Preon models

ahem....philosophy forum..... :angry: — Wayfarer

Physics was part of philosophy once... Why not anymore? Especially physics not accepted on other forums. Ain't this the place?

Natural philosophy! :grin:

What is matter? What is a particle? What is space? What is time? Seems philo-talk to me...

Also of interest, Braid group

Oh! Sorry! It's your thread. Ill leave it...

Kant is now classified as a German Idealist, who trafficked in transcendental notions & a priori concepts. — Gnomon

Accordingly, many who misunderstand both classical metaphysics and German idealism believe it's all the same schtick.

Physicists just take Laws & Constants for granted, without further explanation. — Gnomon

There's nothing inherently the matter with that. It's only since science popularisers like Krauss and Dawkins started to claim that science somehow 'disproves' God that natural science has itself started to be taken as a metaphysics.

The Buddha always told his disciples not to waste their time and energy in metaphysical speculation. — Gnomon

I know that territory very well, I did a Master's in Buddhist Studies ten years ago. In fact my introduction to Kant was through a 1950's book The Central Philosophy of Buddhism by T R V Murti, which is one of those formative texts you read early in life that forever becomes part of your outlook on life. Murti goes into extensive comparisons of the philosophy of the Buddhist Madhyamika (Middle Way) philosophy with Kant, Hegel, Hume and Bradley. This book is now generally scorned by later generations of Buddhologists as being overly euro-centric, but I found it tremendously helpful. You can read a snippet here.

Ain't this the place? — Haglund

I think at the very least it ought to be discussed in a different thread. This thread like many is subject to constant digressions, but esoteric and contested concepts in current theoretical physics is perhaps a bridge too far. I'm sure nobody here other than yourself and Apo would know what a 'preon' is (or a Mexican hat, for that matter :roll: )

There's nothing inherently the matter with that. It's only since science popularises like Krauss and Dawkins started to claim that science somehow 'disproves' God that natural science has itself started to be taken as a metaphysics. — Wayfarer

A wise observation. That Krauss guy is a total creep. Together with Dawkins, Harris, Pinker, etc. he started a new religion.

Are you claiming superbradyons have something to do with your approach? Am I suppose to understand that your specific points are all to be found in rishon theory? Or perhaps they come instead from braid theory?

C'mon. I asked you to substantiate your claim that preons have some advantage is accounting for the g-2 muon result. Just give us the paper that backs that one up.

If not exotic preon combos like W8, then what?

Every particle process can be explained. Proton decay is easy. The basic group is SU(3)XSU(3)XU(1). — Haglund

OK. Which actual preon theory are you speaking for here. References please.

C'mon. I asked you to substantiate your claim that preons have some advantage is accounting for the g-2 muon result. Just give us the paper that backs that one up. — apokrisis

That's the point. The preon model isn't even considered. Rishons and braids show similar structures Triplets.

If not exotic preon combos like W8, then what? — apokrisis

The electron: C/C/C/
Up quark: CCU
Down quark:C/U/U/
Neutrino UUU

/ is anti, C is 1/3 charged, U is uncharged

Color and superstrong colors cause binding and colored quarks.

The muon's magnetic moment is larger than thought. Which happens if three charges circulate wider.

But isn’t that what we would say about the running of a computer program?

So it is the other way around. The problem is the need to amend the usual notion of material cause so that it ain’t so robotically determined. — apokrisis

I'm not clear on what you're saying; can you explain? I wasn't asserting the idea of strict determinism, just outlining it, and pointing out that there is no logical contradiction in the idea that it doesn't obtain.

Bear in mind that the Cosmos exists to serve the second law and thus its aim is to maximise entropy. So even without the inherent quantum uncertainty, the Cosmos is committed to the production of uncertainty at every turn. — apokrisis

How do we know that this is not just the way it appears to us, time-bound creatures that we are? Also why could entropy not also obtain under the dominion of strict determinism wherein the only uncertainty would be epistemic?

I'm sure nobody here other than yourself and Apo would know what a 'preon' is (or a Mexican hat, for that matter :roll: ) — Wayfarer

Alternatively, particle physics is exactly where concepts of logical necessity and physical causation intersect in practice. It is the frontline of the debate.

Is reality little atomistic lumps of matter in motion or instead a mathematics of structure and relation?

That's the point. The preon model isn't even considered. — Haglund

So you were hand-waving. Yet even my quick search found such consideration from 2004 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0102242.pdf

The muon's magnetic moment is larger than thought. Which happens if three charges circulate wider. — Haglund

You tell me. I don't claim to understand what the superstrong force might be, let alone how it could apparently lack the essential strong force feature of asymptotic freedom.

I'm sure nobody here other than yourself and Apo would know what a 'preon' is (or a Mexican hat, for that matter — Wayfarer

Not sure about the preon, but a Mexican hat? Don't we all know that? But you're right. This thread ain't the place. Though the most fundamental cause could be found...

The noumenal is not. The very term ‘noumenal’ is a ‘phenomenal’ (both technically and literally!). — I like sushi

'Noumenal' is a polemical distinction from 'phenomenal', so I don't know what you are trying to say here, unless it is just the (unquestionable?) truism that all ideas are phenomena. More explanation required.

Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is the way to refer to the absence of something somewhere not nothing nowhere (because that is meaningless drivel much like ‘potato on yellow under the is and but of it one two trousers’) — I like sushi

Again not sure what your point is. What you say here doesn't seem to relate to anything I've said. I will say though that the idea of there being absolutely nothing is not meaningless, even if it might seem impossible or contradictory. But again this is far from anything I've been addressing.

Is reality little atomistic lumps of matter in motion or instead a mathematics of structure and relation? — apokrisis

The problem is, mathematical physics is highly specialised and requires training. Unless you understand what lagrangians and hilbert spaces and vectors are (no need to explain!)

There's a genre of popular science writing which does help cast light on the philosophical implications of physics - I'm thinking Jim Baggott, Manjit Kumar, New Scientist etc - but there's a difference between discussing the philosophical implications of physics, and the kinds of debates going on inside physics, which are pretty well by definition only intelligible to those trained in it.

You tell me. I don't claim to understand what the superstrong force might be, let alone how it could apparently lack the essential strong force feature of asymptotic freedom — apokrisis

If charges rotate wider, the magnetic moment changes. The superstrong color force keeps the prekns together, like the quarks in hadrons. So the Lagrangian is QCD like. Charged hadrons have various magnetic moments too.

See! Lagrangian. What I said.

The problem is, mathematical physics — Wayfarer

Where do you see me using math?

but there's a difference between discussing the philosophical implications of physics, and the kinds of debates going on inside physics, which are pretty well by definition only intelligible to those trained in it. — Wayfarer

Would it be possible, though, to unpack "the philosophical implications of physics", without understanding "the debates going on within physics"? (This of course assuming that there must, or at least could be philosophical implications of physics).

See! Lagrangian. What I said. — Wayfarer

So. Gibbs free energy, Friston blankets, markov blankets... I saw them all here. What's wrong with a Lagrangian? Kant would have liked it!

Not to mention the wavefunction.

Where do you see me using math? — Haglund

It's not a matter of using maths explicitly, but that most of the concepts in mathematical physics require a grasp of the maths in order to understand. The concept of the Hilbert space can't be understood except through the mathematics. So it's not that there's anything 'wrong' with them, only that unless you have that training, then it's not intelligible.

Would it be possible, though, to unpack "the philosophical implications of physics", without understanding "the debates going on within physics"? — Janus

To some extent! The books I referred to, like Manjit Kumar's Quantum, David Lindley's Uncertainty, Jim Baggott's Farewell to Reality - and of course Tao of Physics - are accessible to the lay reader. I think I have some drift of 'the debate between Bohr and Einstein', of the basic implications of the Copenhagen interpretation of physics vs 'many worlds', and something about physics from the perspective of the history of ideas.

There are philosophically-inclined physicists - the first generation of physicists were very much so. Heisenberg read Plato, Schrodinger read Schopenhauer and Vedanta, and Bohr's ' Principle of Complementarity' was a philosophically-sophisticated idea. But as physics moved from Europe to the USA and increasingly under the patronage of the military-industrial complex then it became much more a matter of shut up and calculate. See Quantum Mysticism: Gone but not Forgotten.

This of course assuming that there must, or at least could be philosophical implications of physics). — Janus

I was exactly wondering about them. The implications.

The concept of the Hilbert space can't be understood except through the mathematics. — Wayfarer

It can be very easily laymanified.

It's not a matter of using maths explicitly, but that most of the concepts in mathematical physics require a grasp of the maths in order to understand. The concept of the Hilbert space can't be understood except through the mathematics. So it's not that there's anything 'wrong' with them, only that unless you have that training, then it's not intelligible — Wayfarer

But why isn't it a part of philosophy? The love for wisdom.

Besides, it's really not that inside knowledge kind of thing. Math is just about quantities, and space.

I'm not clear on what you're saying; can you explain? I wasn't asserting the idea of strict determinism, just outlining it, and pointing out that there is no logical contradiction in the idea that it doesn't obtain. — Janus

I was saying that the physical idea of a constraint works better as it is large enough to include determinism without presuming determinism and thus excluding contingency.

A constraint certainly determines the likelihood of events. That likelihood can be made "almost sure", or effectively a probability of 1, by really piling on the constraints. But even a loose constraint is still some degree of determinancy.

How do we know that this is not just the way it appears to us, time-bound creatures that we are? — Janus

But we can see to the start of time and the end of time - if we believe our astronomical instruments and cosmological models. So we are not particularly impoverished in that regard.

Also why could entropy not also obtain under the dominion of strict determinism wherein the only uncertainty would be epistemic? — Janus

Determinism doesn't explain the existence of degrees of freedom - the uncertainty that is ontic.

An ideal gas is defined as a system of non-interacting particles that thus are described by their simplest six degrees of freedom - three directions of translation and three directions of rotation.

Each particle is thus free to go at any speed in any direction with the only thing to fear being the uncertainty of some momentum-exchanging collision.

But then being constrained within a box set within a heat bath (a tellingly complex set of constraints!) the collection of particles is thus entrained to the inevitability of arriving at a Gaussian thermal distribution.

So you can choose to focus on all that seems deterministic about the situation - the Newtonian laws governing the particle collisions, the central limit theorem and law of large numbers. Or you can choose to focus on all that seems contingent - the information uncertainty attached to any individual system microstate, the actual momentum of any particular particle.

Or you can do the third thing of adopting the constraints-based view which sees the necessity and the contingency as the two faces of the one causal story - the two metaphysical limits that bound the reality.

Nature is never either completely determined, nor completely contingent. And entropy models are the way to establish the ground state of such a metaphysics - the state of nature as it is when fully thermalised and at its destination of achieving a steady equilibrium.

Have you ever studied units in philosophy? Philosophy of science - Kuhn, Feyerabend, Polanyi? And of those books I mentioned? like Quantum, Manjit Kumar?

Philosophy has a curriculum and a history. Certainly it's become very eclectic and synthetic in modern culture which is kind of unavoidable, but there are some core themes and ideas running through it which are specific to that curriculum.

As far as physics and philosophy is concerned, they intersect at points but you don't expect that physicists would necessarily have to know anything about the subject of philosophy, and vice versa, although there are some who do - as I mentioned.

My take on your posts is, you have a curious mind, and are open-minded, you're not trying to push pet theorems, which is a big plus, but on the other hand, your posts don't seem particularly well-informed from a philosophical perspective, if you don't mind me saying.

But as physics moved from Europe to the USA and increasingly under the patronage of the military-industrial complex then it became much more a matter of shut up and calculate — Wayfarer

Yes. But that's exactly what I don't do. For example I asked why the model aint popular while it explains all.

Yes. I read all of Feyerabend and wrote a thesis on forms of reality, from empiricism, logical positivism, to van Fraassen, Radder, Pickering, etc. And one guy I like, experimental metaphysics. Don't remember his name. He wrote Feyerabend wrote 3 different books in 3 editions.

Well in that case you probably know a lot more than I do. That might be the source of my disquiet. I only know smatterings of everything.

Anyhow, Ill back off from your thread. With these preons, that is. :smile: