I’m not talking purely about online, although certainly most of the frustration comes from online interactions. I have these interactions offline as well, typically it is an undergraduate student who has a great new idea on artificial intelligence. And look, I always listen, and I always start off polite and try to give them some advice. Typically either some material to read, or if possible a brief explanation on where they have a misunderstanding. And for a lot of such students that’s good enough, but every now and then you get one who is as stubborn as some of the online people we see. I honestly hate to leave things unresolved, as I love teaching. I teach two university level courses right now and it is great.
Plus, the broader question, is how to reach the general public? Science is so badly mangled by most journalist, whether intentional or not. It would be nice to have research be understandable by most people, but I don’t know what can be done (other than those things already discussed). I would seriously, if somebody had a great idea, bring it to the university for discussion. I find this all very personally frustrating, such that I’ve had to create my “No loops rule” for online discussions. When a conversation is going in a loop, I break it but I hate to do that. It offends me as a teacher and an academic.
Where is your evidence to support your assertion that we now have a theory of everything? If one has been formulated who produced it and when did he/her/them receive their Nobel Prize?
(BTW, you can prove anything with mathematics but that’s not much good if it’s all based on a false assumption).
“Stephen Hawking was originally a believer in the Theory of Everything but, after considering Gödel’s Theorem, concluded that one was not obtainable: “Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory, that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind.””
Where did you get the idea that Half Man Half Wit was in fact asserting that we now have a theory of everything? I don’t see any such assertion anywhere in his post.
Did you maybe read Half Man Half Wit’s phrase “unified framework” in the context of formulating classical and quantum physics in the same space, and somehow confuse it with the concept of “unified theory”, in the sense of “theory of everything”?
Now for the next step. Learning what a false assumption is. And after that, why none of the math being discussed here is based on false assumptions. And after that, how all the physics being discussed here is judged based on how well it predicts actual physical behavior. And after that, how philosophical interpretations of physics are not physics. And after that…
You’ve misunderstood again. A TOE doesn’t describe classical mechanics emerging from quantum mechanics. It’s suppose to allow all physical theories to emerge from a smaller set of laws. GR and QM in particular.
Well, no, a TOE will overarch and synthesise all of physics. You can’t have two separate realities. There must be something common to both the classical world and the quantum world. The obvious candidate is ideas which is what scientific models rest on. The question is: where do such models originate? If you can answer that you are on the way to discovering the answer.
He was trying to present a mathematical model that could be applied to both classical and quantum effects. How is this possible since they have nothing in common? You would have to have some unified theory to do this.
Again, you misunderstand. A “Theory of Everything” is what we don’t have, something which will put QM and General Relativity together into one concise model.
This has nothing to do with the differences in classical physics and quantum physics - those two are already united. If you take quantum physics and look on a large scale, it predicts all of classical physics.
Yes, we know all this, but that does not answer the question about why they differ so much. The point is we cannot apply what occurs on a large scale to what happens at the quantum level. I have tried to provide information but it seems in vain. Are you arguing for the sake of it?
As others have pointed out, what I’ve posted has nothing at all to do with a theory of everything. Perhaps it’s best if you think about classical and quantum mechanics as frameworks, toolkits to assemble theories of individual systems. So, within classical mechanics, you can produce a theory of how a pendulum oscillates, how a ball rolls down an incline, how masses attract one another (i.e. Newtonian gravitation).
Within quantum mechanics, you can likewise formulate such theories—the quantum harmonic oscillator, the theory of the hydrogen atom, and so on. It turns out that some such theories have an astonishingly wide scope: the quantum theory of the electromagnetic field, for instance. Add to this the quantum theories of the weak and strong force, and you have what we call the standard model of particle physics. This is enough to account for all known particle interactions (although we’re pretty sure there has to be more than that out there). Of these, the weak and electromagnetic forces can be described by a single theory, but the theory of the strong force is basically ‘tacked on’. The quest for a grand unified theory is to find a single theory sufficient to encompass those three forces.
On the other hand, you have what one might call metric theories: special and general relativity, as well as various generalizations, such as Lanczos-Lovelock theories. Bringing that particular metric theory that describes our universe (taken most commonly to be general relativity) together with the theory describing particle physics (the standard model, some GUT, etc.), is what one is typically after in finding a theory of everything.
The main problem here is the unification of the quantum- and metric-theory frameworks. This is what’s usually described as quantum gravity. We can readily treat classical and quantum theories within the same framework; likewise, we can treat classical and metric theories within the same framework. We can even treat quantum theories in the framework of special relativity, which is a metric theory, but one in which the metric isn’t dynamic. What we can’t do, however, is unify quantum and metric theories, so far at least.
Quantum and classical mechanics have a lot of things in common; vastly more than separates them. Perhaps it’s simplest to think about theories in phase space, which we can think of as the space spanned by positions and momenta of a set of particles. In classical mechanics, a physical system is represented by a point in phase space; in quantum mechanics, it turns out that this point is actually not without extent, but occupies a volume that is, for most intents and purposes, absolutely tiny (that the system cannot be localized to a smaller volume is the uncertainty principle). It’s only where the the size of that point matters that we get quantum effects; otherwise, we recover ordinary classical mechanics.
In a sense, quantum and classical mechanics have the same relationship to one another as a circle and an ellipse: sure, an ellipse isn’t a circle, but they both nevertheless come from a family of similar objects. Mathematically, there’s a deformation parameter which quantifies the deviation from the original object; if you take it to zero, you recover your starting point. In the ellipse, that’s the eccentricity; an ellipse with eccentricity zero simply is a circle. In quantum mechanics, it’s Planck’s constant; quantum mechanics with Planck’s constant taken to zero recovers classical mechanics.
Surely, all of this points to the idea that everything is fundamentally information. The fact that people have tried to provide a mathematical framework within which both classical and quantum phenomena can be treated shows (to me at least ) that you have to abandon materialism in favour of purely theoretically constructed models that have their origins in some mental realm, not the physical realm. The fact that physicists were unable to simply use the same models they did for classical objects when applied to the quantum world forced them to come up with new structures which placed all of physics within a workable scheme. So this is my point; that scientific models have to be continually refined in order to account for new information that becomes available after we do experiments by asking the universe new questions. In other words you can’t get ‘there’ from ‘here’ by a logical progression. You have to discover novel data that, hitherto, could not be predicted by existing information.
This simply doesn’t follow at all. Models have always been purely theoretical, before and after quantum mechanics. But moreover, that our models are a certain way has simply no bearing on the way the world has to be. Again, our models are also written down on paper, but the world isn’t made from cellulose.
So no, none of the above points to the idea that everything is fundamentally information in any way whatsoever. That’s purely your fiction.
But what else could have happened? Short of classical mechanics simply describing all of the universe correctly, no matter what, classical ideas would have ultimately had to be refined. Which, to reiterate a point I’ve made a good half-dozen times now, points against the world being created by our subjective ideas: otherwise, there would be nothing to oppose the ideas of classical mechanics, no independent truth to discover.
First, you say “we know all this,” then you contradict yourself in the next sentence.
Please pause to understand this: we CAN unite the large scale and the small scale. If you took the small scale physics (quantum), and applied that to billions and billions of particles and atoms, you will get the same behavior that large-scale classical physics describes. Exactly.
For example, you can use quantum physics to describe the precise interaction of gas molecules in a room; their velocity (energy), and collisions with each other and with the walls. That would be an enormously involved process for something the size of a room full of air, but it could be done. If you did it, you would find all the same large-scale behavior that we describe with volume, temperature, and pressure in classical physics.
We use different ways of thinking about the way the world works because there are approximations we can make, which make the problem easier to work out. There is micro- and macro-economics. No one doubts that macro-economics is just the aggregation of a whole bunch of micro-economics, right? But on a large scale, you can model the behaviors of millions of elements in generalized groups, and see patterns that you couldn’t grasp if you tried to think of millions of little decisions.
At the lowest level, there’s quantum physics. You could do the quantum physics to model a group of eight protons and eight neutrons, surrounded by a cloud of eight electrons, and how that bundle of stuff interacts with other bundles of particles, but we’ve figured out other properties that the particles have in groups, and found it useful to think of that bundle of particles as an oxygen atom, and can name the other bundles and then make useful predictions about how they interact with each other using the rules of chemistry, without having to do the tedious math of the quantum world. It’s the same with everything.
The former is a subset of the latter. A proper subset. There isn’t anything in large-scale physics that quantum physics doesn’t describe.
There are effects that we, as large animals, don’t see at our size/scale. Strictly within classical physics, we, being large animals, only are very barely aware of surface tension in water, whereas if we were the size of mosquito larvae, this would be a major effect.
It doesn’t mean that surface tension “goes away” somehow, magically, when we get big. It just is small in proportion to other observed forces.
We, as individuals, are too small to perceive Coriolis force from the rotation of the earth (unless we’re firing cannon-shells at Paris) and we’re certainly too small to perceive the inverse-square diminution of the earth’s gravity with increases in altitude.
Again, it doesn’t mean that the laws of physics change with scale: only our perceptions.
Where did you get the idea that Half Man Half Wit was in fact asserting that we now have a theory of everything? I don’t see any such assertion anywhere in his post.