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

Tue Jul 14 20:26:28 EDT 2020

Eric, Jon

Did you guys know each other at SFI?

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 5:31 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Hi Roger, Dave, Jon,
>
> Jon’s answers are at a level of technical sophistication and quality I
> don’t have to offer.  They already subsume and surpass anything I would say
> below., to the extent that I think I appreciate roughly what they refer
> to.  I also admit not having been able to justify the time to watch
> internet videos, much as I would like to, so I haven’t watched Bethe and
> Feynman lectures (though have read Feynman on this topic at some length
> over the decades).
>
> But there is a thing it is hard to let go, and which perhaps is not
> identical to things already said on the thread.  Repeatedly the following
> fragment appears as an anchor point:
>
> [From Bethe below -- I lost the indent symbols:]
> 2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
> uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."
>
> What I wanted to add was:
>
> Why would anyone expect that an electron in an atom has “an orbit”.  The
> sentence structure entails that assumption, but why would one make it?  An
> orbit is an emergent property of “objects” that arise in classical limits,
> like the wetness of water is an emergent property of a condensed phase of
> matter.  Sure, one can ask “how wet is a single H2O molecule”, and then
> defend the sentence on the ground that it doesn’t violate rules of syntax.
> But would we do that now?  If not, why would we grant defensibility to
> sentences that contain word sequences like “the orbit of the electron in an
> atom”?
>
> I wish I could put my finger on how and why what I think is the same thing
> can be so differently experienced by people.  I believe the following are
> sort of to the same point:
>
> From Roger:
>
> The physicists first discovered that their existing categories of
> explanations were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of
> their study disappear into wave functions. [btw, I find this a beautiful
> articulation]. Wave functions could be manipulated to predict what nature
> would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show what nature is doing.
>
> From Dave:
>
> The tension between what the math can describe and what the math 'means'
> is not new.
>
> What is new; the math has become so esoteric, so incestuous, that it
> "means" nothing. It is not even a description of 'the world' merely a
> description of itself.
>
>
> I wonder if the way to understand these perceptions links back to Nick’s
> metaphor monism/mania/madness (in the Italian sense of “sono pazzo per”,
> said of a crush):
>
> It could be that people never really think “about” “anything”.  What they
> refer to as “thinking” is just the management of metaphors that point to
> metaphors which are metaphors of metaphors.  (Nick, embrace your inner
> category theorist.)  If that is right, then the only thing quantum
> mechanics can ever be is a metaphor for classical mechanics with some new
> management rules that use other metaphors to create tension and discomfort,
> and the classical mechanics is a set of metaphors for something else
> (greater fleas having lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum).  If that is true
> of everybody, then it is true of me, too, and the fact that it seems
> incomplete as a description of my experience is just part of a larger
> self-delusion.  But it feels too linguistic to me, and not
> reflective enough of the possible diversity of cognitive or experiential
> states.
>
> The Bethe fragment above feels familiar to me as an antique language that
> characterized the ones two generations before me, who reached cognitive
> adulthood in a world before QM was established, and who in fact had to
> achieve that establishment climbing up on a Wittgenstein’s ladder of
> classical mechanics and frequentist probability theory, which they could
> not then bring themselves to throw away, any more than they could lose the
> accents of their birth languages even as they became good speakers of
> languages where they emigrated.  As I think Dave said in some earlier
> thread (though not in quite these words), the metaphors are Wittgenstein
> ladders, but that is not the same thing as the places one climbs to on
> them.
>
>
> I _think_ it is different to say that the math is a structured setting
> within which the mind is offered a way to have new experiences.  Like
> working as a musician is a setting within which the mind is offered a way
> to have new experiences of music.  Or being a tennis player, or being a
> chess competitor, or a crime boss, or emperor of the galaxy.  An electron
> is not a metaphor for a planet.  An electron is an electron.  But for the
> word to take on a meaning, and hence the sentence it appears in, we will
> have to experience some new thoughts.
>
> I don’t know what it would mean to say that mathematics is “a description
> of itself”, but I think I am familiar with various practices of doing
> things with (fairly low-level, applied) mathematics, and having it affect
> the inventory and process of my mental imagery.
>
> Dunno.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 15, 2020, at 3:14 AM, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 3:26 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Roger,
>>
>> I wish to clarify what I believe our positions to be. Your position is
>> that Richard Feynman claims that no one understands quantum mechanics
>> and that you believe him. I am claiming that misunderstanding photons
>> has its origins in demanding that photons be greek waves or particles
>> and that this perspective is reminiscent of the classical problems of
>> compass and straight-edge geometry.
>>
>> Yes, I believe Richard Feynman as I understand him, and I think he makes
> his point quite clearly in the lecture.  And I believe Hans Bethe in his
> 1999 lectures identified the exact same part of quantum mechanics which is
> not and can not be "understood" in the usual sense of physicists explaining
> things.
>
> I haven't seen any indication that you understand what I am saying, what
> Feynman was saying, or what Bethe was saying.
>
> I don't think your analogy to post-Euclidean geometry has any bearing.
> The geometers simply changed the postulates, turned the logic crank, and
> kept on reasoning about geometries in the same way.  New geometries for a
> new age, but categorically geometries just like the old one.  The
> physicists first discovered that their existing categories of explanations
> were mutating into each other, and then watched the objects of their study
> disappear into wave functions. Wave functions could be manipulated to
> predict what nature would do, but they couldn't be disassembled to show
> what nature is doing.
>
> you write:
>> "...and that led to philosophers proclaiming that everything is
>> uncertain. But there are no bad faith actors there, it's just typical
>> science journalism, trolling for the juiciest clickbait."
>>
>> Our discussion arose in the context of 'quantum woo', advocates and
>> discontents. From my perspective, it is an instance of bad faith
>> when 'philosophers' claim that *the uncertainty of everything* is
>> justified by Heisenberg. Additionally, it is an instance of bad faith
>> when 'journalists' unfaithfully invoke Heisenberg so as to produce
>> clickbait. I gather from your comment that with more discussion you
>> perhaps may agree, to some extent?
>>
>> It would be bad faith if the journalist or philosopher understood quantum
> mechanics and deliberately misrepresented it.  Misunderstandings are much
> more common than villains.  Bethe did not accuse anyone of bad faith.
>
>
>> In one sense, I interpret Bethe as speaking about the lack of
>> uncertainty associated with macroscopic events as a rebuttal to the
>> flights of fancy, the 'quantum woo' espoused by first-year physics
>> students. However, further analysis of my interpretation perhaps cannot
>> be certain. In another sense, and intended with less cheek, I interpret
>> Bethe as highlighting the fact that the point metaphor diverges for the
>> very small. Heisenberg uncertainty is a claim about how well we can
>> approximate an object of inquiry with a particle, ie. treat the object
>> as a dynamical Euclidean point. We can treat a pea or the moon
>> accurately in this way, but we cannot treat an electron accurately in
>> this way.
>>
>> you write:
>> 1) "I especially liked the derivation of the uncertainty principle
>> through the limitations on representing a free particle with a Fourier
>> series"
>>
>> 2) "He then goes on to say that the thing which _is_ completely
>> uncertain is the orbit of the electron in an atom."
>>
>> Bethe speaks to your first point by saying that "this is the best we can
>> do with bell-shaped curves". In doing so, he is referring to a toolset
>> and it is only within the scope of a given toolset that the meaning of
>> uncertainty is defined. Crudely, I interpret the work done by the mixed
>> efforts of topos theorists and theoretical physicists to be an effort to
>> flesh out better matching objects, objects which are more like electrons
>> than Euclid's points are to being like electrons[⏁]. Speaking to your
>> second point, my hope is that as such a program continues, we will one
>> day have a metaphor for quantum things that we find as satisfactory as
>> points are for macroscopic things[⏄].
>>
>>
> If we imagine a theory which transcends quantum mechanics as it is
> currently formulated, then we can imagine some features of quantum
> mechanics might turn out to be artefacts of the methods we used?  Sure, I
> can't and won't argue with that proposition.
>
> As long as we're talking about quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger
> equation, wave functions, basis sets for describing harmonic motion, then
> Bethe is saying that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a consequence
> of fourier analysis, which is a neat argument that I should have learned
> decades ago.
>
> We can talk about what Bethe says, or I can talk about what Bethe says and
> you can talk about what you imagine the future will say about what Bethe
> says, it's up to you.
>
> I suggest that my arrogance in this matter is not the claim that someone
>> understands quantum mechanics in some universally acceptable way. My
>> arrogant assertion is that forcing a known-to-be incongruous model is
>> the wellspring of a perceived paradox and an unjustly disproportionate
>> production of 'quantum woo'.
>
>
> "forcing a known-to-be incongruous model" is exactly what Schrödinger did,
> if you remember Bethe's story about the ski holiday where all Sommerfeld's
> students were laughing at de Broglie's paper, and the result was quantum
> mechanics.  I guess the invention of quantum mechanics must be a necessary
> condition for "quantum woo".
>
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