I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics. — Richard Feynman, eminent physicist
I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics. — Richard Feynman, eminent physicist
and quantum physics is the frayed edge of reality, where existence bleeds into nothingness. — counterpunch
I am a self taught web programmer and I would like to share my view on the modern day computer. How would you categorize it? I, personally, would put in the category of magic. I am not saying it is not technology. I think that magic and technology can be one and the same. So, to better categorize it, I think it fits perfectly in the category of Magical technology. — elucid
I think that's true, but only because quantum mechanics is misconceived. I think the fundamental seat of reality is the causal, macroscopic reality we inhabit - and that quantum mechanics is a "science" of the frayed edge of reality, on the border between something and nothing. — counterpunch
Software runs on the hardware. Hardware is based on electronics, which is based on physics. — fishfry
The discomfort that I feel is associated with the fact that the observed perfect quantum correlations seem to demand something like the "genetic" hypothesis. For me, it is so reasonable to assume that the photons in those experiments carry with them programs, which have been correlated in advance, telling them how to behave. This is so rational that I think that when Einstein saw that, and the others refused to see it, he was the rational man. The other people, although history has justified them, were burying their heads in the sand. I feel that Einstein's intellectual superiority over Bohr, in this instance, was enormous; a vast gulf between the man who saw clearly what was needed, and the obscurantist. So for me, it is a pity that Einstein's idea doesn't work. The reasonable thing just doesn't work.
And quantum physics is what Feynman says 'nobody understands' — Wayfarer
Not at all. Computers rely on discoveries made in quantum physics in order to operate at all. And computers are indeed 'special', they are one of the most consequential discoveries of the 20th c. — Wayfarer
It's not so simple. Many great minds, Feynman's included, have been baffled by the discoveries of quantum physics, and it's still a great unsolved question. In fact there are many enormous baffling conundrums in modern science, generally. (I read a fair amount about it, but on the other hand, I'm not credentialled to talk about them, which requires a higher degree in mathematical physics.)
In any case, be assured that quantum mechanics is genuinely baffling, which is a source of great discomfort to many people, for different reasons. It would be far more comforting to scientific realists, and indeed realists of all stripes, were it not so, but Nature has not obliged. — Wayfarer
What if, instead - reality is the nexus of forces and properties, focused at the macroscopic level? QM could be trying to make sense of what becomes ever more blurred the closer they look — counterpunch
Well, yeah, but then you’re of a generation where this has become evident. — Wayfarer
That is why our life and times are called ‘post-modern’. I maintain that ‘modernity’ was the period between Newton and Einstein, and that when quantum physics came along, it knocked down all of the things modernity took for granted. Hence the sense that nothing has any real foundation or absolute reality which is very typical of postmodernism. — Wayfarer
QM continues to assume there's some fundamental stuff - strings, or loop quantum gravity, or whatever, at the basis of reality. — counterpunch
I loved my Mac Plus computer. — Bitter Crank
Not. Two of the pioneering popular works of philosophy of science in postwar Britain were by James Jeans and Arthur Eddington and they both had a decidedly idealistic attitude. ‘The stuff of the world is mind stuff’, ‘the universe seems more a great mind than a great machine’. It was precisely the concept of the mind independence of reality that was called into question by the early discoveries. Is the probability wave objectively real or a sign of subjective uncertainty? Nobody knows. — Wayfarer
There's an objective reality that exists independently of our experience; and this must necessarily be so, because of the age of the earth and the fact the experiencing intellect comes about as a consequence of evolution. — counterpunch
It occurs to me that subjectivist philosophy is disgusting. — counterpunch
Illuminating response! — Wayfarer
Forty-five years ago, the inventor of the term “paradigm shift” threw an ashtray in exasperation at a young graduate student in the philosophy of science, and soon afterwards ejected him from Princeton. The ashtray hurler was Thomas Kuhn, and his student grew up to become the documentary film-maker Errol Morris, who has – perhaps understandably – harboured a grudge ever since. This book is his long-brewed revenge.
Morris explains early on that he is worried about post-truth, fake news, the Trump administration’s invocation of “alternative facts”, and so forth, and hopes his book will serve as an “antidote”. But what exactly makes Kuhn a proto-Trumpian?
In his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), he argued that science proceeds in two modes. “Normal” science consists of “puzzle-solving”, finding answers to questions that remain within a certain overarching theory, or “paradigm”. But at certain points, anomalies pile up and a revolution occurs, replacing the previous theory or paradigm with a new one, as when Newtonian mechanics was overthrown by Einsteinian relativity. That is a paradigm shift. And, according to Kuhn, it’s usually messier and less objective than people had previously assumed. In particular, he argued, the criterion for the acceptance of a new paradigm is not some kind of provably superior fidelity to objective truth, but simply its consensus adoption by the community of human beings engaged in scientific practice.
This is all terribly dangerous, Morris says: “Kuhn’s ideas promote a denial of truth,” and if we can’t rely on objective truth in science then we may as well all become White House spokespeople. (I am paraphrasing slightly.) His aim, then, is to refute this “postmodernist bible”. To do so, somewhat eccentrically, he spends a lot of time on the picture of language advanced in the 1960s by the philosopher Saul Kripke, because he takes this to imply that the meaning of words is fundamentally connected to reality in a reliable way, so that scientific language, too, can point to the world unproblematically. There are also some entertaining interviews, laid out documentary-script-wise, with such luminaries as Noam Chomsky, the philosopher Hilary Putnam and Kripke himself, and Morris races off on tangents about Jorge Luis Borges, Pythagorean mathematics and armadillos, and down some deep Wittgensteinian rabbit holes (or duck-rabbit holes) about rules and language.
There’s a really big problem with Morris’s account, and it’s right there in his book’s subtitle: Kuhn did not, in fact, “deny reality”. He simply insisted that we could ultimately never know the fundamental truth about reality, but we could, he thought, make ever more useful predictions about it with scientific theories. This is clear enough even in many of the passages Morris himself angrily cites, as when he quotes Kuhn writing (in 1989) about “the natural sciences, dealing objectively with the real world (as they do)”, or, at the end of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions itself, where Kuhn writes of the evolution of science as “an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature”. That doesn’t sound like a postmodernist supervillain denying reality, does it? No, because it isn’t.
Morris is also upset about Kuhn’s notorious concept of “incommensurability”. According to Kuhn, competing scientific paradigms are “incommensurable” in that they slice up the world into different sets of incompatible phenomena, but this doesn’t mean, as Morris thinks, that he is saying they can’t be rationally compared at all. In Kuhn’s picture, when assessing theories, the community of scientists decides not that a new paradigm is “true” in that it accurately reflects fundamental reality, but simply that it explains a wider collection of experimental findings than the old one. This was the explicit view of many of the pioneering quantum physicists, who thought that to ask what the mathematics implied about the nature of reality itself was silly. As Chomsky tells Morris, evidently to the latter’s disappointment, it is perfectly respectable to hold the following view: “The world is indeed incomprehensible, it’s a mystery, but we can at least construct intelligible theories.”
In Morris’s partial defence, more scholarly critics have long taken Kuhn to task for seeming to be vague about his central terms and using them in apparently different senses in different places. But this book’s central and rather hysterically repeated accusation, that Kuhn thought reality didn’t exist and science was merely a social power game, is just plain wrong. Whenever something sounds a bit relativist, Morris pounces on it and reads it as though it is saying the most ridiculous thing possible: the principle of interpretive charity is here everywhere absent. It’s a particular shame, since in his films about Robert McNamara or Donald Rumsfeld, Morris beautifully withholds authorial judgment in order to allow the subjects to damn themselves. In this book, though, he does the opposite, going on a flamethrower rampage from the start in an attempt to reduce everything to smouldering ash. The cause of truth is not thereby advanced. — Steve Poole
Kuhn thought reality didn’t exist and science was merely a social power game, — Steve Poole
That's obviously not so. Scientific principles can be applied to create technologies that work - and work better, the better the technology accounts for the underlying scientific principles. Like steam engines and thermodynamics. If the laws of thermodynamics were false - steam engines wouldn't work. It's not "just a theory." — counterpunch
And there's a concerted philosophical crusade to deny objective reality, and the possibility of objective knowledge. — counterpunch
I mentioned that above. It works - but we don’t necessarily understand the principles. ‘Spooky action at a distance’ is proven, in fact it’s now used for cyber security technologies. But nobody can explain why doing something here produces an immediate consequence there, without any intermediary or contact being possible. It just does. Hence, ‘shut up and calculate’. — Wayfarer
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.