<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Roger, hi,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Trying to figure out how to usefully reply to what you have below.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I\u2019m not sure what you believe I am saying, but let me try the following. You wrote: <br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">..., it doesn't matter what it really is </div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>I have no idea what I am supposed to do with the above sequence of words. Sure, English allows you to put them together. But if you use them or don\u2019t use them, it has no effect on what I know to do next, about anything.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>If you write me a long scholastic discourse on whether the true nature of God is Love or something else, English allows you to put those words together too. But no matter how strongly you believe your saying that should make it self-evident to me that it \u201cmeans\u201d something, I don\u2019t know how to take on whatever state of mind you think I should be taking on, as \u201cseeing\u201d a \u201cmeaning\u201d in it. </div><div><br class=""></div><div>I can go into some other direction, about what to try to do with words like \u201creally is\u201d in science, but then we\u2019re off in some other domain of analysis of language, cognition, behavior, or whatever. I think if we go in that direction, the philosophers take that as a bad-faith response, refusing to engage with whatever they want to engage in but not admitting the refusal, sort of like \u201cAll lives matter\u201d was a refusal to acknowledge the complaint expressed in \u201cBlack lives matter\u201d without accepting responsibility for the refusal and thus an act of bad faith. But I don\u2019t mean bad faith toward the philosophers; I just don\u2019t know how to play along with their wording that wouldn\u2019t be engaging in a language game.</div><div><br class=""></div><div><br class=""></div><div>I remember a good conversation with Jim Hartle maybe a year ago (or two), where I wanted to ask him some questions about the use of decoherent histories in cosmology. I forget exactly what I asked him, but before trying to answer, he asked me as a clarifying question: \u201cdo you mean, `in the math\u2019, or `really\u2019?\u201d I told him that, if we weren\u2019t referring to what was in the math, I would know what it meant to ask about \u201creally\u201d, at which point his face relaxed and he understood it would be possible to have a conversation, and he went on to provide a wonderful answer to whatever I had been asking. It had something to do with the fact that the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary initial condition for a \u201cwave function of the universe\u201d had the effect of providing a certain kind of hydrodynamic variable as the macroscopic coarse graining without having to fine-tune something. </div><div><br class=""></div><div>Anyway, </div><div><br class=""></div><div>Eric</div><div><br class=""></div><div><br class=""></div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">-- rec --</div></div><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:48 PM David Eric Smith <<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu" target="_blank" class="">desmith@santafe.edu</a>> wrote:<br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="">Roger but also Jon, <br class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">It is neat that this question can be so simply posed, and can be answered in a way that isn\u2019t trivial but is also hard to disagree with.</div><div class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">Where are the solid foundations of quantum mechanics?</div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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). </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I am in this conversation in a different venue, about whether \u201cinterpretations of quantum mechanics\u201d even is anything. The crux seems to be that there isn\u2019t anything in quantum mechanics one can say is \u201cwrong\u201d. The best an honest person can say is \u201cI don\u2019t like it\u201d. By \u201chonest\u201d 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 \u201chonest\u201d in the sense I mean, at least as I view him. I think we circulated this before on the list:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><a href="https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fquantum.phys.unm.edu%2f466-17%2fQuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf&c=E,1,wSKtoQSJ9_jHKoI1JA1R57f98ASKyBIHSGXPNlsBNjsYbh5nTjDxyG_lROct7JMi1tewBRvxtTVhcHltjiJ9q76mONAq3j74_QdCJowr-bEPlAzTETmrVHPRIg,,&typo=1" target="_blank" class="">http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The thing that I think captures this ideally is Weinberg\u2019s quote below the caricature of Schroedinger, around p.4, where he says \u201cBut the vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling, and like many other physicists I
would prefer a single history\u201d. Nietzche had a criticism, I think of Kant, that \u201cKant formulates the common man\u2019s positions in terms that will confound the common man\u201d, and much of the conversation about interpretations delivers as sophist in that sense to me. Weinberg won\u2019t let himself dress something up in the hope of obscuring, with fancy constructions, the truth that he doesn\u2019t have a real objection. So he just admits that not liking it is the most he can offer. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I am unable to understand claims that there is a substantive place for \u201cinterpretation\u201d (such as made on the Stanford Encyclopedia <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/" target="_blank" class="">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/</a> , <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/" target="_blank" class="">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/</a>), because the areas of work that I can follow all seem to me to fall into the following categories:</div><div class="">1. Computation approaches _within_ quantum mechanics \u2014 specifically regarding decoherence \u2014 that remove the need for \u201cmeasurement\u201d 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\u2019t know where he is on that now; </div><div class="">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). </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The Stanford encyclopedia has some verbiage that including decoherence makes the \u201cproblem of measurement\u201d even more pressing, but I read it and it doesn\u2019t make any sense to me. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Everything else seems to me to be about liking or not liking, but not about what is or isn\u2019t the most-true description we know how to formulate.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">But, to circle back to the start: the reason I say Roger\u2019s focus of the question is \u201cinteresting\u201d 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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Eric </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I suppose it could all be <i class="">pro forma</i> 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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">But maybe it's exactly the inexplicability which is the secret sauce, that there is something ineffable about the quantum physics.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">-- rec --</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 9:51 AM \u2204 u\u01ddl\u0183 <<a href="mailto:gepropella@gmail.com" target="_blank" class="">gepropella@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">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.<br class="">
<br class="">
In order of appearance in the thread:<br class="">
1) justificationist appeals to authority<br class="">
2) donning attributes others (seem to) have but you don't<br class="">
3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid foundations<br class="">
4) power (both social and individual)<br class="">
5) evocation of the shaman/oracle archetype<br class="">
<br class="">
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.<br class="">
<br class="">
Speaking of the Purcell paper, this popped off the queue this morning:<br class="">
<br class="">
New Clues To ALS And Alzheimer's From Physics<br class="">
<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/888687912/new-clues-to-als-and-alzheimers-from-physics" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" class="">https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/888687912/new-clues-to-als-and-alzheimers-from-physics</a><br class="">
<br class="">
I'm embarrassed that I didn't notice it sooner.<br class="">
<br class="">
-- <br class="">
\u2623 u\u01ddl\u0183<br class="">
<br class="">
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