In this essay we will mainly address why science is the way it is and why it could not have been any other way (in my opinion), and whether it can be made more realistic (better? This may be a matter of taste…) to comprehend natural phenomena considering all we have already understood and found out after centuries of thought. The intention is to explore an alternative view of natural phenomena that may be more accurate than the standard one, albeit it could be more cumbersome. One of the perspectives from which the subject of finding fundamental laws of physical reality appears simpler is given by what we almost immediately perceive in natural phenomena: interactions, elements exchanging energy. Inspecting these matters, some suggestions as to how the process of doing science and the world of academia could be improved by more balanced budgets will naturally appear along the lines of our reasoning. Let’s start inspecting reasons why contemporary science is performed in the ways we all know.
The inevitability of our current approach to science and the search for the simp
You write in an essay:
<<Nevertheless, discussing philosophical approaches is beyond our purpose now, rather the intention is to explore an alternative view of natural phenomena that may be more accurate than the standard one, albeit it may be more cumbersome as we have seen.>>
I believe that in order to overcome the modern conceptual - paradigmatic crisis in the metaphysical basis of fundamental science (mathematics, physics, cosmology), it is precisely alternative, breakthrough ontological ideas that are needed. And for this, first of all, a new look at matter and space as an holistic generating process, "grasping" (understanding) of their ontological structures is needed.
Here it is good to recall the philosophical testament of Pavel Florensky:
“The problem of space lies at the center of world understanding in all emerging systems of thought and predetermines the composition of the entire system. With certain limitations and clarifications, one could even recognize space as a proper and primary subject of philosophy, in relation to which all other philosophical topics have to be evaluated as derivatives. And the more closely this or that system of thought is worked out, the more definite becomes the peculiar interpretation of space as its core. We repeat: worldunderstanding is spaceunderstanding."
The "space of states" is the ontological (existential, absolute) space of the existence of the Universe as an eternal holistic process of generating more and more new meanings, forms and structures. This is the space of the primordial tension of the Cosmos, the tension of the triads "being-nothing/otherbeing-becoming".
Have you ever dealt with the problem "with a hundred-year-old beard" - the ONTOLOGICAL justification of mathematics (ontological basification), and hence knowledge in general?
Why G. Weil made such a conclusion in 1946: "Now we are less sure than ever of the primary foundations of mathematics and logic. We are experiencing our "crisis" as everyone and everything in the modern world is experiencing it."
Why did mathematics and logic "lose certainty" (M. Kline "Mathematics: Loss of Сertainty", D. Zaitsev "Truth, following and modern logic")?
I agree with you completely and with your proposals for financing fundamental research:
<<The utilitarian approach to science is absolute [11]. Thus to really improve science and academia in general, a balance should exist between money awarded to big groups or others researching practical approaches and money given to a scientist who, alone in a remote corner of an institute, investigates whatever entices him. >>
The history of the development of science in New Time tells us only one thing: reasonable financial support is needed for several competing scientific programs, at least three. If there had been such a conscious support for scientific programs in the 17-18 centuries (Descartes, Newton, Leibniz), then television would have appeared in the 19 century. The same applies to the 19th-20th centuries and the present for all countries.
Thanks, Vladimir, for your comments. Due to space limitations I had to admit that "discussing philosophical approaches is beyond our purpose" because I preferred to focus on specific matters and suggest more or less specific ideas for possible different avenues of thought. But of course, the issues you mention are fundamental too, although I am just a scientist, not a philosopher, thus it is hard for me to address philosophical matters in strictly philosophical terms. For instance, I wanted to touch the issue you mention about how the foundations of math & logic became shattered by Godel and others, but again, there are space constraints and I had to decide what to focus on. I didn't know Florensky's proposal, and I fully agree that an understanding of space is a most crucial point in the development of our science. This is more or less what I meant in the essay, that science is mainly ruled by the Cartesian coordinate system or similar devices; hence, how we perceive space (and time) determines to a very large extent how our science progresses. And this has been like that since the beginning.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
I liked your essay and the really interesting issues you discuss. I know you are a neuroscientist and I deeply believe that neuroscience (and neuroscientists) could make a big difference to science. It seems to me that the brain has developed to cope with the world by using lots of practical shortcuts that work really well most of the time but are also the root cause of many deep misunderstandings. The obvious remedy is for all scientists to take a course in neuroscience and psychology!
P.S. I personally love the study of illusions.
Indeed, most of cognitive processing in our brains is unconscious because so much has to be dealt with, and it would be a disaster if all those things/computations or whatever one wants to call the inner workings of the nervous system came to our attention. So we created the concepts of conscious and unconscious, and more...
And to fix those misunderstandings I agree with you that a course in neuroscience would be needed, but not only for scientists, but for everybody. In fact I am now designing a course for children on mental education because, if we had always physical education in school, why not mental education? After all the mind moves the muscles! In that course, I plan to teach children the very basics of our notions of self-awareness and consciousness, and to explain why we behave like we do. This course is based on a graduate course I taught at a certain university, and it is not a trivial matter to "translate" it for children!
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The intention is to explore an alternative view of natural phenomena that may be more accurate than the standard one, albeit it could be more cumbersome. One of the perspectives from which the subject of finding fundamental laws of physical reality appears simpler is given by what we almost immediately perceive in natural phenomena: interactions, elements exchanging energy.
End of quote
OOPS, then how as an example does one explain Beta decay and/or parity violations ? Energy does NOT play a role as to parity violations.
Some of the 'laws' of physics are genuinely just plain WEIRD because they do NOT assume a conservation law of physics involved, but are involved with other processes entirely. Want an example. I.e.
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The Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP) states that all point-like structureless particles fall along the same path within a gravitational field. If general relativity is correct, the WEP holds for all forms of matter and antimatter, but most experiments are carried out with neutral matter only.
end of quote
I.e. how is this related , the WEP to a conservation law ?
Spoilers alert, its not
Thanks for your observations. Not being a physicist, I don't know what WEP is, or the details about beta decay. What I meant is that, at the psychological/cognitive level, the immense majority of people find nuclear or quantum physics hard to understand but everybody is familiar with the notion of interactions, and I did not especially talked about conservation laws. Most of scientists study interactions: in chemistry among molecules, in neuroscience among neurons, in psychology among people etc. Almost everything we do boils down to the study of correlations, interactions.
Thus my point is that frameworks to understand natural phenomena based on properties of interactions are easier to handle for most of scientists. At the same time, again, I did not mean that energy has to be conserved in those interactions, only that interactions always, or almost always (at least at a level higher than that of elementary particles), involve an exchange of energy. Even that beta decay you mention, being a consequence of the weak interaction (or force) which is the mechanism of interaction between subatomic particles responsible for radioactive decays, may be due to, as mentioned here, interactions, interactions among subatomic particles. but again, I am not physicist.... And I wonder whether the questions about the conservation of energy and other properties could be also handled by the scheme I propose in my text.
Thank you for this very interesting presentation, which has given me many ideas. Regarding your first, detailed aspect, I have a few questions:
(A) Are mathematics and counting actually equivalent? Or isn't mathematics just a very powerful language of logic in which counting can also be organized very easily and precisely? And counting would actually be more experimental physics in the sense of measuring, determining, comparing?
(B) Why is the question about the "right" coordinate system so important? I.e. those who consider circular motions will prefer polar coordinates, other problems are easier to study in the Cartesian system.
(C) I am still trying to understand if your "relationship/interaction network" is not also a coordinate system? Comparable to typical Bigdata concepts that are ultimately broken down to an n-dimensional category space with a simple event metric during data realization.
(D) Should different description concepts, i.e. here the physical-conventional approach formulated in a traditional mathematical dialect and in contrast your category approach in another, newer dialect, both be logically correct and thus translatable into each other? Wouldn't the reason to prefer one system be that the representation in the system is so simple that one can recognize new relations/laws of nature that, if formulated in the other mathematical dialect, would not be recognizable? I couldn't really find such an example in your text.
(E) Isn't the difference between things and structures that you point out a metaphysical construction? I would argue for once that in a purely physical thinking real "structures" have the same character as real "things". If you examine a "thing" more closely, you find that it is a structure. "Thing" I would take to be a semantic generalization of "structure": If I cannot or will not describe a structure, I generalize it as a thing.
Your short second, science-politics part also got me thinking:
(F) Einstein was, after all, a "lonely scientist" who made his living in a boring patent office making boring patent decisions, and who could still come up with great scientific innovations. Therefore, I don't quite understand the logic of your criticism. Today there are ideal conditions for scientists, somehow everybody gets money and be it from social welfare, one has free access to all knowledge of the world via internet and can enter Diogenes' barrel to produce a noble prize worthy scientific insight every day. Perhaps it is the other way around, that all the big money flowing into science is attracting too many dilletantes who are clogging up science.
Thanks for your interest and for making me think, thinking is my favourite pastime... although I don't do it very well, sorry...
Yet, I will try to answer your queries.
A) Counting and math are, seems to me, inseparable. The development of math was to a large extent due to our capacity to use abstraction and use symbols representing numbers. Thus, math, as you say, is a "language of logic", and as well the art of counting/quantifying (forgot who said this or where I read it, somehow I liked that expression because, as I describe in the text, seems to me all started with counting).
B) I am not sure there is a "right" coordinate system, as you mention there are several to choose from. My point was that if we eliminate those coordinates and focus on the important thing, the relative positions of the elements, this may be beneficial in terms of simplifying. Simplification is what I am after (in my personal and professional lives!).
C) You are right in that if we study or characterise interactions/relations among elements, some "coordinates" are needed. So even if we get rid of cartesian or polar or any other coordinate, there is still the relative position, namely the separation between the possibly interacting elements, that will determine whether or not those elements will interact (exchange energy). Hence one cannot get rid of space, that is, some sort of "coordinates", because after all, space is all there is. Some metric, then is needed. But I would prefer the simplest metric that does not use absolute reference frames, rather the relative positions, although, naturally, the relative positions have to be estimated with something, so here we are back to some sort of coordinates?... I don't know. In any event, I liked Merleau-Ponty's definition of space as the means whereby the position of things become possible; it is a more dynamic view than the classical one and helps conceptuliase together the "position/arrangement" of things with the progression of their interactions/changes, that is, with time. To my mind, this perspective helps me understand that space and time are, like someone said, modes by which we think and that these two are completely inseparable, two sides of the same coin. so to speak. Although bear in mind I am not a physicist, so this sort of high-level, abstract thinking does not come easily to my mind, I am just an experimentalist scientist interested in the nature of that thing we term reality.
D) I would hope that, as you say, the distinct perspectives are translatable into each other. And indeed, the simplest perspective would be the, let's say, most convenient! Not sure what kind of example you mean, that you were trying to find in the essay. I could try to guess what you were after, so let me give you a simple example. This is not really a math versus other, simpler view, it is an instance of a very complex thing becoming simple at higher levels of description. There is a wide variety of biochemical alterations that give rise to the many epileptic syndromes, but going "beyond" molecules and focusing on the collective activity of neurons during epileptiform events, and analysing this collective activity using math (of course!), particularly dynamical system theory, we can come up with a relatively simple description that can be described in few words as to why epileptic seizures occur and even how we can stop them. Once I read that Feynman said something like a good theory should be one that is understandable without the need to solve the equations. So going back to the beginning of this paragraph, the complex mathematical view and the perhaps simpler view (although I suspect it would be of a mathematical nature too, but hopefully simpler) should be compatible and translatable into each other, but maybe we don’t need to “solve” all the equations to comprehend whatever natural phenomenon.
E) I tried to stay away from these metaphysical aspects, and besides, as you also mention, it is a matter of semantics. These are terms we created and that help us communicate, but we should not take them too seriously, for these are our subjective notions. What I mentioned about the properties and things/structures was needed to make myself understood that relations between properties is what we almost always perceive, what most scientists work on. I would also admit that properties are all we sense, and never the essence of things. As far as I know, nobody has ever seen a protein, or an alpha particle, all we have "seen" are their properties, light diffraction or dispersion, bubbles in a cloud chamber we attribute to the particle, etc.
F) The crucial point is that about "somehow everybody gets money and be it from social welfare...". In my career I have witnessed how, to my opinion, excellent scientists had to quit academia because the money they were getting was not enough.... although it was enough for them but not for their institutions!! Such is the nature of academia these days, more like a corporation, and if they judge you are not obtaining enough moneys, they will invite you to leave, with tears in their eyes of course! Once you leave academia, well, it may not be that easy to perform research, other priorities appear: jobs, etc. Your Einstein example is a valid one, but I am afraid, he was the exception that proves the rule. Regarding the big money flowing into science, you may be right in that the result is a clog in the system. One reason is that the big moneys are normally awarded to big groups producing tons of megadata. Today we have such a flood of data that, in fact, it is clogging us up. My colleagues and I have devoted thought to these matters (published a few blogs, texts...), thinking about alternatives to remedy the immense avalanche of data and make sense of all these observations by a different money distribution policy, but to tell you all this would take a long, long time.
As you say "In any event, the purpose now is not to delve into the concepts of space and
time discussed by scholars, but rather to explore an alternative perspective of our description of
natural phenomena that is more realistic, though more cumbersome as we shall soon see."
I think that you mean inyour article the imortance of scale to speak about interactions. Scale is imoprtant in terms to speak about the motion of a point or a system (a structure). Time in fact is the change in our vision.
In this perception I found the good way in Restreint Relativity as:
4-vector momentum= universal constant times 4-vector identity
4-vector identity=(speed of light times inertial time of the corpuscle, speed of the corpuscle times inertial time of the copuscle)
Inertial time of the corpuscle =universal constant times the energy of the corpuscle
It is evident now that:
4-vector wave-vector= universal constant times 4-vector identity
The inertial time is like a five dimension of space. The ordinary time is only change. Inertial time does'nt change if the energy of the corpuscle is constant.
Thanks for the comments. Indeed, I think scale is important because interactions occur among elements at different levels of description, and at each level one finds new, so-called "emergent" rules that are not present at lower levels.
However, not being a physicist, it is hard for me to follow your suggestions, excuse my unlimited ignorance!
I will just mention only one thing about time, that it is not without interest that so much debate has occurred throughout the centuries about something nobody has ever seen! As far as I know, nobody has seen time, we see events and things changing in that flow we call time. By the way, same thing can be said about space: nobody has seen space, we perceive the things that occupy that space. And yet, since the times of ancient Greece a myriad of people have been discussing these apparently invisible items. Perhaps this should indicate something to us, that space and time is just what we perceive, the "things" we see. Could it be that the structure of space-time, discussed in physics and philosophy, has always been in front of our eyes?
You say"M. Merleau-Ponty said in his Phenomenology of Perception: “Space is not the setting in
which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible ”.
I find this an appealing definition of space as it is a dynamic one. And, since the position
determines a possibility for elements living in that whatever state space to interact, then this
sentence could be rephrased as space being the means whereby the interaction of things
becomes possible. By interaction is meant everything from just collisions to, say,
gravitation, electromagnetic or chemical interactions; and naturally, some types of
interactions are possible only if the units ―or elements of that space― have the right
physical properties that allow them to interact with others, interactions which normally
entail an exchange of energy or matter (although considering the famous Einstein’s
equivalence E=mc2 we could consider these two as equivalent, two sides of the same coin).
Along the same lines, we could think of time as the means whereby the interactions (or
relations) proceed".
yes space is dynamic. We can conlude this from the earlier times of Planck: since we can made an absolute system of unities from Planck constant, the speed of light and the gravitationnal constant than it signifies that spatial extension is equivalent to energy eventhought there is no matter or waves.
For me the 4-vector identity is a lenght and translate that corpuscles with approximatively the same 4-vector can interact with each other so 4-vector identity translate in fact the scale factor.
Let's take an example:
the time identity of an electron=the mass of th electron/universal constant
the time idnetitity of a stone = the mass of the stone/the same universal constant
It is clear that there is no comparison between the two times so we can't speak about intercation of the lectron and the stone. Replace the stone by the proton , the identity time of the last is 2000 times the first one so there is interaction.
This FQXI Competition is very benefic for me. I had introduce which i ahd call the inertial time of a corpuscle and I did'nt know what is its real significance: now I know it, it is related to the scale of space at which the interaction are studied.
Physics nowdays luck a new universal constant.
Hi LilacSeahorse.
I highly appreciate your essay. Your principles really bring science closer to the comprehension of nature. Your views of the experimenter on reality are close to me:
“Space is not the setting in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible”.
“Along the same lines, we could think of time as the means whereby the interactions (or relations) proceed”.
I believe that space and time are not material concepts and therefore they cannot be bent and affect matter. I believe that the basis of the functioning of the Universe is the dispersion interaction of the topological elements of matter at close resonant frequencies, which are due to the stability of the parameters of space and time.
In my essay, I focused on misinterpreting the results of experiments and come to the opposite conclusions. I hope you, as an experimenter, will be interested in this.
In addition, you will be interested in the reasons for the origin of life on Earth with unique properties.
I wish you success.
Thanks, Jackal, for your comments. I particularly like Feynman's first quote in your essay, for I have the same intuition: in the end, the laws governing natural phenomena will be found to be simple.... but not simpler! (to rephrase Einstein). I agree with your comment that ".... is the extension of experimentally established laws to all areas of use". I have witnessed that phenomenon of exporting results and concepts from one to another area, especially from quantum physics to neuroscience, two totally different levels of description. I always insist that mixing up notions among different levels of description, without deep thinking, leads to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
Regarding time & space, well, not being a physicist there is not much I can say, but for all I perceive, time, and its division in intervals, is just a convenient manner for us to communicate and to characterise the changes in things which in the final analysis take place because of interactions. So the space-time continuum, I wonder whether it is just a space continuum (or whatever is in it, maybe your "topological elements of matter") since the entity called time is our construction to make things simple.
You have to think big!
It is known that Newton determined the gravitational coefficient through the parameters of the orbits of the planets of the solar system. If the gravitational coefficient is determined in a similar way from the parameters of the orbits of electrons in the Hydrogen atom, then the gravitational coefficient of the planetary system of the Hydrogen atom becomes 40 orders of magnitude greater than in the solar system. Then the Planck parameters of the Hydrogen atom are the parameters of an electron with its radius equal to the radius of the Compton wave of the electron. Those. each level of fractal matter has its own “Planck parameters”, and the generally accepted Planck parameters are an abstract delusion and have no real meaning at all. Indeed, what relation does the gravitational coefficient from the parameters of the Solar system have to the parameters of the planetary system of the Hydrogen atom? None!!!
You have to think big!
The fine structure constant can be easily calculated with an accuracy of up to 7 digits, assuming that all elements of matter have a fractal structure. Then, therefore, "black holes" do not exist, and there is no event horizon. Those. inside putative "black holes", there is deterministic matter that obeys the simple quantum laws of fractal matter, which unify gravity and quantum phenomena of the deterministic functioning of matter on all scales of the universe [ appendix: https://s3.amazonaws.com/fqxi.data/data/essay-contest-files/16/reference_id_2304.pdf
https://qspace.fqxi.org/competitions/entry/2304#control_panel ].