Onebornfree, since you dismiss anything coming from a government or government funded source as a lie and/or completely wrong I guess I can dismiss anything you say because you’re a 9/11 truther (since that position is completely insane and not supported by anything).
Protip: Don’t be so ridiculous
Religion is fake because it’s logical nonsense, that has nothing to do with physics. I see no reason to take anyone seriously who contends that magic is real.
That aside, physics is largely a useless state project and it has outstripped the ability to test or develop technology, so a lot of it is probably bogus.
Young sir, [20 and knows everything, right?], first of all my comment were addressed to the instigator of this thread, not yourself.
You are free to believe whatever you want to - your beliefs are your responsibility, not mine. I don’t give a flying rat’s a$$ what you believe.
If you choose to believe everything the government says is “the truth” , and that what others outside it/them say is therefor “ridiculous”, that is your look out.
Good luck with that.
Regards, onebornfree
I agree. It seems to me that the place to look for new developments in science, or scientific theory [or anything else!] is outside of government funded research.
Any/all of the future breakthroughs in theoretical physics will most likely come for scientists outside of the scientific community funded by government [either directly or indirectly], for example from the minds of people like the instigator of this thread - even from people without “proper scientific education /accreditation”]
Scientific breakthroughs nearly always come from those determined to think outside the box created by government institutionalized “groupthink” . Those most likely to achieve this mindset are independents, un-funded or perhaps minimally funded, by the state.
Regards, onebornfree.
Nice strawman.
Post this at physorg or some other science specific site. I would like to see what they say.
From my very limited understanding in the realm of theoretical. It’s theoretical. They pose theroys to try to make sense of the universe. We can only observe, we can’t create suns or black holes to test and independantly verify. THe scientists take what they can observe and fit it to models.
Basically like a computer program that runs stable. IF something is observed that is not explained by current theories, they try to make sense of it.
Kealey - The Myth of Science as a Public Good
Kealey - Science is a Private Good; Or Why Government Science is Wasteful
BP restricted scientist involvement in the oil disaster. Given the scope of the area, it is not easy but they tried.
Is it far-fetched to consider that government controlling the disaster area afterwards, who can analyze the situation, the physical evidence, etc, can filter what evidence it wants leaked out?
Of course not. Government and BP both had [and continue to have] a vested interest in restricting the free flow of information in this scenario.
Same with all national and state level major events [ e.g. 9/11, OKC etc.].
It’s par for the course- to be expected.
Regards, onebornfree.
@Michael: Thanks for the interesting blog post and many links. I too take an amateur interest in physics and cosmology (and mathematics) and I think that most lay people do not understand just how detached many of these theories of the “universe in the large” are from any reality checks. I have read the first few chapters of Ernst Mach’s book The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development and I have to say that the difference between how he lays out even rudimentary physical principles, such as the law of inertia, and how a mainstream physics textbook lays it out is very analogous to the difference between reading Austrian economics and mainstream macroeconomics. The clarity of Mach’s exposition of the history of physics is nothing short of stupendous. I actually understand how Galileo and Newton came to the law of inertia (Galileo derived his argument from a series of empirical observations that, when taken in the limit, imply that a body in motion will remain in motion) instead of simply taking it as an “assumption” or “way of thinking”, as it is often presented in physics classes.
Based on the little research I’ve done into the subject of plasma cosmology, I suspect that there has been a paradigm error, namely, the focus on the gravitational force as the dominant organizing force in the universe. And the Big Bang is on much more shaky ground than many physicists put it across. We can’t know what the difference is between a universe that is only finitely old and a universe that is infinitely old, that is, we can’t know from introspection how to discriminate between one or the other by observation. I find the red-shift argument to be persuasive but then there’s more to it than just “everything is moving away from us now, so everything must have been moving towards us in the past.”
Taking the assumption of a finitely old universe is actually very problematic, philosophically speaking. If we set the two alternatives on the table, side-by-side, for any given universe we should prefer the infinite age thesis over the finite age thesis by Ockham’s razor. The finitely old universe requires some further cause in order to be explained, the infinitely old universe does not. In other words, a finite-age universe just pushes the problem of origins outside of physics whereas the infinite-age universe simply abolishes the problem of origins. Nevertheless, the real problem may just be that we don’t fully understand time. Time is the least understood aspect of physics yet it is the most important. Perhaps the choice between finite and infinite-age universe is a false dichotomy.
In any case, I think that physics has gone off into the “weird for its own sake” territory. This is in large part a result of its subsidization by the State which looses science (and all other study) from its mooring to the reality of human action. In the past, scholars were often patronized by wealthy private individuals. To acquire patronage, your patron had to have a reason to believe that your ideas were worth listening to, whether by himself or others he cared about. Today, you just file the grant paperwork and the whole process is regulated by the same sort of groupthink dynamics as popular election lobbies. Whatever plays (like “string theory”) is what gets funded.
Clayton -
Well, it depends on what you mean by the universe. If you mean the four-dimensional spacetime structure itself, I don’t think it makes any sense to say how old it is, infinitely or not. The spacetime structure exists outside of time.
As for causality itself, I’m beginning to wonder if it is an aspect of information rather than an aspect of physical processes.
Information is certainly far more important than physicists have, until recently, imagined it to be.
I prefer to think of physics from the point-of-view of humans acting. What are we really doing? What we’re really doing is trying to understand the physical world to a sufficient degree as to be able to make predictions about its behavior, predictions that are sufficiently good to build machines that can help us harvest and utilize energy from the Earth and the Sun more efficiently.
This should cast a shadow over any sort of ontological speculation regarding the unseen world (either in the microscopic, macroscopic or other realms which we can only observe indirectly or not at all). The point-particle model, for example, could itself be a significant hindrance to taking that next step in really understanding the physical world (getting past the current hurdles facing physics today), just like the ether was a hindrance to physicists for a period. Speculative ontological entities like quarks or black holes may be useful as imaginary constructs that help physicists anchor their comprehension of their own theories but, in the end, physics is about trying to explain what the world does, not what it is.
Clayton -
The connection between things on the macroscale (like planes flying) and theoretical physics is called the correspondence principle. It states that quantum mechanics must be able to predict everything that happens on the macroscale. basically, if you go from a few particles to billions of billions of particles or from low temperature to high temperature quantum mechanics must become classical mechanics.
I’m a chemist, not a physicist so I’m not really interested in anything smaller or more fundamental than electrons and protons (neutrons too, I guess) but I know a thing or two about quantum mechanics. I’m working on my PhD so I also happen to know a thing or two about the realities of publicly funded science research in the US of A. Although I am currently being paid by a government agency, not everything that comes out of my mouth is a lie. You forgot to think about the fact that theoretical physicists and other scientists are quite intelligent people. Of course they love government largesse but for the most part they are more motivated by the same thing that has motivated you to learn about cosmology and physics on the side. They want to know the truth and they would really like to do something useful with their lives. This is what sets public science funding apart from defense contractors and the other disgusting mechanisms by which governments throw money away. Don’t get me wrong, I know things would be much more efficient if private funding were dominant but It isn’t as bad as you think (at least in the realm of chemistry and biochemistry). I don’t know all the ins and outs of grant writing but scientists at research universities decide who gets funded and who doesn’t. The government doesn’t have a direct role in deciding what gets done. It just says: The NSF gets x amount of dollars for this research area and y amount for that area and then actual scientists decide which individual project gets funded. It’s certainly not the most efficient system in the world, but it could be worse, I’m sure. There is always competition between professors to do new and innovative things. It’s not a competition to see who can throw away the most money in the smallest amount of time like it is at most other government jobs.
I did some thinking about this last night. It seems that “causality” is a human-level explanatory term to refer to one of three concepts:
F=ma
F (the force acting on the object; in this case gravity) being positive “caused” a (acceleration) to be positive. Well yes, increasing F increases a; that’s one of the things being implied by the equation - the directly proportional relationship of F and a. The premises of our system already contained that fact, and we are just recognizing it in a different way for our human purposes and comprehension. So in this case, we can make a logically certain statement of the form “Event A is always followed/accompanied by event B (assuming the model)” but that is only phrased in these more human terms of causality for our ease of comprehension. To say that something caused something else is no more than merely choosing a way to carve up the concept space of that system so that the significance of certain aspects is more readily apparent to humans.
Strong enough correlation, often backed by a “story” given in terms of 1 (whether or not the model in 1 is so idealized), to form a data-fitting tentative hypothesis of the form “Event B will always be observable following observation of event A.”
Chains of the above.
I believe science uses 1 when using mathematical models or other idealized systems of axioms, 2 when making empirical theories to fit observed data, and 3 when the mechanisms in the gaps are not well-understood or are when it’s simply not necessary to go into the details at that time.
Hmm, interesting. What would you happen to think of this?
I’d post what I did above as a response to that
Of course, these questions cannot be entirely answered until one assumes a certain perspective on epistemology, and I think Eliezer’s uncertainty in that article is based on a deeper uncertainty about which epistemological perspective to adopt, at least back in 2008 when he posted that.
So time wouldn’t factor into it at the base-level of physical analysis of a single “cause and effect” event, because all “events” are after all just features of the initial conditions of the system and its physical laws, just as all mathematical theorems are already contained in the axioms of the system. In both cases, a sufficiently intelligent being would find all such events and theorems too obvious to be worth mentioning - in fact tautological - given the starting premises. We would still need to use these concepts, though, because unlike that super-intelligent being we do not find all the implications obvious from the starting conditions/premises (not to mention that we don’t even have full knowledge of all the starting conditions and physical laws).
If I can use these words without all the baggage they usually entail, I would call it “empirical inductive prediction (of sensory phenomena) based on models that seem to fit the sensory data.” Of course then you can perform pure deductions with those models/hypotheses as starting premises, as well.
In this latter case, time would factor into it, because we have a subject experience of time, or at least of memory. (I’m not yet sure whether to conceive of memory in terms of time or time in terms of memory, but I’m leaning toward the latter: that from the perspective of strict methodological individualism time would be a concept constructed in terms of memory.)
That’s putting it very abstractly, but in more common terms you simply predict the future of your sensory experience based on the past, and cause-and-effect relationships are a useful heuristic for thinking about things like that. You only have limited short-term memory to work with, so it makes sense to think in those terms most of the time. However, I suggest that at a deep enough level of analysis this (cause and effect) reveals itself as just a heuristic.
Write Paper
Proove you’re right
Nobel Prize in Physics
???
Profit!!
Nobel Prize is bullshit. It is like when a statist is proposing to anarchist: “wow, if private defence and health care is so cool, why don’t you write to our government and ask for permission to do what you wanna do?”
I think you get what I mean. Nobel Prize is very political and can be very biased too.
MaikU, it was a (sarcastic) joke :-).
But, yes, for the most part I agree with you, albeit to a much lesser degree in Physics than, say, Peace or Economics which i would consider a downright fraud.
oh, ok 
I agree with you. Especially on “peace” and “economics” 