[FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Sun Jul 12 12:59:31 EDT 2020

Roger, 

I think this letter is a FRIAM Hall of Famer.  

My own thoughts on reading it go back the relation between hypothetical constructs and intervening variables, and my suspicion is that QM strips a lot of physics of its “surplus meaning”.  I won’t review all that now because I am not sure these thoughts are even relevant. 

Thanks for your post. 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2020 8:57 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

To Jon and EricS --

I used to think I could finesse the problem by simply letting the physics be the mathematics.  No particle, no wave, no worry, just follow the differential equation, or the group of the symmetries of its solutions, it doesn't matter what it really is as long as you have a way to compute the results of observations.  And I do think it is perfectly reasonable to ignore the problem for reasons of interest or time management.

But Physicists have been explaining how stuff works for a long time, for generally accepted definitions of explain and stuff.  Many explanations turned out to be wrong, some of the stuff turned out to not actually be stuff after all, but all the explanations were about how stuff worked.  Mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics all wonderful explanations of how stuff works, suitable for sharing with intelligent friends over pizza and leaving the friends with a better understanding of how stuff works.   

Quantum mechanics broke that streak of stuff explaining.  The wave functions which are solutions to Schrödinger's equations are not waves of any kind of stuff that anyone has explained, which is what I took Feynmann to be saying.  Physics changed at that point from how stuff works to how physicists work.  You can say it doesn't bother you, but it did and does bother a lot of people.

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:48 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu> > wrote:

Roger but also Jon, 

It is neat that this question can be so simply posed, and can be answered in a way that isn’t trivial but is also hard to disagree with.

Where are the solid foundations of quantum mechanics?

I would characterize my own position in nearly identical terms to those Jon used, or that he invokes from Bethe.  The solid foundation is the mathematical formulation of the theory (+ the recipe-book explanations of how to do and read off the measurements that the math is supposed to predict).  

I am in this conversation in a different venue, about whether “interpretations of quantum mechanics” even is anything.  The crux seems to be that there isn’t anything in quantum mechanics one can say is “wrong”.  The best an honest person can say is “I don’t like it”.  By “honest” here, I am being denigrating toward most of the people who work in interpretations, every one of whom is smarter and more patient and thoughtful than I am.  But I hold up against them Weinberg, who is “honest” in the sense I mean, at least as I view him.  I think we circulated this before on the list:

http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

The thing that I think captures this ideally is Weinberg’s quote below the caricature of Schroedinger, around p.4, where he says “But the vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling, and like many other physicists I would prefer a single history”.  Nietzche had a criticism, I think of Kant, that “Kant formulates the common man’s positions in terms that will confound the common man”, and much of the conversation about interpretations delivers as sophist in that sense to me.  Weinberg won’t let himself dress something up in the hope of obscuring, with fancy constructions, the truth that he doesn’t have a real objection.  So he just admits that not liking it is the most he can offer.  

I am unable to understand claims that there is a substantive place for “interpretation” (such as made on the Stanford Encyclopedia https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/ , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/), because the areas of work that I can follow all seem to me to fall into the following categories:

1. Computation approaches _within_ quantum mechanics — specifically regarding decoherence — that remove the need for “measurement” as a primitive concept, and seek to derive everything we have associated with measurement as epiphenomenal.  Wikiledia says somewhere that Zurek used to argue essentially this position; I don’t know where he is on that now; 

2. Commitments that may not be in QM now, but are eligible to become part of it if they can make falsifiable claims that can eventually be nailed down (Bohm and pilot waves, for example).  

The Stanford encyclopedia has some verbiage that including decoherence makes the “problem of measurement” even more pressing, but I read it and it doesn’t make any sense to me.  

Everything else seems to me to be about liking or not liking, but not about what is or isn’t the most-true description we know how to formulate.

Of course to do this properly, I would need to (first) be somebody else smarter than I am, and (second) drop whatever else I am doing and read all this literature full-time, and (third) be 30 years younger so that I could read all the literature within the remainder of my lifetime.  So not an option, on all three counts.

But, to circle back to the start: the reason I say Roger’s focus of the question is “interesting” is that, to me, it is not clear that the likability of a scientific construct is relevant to the solidity of its foundation.  To our ability to use it gracefully, or to explore and extend it, yes.  But not to our assessment of how solid it is, relative to other positions of which we ask a similar question.

Eric 

I suppose it could all be pro forma in that none of the participants understand that there is no there there to which one could appeal, so the appeal becomes nothing but a ritual motion with "quantum woo" taking the place of whichever holiest holy worked last week.

But maybe it's exactly the inexplicability which is the secret sauce, that there is something ineffable about the quantum physics.

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 9:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

OK. So, maybe y'all have collectively provided an answer. The reason(s) people invoke quantum woo so *often* is because it serves several (perhaps conflatable and ambiguous) purposes.

In order of appearance in the thread:
1) justificationist appeals to authority
2) donning attributes others (seem to) have but you don't
3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations
4) power (both social and individual)
5) evocation of the shaman/oracle archetype

Note, I'm not including ordinary physics, only woo, because that's what irritated me enough to stop reading "Ignorance" for so long. Firestein has lots of other riffs and hooks and it was childish of me to react that way ... but I can't help it. The woo is killing me. By contrast, imagining (and ruling out) an "airfoil" around pond scum in relation to the Purcell paper was NOT irritating at all. Invocations of actual physics are fine. Invocations of mysterious stuff just because it's mysterious flips my triggers.

Speaking of the Purcell paper, this popped off the queue this morning:

New Clues To ALS And Alzheimer's From Physics
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/888687912/new-clues-to-als-and-alzheimers-from-physics

I'm embarrassed that I didn't notice it sooner.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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