Nice prezi AJ. I see what you are talking about now with the potential of these prezis.
Imagine if the statistical method of science was in vogue in Copernicus’ day. Poor Copernicus is laboring away day and night searching for the equations to “fit” his data using regression analysis. In fact, this is precisely what all of Copernicus’s predecessors had done, they had developed amazingly compact and elegant equations by which to predict and “explain” the motion of the Sun, Moon, the stars and each of the known planets. But Copernicus hit on the idea of thinking about the whole thing in a completely different manner. “What if it is the planets that go round the Sun?”
In the process, he “unknotted” the conceptual problem of the motion of the heavenly bodies. Suddenly, not only did we have elegant mathematical equations (which remained formally equivalent to the older equations, obviously) but we had a clear and easy-to-conceive picture of why those equations describe the motion of the heavens.
The process of thinking about the world in completely new ways and exploring the consequences of the new ways of thinking (through deduction and experiment) is the real source of scientific progress. Most new ways of thinking are dead-ends… either they are eventually discovered to be inconsistent or to add nothing new to our existing understanding.
I believe that there is a social component at work here - the sciences imitate, to a degree, the political structure. The political structure of society is monopoly tournament. Like an Olympic race, there is only one First Place and everyone is competing to be King of the Hill and topple whoever is the current King of the Hill in order to get there. There is One Right Theory of Physics and so all research must go in this direction.
Science has lost sight of the fact that we don’t know what the next breakthrough is going to be. String theory is a great example. Everyone understands that String Theory adds nothing to our understanding of the world, it’s just a particular way of systematizing the existing Standard Model equations according to the metaphor of a “vibrating string.” But all the PhDs and the dispensers of research grants have decided that if there can be a breakthrough in basic physics, it will be in the direction of String Theory.
Clayton -
With all due respect, I think this is a bit of an over-generalisation. I know it is dangerous to abstract too much from personal experience, but I think this is not necessarily in the case in Theoretical Physics. Where I received my masters degree a few years ago for instance, nobody in the Theoretical Physics department was engaged in quantum gravity research, let alone string theory, but in far more grounded problems in condensed matter, solid state, cold atom and quantum statistical physics, as well as superconductivity (I don’t suspect they were unique). I do agree however, as far as fundamental research goes, there does seem to be an overinvestment in string theory, within the quantum gravity line of research, which is perhaps too bloated a field itself for the funding it deserves.
Also, please could you answer my above question? I’d love to get your take on Landau’s work.
@abs: Oh, sorry, meant to respond to that but forgot. No, I’ve not read any of Landau. I looked online and didn’t see his stuff available for free.
I’m not disparaging all of physics - clearly, a lot of the work that is being done is as you say grounded. But this isn’t the kind of work that makes the headline news. The trouble lies with the Establishment mindset that creeps back in after suffering a blow from each new advance. The mindset is that “we basically know how the Universe operates, sure, there are a few missing details but we’re just millimeters from a Grand Unified Theory of Absolutely Everything”.
It mitigates against progress by punishing “oddball” and “crank” physics with ridicule and removal of funding, while showering resources on those who keep blindly pushing the envelope of the status quo. The “if we could just build a bigger particle accelerator” mindset is part of what I’m talking about. Particle accelerators are great and everything but just building bigger and bigger particle accelerators will not yield the answers to our questions. Someone’s going to have to come up with a fundamental insight that clarifies and unifies the mountain of data we already have.
Blockbuster research budgets are no substitute of brilliant insights. We may just have to wait for the next genius to come along and get his flash of insight that moves us to the next level of understanding of the physical world and this is a question of how resources should be allocated (an economical question). Perhaps our money would be better spent cultivating geniuses rather than indoctrinating people into the status quo of physics and then blowing hundreds of billions of dollars on mega-particle accelerators which at best can hope to give us a yay-or-nay on a few abstruse questions in physics, such as the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson.
In my view, this is all symptomatic of the increase in public subsidy of science research. A tiny number of bureaucratic decision-makers are determining how mountains of research money are being dispensed. If those monies came from private individuals - as used to be the case - the spending would represent the much more dispersed interests and knowledge of many decision-makers. Fundamental scientific research is perhaps the limiting case of human uncertainty - we can’t be more uncertain about anything than we are about the next scientific breakthrough or the next brilliant scientific insight precisely because so many of the smartest humans are thinking about these problems all the time and they don’t know what’s next. Where uncertainty is the greatest, variation is the most important.
Clayton -
Let me give an example of the kind of crank science I have in mind (I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately). Consider relativity theory which is largely taken for granted these days. First of all, the foundation of relativity theory has both theoretical and empirical problems that are not widely recognized.
The theoretical problem I see with relativity theory is that it rejects the ether which is actually not the “no big deal” that modern physics makes it out to be. In every other instance where we observe a wave (including EM waves of which visible light is merely a frequency band) other than small particles, there is some medium the disturbance of which constitutes the wave. We have thrown out the ether but have not explained how it is that the wavelike properties of photons or electrons arise absent a medium. What is it that is waving, or to be less ontological, why do we observe a wave if there is not a medium which is being perturbed? I have not read a satisfactory response to this (doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, just that I haven’t read it).
The empirical problem I see with relativity theory is that the failure to detect the ether wind by the experimental means which have been tried so far is not as decisive as it is generally taken to be. I recently read about the physicist Dayton Miller who spent a good portion of his life attempting to detect the influence of the ether. He believed he was detecting some amount of ether wind though his contemporaries argued that his readings were far too low and his readings have since been explained away as down to error margins.
However, it seems to me that neither the original Michelson-Morley experiment nor the later experiments by Morley and Miller were decisive of the matter because we do not know the extent to which the Earth is, in fact, dragging around the ether with itself. Imagine if space was filled with air instead of being empty and imagine that the Earth was revolving about the Sun through this air medium. Now, the Earth’s gravity would still create a troposphere around us. Imagine that winds on Earth were always very light and imagine that we wanted to detect the medium through which sounds arrive to Earth from space. It could be argued that there is no air medium through which these sounds are arriving from space because the Earth is racing around the Sun at thousands of miles per hour but we feel no wind or the readings are so small as to be discounted as anomolous.
Because we do not know the velocity of the medium relative to the Earth in the vicinity of Earth, what would really need to be done is to launch an experimental apparatus at speed to detect whether it experiences effects from motion through the medium. I think this is true today. Has anyone tried launching a rocket with a Michelson-Morley apparatus in it? Also, Miller was highly concerned about the effects of shielding. Given that the ether, if it exists, mediates the propagation of electromagnetic waves and given that we know that a Faraday cage, for example, completely shields its contents from external EM disturbances, I would like to see an experiment with a rocket-mounted M-M apparatus in an unshielded (say plastic or glass) configuration. The configuration would have to be highly sensitive as the rocket’s maximum velocity would have only a tiny effect on the propagation of light in the hypothesized ether. Has anyone tried an experiment of this sort?
Clayton -
The earth rotates at about 1,000 mph. The earth also revolves around the sun at about 67,000 mph. The sun revolves around the galactic center at about 500,000 mph. Given this, the “ether” could not have a stationary reference frame with respect to the earth.
Recent M-M experiments [Phys. Rev. D 80, 105011 (2009)] show no detecable ether shift to 1 part in 10-17. Conclusion: no ether.
Clayton, excellent point about waves. Waves without something waving is pure reification. There is one other possibility for the ether: it is not that matter floats in the ether, but rather that matter consists of wave patterns of the ether. And so do all the phenomena we already consider wave phenomena. It would just be that the former are standing waves and the latter are traveling waves. Such an ether would presumably not be detectable by such types of experiments.
@Josh: We know the Earth and the Sun have powerful (in aggregate) magnetic fields that extend far out into space. Given that the ether would be responsible for propagation of EM waves, it seems to me that perhaps the ether is influenced by magnetism. If so, it could be being “dragged along” with the Earth’s and the Sun’s magnetic fields so the relative motion of the ether to the Earth may actually be quite modest.
The ether, if it exists, could even be playing a role in gravitation itself. It’s not like modern physics has just almost got everything all wrapped up into a complete theory. We can actually estimate how wrong modern physics is… it’s about 95% wrong. How do I know this? Because modern physics says that about 95% of matter in the Universe is non-observable except as it influences gravity. Dark Matter. At least there were some good a priori reasons to believe in the ether. There are no good reasons to believe in Dark Matter.
Clayton -
Clayton, I think physicists have (correctly) rejected the kind of static ether theory originally believed in the late 19th century and disconfirmed by the Michelson Morley experiments. I do think however, the matter is not wholly settled with regard to the fact that as I recall one of my old lecturers in fact pointed out to us, one of the things we know from quantum field theory and its confirmed results is the existence of vacuum field groundstates of nonzero energy, so clearly the notion of “empty space” has some problems (especially given the number of creation and annihilations that simultaneously take place in it). Hence this might be somewhat a sign of “tension” in effect between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity in one sense here (Wikipedia claims, Dirac’s attemped to reinterpret the quantum vacuum as an aether with a state of motion in 1951 but failed)
Also, the Michelson Morley experiment failed to indirectly detect a velocity w.r.t the hypothesized medium, given no difference in the time displacements between orthogonal slits. But this is supposed to simply be a manifestation of relativity, the fact that these observations will be invariant to reference(and in fact symmetric in each in SR, until acceleration breaks symmetry). I was under the impression the latter was a well established fact, and pertains to most practical applications of relativity theory (which again accords with experimental confirmation to the type of degree the economists we regularly criticise on this forum could only dream of getting). How would a modified ether theory cope with this fact?
I think I’m out of my depth here… All I can say is that from an a priori point-of-view there is a good argument that if we see a wave, there’s “something” that’s waving because in every other case where we observe a wave, there is a medium. When you combine this with the growing cracks in the edifice of modern physics - Dark Matter/Energy, Pioneer anomaly, anomalous energy discharge during the Deep Impact mission, etc. - you begin to sense that there’s something maybe wrong in the foundations.
This is interesting.
Feynman said: “It always bothers me that according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space and no matter how tiny a region of time … I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed and the laws will turn out to be simple. … But this speculation is of the same nature as those other people make - ‘I like it’,‘I don’t like it’ - and it is not good to be too prejudiced about these things.”
I think there is something wrong with so much going on at every unit of space… at some point (in the small), space must become “simple” or at least “statistically uniform” or there must be some law that describes the nature of space as you go down smaller and smaller (even if that law itself yields really bizarre things like fractals or something).
Clayton -
This is crucial setup for the theory, because if the “actors” (physical objects) in your mechanistic movie are themselves inconceivable, there is of course no way that the movie as a whole can be conceivable.
So this explanatory scientific method (ESM) is pretty simple if we leave out the words and just do it visually:
1 - Hypothesis: Show a picture of the objects hypothesized to exist.
2 - Theory: Show a movie of how these objects are hypothesized to mechanically interact in order to produce the observed phenomenon.
Observations and measurements, etc. happen before and after, as motivation for coming up with the theory or as motivation for looking for a new one.
On this topic, I made a different version of the above prezi, geared toward praxeology / a priori economics. Watch it here: http://prezi.com/m0wdftavsag5/austrian-economics-description-vs-explanation-in-the-explanatory-scientific-method/ (use arrow button to advance)
I’d say those are just deeper questions to be answered by a later theory at a deeper level of analysis. If we merely want to know how the remote got chewed up, which is after all a practical question, we don’t necessarily care about those other questions. Or if we do, it’d only make sense to resolve the initial question first - the question of whether it was the dog or not.
When you break down causality to its core components, it really is just “seeing movies.” Experientially, all we know is that Sensation A follows Sensation B in a significant number of cases. But that’s usually a little too deep to be useful for physics. For the purposes of physics, causality means how something mechanically happened - that is, seeing movies.
Any mechanical oddities that we might one day encounter, such as portals like in the game Portal, would require us to fall back on the deeper “Sensation A follows Sensation B” notion of causality, because we can no longer use the familiar mechanical machinery we were evolved and raised to understand. I have never yet seen any need for this, however. No “portals” have ever been found.
+1
I might lean toward dropping all the baggage of “science,” “scientific method,” “theory,” etc. and just state what we are doing directly: observing, positing objects and possible mechanical interactions of those objects that would produce the observations, and then deciding which such objects and mechanical interactions seem most plausible. We could define “science” or “physics” as just the bold, or as all the underlined. Or we could call it something else if people object to the terminology.
That is a common objection of Quantum Mechanics that probably dates as at least as far as Schrodinger developed his wavefunction formulation of quantum mechanics, the nonrelativstic version of which makes up the staple of undergraduate teaching in the subject today. I think there is something to be said about relying too much on our intuition based on our experiences of the molar world to guide us here. What Quantum Mechanics teaches, under the Bohr interpretation (which I began to sympathise with more, the further I studied the subject), is that really the terms “particle” and “wave” do not necessarily describe reality, but depending on the conditions which we have constrained, what we mean by these 2 terms suffices to describe reality approximately so well, that we may drop our caveats against their unambiguous use. One good, pretty simple illustration of how the convergence occurs can be seen by showing the correspondence principle with regard to a quantum harmonic oscillator.
The other danger w.r.t emphasis of intuition, is to be clear, that the type of “waves” implied by state vectors (by taking the modulus of them) of quantum phenomena are not waves in the classical sense, describing the actual latitudinal/longitudinal movement, and whose only interpretation arises from taking the modulus square over certain regions with varying degrees of freedom to interpret a probabillity distribution for the phenomena described taking certain parmeter values upon measurement. The simples example of this could be seen with distribution produced from an identically repeated experiment using a particle with a known and derived state vector or its modulus (wavefunction) passing through a single slit before “striking” a screen.
As I think it relates somewhat to the theme of this thread, I think it might be important to note that Menger too did not see such a fractious divide in the methods of the sciences, hence why he considered himself to simply be applying what he referred to as the “empirical method” (given the book is a translation, I understand I should be a little weary of the risks of reading too much into certain connotations). He also notes the dangers of carrying naturalistic analogies from other branches of knowledge in an automative fashion to where they do not belong, and interestingly cites Francis Bacon in his support (otherwise panned by many, including Rothbard as a naive empiricist).
All this he stated quite clearly in the preface to his Principles.
I think it might be important to note that Menger too did not see such a fractious divide in the methods of the sciences
I haven’t really got very far into this, but it is something that I have been paying more and more attention to with regards to the social sciences. I haven’t read much of Mengers articles on method, but they may be key. It seems like focusing on the similarites and differences of Menger and Mises and what is meant by “empiricism” (I think Barry Smith and Peter Boetteke/ Leeson get a bit into this). Either way, it seems to be a crucial question that I do not think can be stressed enough.
The social sciences as we know it really know little of what Menger and Max Weber were trying to say - the Anglo American tradition just simply doesn’t know about it, it was never really that hot of an issue over here.
What seems to be mostly being discussed in this thread is well know to physicists. No-one actually imagine space is a thing independent of other things.
Idea that space does not exist and philosophy of general relativity (all motion and time are just coordinate invented by us and relative and there are no preferred coordinates) were stated by Leibniz and then Boskovich, and very well re-stated by Julius Mayer and then by Ernst Mach.
Physicists such as Einstein and Robert Dicke called it simply Mach’s Principle whenever they made use of it.
Actually, because of Mach’s Principle, we may talk entirely of curvature of empty space-time without contradiction.
It just formulism to talk about non-local relations more easily: space is merely set of all relations of things between themselves, therefore when we talk about nothing except empty space-time, or deform it, we are using a continuous formalism to discuss in fact changes in relations of things, since space is just another way of talking about relations.
Hence things like spinors or 2-spinor formulisms (e.g., Roger Penrose & Wolfgang Rindler) using abstract tensor notation such as twistors: by talking exclusively about space, we actually discover relations between things once we decode our formalism back into discussing things.
We can talk about particles interacting with particles without any coordinates at all, or what is same thing, about empty space-time, since that is merely defined in terms of overall configuration of particles.
This further illustrates the main point: descriptions are not explanations. This space-time formalism has the appearance of an explanation, but it is merely a fancy way of summarizing a bunch of observations. What happened to the question of what underlies those observations?
@AJ: I agree. Now, I acknowledge that there is a bit of arbitrariness here… when we say that the laws of electromagnetism “explain” it, what we really mean is that if we invoke these concepts of “electric current” “mangetic field” “capacitive reactance” “inductive reactance” and so on, we can explain the phenomena in terms of these conceptually “more basic” entities.
Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of gravity do not involve conceptually more basic entities that serve as the “causal agents” of gravitation and that is what we mean when we say that they do not “explain” gravity. Rather, they organize the phenomena of gravity into mathematically elegant form. We have not advanced as far as we might like from the Ptolemaic view of the planets: they are at this and this and then this position at this and this and then this time and here is the very mathematically elegant equation which computes the relationship between them.
Clayton -
I agree, intuition is a feeble guide, at best. But my objection is based more on the idea of a “balance of evidence in similar cases” not intuition. Sound waves are not “intuitive”, but they are real and they propagate over the medium, air. And so on for any other kind of wave besides the waves of elementary particles.
I agree with Bohr’s allowed uses of “particle” and “wave” because that is what any elementary concept in physics really is, just a label for a concept that is accessible to my brain that is, overall, a “good fit” to the physical phenomena.
And note that I do not mean that it is not possible that the universe is, at root, some gigantic wave equation, such as Schodinger’s.
In my spare time, I’m working on a widly speculative theory based on digital physics. The idea of digital physics is this. A computer can compute any function. So, the problem of “modeling” the universe can be thought of as searching for the right computer with the right program on it that, when executed, causes all the state information of this actual Universe to be computed. OK, fair enough.
However, most DP theories strike me as horribly obtuse. For example, the Cellular Automata model is very popular and people think maybe they can construct a 3-dimensional or even 2-dimensional (?) lattice of cellular-automata and then think of the universe as being “made out of” a gigantic cellular automata lattice and all macroscopic phenomena as “arising” from this lattice. It’s not completely far-fetched when you realize that physics still has a lot of “room at the bottom” since our ability to resolve the physical world is about 20 or so orders of magnitude from the Planck length. In any case, I still don’t like the idea of assuming this a priori spatial structure from the outset. Yes, my brain perceives the Universe in three dimensions but why should space necessarily originate as a fundamentally 3-dimensional phenomenon? Why is the number three so special??
So, I asked myself how would you build a continuous computer, a wave computer? Quantum computation is a field that exists and is real and comes very close to answering this question. In fact, Seth Lloyd wrote a book called “Programming the Universe” about QC and he asserts that “the Universe is indistinguishable from a Quantum Computer.”
I don’t understand the mathematics of quantum computation and I suspect, in any case, that the mathematics of quantum systems are unintentionally obfuscatory. So, I’m working on my own purely mathematical approach and my current idea is to use the complex exponential function as the basis for a new numbering system (like the decimal numbering system) that treats complex values as properly basic entities which can be computed and operated on like any other. In other words, rather than a+bi, I would like to just have z, where z is encoded in such a way that both the a and the b can be recovered from it in the same way that the 3 and 0.14159… can be separately recovered from the decimal encoding of the real number pi.
If I ever succeed (not a high probability of this… :P), it will be possible to construct a “wave computer” from the complex numbers though I haven’t worked out how.
Clayton -