That’s remarkable.
I seem to recall an episode of a radio show—I think it was “This American Life”—about an amateur hobbyist who was certain that he had solved or debunked some basic something-or-other in physics and he had spent years trying to persuade people he was right.
The show introduced him to a real scholar who tried to point out his errors and explain why he was hindered by some basic gaps in his knowledge, but he wouldn’t accept it. He kept saying that scholars and experts were over-educated and were failing to see something simple.
In the end, he refused to accept the criticism, saying that he, as a reasonably intelligent person, should be able to understand these things. He just wouldn’t admit that you had to know a lot of things in order to understand how science worked.
I think I recall him insisting in the end something like “It has to be simple enough for me to figure out on my own.”
I tried searching for that episode, but I can’t recall enough about it to find it.
I recall that podcast, too. I’m not 100% certain it was on “This American Life” but it’s most likely that was the source.
I can’t identify the precise episode, either. But I recall that the narrator and the experts consulted were quite earnest in trying to kindly walk the guy through his mistakes without condescension, but he just wasn’t having any of it. IIRC the guy’s wife was sort of frustrated with him for not letting it go.
I also seem to recall the guy felt he’d disproved Einstein’s work.
eta: sucker MC squared! https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge?act=3
Well, let’s look at it this way. A researcher comes along with a controversial paper that contradicts what most other researchers think. You say she did that because of politically correctness. Could be, I suppose, although she’s Israeli, and I don’t know what’s politically correct there. By your logic, though, the scientists who have been agreeing on something else all this time, weren’t toeing the politically correct line. How’s that possible? And since what she’s saying is controversial, they still aren’t advocating for what’s politically correct. How are they getting away with that?
Wait. It gets worse. Her research follows other research going back decades. You mean to say that all that political correctness has been ignored all that time? And if you read the article - you haven’t and won’t, I understand that - but if someone not you reads the article they’d see that a great deal of nuance is given about the different results researchers have found and the different ways they’ve been interpreted, so it’s hard for us ordinary folk to know which of them are being politically correct and which aren’t.
What we really need is a guide. You seem quite confident you know which results on gender findings in the human brain are politically correct and which aren’t. Please give a detailed list on the two sides, so that when we read articles in the future we can tick off the results against the list. It would be so helpful that I’m sure you won’t refuse.
What “witch hunt”? AFAICT, a lot of people were angry about the Summers speech, but not because he dared to mention some research on innate gender differences that wasn’t “politically correct”.
Rather, it was because he pulled a bunch of lazy speculation about gender differences out of his own ass and expected it to be taken seriously as a potential justification for specific faculty hiring policy approaches.
Here, for example, are a few of the things Summers said:
The problem with Summers’ poorly-thought-out arguments wasn’t that he courageously transgressed “totalitarian rules of the PC thought police” and was consequently “hounded from office on a partisan witch hunt” or any of the similar rhetoric that the urban legend of this event has morphed into.
The problem was that Summers offered a lot of superficial and sloppy speculation about possible contributing factors to gender differences in science—which in itself is not that big a deal, although admittedly not particularly impressive in the leader of America’s flagship university—while constantly emphasizing that his speculations weighting innate differences more heavily than social ones somehow had to be true.
There’s nothing wrong with saying that gender differences are very complicated and we need more research about them and we shouldn’t shy away from studying biological bases of gender differences. But there’s a lot wrong with laypeople repeating their own sketchy impressions of scientific research on gender differences while explicitly pushing the claim that these impressions “have got to be a large part” of the truth, or that “it’s impossible not to conclude that something of the sort is significant”, or that people “just have to recognize” their alleged validity.
And the bit where he credulously assumes that his own toddler daughters remained somehow uncontaminated by socialized gender expectations because their parents gave them trucks instead of dolls, so their behavior counts as some kind of evidence for the innateness of gender differences? :rolleyes: I’d be surprised if that kind of sloppy reasoning would be accepted in a freshman application essay to Harvard, never mind in a speech to distinguished researchers by Harvard’s president.
I’m sorry, but how can Occam’s Razor eliminate the undeniable fact that an observer has to observe phenomena? What you seem to be suggesting is that without the participation of human beings all of the science we see today would have been possible. This seem really illogical.
Then why did Richard Feynman say nobody understands quantum mechanics?
“So, what is quantum mechanics? Even though it was discovered by physicists,** it’s not a** physical theory in the same sense as electromagnetism or general relativity.”
I kind of doubt that and I resent your implication.
There’s a difference in developing a detailed knowledge of something and understanding why it is the way it is. If your ‘deep knowledge’ is based on a model that is incomplete all you’re left with is incomplete knowledge.
First of all I’m not saying observer-less observations, I mean there are alternatives to calling the collapse of the wave function “observation” that greatly simplify the model.
Also, as I say, the copenhagen interpretation is hardly the only game in town.
As for human-less science, I’ve no idea what you are talking about. Very obviously we need sentient actors to do science.
That’s a computer scientist trying to give his opinion of what QM is. And in any case, note “in the same sense” does not mean not a physical theory especially since later in the same quote he says:
Basically, quantum mechanics is the operating system that other physical theories run on" [emphasis added]
Your cherrypicked quote from a wiki page of out-of-context quotes about quantum mechanics doesn’t actually refute Mijin’s claim that quantum physics “is not considered to be non-physical”. Just because quantum physics is a highly mathematical and counterintuitive part of physics doesn’t mean it isn’t physics.
(Note, by the way, that at the very top of the page you linked to is the statement “It [quantum mechanics] is a fundamental branch of physics that provides the underlying mathematical framework for many fields of physics and chemistry.”)
But how can you demonstrate wavefunction collapse occurs at all without a human-based consciousness? You can’t.
You’ve no idea what I’m talking about? Really? Okay. What kind of science would exist (if at all) if human beings had not evolved?
If you don’t like the word ‘physical’ then ‘classical’ is just as appropriate. In other words, QM does not behave classically. And it’s all very well saying QM underlies physical theories but the point is it has changed our whole perspective on how reality is. We now regard reality as essentially a set of ideas rather than something that can only be physically experienced. Ideas are non-physical, therefore, we and QM are non-physical.
How can a mathematical wavefunction be real? How can a probability distribution be real?
How can any of the current interpretations of QM be called physical? They’re all just mathematical concepts, nothing tangible.
You can call something anything you like but that does not mean it’s physical.
Yes, it is because it has to be a branch of something. So what?
Why is it out of context? From where would you* like* me to obtain information?
I don’t care enough about it to really debate it. My recollection of the events doesn’t quite match up with what you’re saying. I.e. I don’t recall there being my objection to the quality of his arguments vs. the content. However, if you say that is what happened I’ll take your word for it. Summers isn’t particularly relevant to the discussion at hand one way or the other really.
All knowledge of everything is incomplete. That’s a tautological and meaningless statement.
What difference would that make to reality? Reality existed before humans and will exist after humans. Humans are only necessary to discuss reality with other humans. They are not causal in any way.
In these few posts you’ve confused science with reality, you’ve attempted to use terms like physical and non-physical as scientific terminology when they are no such thing, and you’ve failed to cite a single source that is a scientific paper. I’d say you’re going backwards but you started at zero.
Are you claiming that negative numbers don’t exist? 
Yeah I think I’m just going to back away slowly from this “debate”.
I’ll keep an eye out for a Pit thread.
Of course QM is a physical theory! There are differences between it and classical physics, which I think is what this person was talking about, but QM describes the physical world extremely accurately using only physics (no spookiness).
This is no different than the freshman philosophy question of whether a tree falling makes a sound if no one is around to hear it. What if you put microphones to capture the sound? You’re saying that even if microphones capture the sound, it still takes a person to hear the recording for us to know for sure. So in your example, there’s nothing different about QM than about classical physics.
Again, you’re playing freshman philosophy games. Classical physics is a set of ideas as well! You seem to be trying to say that QM is fundamentally different from classical, but the things you’re saying apply just as well to both.
This is an extremely simplistic presentation of both how scientific research and political correctness work.
Research is not constantly rated for political correctness in real time, and new research is not instantly produced in order to account for political correctness. (And political correctness itself is not updated instantly either.)
The way it works, both for science and other matters, is that the atmosphere becomes more welcoming of certain ideas and more hostile to certain others. At some point, if the focus becomes one particular notion, then the force of political correctness comes to bear on that issue.
So you can have some non-PC idea floating along under the radar for years without feeling the brunt of PC, but then someone publishes a paper that argues for a more PC view of things. And at that point, it possibly gets some publicity in less scientific but more mass appeal outlets as an example of how some previously-held scientific notion may have been based on bias etc. and new research is supporting a more PC view, it gets seized on by various ideological commentators and the like, and next thing you know people who adhere to the previously-accepted version are getting attacked as chauvinists - or at last at risk of it.
Or some variant of the above.
I don’t think most “ordinary folk” would have a hard time with this on a general basis, assuming they pay even the slightest bit of attention to political winds. As for people who just like asking rhetorical questions - not much purpose in addressing them.