I can’t draw an electron. In fact, nobody can really draw any sort of fundamental particle. They don’t look like anything. This might seem like a cop out, or a way to handwave away the fact that we don’t know what they look like, but it’s not. On the scale that fundamental particles exist on, the mechanisms which give rise to the phenomenon we experience as “looking like something” don’t exist. An electron cannot look like anything.
I can understand something and still tell you that it makes no sense. Do you understand that? I can also regurgitate the definition of phase angles that I memorized in 1978, does that mean I understand it?
If you insist that you understand what scientists mean when they call matter wavelike and particlelike, why don’t you try explaining it? That much, I do understand, well enough that I can explain what it means I should observe regarding matter on the particle scale and what I should not, and I will be able to tell if your explanation is correct.
I also can’t explain directionless arrows, because to the best of my understanding, Eliezer isn’t actually talking about directionless arrows at any point. If he is, my understanding of this post is wrong. What he does talk about are arrows, figurative entities which indicate both what direction from the origin something is pointing and how far away from it is is (I’m not even going to try explaining what the origin in this context is and what it means to move away from it, not because I don’t understand it, but because it would take way more time and effort than I’m willing to put in right now to make it comprehensible to you,) but although the arrows point in a specific direction, we can’t tell which direction it is. Imagine an actual, physical arrow affixed to a pole in the ground, and the arrow is pointing either north or south. Imagine also that we have no way of knowing which way is north or south, we have no compass, the sky is overcast, we have no landmarks to orient by, etcetera. We do not know whether the arrow is pointing north or south, but we can still measure how long it is.
This is not a perfect analogy, but if you think of it this way you’ll have a better idea of what Eliezer was talking about if you just think “directionless arrows = nonsense.”
Actually, I already explained wave earlier. “A disturbance thru a medium” is the best definition which can be used consistently. Of course we could refer to the popular definition, from WIKI or whatever. But you asked me my definition. A particle is a discrete “piece” of matter, or in the case of a photon, a discrete ‘amount’ of energy, or quanta.
“A disturbance through a medium” is not what scientists mean when they say that matter has wavelike properties though. It doesn’t matter what “your definition” is, if it’s not what scientists mean when they use the phrase “matter has both wavelike and particlelike properties” to communicate an idea to each other.
In any case, I’ve been suspicious for a while, but at this point I think it’s very likely that you’re deliberately trolling this site. You’re combining a significant level of familiarity with scientific anecdotes with a profound, seemingly willful level of ignorance, and I think you’re faking it.
No, not exactly like that, as I just explained in my last post. However, I have some paradigms that have allowed me to successfully cut through a lot of BS. If I discover they do not apply to mathematical physics, then I won’t waste any more of your or my time, that you can “count” on.
No, you’re not making too much sense for someone who’s profoundly ignorant, you’re making too little sense for someone who knows what you seem to know. It’s possible that you’ve actually gone out of your way to pick up all these words and pass phrases without having any idea what they mean, and that’s exactly what you’re acting like, but I don’t buy it.
I don’t want to continue a discussion with you if I think you’re willfully refusing to understand, but I like this analogy, so I’m going to toss it out and if by some chance you’re not faking and it actually helps, it’ll give us something to work with.
A person who is born blind and grows up that way does not have the neurological faculties to process an image and take information from it the way we do. A blind person may have a concept of “sphere” or “cube,” and know what they will feel if they run their hands over one, but if a person who’d grown up blind were given functional eyes and looked at a sphere, they would not be able to tell you in advance that by running their hands over it they should feel a smooth surface that curves uniformly in on itself. This was an issue which was debated for some time by philosophers, but eventually we developed the medical technology to actually give eyesight to some people who’d grown up without it, and it stopped being just a matter of “logical argument,” and became something we could go out and actually check.
If you were to take a person who’d grown up blind, and try to explain the concept of looking like things to them, it would be incomprehensible to them. Generally, blind people take it for granted that sight is a real phenomenon that they’re missing out on, because civilization around them runs on it in such a way that it wouldn’t make much sense if all the sighted people were just making it up. You could describe the mechanics of sight to a blind person, but they will not be able to conceive of the idea of “getting a picture in your head” the way we do. If a blind person told you “Don’t mess around with math and diagrams (which I can’t see anyway, so fuck you,) just give me an explanation of this whole “picture in your head” thing which you say lets you tell what shape something is without touching it,” no matter how you explained it, you wouldn’t be able to get them to understand sight like we do. It’s not that there’s something wrong with our models of how sight works, the problem is in the brain of the person who’s never developed a capacity to deal with vision.
Similarly, our brains don’t have the capacity to picture what’s going on on the scale of fundamental particles. There’s no reason why they should. Like blind people dealing with sight, we can explain what’s actually going on, but it’s never going to make intuitive sense to us. Can’t visualize a zero dimensional particle? Well, who says fundamental particles have to have size? Who says there can’t be any real thing which doesn’t take up space, so you can pack any number of them together without ever getting a bunch an inch across? Who says that you can’t really tell what shape something is until you run your hands over it?
If a blind person, unable to comprehend sight, decides that sight doesn’t exist, there will be things in the world around them that just don’t make sense to them. Similarly, there are physical theories which we can’t picture, but we can tell that the world around us makes a lot more sense if they’re true than if they’re not.
Your method of argumentation is a little unusual and perhaps a bit off-putting, but I don’t know why all your posts are being systematically downvoted this low. It’s clear from posts like this one that you’re not merely trolling, but I think you’re taking on too much at once. Also, your style is not very LessWrong friendly and you’re posting a lot. Maybe slow it down a bit, get familiar with the lay of the land a bit more.
I, for one, would like to hear a bit more about your misgivings. You’ve said some interesting things so far that have got me thinking.
As he comments, his posts show a clear disagreement with the scientific method. That, not the truth of quantum mechanics, is a basic part of what this community calls rationality.
Later in this sequence, Eliezer asserts that QM represents a failure of science to be as rational as it could be. The example can’t be understood unless one has a fairly good grasp of QM, but the truth of QM is not precisely the point of this particular series of essays.
(As an aside, I’m not completely convinced of the point because I think the example is poor, but that also is unrelated to the truth of quantum mechanics).
Further, explain a zero dimensional particle without math or magic.
Descriptions of anything to do with ‘zero’ contain math, either explicitly or implicitly. Demanding that others explain mathematical things without using math is a highly dubious tactic and I’m not sure what it is supposed to achieve.
My bad, I meant no dimension. 0 is for counting. Numbers can do anything apparently. Words can not. Mathematicians say they understand each other and perhaps they do. Perhaps I just can’t use EY’s magic tool yet?
One can’t really “explain” a particle. I would say, however, that if you cannot show the shape of the particle (how it occupies space), it is somewhat questionable to call it a “particle” in any classical sense that I’m familiar with.
I don’t think anyone disputes that the classical definition of particle and wave don’t really apply in the quantum mechanics level. But QM makes good predictions. If QM talked about the blicket/fand distinction, and said that blicket was sort of like particle, and fand was sort of like wave, would you be more comfortable with it?
Because QM is the only scientific theory that explains observations, including the weird ones. That’s something that needs to be acknowledged. The idea that math can’t be used to describe reality is just a more specific way of saying that we can’t describe reality at all.
Can you draw a dimensionless particle for me please?
All drawings that we do are abstractions. They represent something from a reality (fictional or allegedly actual) but they are never the same as the actual thing—they just represent it. Mathematics does much the same thing—just better.
Depends how far apart you space them. In a black hole, you could crunch up all the particles in existence into the same space, and you still wouldn’t be any closer to spanning the length of an inch.
We might not be able to visualize this, but our brains developed to help us operate on a scale where things actually do behave as if they were all made of substantial lumps of stuff which take up space and two things can’t be in the same space because the space is filled. That’s the sort of thing our brains evolved to deal with, so whether or not reality really works like that at the most fundamental level, we should expect ourselves to be bad at envisioning things that don’t work like that. For a rather long time, scientists thought that reality was like that all the way down. But then when we developed the technology to do experiments which actually probe what’s going on at that level, we started finding that reality simply doesn’t work that way. You can try and envision matter as being made of tiny little lumps of stuff bopping around, but if you do, you will unavoidably end up drawing conclusions that contradict what we find is actually going on.
“I can’t get a picture of this in my head” is not a rebuttal of a physical theory, because there’s no reason that our heads must actually be equipped to create pictures of how the fundamental level of reality works.
“I can’t get a picture of this in my head” is not a rebuttal of a physical theory, because there’s no reason that our heads must actually be equipped to create pictures of how the fundamental level of reality works.
Agreed, the basic structure of reality may be unvisualizable and otherwise incomprehensible to us. However, a theory is ostensibly a physical explanation, not merely a mathematical summary of the observed data. Reading over Monkeymind’s posts, it seems the point he is making is that these theories sort of seem to “feel like” physical explanations, but in the end are “just math.”
The question naturally arises, to the newbie at least, of what the difference really is between a mathematical summary of the data we’ve collected and a mathematical theory of how (by what mechanism) a physical phenomenon occurs.
I can’t explain QM very well, but here’s a video of “someone that can”. I would recommend paying special attention to the speech he gives around 37:00 minutes in about concepts like “wave” and “particle”, which we have coined in the macroscopic world and how we should not really apply terms which have mutually exclusive qualities in the macroscopic world to describe the world of fundamental particles.
His answers might still be unsatisfactory to you, but its the best I can offer.
Yes, “we should not really apply mutually exclusive terms.” And thank you for using the word concept when relating to wave and particle. I think the whole issue is knowing the dif between concepts and objects. Physics should be about objects. Of course all words are concepts, but if they can not resolve down to objects, they should not be used in ones hypothesis or theory.
Thanx for the link, hopefully I will be able to get to it.
My high-school physics class spent a lot of time talking about distances, and time, and forces, and velocity, and accelerations, and vectors. Neither distance, time, force, acceleration, velocity, nor vectors are objects; they are concepts we’ve formulated to characterize particular patterns in the ways objects behave. They sure seemed useful to me. So I’m inclined to reject this claim.
Just because we can’t visualize something doesn’t mean we can’t work out the rules. If quantum mechanical models accurately describe what’s happening, the fact that we can’t picture it in our heads is not a problem.
I would be a lot more willing to help you understand if I didn’t think you’re being obtuse on purpose though.
If quantum mechanical models accurately describe what’s happening, the fact that we can’t picture it in our heads is not a problem.
I think there’s a danger of equivocating here on the words “what’s happening.” In other words, which “what’s happening” do the QM models describe?
I’ll elaborate. If we observe X, do the QM models describe X, or do they describe the (so far unobserved) phenomena that may underly X?
If the mathematical QM model merely describes X, it’s hard to see how it is anything other than a very succinct cataloging of the observations, put in a very useful form. That’s quite an achievement, but I can understand the hesitation with calling it an explanation or a theory.
If the QM model actually describes some as-yet unobserved phenomena that is proposed to underly X, then it seems like it avoids Monkeymind’s criticisms because there is actually something additional being posited to be happening, behind the scenes as it were.
If it is the latter, I’d be interested in seeing an example (anything in QM).
If the QM model actually describes some as-yet unobserved phenomena that is proposed to underly X, then it seems like it avoids Monkeymind’s criticisms because there is actually something additional being posited to be happening, behind the scenes as it were.
There are probably more examples than I’m aware of, but as I pointed out in an earlier comment to Monkeymind, quantum entanglement, which was regarded as an extremely counterintuitive prediction, was predicted by quantum mechanical models well in advance of observation.
Yes, but I’m a lawyer and lack the background to give a more specific example. All I’m trying to say is that disbelieving QM does have practical, real-world consequences.
Well, I agree that there are things about the scientific process that could be done better, and I think most of the other people here would also, but I expect we disagree about the specifics. Can you tell me what you think ought to be done differently and why you think it would work better?
I think it would be easier to understand if you were to frame it in terms of specific examples. Supposing you want to find something out, how would you expect a scientist to do it, and how would you do it differently? Try using an example with a specific question, like “what makes it rain?” or, if you want to exercise some more creativity, something that we can’t easily look up the answers to, like “if you put someone in a position of power, do they really become more inclined to take advantage of people, or is it just a difference of opportunity?”
At this point, I don’t think we can work through this article without hashing out our differences about the scientific method. There’s too much of a gap of inferential distance (and please actually read that post I’m linking to, I’m not just putting it there for thematic appropriateness.)
This makes good sense and is the very reason why it is crucial to define ones KEY TERMS in the hypothesis stage. It is why I press for precise definitions, only to be told I do not understand or I am being obtuse, etc. I have been told that scientists use precise terms, but wave, particle, energy are anything but. It seems that they are having difficulty telling the difference between nouns and verbs as has already been discussed. Let us stick with WAVE for now:
Give me EY’s definition of wave (as pertains to this article). I gave mine earlier and was told it was not the scientific one as relating to the particle/wave duality. If wave is a disturbance through a medium, then wave is not an it but a what. This whole wave/particle paradox might have been avoided had someone defined the terms waaaay back then.
Scientists did define their terms way back then. They never introduced the idea of a wave/particle duality without knowing exactly what they meant.
The reason I keep diverting from the topic is that it takes more than just defining one’s terms to communicate complex ideas without a shared body of information. Try and explain evolution to a person who’s been brought up in a fundamentalist household, for instance, and while you might pat yourself on the back afterwards for an explanation well delivered, they’re probably not going to come away understanding it, unless you take the time to bridge the entire gap of uncomprehension.
I seriously suggest reading the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, which I linked to before, because some of the points you’re expressing are misconceptions that it was written for the specific purpose of addressing. Eliezer wrote the sequence in order to bring people up to the point of being able to meaningfully discuss the ideas we work with here without talking past each other. He put a lot of work into them, and I’d rather not replicate it all when it’s already there for exactly that reason. There is a reason that Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions is the first in the suggested reading order of the sequences, and the quantum physics sequence is the fifth.
Yes, it does take far more than just defining ones terms, but we must start there b4 we can go anywhere else! I don’t mean a infinite number of now define that, now define that....just the KEY TERMS of one’s hypothesis b4 moving on to the theory. Whatever the defs are they must be used CONSISTENTLY.
I agree that key terms need a definition. They have apparently all been defined before, but no one here has yet shown an interest in giving those (or any) precise definitions right now. I’m not sure why, especially given that this is LessWrong. I’d help you out on that, but I honestly don’t know the precise definition that QM theorists use for wave. Surely someone must know?
While there are plenty of issues affecting reproducibility of scientific results, physics is much better in this area than other sciences having stricter requirements to establish statistical significance.
x
I can’t draw an electron. In fact, nobody can really draw any sort of fundamental particle. They don’t look like anything. This might seem like a cop out, or a way to handwave away the fact that we don’t know what they look like, but it’s not. On the scale that fundamental particles exist on, the mechanisms which give rise to the phenomenon we experience as “looking like something” don’t exist. An electron cannot look like anything.
No, it doesn’t.
If you insist that you understand what scientists mean when they call matter wavelike and particlelike, why don’t you try explaining it? That much, I do understand, well enough that I can explain what it means I should observe regarding matter on the particle scale and what I should not, and I will be able to tell if your explanation is correct.
I also can’t explain directionless arrows, because to the best of my understanding, Eliezer isn’t actually talking about directionless arrows at any point. If he is, my understanding of this post is wrong. What he does talk about are arrows, figurative entities which indicate both what direction from the origin something is pointing and how far away from it is is (I’m not even going to try explaining what the origin in this context is and what it means to move away from it, not because I don’t understand it, but because it would take way more time and effort than I’m willing to put in right now to make it comprehensible to you,) but although the arrows point in a specific direction, we can’t tell which direction it is. Imagine an actual, physical arrow affixed to a pole in the ground, and the arrow is pointing either north or south. Imagine also that we have no way of knowing which way is north or south, we have no compass, the sky is overcast, we have no landmarks to orient by, etcetera. We do not know whether the arrow is pointing north or south, but we can still measure how long it is.
This is not a perfect analogy, but if you think of it this way you’ll have a better idea of what Eliezer was talking about if you just think “directionless arrows = nonsense.”
x
“A disturbance through a medium” is not what scientists mean when they say that matter has wavelike properties though. It doesn’t matter what “your definition” is, if it’s not what scientists mean when they use the phrase “matter has both wavelike and particlelike properties” to communicate an idea to each other.
In any case, I’ve been suspicious for a while, but at this point I think it’s very likely that you’re deliberately trolling this site. You’re combining a significant level of familiarity with scientific anecdotes with a profound, seemingly willful level of ignorance, and I think you’re faking it.
Reminds me a bit of this.
No, not exactly like that, as I just explained in my last post. However, I have some paradigms that have allowed me to successfully cut through a lot of BS. If I discover they do not apply to mathematical physics, then I won’t waste any more of your or my time, that you can “count” on.
x
No, you’re not making too much sense for someone who’s profoundly ignorant, you’re making too little sense for someone who knows what you seem to know. It’s possible that you’ve actually gone out of your way to pick up all these words and pass phrases without having any idea what they mean, and that’s exactly what you’re acting like, but I don’t buy it.
I don’t want to continue a discussion with you if I think you’re willfully refusing to understand, but I like this analogy, so I’m going to toss it out and if by some chance you’re not faking and it actually helps, it’ll give us something to work with.
A person who is born blind and grows up that way does not have the neurological faculties to process an image and take information from it the way we do. A blind person may have a concept of “sphere” or “cube,” and know what they will feel if they run their hands over one, but if a person who’d grown up blind were given functional eyes and looked at a sphere, they would not be able to tell you in advance that by running their hands over it they should feel a smooth surface that curves uniformly in on itself. This was an issue which was debated for some time by philosophers, but eventually we developed the medical technology to actually give eyesight to some people who’d grown up without it, and it stopped being just a matter of “logical argument,” and became something we could go out and actually check.
If you were to take a person who’d grown up blind, and try to explain the concept of looking like things to them, it would be incomprehensible to them. Generally, blind people take it for granted that sight is a real phenomenon that they’re missing out on, because civilization around them runs on it in such a way that it wouldn’t make much sense if all the sighted people were just making it up. You could describe the mechanics of sight to a blind person, but they will not be able to conceive of the idea of “getting a picture in your head” the way we do. If a blind person told you “Don’t mess around with math and diagrams (which I can’t see anyway, so fuck you,) just give me an explanation of this whole “picture in your head” thing which you say lets you tell what shape something is without touching it,” no matter how you explained it, you wouldn’t be able to get them to understand sight like we do. It’s not that there’s something wrong with our models of how sight works, the problem is in the brain of the person who’s never developed a capacity to deal with vision.
Similarly, our brains don’t have the capacity to picture what’s going on on the scale of fundamental particles. There’s no reason why they should. Like blind people dealing with sight, we can explain what’s actually going on, but it’s never going to make intuitive sense to us. Can’t visualize a zero dimensional particle? Well, who says fundamental particles have to have size? Who says there can’t be any real thing which doesn’t take up space, so you can pack any number of them together without ever getting a bunch an inch across? Who says that you can’t really tell what shape something is until you run your hands over it?
If a blind person, unable to comprehend sight, decides that sight doesn’t exist, there will be things in the world around them that just don’t make sense to them. Similarly, there are physical theories which we can’t picture, but we can tell that the world around us makes a lot more sense if they’re true than if they’re not.
x
Your method of argumentation is a little unusual and perhaps a bit off-putting, but I don’t know why all your posts are being systematically downvoted this low. It’s clear from posts like this one that you’re not merely trolling, but I think you’re taking on too much at once. Also, your style is not very LessWrong friendly and you’re posting a lot. Maybe slow it down a bit, get familiar with the lay of the land a bit more.
I, for one, would like to hear a bit more about your misgivings. You’ve said some interesting things so far that have got me thinking.
As he comments, his posts show a clear disagreement with the scientific method. That, not the truth of quantum mechanics, is a basic part of what this community calls rationality.
Later in this sequence, Eliezer asserts that QM represents a failure of science to be as rational as it could be. The example can’t be understood unless one has a fairly good grasp of QM, but the truth of QM is not precisely the point of this particular series of essays.
(As an aside, I’m not completely convinced of the point because I think the example is poor, but that also is unrelated to the truth of quantum mechanics).
Descriptions of anything to do with ‘zero’ contain math, either explicitly or implicitly. Demanding that others explain mathematical things without using math is a highly dubious tactic and I’m not sure what it is supposed to achieve.
My bad, I meant no dimension. 0 is for counting. Numbers can do anything apparently. Words can not. Mathematicians say they understand each other and perhaps they do. Perhaps I just can’t use EY’s magic tool yet?
One can’t really “explain” a particle. I would say, however, that if you cannot show the shape of the particle (how it occupies space), it is somewhat questionable to call it a “particle” in any classical sense that I’m familiar with.
I don’t think anyone disputes that the classical definition of particle and wave don’t really apply in the quantum mechanics level. But QM makes good predictions. If QM talked about the blicket/fand distinction, and said that blicket was sort of like particle, and fand was sort of like wave, would you be more comfortable with it?
Because QM is the only scientific theory that explains observations, including the weird ones. That’s something that needs to be acknowledged. The idea that math can’t be used to describe reality is just a more specific way of saying that we can’t describe reality at all.
All drawings that we do are abstractions. They represent something from a reality (fictional or allegedly actual) but they are never the same as the actual thing—they just represent it. Mathematics does much the same thing—just better.
OK, then draw a dimensionless point for me. If you can’t do that then describe it.
I plus thee for humor! That’s what I thot. Now how many of these makes up a one inch line?
Depends how far apart you space them. In a black hole, you could crunch up all the particles in existence into the same space, and you still wouldn’t be any closer to spanning the length of an inch.
We might not be able to visualize this, but our brains developed to help us operate on a scale where things actually do behave as if they were all made of substantial lumps of stuff which take up space and two things can’t be in the same space because the space is filled. That’s the sort of thing our brains evolved to deal with, so whether or not reality really works like that at the most fundamental level, we should expect ourselves to be bad at envisioning things that don’t work like that. For a rather long time, scientists thought that reality was like that all the way down. But then when we developed the technology to do experiments which actually probe what’s going on at that level, we started finding that reality simply doesn’t work that way. You can try and envision matter as being made of tiny little lumps of stuff bopping around, but if you do, you will unavoidably end up drawing conclusions that contradict what we find is actually going on.
“I can’t get a picture of this in my head” is not a rebuttal of a physical theory, because there’s no reason that our heads must actually be equipped to create pictures of how the fundamental level of reality works.
Agreed, the basic structure of reality may be unvisualizable and otherwise incomprehensible to us. However, a theory is ostensibly a physical explanation, not merely a mathematical summary of the observed data. Reading over Monkeymind’s posts, it seems the point he is making is that these theories sort of seem to “feel like” physical explanations, but in the end are “just math.”
The question naturally arises, to the newbie at least, of what the difference really is between a mathematical summary of the data we’ve collected and a mathematical theory of how (by what mechanism) a physical phenomenon occurs.
x
I can’t explain QM very well, but here’s a video of “someone that can”. I would recommend paying special attention to the speech he gives around 37:00 minutes in about concepts like “wave” and “particle”, which we have coined in the macroscopic world and how we should not really apply terms which have mutually exclusive qualities in the macroscopic world to describe the world of fundamental particles.
His answers might still be unsatisfactory to you, but its the best I can offer.
Yes, “we should not really apply mutually exclusive terms.” And thank you for using the word concept when relating to wave and particle. I think the whole issue is knowing the dif between concepts and objects. Physics should be about objects. Of course all words are concepts, but if they can not resolve down to objects, they should not be used in ones hypothesis or theory.
Thanx for the link, hopefully I will be able to get to it.
My high-school physics class spent a lot of time talking about distances, and time, and forces, and velocity, and accelerations, and vectors. Neither distance, time, force, acceleration, velocity, nor vectors are objects; they are concepts we’ve formulated to characterize particular patterns in the ways objects behave. They sure seemed useful to me. So I’m inclined to reject this claim.
Why shouldn’t physics talk about concepts? Or first, what is your definition of “object” and “concept”—even just by examples.
Just because we can’t visualize something doesn’t mean we can’t work out the rules. If quantum mechanical models accurately describe what’s happening, the fact that we can’t picture it in our heads is not a problem.
I would be a lot more willing to help you understand if I didn’t think you’re being obtuse on purpose though.
I think there’s a danger of equivocating here on the words “what’s happening.” In other words, which “what’s happening” do the QM models describe?
I’ll elaborate. If we observe X, do the QM models describe X, or do they describe the (so far unobserved) phenomena that may underly X?
If the mathematical QM model merely describes X, it’s hard to see how it is anything other than a very succinct cataloging of the observations, put in a very useful form. That’s quite an achievement, but I can understand the hesitation with calling it an explanation or a theory.
If the QM model actually describes some as-yet unobserved phenomena that is proposed to underly X, then it seems like it avoids Monkeymind’s criticisms because there is actually something additional being posited to be happening, behind the scenes as it were.
If it is the latter, I’d be interested in seeing an example (anything in QM).
There are probably more examples than I’m aware of, but as I pointed out in an earlier comment to Monkeymind, quantum entanglement, which was regarded as an extremely counterintuitive prediction, was predicted by quantum mechanical models well in advance of observation.
ETA: Bose-Einstein condensates also come to mind.
If QM were false, computer circuits would not work.
That depends how false, and in what ways.
Yes, but I’m a lawyer and lack the background to give a more specific example. All I’m trying to say is that disbelieving QM does have practical, real-world consequences.
x
Well, I agree that there are things about the scientific process that could be done better, and I think most of the other people here would also, but I expect we disagree about the specifics. Can you tell me what you think ought to be done differently and why you think it would work better?
x
That’s an extremely unclear explanation.
I think it would be easier to understand if you were to frame it in terms of specific examples. Supposing you want to find something out, how would you expect a scientist to do it, and how would you do it differently? Try using an example with a specific question, like “what makes it rain?” or, if you want to exercise some more creativity, something that we can’t easily look up the answers to, like “if you put someone in a position of power, do they really become more inclined to take advantage of people, or is it just a difference of opportunity?”
At this point, I don’t think we can work through this article without hashing out our differences about the scientific method. There’s too much of a gap of inferential distance (and please actually read that post I’m linking to, I’m not just putting it there for thematic appropriateness.)
x
Scientists did define their terms way back then. They never introduced the idea of a wave/particle duality without knowing exactly what they meant.
The reason I keep diverting from the topic is that it takes more than just defining one’s terms to communicate complex ideas without a shared body of information. Try and explain evolution to a person who’s been brought up in a fundamentalist household, for instance, and while you might pat yourself on the back afterwards for an explanation well delivered, they’re probably not going to come away understanding it, unless you take the time to bridge the entire gap of uncomprehension.
I seriously suggest reading the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, which I linked to before, because some of the points you’re expressing are misconceptions that it was written for the specific purpose of addressing. Eliezer wrote the sequence in order to bring people up to the point of being able to meaningfully discuss the ideas we work with here without talking past each other. He put a lot of work into them, and I’d rather not replicate it all when it’s already there for exactly that reason. There is a reason that Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions is the first in the suggested reading order of the sequences, and the quantum physics sequence is the fifth.
x
I agree that key terms need a definition. They have apparently all been defined before, but no one here has yet shown an interest in giving those (or any) precise definitions right now. I’m not sure why, especially given that this is LessWrong. I’d help you out on that, but I honestly don’t know the precise definition that QM theorists use for wave. Surely someone must know?
What wrong answers do you see it giving?
While there are plenty of issues affecting reproducibility of scientific results, physics is much better in this area than other sciences having stricter requirements to establish statistical significance.
How big is an “inch” again? I’m stuck in the 21st century over here. We haven’t used inches since before my parents were born.
More seriously, why would I try to make up a one inch line out of dimensionless points? That sounds difficult and doesn’t seem to prove anything.
x