I watched a show on fizziks that is freakin bugging me.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by MikeH
Hardly anyone can understand the maths, or really needs to understand it to that level. So the analogies are very valuable to introduce people to subjects. If they then follow on into the maths, great. If not, they understand a little better than they did.

It's a false understanding. If you understand QM in terms of macroscopic analogs, you understand it wrong. At best, the knowledge is absolutely worthless; at worst, it results in mystical crap built on pseudoscience, or even more inappropriate metaphors from QM back to real life.

There isn't really a good reason for someone who can't hack the math to actually know any QM anyway.

[Maniac]

Do you think math is reality or describes reality?

[Kuciwalker]

At this level there isn't really a difference. There's no real way to conceive of the system beyond "a thing that behaves the way this thing behaves".

[Colon™]

Hencefort I declare a cordon sanitaire around this thread.

[Zkribbler]

Re: Re: I watched a show on fizziks that is freakin bugging me.

Originally posted by Dry

Either you remember wrong, or the show was plain wrong.
The Heisenberg uncertainty is not for atoms, but for [subatomic] particles.

I don't have time to watch the U-Tube thingie. Maybe later.

Back in the 60's, I was taught that subatomic particles were "wavicles." That is, in some ways, they are like particles --- they have mass; in other ways, they are like waves -- they have wavelengths.

[Jon Miller]

Atoms are definitely quantum mechanical objects. There are experiments in the last decade which shows this.

JM

[Pekka]

Without reading replies, I think you saw a show about quantum mechanics, which certainly is interesting and cool. However, if you saw what the ***** do we know, please be aware that the show is horrendous and horrible. It mixes things up so much that it should't be called a documentary at all. It mixes up with spirituality way too much and it's sort of clear it has an agenda where physics doesn't matter anymore.

It wants to say we're all one, and that particles and everything have a sort of conscious side to them and that possibly before big bang when we were young, that it explains attraction between components but do note that the show was horrible and just forget about it. Maybe what you saw was the whole superposition thingie?

If you want to see shows about physics, there's good documentaries about Einstein's theories and how he came about them, and then string theories. In fact, you should see some of them better string theory shows, I saw a good one which was good enough to challenge it being a theory at all, and that it might be just... who knows, crap. But at the same time, it explored it and was understandable for most people so it was a good show.

So if you're interested in these kinds of things, I'd suggest you watch that. About things that are very small. And colliding universes. Just don't get to much into the latest string theory version that has what, 11 dimensions? Anyways, that's about it.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Philosophy about physics. AIUI that's basically what it means.

No. It's completely different. Modern metaphysics is concerned with such tedious topics as identity, necessity and possibility. The only place where it would touch physics is where they are interested in the concepts of causation and natural law, and half the time that is a conceptual enquiry, unless they are Kripkean about it.

Heisenberg, whom I quoted above, isn't talking about that, but about epistemology and the difficulties that older views present in preventing people from understanding his work.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


It's a false understanding. If you understand QM in terms of macroscopic analogs, you understand it wrong. At best, the knowledge is absolutely worthless; at worst, it results in mystical crap built on pseudoscience, or even more inappropriate metaphors from QM back to real life.

There isn't really a good reason for someone who can't hack the math to actually know any QM anyway.

That just sounds like a cop out. It's one thing to be an instrumentalist, but that is really just giving up the ghost. It's kind of typical in the English speaking world where people are uneducated and don't care about the truth, but Heisenberg himself did not think that way, probably because he was German and had had a proper education in a culture where people cared about knowledge for its own sake.

[Jon Miller]

I know it is just a wiki link, but my link posted above lists Heisenberg as one of those interested in the link between quantum mechanics and mysticism. Just because he is one of the founders, doesn't mean that everything he said was correct.

This doesn't mean that he was incorrect, it just means that putting for his views as being quantum mechanics is holding to one specific interpretation of quantum mechanics. I expect that if you quoted the entirety, it would be more complete.

JM

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
I know it is just a wiki link, but my link posted above lists Heisenberg as one of those interested in the link between quantum mechanics and mysticism. Just because he is one of the founders, doesn't mean that everything he said was correct.

No. But I think he's quite correct about the aetiology underlying the problems people have understanding it. That is the only piece I quoted, because it said much the same thing as I did, only better.

This doesn't mean that he was incorrect, it just means that putting for his views as being quantum mechanics is holding to one specific interpretation of quantum mechanics. I expect that if you quoted the entirety, it would be more complete.

The rest of what I have isn't mystical. It's rather dull stuff, actually.

The question at issue is whether QM is in need of interpretation. A great many scientists are instrumentalists, if anything. So all that has to happen for them is that the calculations have predictive value. Without some argument for this, it is a bit of a cop out, although a popular one, especially in the English speaking world, where knowledge for its own sake is somewhat of a dirty word.

Kuci seems to be saying that QM is untranslatable into ordinary language. If QM is understood as instrumental, then that's not a problem, but an argument will still be required. On the other hand, if we say that QM, like other scientific theories describes the way things are, then saying that it is necessarily untranslatable is a pretty big claim. It could be just that our ordinary language isn't very good at describing it. But then again, our ordinary language wasn't very good at describing what people discovered in the first scientific revolution. That's just to say that our language and ordinary way of thinking lags behind our scientific discoveries. That should be no surprise as the same thing happens in the arts, politics and ethics. The search for an interpretation of QM is really an attempt to search for a way of normalizing it as a worldview for us. Working scientists tend to lack a historical sense of human thinking, which is why they often fail to recognize the revolutionary nature of their own work.

[Jon Miller]

How is mathematics, by definition, not ordinary language?

I know it is not, but that is the fault of our education system and individuals, rather than the fault of mathematics I think.

I think that communication of ideas is a crucial part of science, but I fail to see how communicating them to Bob who barely passed the eight grade has anything to do with science.

JM

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Jon Miller

I think that communication of ideas is a crucial part of science, but I fail to see how communicating them to Bob who barely passed the eight grade has anything to do with science.

JM

Bob is a registered voter. So either:

A) Start a technocratic revolution

B) Trick poor Bob into thinking he understands what you are talking about and will support funding your base research

C) Stop doing base research

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
How is mathematics, by definition, not ordinary language?

I know it is not, but that is the fault of our education system and individuals, rather than the fault of mathematics I think.

I think that communication of ideas is a crucial part of science, but I fail to see how communicating them to Bob who barely passed the eight grade has anything to do with science.

JM

The idea is that a mathematical description of reality is supposed to represent reality. If you're an instrumentalist, then you don't believe this, and you just care that the mathematical theory predicts the correct results. But science has generally aimed at more than this - it isn't enough to have a theory that predicts results, since such a theory produces no understanding. If we want understanding, we need some explanation of the relation between the theory and reality. If the theory can't be translated into non-mathematical terms, then, because mathematics is a formal rather than substantive discipline, it is an open question what the theory is about. Kuci's tautology or near tautology above evidences the poverty of explanation afforded by a merely mathematical understanding.

Trying to interpret quantum mechanics, or to develop a way of talking about it in non-mathematical language is extremely difficult. But this is not new. The Greek philosophers I study were attempting to explain an entirely new way of looking at the world using a language that did not have the words they needed. So they took up ordinary old words and used them to metaphorically express new ideas. The irony is that a lot of the technical words that 21st century English speakers are comfortable with are these very words that were taken up and given a new spin by Greek philosophers.

Naive scientists believe that progress is just recording information that we derive from experience. In fact, it is much more than that. It is the development of new ways of thinking about the data we get. You can call it science or philosophy or whatever you want, but it is just what we do to progress.

I think a lot of it has to do with cultural bigotry as well. A lot of people simply cannot understand that others do not think the same way they do, and their response is simple bigotry. The task of limning the universal rules of discourse, if there are any, and so understanding how these different ways of thinking connect, and if any of them are necessarily better than the others is the task of philosophy. It's just an incredibly difficult task.

[Jon Miller]

I don't understand what you mean by merely mathematical understanding. You seem to place mathematics as some sort of sub language, or not as good as real words. I disagree, I agree that it is highly formalized and useful and very particular. But these are all good things, I don't see how it is lesser somehow for that.

We developed the language of mathematics to get across certain ideas and concepts. It does very well at that. English, on the other hand, wasn't deleloped to communicate these ideas and concepts. So obviously it does much poorer at it, and some question (like myself) whether it contains the needed tools to communicate these ideas at all.

That doesn't mean mathematics is lesser. No, for physics and like sciences, mathematics is the far greater language. There is no reason to denigerate it.

As for communication being inherent to what nature is, I disagree. I do agree that communication might allow or disallow certain concepts to be shared, and so might blind some aspect of nature. But we aren't suddenly going to discover that due to a change of perspective that the black body doesn't radiate at T^4 or that people can fly.

Science is discovering independent truths of our universe. Just because there might be some limitation due to the language that the scientists think in does not mean that the understanding is depedent on the culture that the scientist exists in.

Note for complicated things that we don't really understand anyways, like psychology or even biology, then our culture might be making us miss the crucial points needed to understand things. But physics is simple and easy to understand, for those who understand mathematics. That is why I am a physicist.

JM