Abacus

Okay yguy. You say you have a problem with science. What do you propose that scientists do about it?

Jesse

yguy, why is it "myopic" for a field to limit itself to questions that can be answered using a particular methodology? Is science myopic because it can't answer moral questions? Is the discipline of history myopic because its own methodology can't tell you the composition of the sun?

If scientists were claiming that science could answer all important questions about reality--the philosophy of "scientism"--then I'd agree with you that this is wrong. But instead it seems that you yourself are endorsing scientism, as if science should be able to answer all questions about reality, even though its methodology is clearly incapable of addressing many of these questions.

yguy

With regard to the question of random motion, I would suggest they approach it with the same attitude Newton had regarding the moon. Maybe they wouldn't come up with God as the proximate cause, but they might understand more about it than they do - just as Newton understood more about objects in motion for having asked why the moon doesn't fall.

yguy

Now that I think of it, "tunnel visioned" would be more accurate. From what I've seen, physicists treat the universe as a dead thing. If that's what it is, then you're on the right track. If not, you are straining to produce codifications which may be obsolete by the time they are presented.

Physics is the basis for the other hard sciences, so the question of "why does such and such happen" will always end up at the physicist's doorstep.

But even in pathology, for example, the prevailing view seems to be that cancer is a biochemical phenomenon, which leads physicians to disregard the emotional state of the patient to a greater degree than I believe is justified. IMO, radiation and chemotherapy are analagous to the mechanic whose customer complains that his car is overheating, and whose solution is to install a refrigeration system under the hood to cure the symptom. IOW, many effects have been catalogued, but we seem to be way short on causes.

Here's the deal: people with any common sense don't really care where the truth comes from - and need no validation from the religious or scientific priestcraft before they will believe it. Whether that qualifies as "scientism" I don't know, and don't much care.

Abacus

I'd be careful about using the word random. The time development of the wave function is no more random than the time development of the motions of celestial bodies.

Why do you think there is any big difference between what Newton did and what 20th century physicists did? Newton came up with a set of simple laws that consistently and accurately described a wide variety of natural phenomenon. Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Einstein, and company did the same. The question that all of these gentlemen, including Newton, answered is a HOW question. None of them answered the WHY question.

I'd say that 20th century physicists did approach their particular problem much the same way Newton approached his, and that they were even more succesful. Afterall, the classical view that a particle can have a specific location and a specific momentum simultaneously has been shown to be false. We've now reached past the limit of usefulness of the point particle approximation, and we now have a much, much deeper understanding of our universe. You just don't like the result. Tough.

Besides, if there was a magician deciding where the electron would appear everytime you went looking for one, it seems to me that its choices are pretty well constrained by the probabilities specified by the wave function. That's a mighty small gap to fit your pet deity in.

But they do understand much. You know, there is a reason that QM has been lauded as the most accurate physics theory ever.

The moon is falling. So is the earth, the sun, the other planets, the asteroids, and the comets. They're all falling.

yguy

Maybe not, but they asked it.

One Professor Paul Davies said this:

"These are cherished laws and they don't really want to have to ditch them, because all of the favoured frontier stuff these days, with people working on string theory, M-theory and all these other sexy topics, would have to down tools and start with a completely different conceptual scheme."

This strikes me as betraying a decidedly non-Einsteinian mentality; in fact it is rather more reminiscent of that displayed by those who cowed Galileo into recanting, even if not nearly that extreme.

My understanding is that position and momentum cannot be known simultaneously. That a particle lacks either attribute is not an established fact if what I've seen on this board is accurate.

I don't know what result it is you think I don't like. If you mean that QM has somehow relegated God to the scrap heap of scientific history, it hasn't done anything of the kind.

Yeah sure - it would only put Him inside of every particle in the universe.

Peter Soderqvist

TO YGUY

Soderqvist1: Our measurement disturb nature, in example when we bouncing photons off the electron and thus determining where the electron is, afterwards we don't know where the electron is? It is analogous to billiard game there the player disturb the cue ball with 8 balls. But not only does our measurement disturbing the untouched nature, Heisenberg 's principle of uncertainty is intrinsic in the quantum world. Take the Bohr atom as illustration, the more we know about an electron's momentum the less we know about its position, and vise versa!

An electron orbiting the atom in a standing wave of probability distribution of Eigenstates, when this electron emits energy of quanta, and thus jumping down to a lower energy level, the electron doesn't exists between these two orbits, or levels, hence we know about two positions, the higher, and the lower energy levels, or orbits, but we doesn't know about its momentum between these levels, because the electron doesn't exist there! These quantum jumps are known as discontinuous transformation of energy! Experiments later than Aspects' has been made in order to pin down the electron's momentum and position in a closed box, but the electron begins to bounces like crazy more, and more as the space decreases. That confirms that Heisenberg 's principle of uncertainty is intrinsic in the quantum world!

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene Chap 4: Microscopic Weirdness
If an electron is confined to a space of decreasing size, its motion (momentum) increases wildly due to "quantum claustrophobia"
http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/elegantuniverse.html

Quotations by Niels Bohr: Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~...ohr_Niels.html

Quotations by Werner Heisenberg: Since my talks with Bohr often continued till long after midnight and did not produce a satisfactory conclusion, both of us became utterly exhausted and rather tense. Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely. The "path" comes into existence only when we observe it. I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm

Soderqvist1: Thus, the standing wave of probability distribution of Eigen states in the Atom is more correct interpreted as a wave of possibility, because these waves doesn't jibe with ordinary waves, and the wave of possibility collapses into actuality, (one Eigenstate) when it is measured!

Corona688

Bzzzt! Quote out of context. Let me show the whole thing, with the stuff you left out in bold:
"If they're right, this makes theoretical physicists very uncomfortable," Davies says. "These are cherished laws and they don't really want to have to ditch them, because all of the favoured frontier stuff these days, with people working on string theory, M-theory and all these other sexy topics, would have to down tools and start with a completely different conceptual scheme." (bold is the stuff yguy left out) Er, where the heck did you get that? The quote says, 'If they're right, this makes theoretical physicists very uncomfortable.' As they should be. The current theory isn't so much "entrenched", as much as "works"; a theory as well-developed and well-supported as the Standard Theory is not something to be tossed aside lightly.

Granted, individuals are individuals, and human beings; some scientists may have invested so much in the current theory that they are loathe to give it up when evidence says otherwise. So what? Unless this scientist starts burning holders of opposing viewpoints at the stake, there's not much he do about it.

In any case, I see nothing in that quote that says they are blindly holding on to their theories to the exclusion of all other evidence. It's my(admittedly uneducated) understanding that it's the same thing. There's nothing magical about scientific measuring apparati - they operate through the same physical principles as everything else in this universe. If we can't see a photon's simultaneous position and velocity, then neither does another photon "know" the other's simultaneous position and velocity when two interact. This is just what happens. Agreed. It's impossible to rule out the possibility of a stringpuller god in the background handling things; but impossible to give evidence for, either. And that is the crux of the problem:

In making god omni-everything, you put him outside ALL understanding forever. he is the ultimate exception to the rules. he could effectively be said to BE the universe, and that's fair enough imho.

But to say that the universe has intelligence, a plan, goals; to say it cares about the inhabitants of one tiny speck on a tiny speck in a tiny speck in a somewhat bigger speck inside itself; to say it wants us to burn it's own goats for it! That, frankly, is impossible to support by any means at all. There is simply no evidence big enough.

yguy

I fail to see why the omission is of any import, or how I've misrepresented anything. The veracity of the conclusion is irrelevant to what I said, since the jury is still out on it.

Why should they be? Obviously most attempts to find a unified field theory will at some point be revealed as dead ends, in which case such a discovery would save many scientists a lot of wasted effort. Right?

Oh, please. Are you gonna stand there flat-footed and tell me there isn't politics involved in who gets hired and who gets research money? Next you'll be telling me there is no political maneuvering in the Catholic Church.

How can a theory be "sexy"?

What does interaction between two photons have to do with the question of whether either possesses both position and velocity, without regard to whether either can be measured?

Or the evidence is too big to see.

Kimpatsu

Hey, lighten up. I'm the anal retentive one here. Take a Prozac if you have to, but let us rage at each other. It's entertaining.