How often do you manage to assemble a few previous ideas in a way in which it is genuinely possible that nobody has assembled them before—that is, that you’ve had a truly original thought? When you do, how do you go about checking whether that’s the case? Or does such a thing matter to you at all?
For example: last night, I briefly considered the ‘Multiple Interacting Worlds’ interpretation of quantum physics, in which it is postulated that there are a large number of universes, each of which has pure Newtonian physics internally, but whose interactions with near-identical universes cause what we observe as quantum phenomena. It’s very similar to the ‘Multiple Worlds’ interpretation, except instead of new universes branching from old ones at every moment in an ever-spreading bush, all the branches branched out at the Big Bang. It occurred to me that while the ‘large number’ of universes is generally treated as being infinite, my limited understanding of the theory doesn’t mean that that’s necessarily the case. And if there are a finite number of parallel worlds interacting with our own, each of which is slightly different and only interacts for as long as the initial conditions haven’t diverged too much… then, at some point in the future, the number of such universes interacting with ours will decrease, eventually to zero, thus reducing “quantum” effects until our universe operates under fully Newtonian principles. And looking backwards, this implies that “quantum” effects may have once been stronger when there were more universes that had not yet diverged from our own. All of which adds up to a mechanism by which certain universal constants will gradually change over the lifetime of the universe.
It’s not everyday that I think of a brand-new eschatology to set alongside the Big Crunch, Big Freeze, and Big Rip.
And sure, until I dive into the world of physics to start figuring out which universal constants would change, and in which direction, it’s not even worth calling the above a ‘theory’; at best, it’s technobabble that could be used as background for a science-fiction story. But as far as I can tell, it’s /novel/ technobabble. Which is what inspired the initial paragraph of this post: do you do anything in particular with potentially truly original ideas?
You can’t ever be entirely sure if an idea wasn’t thought of before. But, if you care to demonstrate originality, you can try an extensive literature review to see if anyone else has thought of the same idea. After that, the best you can say is that you haven’t seen anyone else with the same idea.
Personally, I don’t think being the first person to have an idea is worth much. It depends entirely on what you do with it. I tend to do detailed literature reviews because they help me generate ideas, not because they help me verify that my ideas are original.
At the moment I’m working on a PhD, so my methods are biased towards resources available at a major research university. I have a list of different things to try when I want to be as comprehensive as possible. I’ll flesh out my list in more detail. You can do many of these if you are not at a university, e.g., if you can’t access online journal articles, try the Less Wrong Help Desk.
In terms of sources, the internet and physical libraries will be the main ones. I wrote more on the process of finding relevant prior work.
This process can be done in any particular order. You probably will find doing it iteratively to be useful, as you will become more familiar with different terminologies, etc.
Here are some things to try:
Searching Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to keep a list of search terms you’ve tried. Also, keep a list of search terms to try. The problem with doing this alone is that it is incomplete, especially for older literature, and likely will remain so for some time.
Searching other research paper databases. In my case, this includes publisher specific databases (Springer, Wiley, Elsevier, etc.), citation and bibliographic databases, and DTIC.
Look for review papers (which often list a lot of related papers), books on the subject (again, they often list many related papers), and also annotated bibliographies/lists of abstracts. The latter can be a goldmine, especially if they contain foreign literature as well.
Browsing the library. I like to go to the section for a particular relevant book and look at others nearby. You can find things you never would have noticed otherwise this way. It’s also worth noting that if you are in a particular city for a day, you might have luck checking a local library’s online catalog or even the physical library itself. For example, I used to live near DC, but I never tried using the Library of Congress until after I moved away. I was working an internship in the area one summer after moving, and I used the opportunity to scan a very rare document.
Following citations in related papers and books. If something relevant to your interest was cited, track down the paper. (By the way, too many citations are terrible. It seems that a large fraction of researchers treat citations are some sort of merely academic exercise rather than a way for people to find related literature. I could insert a rant here.)
Searching WorldCat. WorldCat is a database of library databases. If you’re looking for a book, this could help. I also find browsing by category there to be helpful.
Asking knowledgeable people. In many cases, this will save you a lot of time. I recently asked a professor a question at their office hours, and in a few minutes they verified what I spent a few hours figuring out but was still unsure of. I wish I asked first.
Looking for papers in other languages. Not everything is written in English, especially if you want things from the early 20th century. If you really want to dig deep, you can do this, though it becomes much harder for two reasons. First, you probably don’t know every language in the world. OCR and Google Translate help, thankfully. Second, (at least in the US) many foreign journals are hard to track down for various reasons. However, the benefits could be large, as almost no one does this, and that makes many results obscure.
It should be obvious that doing a detailed review of the literature can require a large amount of time, depending on the subject. Almost no one actually does this for that reason, but I think it can be a good use of time in many cases.
Also, interlibrary loan services can be really useful for this. I submit requests for anything I have a slight interest in. The costs to me are negligible (only time, as the service is free to me), and the benefits range from none to extremely substantial. You might not have access to such services, unfortunately. I think you can pay some libraries for “document delivery” services which are comparable, though maybe expensive.
Finally, you probably would find it to be useful to keep notes on what you’ve read. I have a bunch of outlines where I make connections between different things I’ve read. This, I think, is the real value of the literature review, but verifying that an idea is original is another value you can derive from the process.
With someting so generically put, I’d say write them down to look at a week later.
PTOIs can be really situational, too. In that case, just go with it. Cooking sometimes benefits from inspiration.
For example: last night, I briefly considered the ‘Multiple Interacting Worlds’ interpretation of quantum physics, in which it is postulated that there are a large number of universes, each of which has pure Newtonian physics internally, but whose interactions with near-identical universes cause what we observe as quantum phenomena. It’s very similar to the ‘Multiple Worlds’ interpretation, except instead of new universes branching from old ones at every moment in an ever-spreading bush, all the branches branched out at the Big Bang.
The “Many worlds” interpretation does not postulate a large number of universes. It only postulates:
1) The world is described by a quantum state, which is an element of a kind of vector space known as Hilbert space.
2) The quantum state evolves through time in accordance with the Schrödinger equation, with some particular Hamiltonian.
That’s it. Take the old Copenhagen interpretation and remove all ideas about ‘collapsing the wave function’.
The ‘many worlds’ appear when you do the math, they are derived from these postulates.
Regarding the difference between ‘the worlds all appear at the big bang’ versus ‘the worlds are always appearing’, what would the difference between these be in terms of the actual mathematical equations?
The ‘new worlds appearing all the time’ in MWH is a consequence of the quantum state evolving through time in accordance with the Schrödinger equation.
All of that said, I don’t mean to criticize your post or anything, I thought it was great technobabble!
I just have no idea how it would translate into actual theories. :)
‘Many Interacting Worlds’ seems to be a slightly separate interpretation from ‘Many Worlds’ - what’s true for MW isn’t necessarily so for MIW. (There’ve been some blog posts in recent months on the topic which brought it to my attention.)
That’s sort of opposite to another less-well-known ending that Max Tegmark calls “Big Snap”, where an expanding universe increases the “granularity” at which quantum effects apply until that gets large enough to interfere with ordinary physics.
How would many interacting Newtonian worlds account for entanglement, EPR, and Bells inequality violations while preserving linearity? People have tried in the past to make classical or semi-classical explanations for quantum mechanics, but they’ve all failed at getting these to work right. Without actual math it is hard to say if your idea would work right or not, but I strongly suspect it would run into the same problems.
A year and a half ago, Frank Tipler (of the Omega Point) appeared on the podcast “Singularity 1 on 1”, which can be heard at https://www.singularityweblog.com/frank-j-tipler-the-singularity-is-inevitable/ . While I put no measurable confidence in his assertions about science proving theology or the ‘three singularities’, a few interesting ideas do pop up in that interview. Stealing from one of the comments:
how modern physics (i.e., General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics) are simply special cases of classical mechanics (i.e., Newtonian mechanics, particularly in its most powerful formulation of the Hamilton-Jacobi Equation), and how Quantum Mechanics is actually more deterministic than Newtonian mechanics.
Original Ideas
How often do you manage to assemble a few previous ideas in a way in which it is genuinely possible that nobody has assembled them before—that is, that you’ve had a truly original thought? When you do, how do you go about checking whether that’s the case? Or does such a thing matter to you at all?
For example: last night, I briefly considered the ‘Multiple Interacting Worlds’ interpretation of quantum physics, in which it is postulated that there are a large number of universes, each of which has pure Newtonian physics internally, but whose interactions with near-identical universes cause what we observe as quantum phenomena. It’s very similar to the ‘Multiple Worlds’ interpretation, except instead of new universes branching from old ones at every moment in an ever-spreading bush, all the branches branched out at the Big Bang. It occurred to me that while the ‘large number’ of universes is generally treated as being infinite, my limited understanding of the theory doesn’t mean that that’s necessarily the case. And if there are a finite number of parallel worlds interacting with our own, each of which is slightly different and only interacts for as long as the initial conditions haven’t diverged too much… then, at some point in the future, the number of such universes interacting with ours will decrease, eventually to zero, thus reducing “quantum” effects until our universe operates under fully Newtonian principles. And looking backwards, this implies that “quantum” effects may have once been stronger when there were more universes that had not yet diverged from our own. All of which adds up to a mechanism by which certain universal constants will gradually change over the lifetime of the universe.
It’s not everyday that I think of a brand-new eschatology to set alongside the Big Crunch, Big Freeze, and Big Rip.
And sure, until I dive into the world of physics to start figuring out which universal constants would change, and in which direction, it’s not even worth calling the above a ‘theory’; at best, it’s technobabble that could be used as background for a science-fiction story. But as far as I can tell, it’s /novel/ technobabble. Which is what inspired the initial paragraph of this post: do you do anything in particular with potentially truly original ideas?
You can’t ever be entirely sure if an idea wasn’t thought of before. But, if you care to demonstrate originality, you can try an extensive literature review to see if anyone else has thought of the same idea. After that, the best you can say is that you haven’t seen anyone else with the same idea.
Personally, I don’t think being the first person to have an idea is worth much. It depends entirely on what you do with it. I tend to do detailed literature reviews because they help me generate ideas, not because they help me verify that my ideas are original.
I’m a random person on the internet; what sort of sources would be used in such a review?
At the moment I’m working on a PhD, so my methods are biased towards resources available at a major research university. I have a list of different things to try when I want to be as comprehensive as possible. I’ll flesh out my list in more detail. You can do many of these if you are not at a university, e.g., if you can’t access online journal articles, try the Less Wrong Help Desk.
In terms of sources, the internet and physical libraries will be the main ones. I wrote more on the process of finding relevant prior work.
This process can be done in any particular order. You probably will find doing it iteratively to be useful, as you will become more familiar with different terminologies, etc.
Here are some things to try:
Searching Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to keep a list of search terms you’ve tried. Also, keep a list of search terms to try. The problem with doing this alone is that it is incomplete, especially for older literature, and likely will remain so for some time.
Searching other research paper databases. In my case, this includes publisher specific databases (Springer, Wiley, Elsevier, etc.), citation and bibliographic databases, and DTIC.
Look for review papers (which often list a lot of related papers), books on the subject (again, they often list many related papers), and also annotated bibliographies/lists of abstracts. The latter can be a goldmine, especially if they contain foreign literature as well.
Browsing the library. I like to go to the section for a particular relevant book and look at others nearby. You can find things you never would have noticed otherwise this way. It’s also worth noting that if you are in a particular city for a day, you might have luck checking a local library’s online catalog or even the physical library itself. For example, I used to live near DC, but I never tried using the Library of Congress until after I moved away. I was working an internship in the area one summer after moving, and I used the opportunity to scan a very rare document.
Following citations in related papers and books. If something relevant to your interest was cited, track down the paper. (By the way, too many citations are terrible. It seems that a large fraction of researchers treat citations are some sort of merely academic exercise rather than a way for people to find related literature. I could insert a rant here.)
Searching WorldCat. WorldCat is a database of library databases. If you’re looking for a book, this could help. I also find browsing by category there to be helpful.
Asking knowledgeable people. In many cases, this will save you a lot of time. I recently asked a professor a question at their office hours, and in a few minutes they verified what I spent a few hours figuring out but was still unsure of. I wish I asked first.
Looking for papers in other languages. Not everything is written in English, especially if you want things from the early 20th century. If you really want to dig deep, you can do this, though it becomes much harder for two reasons. First, you probably don’t know every language in the world. OCR and Google Translate help, thankfully. Second, (at least in the US) many foreign journals are hard to track down for various reasons. However, the benefits could be large, as almost no one does this, and that makes many results obscure.
It should be obvious that doing a detailed review of the literature can require a large amount of time, depending on the subject. Almost no one actually does this for that reason, but I think it can be a good use of time in many cases.
Also, interlibrary loan services can be really useful for this. I submit requests for anything I have a slight interest in. The costs to me are negligible (only time, as the service is free to me), and the benefits range from none to extremely substantial. You might not have access to such services, unfortunately. I think you can pay some libraries for “document delivery” services which are comparable, though maybe expensive.
Finally, you probably would find it to be useful to keep notes on what you’ve read. I have a bunch of outlines where I make connections between different things I’ve read. This, I think, is the real value of the literature review, but verifying that an idea is original is another value you can derive from the process.
With someting so generically put, I’d say write them down to look at a week later. PTOIs can be really situational, too. In that case, just go with it. Cooking sometimes benefits from inspiration.
The “Many worlds” interpretation does not postulate a large number of universes. It only postulates:
1) The world is described by a quantum state, which is an element of a kind of vector space known as Hilbert space. 2) The quantum state evolves through time in accordance with the Schrödinger equation, with some particular Hamiltonian.
That’s it. Take the old Copenhagen interpretation and remove all ideas about ‘collapsing the wave function’.
The ‘many worlds’ appear when you do the math, they are derived from these postulates.
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/02/19/the-wrong-objections-to-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics/
Regarding the difference between ‘the worlds all appear at the big bang’ versus ‘the worlds are always appearing’, what would the difference between these be in terms of the actual mathematical equations?
The ‘new worlds appearing all the time’ in MWH is a consequence of the quantum state evolving through time in accordance with the Schrödinger equation.
All of that said, I don’t mean to criticize your post or anything, I thought it was great technobabble! I just have no idea how it would translate into actual theories. :)
‘Many Interacting Worlds’ seems to be a slightly separate interpretation from ‘Many Worlds’ - what’s true for MW isn’t necessarily so for MIW. (There’ve been some blog posts in recent months on the topic which brought it to my attention.)
That’s sort of opposite to another less-well-known ending that Max Tegmark calls “Big Snap”, where an expanding universe increases the “granularity” at which quantum effects apply until that gets large enough to interfere with ordinary physics.
How would many interacting Newtonian worlds account for entanglement, EPR, and Bells inequality violations while preserving linearity? People have tried in the past to make classical or semi-classical explanations for quantum mechanics, but they’ve all failed at getting these to work right. Without actual math it is hard to say if your idea would work right or not, but I strongly suspect it would run into the same problems.
A year and a half ago, Frank Tipler (of the Omega Point) appeared on the podcast “Singularity 1 on 1”, which can be heard at https://www.singularityweblog.com/frank-j-tipler-the-singularity-is-inevitable/ . While I put no measurable confidence in his assertions about science proving theology or the ‘three singularities’, a few interesting ideas do pop up in that interview. Stealing from one of the comments: