition, which you appear down on. You seem to lump determinism and absolute simultaneity, local realism and conservation laws into the same category of 'prejudice'. My current essay argues for absolute simultaneity, and I elsewhere argue for local realism, while I have a more nuanced view of determinism, and I have argued against conservation as a consequence of symmetry, as all symmetries I am aware of are approximate.

I recently watched a YouTube discussion between Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia, a goodly portion of which dealt with Derrida, Foucault, and other deconstructionists and radical relativists. For a number of reasons I feel this nonsense is beginning to infect physics, probably because physics is chaotic in the extreme, based (in my opinion) on fundamental false assumptions and prejudices that have endured for about a century, both in relativity and QM.

Once one discards intuition, one is left with 'word hash', combining words/equations in 'narratives' [see Gibbs essay] and having no idea how to discriminate reality from story. My current essay focuses on one non-intuitive narrative, while previous essays address other such instances. As you spend quite a bit of time on Bell I will address Bell.

You refer to Bell's theorem as "momentous no-go theorem" and spend a couple of pages on his logic. If you look at his first paper, his first equation determines the outcome: A = +/-1, B = +/-1, where A and B are measurements on Stern-Gerlach. This is based on the (prejudiced) assumption of quantum qubits. You clearly state that QM provides only probabilistic predictions. Many-body experiments on spin yield qubit outcomes, as should be expected. Stern-Gerlach does not yield qubit outcomes but smeared results that match 3D spin dynamics in an inhomogeneous field. However Pauli's mathematical projection of qubit mechanics: O|+> = +|+>, O|-> = -|-> is Bell's prejudiced assumption of reality. In other words Bell claims to look for a classical (local variable) description of Stern-Gerlach, but then constrains the problem to quantum results based on the mathematical projection of Pauli, not on the empirical results of Stern-Gerlach.

Feynman later put the final nail in this coffin by assuming that his favorite two-slit photon experiment could be carried over directly to a two-slit spin analog (the SG experiment). Of course the same equations apply, because he's making the same mathematical projection, but the actual physics of the photon in two-slits is vastly different from the physics of atoms in a homogeneous magnetic field, and Feynman's extended SG model has never been tested.

Since Feynman and Bell's math and logic have been accepted as gospel, local realism has been excluded from physics. A no-go theorem based on atoms in a magnetic field, constrained to never-tested single-qubit spin results, is then "proved" by photon-based experiments which actually do produce two-state results: on/off detections.

I repeat - the entire industry is based on the erroneous assumption that the results of the Stern-Gerlach atomic experiments are +1 and -1 deflections, "tested" by photonic experiments that use +1 and 0 detections. The atomic data produced by Stern-Gerlach clearly conflicts with Bell's initial assumption, but instead of trying sophisticated tests of Stern-Gerlach using modern technology the whole entanglement industry is based on 1922 experiments that clearly do not yield +1 and -1 results. The confusion of 1920s quantum mechanics is locked in. Here is your fundamental 'prejudice'.

My suggestion is if one wishes to 'deconstruct' physics, look for the basic assumptions that violate intuition and that lead to nonsense. Of course that is dangerous for those toiling in the establishment, so generalizations are preferred.

This is how I would contrast your approach with my approach.

Good luck in the contest and in your careers.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Flavio (and Chiara),

Thanks for inviting me to read your very interesting and provocative Essay. I find it contains very wise advices. Here are some comments:

1) I think that insurmountable limitations are due not only to "philosophical prejudices" as you correctly stress, but also to the issue that, today, science is sadly dominated by politics.

2) I am essentially a physicist of gravitation. Personally, I have various doubts on emergent gravity. This is NOT in contrast with your point of view expressed here, but with the issue that gravity is considered to not be fundamental in the emergent gravity framework. I think that it should be, instead, the fundamental field of the Universe, which goes even beyond quantum theory.

3) I appreciate your discussion on Popper. This great philosopher has been exploited too often.

4) Your agreement with Bohm that "scientists generally apply the scientific method, more or less intuitively" is also my agreement.

5) Congrats for your nice explanation of Bell's inequality. In general, it is not a simple task and there are various people who still make a lot of confusion on this issue.

In general, I have found your Essay remarkable and very entertaining. It deserves my highest score. Congrats and good luck in the Contest.

Cheers, Ch.

Hi Flavio and Chiara,

I sympathise with your aim to criticize reductionism and realism as scientific doctrines. And I agree with your assessment that local realism has been falsified. However I have some comments on you essay.

Accepting, that local realism has been falsified and that locality is a condition for theories to be falsifiable, we have to reject realism. But it is not at all clear, how to replace it. Some sort of realism has to be maintained. The world outside us is independent of our observation otherwise we would fall in a sort of solipsism, which would make any scientific enquiry impossible. So how to reject realism without rejecting it totally?

Rejecting realism does not mean, we have to reject reductionism. Reductionism was accepted by Popper as a good (and I must say) successful working hypothesis. I find it difficult to unthink reductionism. Mostly the rejection of reductionism is has the goal to justify emergence of some sort. I find it difficult to imagine emergence, although there are a lot of phenomena like free will or consciousness, and some biological processes as you state in your essay, that have not been successfully reduced to elementary processes. The lack of a reductionist explanation for these phenomena is not a falsification of the 'working hypothesis'. I personally do not belief that complex system can explain emergence, since complex systems themselves are described by simpler elementary systems. In a way they accept reductionism.

Most physicist are falsificationists. The problem here is that there is no observation, that is independent of any theory. This was the problem with the positivists, that accepted only observational statements as basic concepts from which a theory has to be developed. But the problems remains, if we want to falsify a theory. Usually the observation needs an auxiliary theory, that has been well accepted, to describe the observation. But if it comes to a fundamental theory of physics, we expect the fundamental theory to provide itself the theory of observation. This is circular or at least problematic.

I raise some of these problems in my essay: The quantum sheep - In defence of a positivist view on physics.

Best regards

Luca

It is the best rated essay thus far. I went through the long discussion here and find mostly the comments appear to arise either due to lack of understanding or due to human tendency to play with words as meaning different to different individuals. Scientific methodology is not a decided issue as it evolves costantly out of working philsophy and ethical values one should follow. I also note that Nature has bewildered many of us with constant presence of random and order. We are all the time get alluded by reality due to the complexity we ourselves introduce into the subject matter. A good theory requires least number of postulates based on known observed facts, application of the same through elaboration of the process involved. Mathematical jugglary isusually adopted to confuse the issues, as Maths is merely a tool justlike experimentation. Uncertainity in measurements arise not merely through statistical errors involved in parameters involved but also due to factors one may neglect out of consideration, without examining the lack of relevance. To me , the discipling one's mind is the most important factor in believing or disbelieving the significance of the parameter involved. Thus human peronality and character, which are subjective parameters also get involved. An issue then tend to become complicated with time and may go beyong adequate comprehension that is necessary for logical growth. These are generaties i mention based on personal experiences that too differs from person to person! We become enigmatic to that extent!

To the authors -

Thanks for a brilliant and erudite essay, seeking to establish a philosophically grounded procedure for eliminating philosophical prejudices from the fields of science. After all is said and done, however, I'm not sure I see what has been accomplished. We are left with FC in every field. And while anti-proof through falsification of no-go theorems is helpful to eliminate unwarranted philosophical prejudices, it it not the only way. I propose a rather more simple and transparent process - take a hard look at the "tenets of faith" (unprovable yet necessary postulates) that guide our thinking, our theories and our techniques. Reductionism, scientism, determinism, and the denial of agency (fundamental to the multiverse theory) may all be self-consistent, but they get in the way of productive advances in our understanding and should be thrown out.

Many thanks for your challenge to conventional thinking. It is indeed time to get out of the box. - George Gantz

Flavio,

It might be worth mentioning an example where an experimental test, if it can be defined, could distinguish between two very different philosophical perspectives:

(a) Einstein's block universe, where the idea of "now" is an illusion, with all of the past and future already existing as a "block", and

(b) Minority theories in which "now" is real. These are not popular because they would seem to fly in the face of special relativity, in which every frame perspective is equally real. That issue was precisely why Einstein chose in favor of the block view, which enables every viewer to "slice" (foliate) the block of preexisting eternity in their own way.

Einstein didn't have computers, however, and was of course unaware that that the potential inconsistencies he worried about are readily resolvable through a combination of perspective-dependent and direction-dependent early and late binding of events that relies on the very speed-of-light constraints he defines in SR. The bottom line is that purely in terms of state modeling, creating a singular "now" universe that exactly replicates the block universe is not even a particular difficult problem in modeling theory. It's just a different, more data-aware approach to the problem.

There is another surprisingly simple reason for looking seriously at now-is-real theories, which is this: The block universe cannot be internally self-consistent unless every slice of it adheres to the rules of causality from past to future. That means that invoking a block universe does not really solve anything, but merely defers the reconciliation of all causality from all perspectives to some ill-defined earlier stage in which the block universe literally had to be "grown" from an initial starting state into the future, all while keeping the infinite number of possible frame-dependent causality paths internally and mutually consistent. That kind of "causally self-consistent growth from an initial state" sounds an awful lot like, well... time with a real "now". So why bother with a block universe if you have to grow the puppy from scratch anyway, as the only possible way to make the final result self-consistent?

The delightful catch is that in such a model, the simulation of non-primary causality frames is so perfect that there is no way to tell the difference between the two cases -- block vs a singular real "now" -- if you live in that universe! A distinction that cannot be tested is not a meaningful distinction.

Which (pardon the long set up) brings up the question relevant to your essay: Is it possible that a test exist that could distinguish between a "real now" universe in which the future is not yet set, and a block universe in which all of eternity has been constructed in advance?

I think there may be? But it would necessarily be very subtle, much like Bell's inequality was. If such a test does exist, it could provide a nice example of the kind of test I believe you are advocating in your essay.

Cheers,

Terry

Flavio,

Plenty to say, but nothing more appropriate than "well done"! Deserving of a prize, publishable now.

Since we share the same view of falsification, I hope we can have a later discussion of Popper's take on probability theory.

For now, congratulations. My essay.

All best,

Tom

Flavio and Chiara,

I feel every concept contributes to an understanding of "fundamental," so I am reviewing my own sketchy evaluations to help my understanding and see if I have rated them. I find that I rated yours on 2/7 reflecting my high regard for your contribution. Hope you get a chance to check out mine.

Jim

Flavio and Chiara,

I saw you had some critical comments but you are still doing very well on the leader board so it must have been healthy criticism. I will offer some criticism in the same spirit.

You say that "... the reductionist program has failed even within physics alone, not

having so far being capable to unify the fundamental forces ..." This seems a little harsh. Reductionism and unification has been incredibly successful in physics from the time of Newton until the development of the standard model. There is still some work to unify gravity but to say the whole process has failed for this reason seems to be stretching a point.

You suggest that gravity could have an emergent origin. Weak emergence is part and parcel of reductionism so are you talking about strong emergence? I am skeptical of strong emergence because I don't see how something can emerge if it can not be derived in principle. I think the idea is inspired by the case of consciousness but that is a very special case open to further debate.

I do agree with your message about prejudices. Physicists have been carried away with the successful derivation of everything up to nuclear physics and chemistry from the standard model without the need for any further information to be added. This has given them an expectation that a unified theory including gravity will also allow everything to be derived without further information, at least in principle. On the other hand their recent work is leading to the conclusion that the vacuum is not a unique solution of quantum gravity and quite a lot of information needs to be input to select the correct vacuum. Theorists have responded by saying that this can't be right. They have forgotten that most science from biology upwards requires some extra information about the environment and cannot be derived uniquely from the underlying physics.

You say a lot about falsification. You are certainly a card carrying member of the popperazzi! My only objection here is that the scientific method is merely epistemological. It is just a human construct that we use as a good practice guide for how to do physics. It can't tell us anything about whether a given theory is true of false. Do you agree and how then can it be part of what is fundamental?

I am sure you will have some insightful answers to these questions. Than you for a great essay.

Flavio & Chiara,

This is an excellent essay. You write clearly and use appropriate supporting quotations. Empirical falsification is the very backbone of science and you show how to combine it with philosophy to produce testable questions. The bit about amino acids at the end was a nice touch.

Best Regards and Good Luck,

Gary Simpson