[FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)
David Eric Smith
desmith at santafe.edu
Tue Jul 14 22:02:42 EDT 2020
Hi Frank,
No. Strangely and unfortunately, I have never met Jon in person.
Eric
> On Jul 15, 2020, at 9:26 AM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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 <mailto: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 <mailto:rec at elf.org>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 3:26 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com <mailto: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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