You have now moved into talking gibberish - experimentation is just systemic observation. Before anyone used a microscope no one knew those unicellular creatures existed.
No, a scientific experiment is simply a systematic process to accept or reject a hypothesis. Observation can certainly be a part of that process, in fact, it might be the only necessary step. If I hypothesize that there’s a cat in my living room, and then I go there and observe my cat laying in the sun, I’ve just validated the hypothesis. Granted, validating that hypothesis isn’t going to get me the Nobel Prize. 
Missed edit window.
Ultimately, observation plays a critical role almost all scientific endeavors. For example, I might hypothesize that an AI algorithm can do X, I then develop the AI, and if I observe it doing X, then I’ve validated the hypothesis. When I write the paper on it, a major part of the paper is presenting the results and that includes any observations. For example, my AI might do X but not in the way I thought it would. That’s an important observation too.
[quote=“Francis_Vaughan, post:17, topic:792615”]
Well the OP is treading a well worn path.
Trouble with this path is that unless you are careful you end up in the usual philosophical infinite regress, one that basically ends up with the fundamental question of philosophy: “why is there stuff?”. So if you want to reason usefully about the original question you are going to need to put some sort of basic axioms in place. Solophism and various existentialist viewpoints get you only so far, and down rather fruitless rabbit holes. For the purposes of your discourse you are going to have to adopt at least a viewpoint that you are not special. That what you observe of other beings, creatures and things is composed of the same stuff and laws as you are. This leads you to minimally allow that there are other conscious beings that you interact with.
Well, I have already said that the reason we are able to interact with the rest of the world, including the world revealed to us by scientific experiments, is because we are all made of the same ‘stuff’ and nobody is special in that sense. The main point I am making is that whatever is ‘behind the veil’ so to speak, can only be resolved in terms that are meaningful to us. So this means that whatever scientific instruments we devise will necessarily be designed to interact with us on a sensory/intellectual level but will not allow to discover anything outside of these constraints. As you know, scientists talk of ‘models’ of reality, not reality itself (whatever that means) therefore we have to content ourselves with whatever models we can construct from out experimental observations. So, if you like, we have to ‘adapt’ what we experience to those characteristics nature has endowed us with for coping with the demands of survival on a hostile planet. That means we can only ever operate within the scope of what our brain is designed to do which probably limits how much we are able to know about anything outside our abilities.
So, in short, what we are able to do is ‘interpret’ the universe in our own terms which means we have, in effect, to make models of our experiences from scratch. In other words, something that is beyond our direct understanding must be created in order for it to be integrated into our ‘big picture’ of reality. For this reason I think we ‘invent’ reality rather discover it.
Well there is the old saw “the universe may not just be stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think.” Which may be true.
OTOH, we think we are pretty adept at working with abstractions that we can manipulate that allow us to construct very precise and, most critically, predictive models of how the universe works. We are not done, that is for sure. But the fact that we have a basis of models that are mostly internally consistent and make accurate predictions, we can reasonably assume that we are not totally off beam.
It is easy to invent models that contain the same amount of information as our experiences. These models are not predictive. It is the idea that our models are very parsimonious and whenever tested accurately predict new experiences that lead us to have some faith that our models are not pure invention, but rather have actually discovered an underlying element of reality.
I don’t understand this part. I would rather say that if something is beyond our understanding (such as an unexpected but repeatable physical phenomena) it is further investigated; or if it doesn’t fit our world view (such as paranormal phenomena) it is dismissed. But in what way is that something “created” to fit our view of reality? Because surely you cannot mean that the “sub-atomic particle” was created to be integrated into our big picture of reality? To me that does not seem to make any sense.
Are we free to invent any reality we want? Can I invent a reality where I can fly, or teleport myself anywhere in the world? If the reality we “invent” is highly constrained by the laws of physics (or whatever you want to call these constraints), then what’s the difference between this kind of invention and discovery?
Do electrons exist?
You could say that the electron field exists, the electron field being the field which the wavefunctions that are at the heart of our quantum mechanical formalisms exist in. Remember my post about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and how it all comes back to waves? These are those waves. Wavefunctions are simply the mathematical representations of waves with various properties. You can make wavefunctions which describe ripples on a pond, or the waves in a vibrating guitar string.
Let’s focus on the guitar string for a while. If you’ve played guitar, you’ve probably noticed that some vibrations lead to standing waves, or stable configurations where the string is most definitely moving but is overall stable in a very real sense. Those can be represented as special solutions of the string’s wavefunction. Long story short, those kind of special solutions are the states a particle can be in once we’ve measured it. The positions electrons can take when they’re orbiting around an atom are the three-dimensional versions of those standing waves, for example.
Here’s an example with not only equations, but numbers and diagrams. Reading this page should give you a pretty good grasp of how wave-like behavior is at that scale, and I think that disconnect between the ball-bearing particles and the wavefunction formalism is what’s tripping you up. But it isn’t like that: The field is real, the energy is real, and the way the energy excites the field into waves is real, just like how guitar strings really move, and that motion has physical consequence, and how some motions are special and distinguished, both physically and in the formalism.
And if you deny electrons are real, I invite you to explain how CRT monitors work. Are you old enough to remember them? They fired electrons at phosphor, and the phosphor lit up, and millions of people saw Christopher Lloyd ask someone “what… does… a… yellow… light… mean… ?” Electrons were involved in every other part of that process as well, but without the very real, very physical electrons being shot out of a gun, steered by coil, and impacting a target, the “vision” part of television wouldn’t have worked.
Those particles amount to wave packets, similar to ripples in a pond, spreading out and diffracting around barriers. And, again, if you doubt their reality, I’ll invite you to go swimming in a small lake while I hurl large rocks into it. And then, after I’ve gotten my aggression out, we’ll talk about physics. Again, it comes back to waves. Again, the waves are real.
There’s something deeper here: It’s real all the way down. The alternative is that there’s a seam, a join, where reality meets unreality at some arbitrary size scale. Seamlessness is strange, but the alternative is much, much stranger.
I don’t know if this video will help, but at the end there is a wrap up that isn’t too bad at covering part of the question. The de Broglie Equation and Why There Is No Wave-Particle Duality - YouTube
Part of a series, and it assumes a bit, but you might be inspired to start at the beginning and work through. It tries to be both gentle and rigorous. What is neat is that there are subtle tie ins with some of the OP’s other questions.
I would say it is the models we create that are real and consistent. There must be a seam somewhere deep down otherwise we would seem to be saying that we human beings possess godlike abilities with which to directly perceive all of reality. Again, we need to remember that we are a result of evolution to survive on earth which has moulded our abilities in a specific way to manipulate our environment in helpful ways. But that ability is relevant to our everyday world and cannot necessarily apply to vastly different environments that exist in different parts of the universe. There may well be advanced organisms that have developed very different abilities depending what kind of surroundings they evolved in and they too would use their mental models with which to represent ‘reality.’ We are carbon-based, which fixes and limits the kind of ways we are able to interact with the rest of the universe and if other organisms do not share this basic characteristic they won’t share our view of it. Even mathematics is a construction based on the ways we have been able to integrate ourselves to earth-bound situations, for example, the separation between physical objects and their combination in terms of adding, leading to subtraction, multiplication, etc. Godel showed that maths was basically imperfect which should not be too surprising, given it is a clever invention. We now know that the quantum world is nothing like the classical world and seems to break all the rules but why should we be that surprised given that we have never needed to deal with such chaotic behaviour in the ‘natural’ world? You were talking about ‘wavelike’ behaviour and ‘packets’ and possibly you were thinking in terms of ‘particles’, but these too are concepts our brains have been designed to produce in response to the way our particular environment works.
**Would it be possible for the mods. to move this thread to The Great Debates section as this is clearly more of a debate than a factual discussion? It was my error placing it here in the first place. :smack:
But if you are in a foreign country and do not speak the language and use an interpreter with which to interact with the locals you are not interacting directly because you are using an intermediary. Human beings do the same thing in terms of analysing scientific data by using their pre-programmed thought patterns with which to organize phenomena.
Why? We don’t perceive much in the universe with out own senses. One reason scientists use instruments is that we know our senses can be fooled. This harks back to a core question in the development of science and a philosophy of science. There was a time when science was “seeing is believing”. A scientist required proof to come from something that could be directly sensed, with no intermediary. Galileo was one of the first to realise that this was both unreliable and limited. He realised, and showed, that the human eye was not linear enough to use as a brightness measuring device. From here a hierarchy of calibration and experimental measuring devices became the way science was done. We have no direct way to perceive much at all. But we have the tools to measure it. We also understand that our innate senses operate with the same laws as our tools. It is just we have flexibility in constructing our tools, and none in our own construction.
Nitpick. Gödel did not do any such thing. He showed a very specific incompleteness in attempts to define all mathematics from a purely axiomatic basis. Everyday mathematics - such as used by your garden variety physicist or engineer are not subject to Gödel.
There isn’t really a divide between the natural world and the quantum one. We don’t perceive many quantum effects ourselves more due to a question of scale than one of naturalness. But our world experience is controlled by quantum mechanics at every step. Something as simple as explaining the colour of a heated object, right down to the behaviour of every chemical reaction is quantum electro-dynamics. The colour of an incandescent light bulb is only so explainable, and is clearly a natural world experience.
The quickest way to suggest something like this to a mod is to use the report button in the top right corner of a post. Mods get a direct notification for action. (It isn’t just for reporting spam and bad behaviour.)
OTOH, where you are is actually a well worn set of questions in the interpretation of physics. There are still lots of factual answers. They are factual answers about the range of possible interpretations and the meta-questions that underpin them. Many would argue that this is a long way from IMHO.
So what you seem to be saying is that the tools that we construct are extensions of our senses but, ultimately, they are designed to present information to us that our senses can process. Going back to quantum mechanics, we use mathematical models with with to make predictions, but such models are constructed using pre-determined axioms that our minds have found meaningful. It doesn’t mean to say the mathematical models* are * the phenomenon but are our way of mapping it.
Yes, everyday mathematics. But sooner or later such shortcomings will fail in codifying deepers layers of reality. How do we use currents mathematical paradigms to describe the interior of black holes? It all just breaks down. You see, the fact that mathematics is based on a limited range of axioms means it can only cope with stuff that behaves in ways that aligns with the restrictions of such axioms. I daresay the universe if far more than we can imagine and beyond our man-made mathematics. I can’t prove that but I think it’s probably true.
Sure, but what I am saying is that we are not naturally attuned to the quantum world because it is so counterintuitive. We are simply not designed to think of objects as being in two places at once, the everyday world does not work this way. We then have to use mathematics to discover some pattern to it all but again, such patterns are not the phenomena, just out ‘take’ on it.
Okay maybe I’ll leave it then. Thank you.
The speaker seemed to be looking for a simpler interpretation of QM than generally accepted which if fine as long as you can use such an approach to account for experimental data and predictive results.
Baah. What does John Snow know?
Not really. The speaker knows exactly what they are saying. What you are hearing is the generally accepted approach. What it isn’t is the popular press version. You can’t grok QM without the maths. Sadly so much of what people are fed is the QM lite version, the one that tells you about deep mysteries and quantum weirdness but provides no meat. Maths is the meat.
Okay, but you can’t just present people with mathematical equations everytime you try to describe QM, it would simply be too obtuse and baffle the general public.
No, but we are limited to creating ideas about reality based on our ability to do experiments and our interpretations of them. If you think of the tools stone-age people made and the way it shaped their environment then today we are really doing something similar in using scientific tools to explore and shape our environment, but in much more profound ways that ancient people could achieve. However, no matter what kind of tool is used it will have been conceived of using mental models of the world we have inherited from our predecessors.
Nobody ever suggested that these models are the phenomena. Mapping is exactly what is being done. However, when it comes to a deep set of questions about the nature of quantum mechanics, there is a very real notion that we have a set if descriptive tools that cover the entire information content of the phenomena. We would have to posit that there is some form of structure of the universe that was intrinsically unknowable by any form of experiment that we could ever devise to believe that we could never know about that part of its nature. This is a self defeating argument.
The axioms we use to base our understanding are axioms we believe are as open as possible. There are some parts to those axioms we do take on trust. We discount the idea that we live in The Matrix, or some other simulated reality. We don’t invoke higher beings or deities as the underling causes of our results. We believe that a parsimonious approach is the only reasonable one. We add the minimal amount of information to our models as we possibly can. Our mathematics is built upon a set of axioms that allows us to feel highly confident that there are no edge cases in our manipulations that lets a grasp of the model we generate fail. (Sometimes these may be slightly controversial. But science is a work in progress.)
Again, no. Gödel deals with the ability of mathematical systems to be self describing. This is at the set theory end of mathematics, and is firmly in the province of pure mathematics and the theory of computability. It relates to questions such as - can I construct a computer program that can tell if any computer program it is given will stop in finite time or not. (Answer no.) Black hole physics has nothing to do with shortcomings in mathematics. It is well accepted that it has everything to do with our lack of a fully worked theory of quantum gravity, or a fully unified theory of all the forces. The breakdown of the current theories are not a break down of mathematics - they are basically a more messy version of dividing by zero, when zero is all we currently have. There are plenty of ways to not divide by zero, but what we are lacking is an understanding of which one to use, from a choice of known ideas or new ideas.
The problem Russell and Whiteheadfaced when attempting a pure synthesis of mathematics from formal logic was that they could not resolve some questions and paradoxes starting with things like “does the set of all sets contain itself?”. “The set of all sets that do not contain themselves”. Eventually Gödel showed that that no formal system extending basic arithmetic can be used to prove its own consistency. None of what Gödel did has any bearing on the mathematical tools used to create models of reality, such as QM. What he did show has deep bearings on computability theory and philosophy. Sadly there is a popular idea that runs about that claims that he showed that all mathematics is broken, when he did no such thing.
Our intuition is based upon how we interact with the universe on our own scale. It is what our brains learn from the cradle based upon what we experience. Our intuition doesn’t allow us to expect many macroscopic effects that have little to nothing to do with QM. We have to learn most of the simple conservation laws (there is a common psychological question about when children manage conservation of volume of liquids.) Try such simple things as the Magnus effect.* As I wrote, Galileo understood the problems with intuition (probably the most famous example of intuition versus reality being the equivalence principle, and ordinary folks “intuitive” belief that heavier objects fall faster. You don’t need to go to QM levels, or cosmological scales to find ordinary experiences that counter our intuitive understanding of how the universe works. Drop a magnet down a conductive tube and see what your intuition thinks.
If you regress back to ability to sense phenomena as the only truth, and all else a model, you will know exactly nothing. **
- I highly recommend the Veritassium YouTube channel. Go wild and watch as much as you can.
Okay maybe I’ll leave it then. Thank you.
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Sadly, the reality is that a lot of people will never have the mental ability or the desire to put the work in to get the mathematics. But they still have an genuine interest in the science. Managing the gap is really hard. And because it runs against the macro scale intuition people’s brains learn, it is even harder. Worse, a lot of people have done a very poor job of bridging the gap in popular media. There are more books than I care to think about that spend more time on mysticism and really rotten analogues when more care could be applied.
Sadly, many people who could bridge the gap to the next level of the descriptions are put off because maths is so poorly taught in general. So they get put off very early, and forever regard anything mathematical as “too hard” or “not for me”. And don’t get me started on the generations of women denied even the basics.
A great deal of life requires one to put the time in to get to a level of capability where the target subject becomes something they can converse sensibly at. Indeed it is almost impossible to come up with an are where this is not true. From following a sport to politics to religious dogma to philosophy. You can the the lite version, or you can put the effort in. No different to getting to the point where you won’t make an idiot of yourself if you walk into a sports bar and try to engage a fan in conversation.