In another post you write: “Quantum mechanics has been around for billions of years before the Sun coalesced from interstellar hydrogen. Quantum mechanics was here before you were, and if you have a problem with that, you are the one who needs to change. QM sure won’t.”
Where did you get this notion from? QM is inconsistent with GR. I could just as easily (and just as unreasonably) assert that GR has been around for billions of years… The problem with that assertion would be the same problem with your assertion. There is no evidence for it.
What makes you a QM-pusher instead of a GR-pusher? It’s not evidence, and you can’t push both. Is this your favorite flavor of the times? As another poster in this thread has noted, the degree of confidence you have in some of the statements you make is way, way off base.
Here’s one more example of your radically misplaced confidence. You write: “But since this final conclusion happens to be counterintuitive to a human parietal cortex, it helps to have the brute fact of quantum mechanics to crush all opposition. Damn, have I waited a long time to be able to say that.”
I’m glad it made you happy to say it. But you have no good argument for it. Nor do I think that on your views you could possibly have a reason to believe it.
You also write: “We live in a quantum universe where the notion of “same hydrogen atom vs. different hydrogen atom” is physical nonsense.”
Let’s suppose your misplaced faith in QM is rational (it isn’t, but let’s suppose it is). And let’s suppose that the notion you describe is “physical nonsense”. (Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.) It doesn’t follow that the notion you describe is nonsense unless you assume that something is nonsense if it is physical nonsense. And here, of course, you are hardly entitled to that assumption. It sounds just like the indefensible verificationist swill spewed by the rabid and wholly irrational logical positivists.
You’re worshipping at the altar of science and you’re picking and choosing the science you think will help you best defend your funny views, and then you’re baldly asserting that this science constitutes a true description of reality EVEN WHEN IT CONTRADICTS other scientific theories (such as GR) that have just as good scientific credentials.
Unless you have some sexy response to this post, I will assume that you would get laughed out of a philosophy of science department.
Quantum mechanics is not inconsistent with general relativity, the standard ways of quantizing a theory fail for general relativity. This is not a surprise; physicists knew that these standard methods were not complete, they just produced theories that worked well enough when applied in other areas. Based on your post, it is somewhat likely that you read popular material about loop quantum gravity. If that theory is consistent, has the right long distance limits, etc., then it is both a quantum mechanical and general relativistic theory.
Even if quantum mechanics is overthrown, whatever replaces it will have to be enough like it that we would not have noticed the difference, which is a very stringent requirement, especially given quantum computing experiments. Quantum mechanics is a very rigid structure, and it is difficult to make something only slightly different.
Quantum mechanics makes a multitude of predictions which have been experimentally verified. Yes, it’s inconsistent with general relativity. Newtonian mechanics is inconsistent with Maxwell’s equations, which led to the theory of special relativity. Special relativity contains those other theories, which are inconsistent by themselves. If there’s a better theory which can describe both quantum and gravitational phenomena, it will contain quantum mechanics and general relativity. The experimentally confirmed results of quantum mechanics will still be relevant in their domain, just as F = ma is still a useful equation today for objects with velocities much less than the speed of light.
The short answer is that while we know QM is incomplete, we equally know that it all has to add up to normality—meaning among other things that tested QM results, including the weird ones, have to be explainable by the underlying mechanics.
We’re not going to discover some result in the future that’ll make quantum mechanics—or general relativity, or any other well-established physical theory—throw up its hands and disappear. We very likely will discover results that’ll explain reality better than they do, but that reality includes everything they predict within the domains where they’ve been shown to work well. Science is not a race, nor a battle.
Eliezer,
In another post you write: “Quantum mechanics has been around for billions of years before the Sun coalesced from interstellar hydrogen. Quantum mechanics was here before you were, and if you have a problem with that, you are the one who needs to change. QM sure won’t.”
Where did you get this notion from? QM is inconsistent with GR. I could just as easily (and just as unreasonably) assert that GR has been around for billions of years… The problem with that assertion would be the same problem with your assertion. There is no evidence for it.
What makes you a QM-pusher instead of a GR-pusher? It’s not evidence, and you can’t push both. Is this your favorite flavor of the times? As another poster in this thread has noted, the degree of confidence you have in some of the statements you make is way, way off base.
Here’s one more example of your radically misplaced confidence. You write: “But since this final conclusion happens to be counterintuitive to a human parietal cortex, it helps to have the brute fact of quantum mechanics to crush all opposition. Damn, have I waited a long time to be able to say that.”
I’m glad it made you happy to say it. But you have no good argument for it. Nor do I think that on your views you could possibly have a reason to believe it.
You also write: “We live in a quantum universe where the notion of “same hydrogen atom vs. different hydrogen atom” is physical nonsense.”
Let’s suppose your misplaced faith in QM is rational (it isn’t, but let’s suppose it is). And let’s suppose that the notion you describe is “physical nonsense”. (Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.) It doesn’t follow that the notion you describe is nonsense unless you assume that something is nonsense if it is physical nonsense. And here, of course, you are hardly entitled to that assumption. It sounds just like the indefensible verificationist swill spewed by the rabid and wholly irrational logical positivists.
You’re worshipping at the altar of science and you’re picking and choosing the science you think will help you best defend your funny views, and then you’re baldly asserting that this science constitutes a true description of reality EVEN WHEN IT CONTRADICTS other scientific theories (such as GR) that have just as good scientific credentials.
Unless you have some sexy response to this post, I will assume that you would get laughed out of a philosophy of science department.
Quantum mechanics is not inconsistent with general relativity, the standard ways of quantizing a theory fail for general relativity. This is not a surprise; physicists knew that these standard methods were not complete, they just produced theories that worked well enough when applied in other areas. Based on your post, it is somewhat likely that you read popular material about loop quantum gravity. If that theory is consistent, has the right long distance limits, etc., then it is both a quantum mechanical and general relativistic theory.
Even if quantum mechanics is overthrown, whatever replaces it will have to be enough like it that we would not have noticed the difference, which is a very stringent requirement, especially given quantum computing experiments. Quantum mechanics is a very rigid structure, and it is difficult to make something only slightly different.
Quantum mechanics makes a multitude of predictions which have been experimentally verified. Yes, it’s inconsistent with general relativity. Newtonian mechanics is inconsistent with Maxwell’s equations, which led to the theory of special relativity. Special relativity contains those other theories, which are inconsistent by themselves. If there’s a better theory which can describe both quantum and gravitational phenomena, it will contain quantum mechanics and general relativity. The experimentally confirmed results of quantum mechanics will still be relevant in their domain, just as F = ma is still a useful equation today for objects with velocities much less than the speed of light.
The short answer is that while we know QM is incomplete, we equally know that it all has to add up to normality—meaning among other things that tested QM results, including the weird ones, have to be explainable by the underlying mechanics.
We’re not going to discover some result in the future that’ll make quantum mechanics—or general relativity, or any other well-established physical theory—throw up its hands and disappear. We very likely will discover results that’ll explain reality better than they do, but that reality includes everything they predict within the domains where they’ve been shown to work well. Science is not a race, nor a battle.