Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
> The next breakthrough in physics will occur in this century. It will be beautiful.
She's objecting to a very narrow interpretation of "beauty" driving physics, not elegance in general, a distinction this article's author seems unable to see.
Anyone who publicly makes an argument dependent on a distinction between ideas that aren't distinct in the mainstream is going to have an uphill battle at best.
>If your standards are low enough, yes. But I don’t think we should compromise on this idea of post-empirical physics. I think that’s appalling, really appalling… If there was any bit of experimental evidence that was decisive and in favor of the theory, you wouldn’t be hearing these arguments. You wouldn’t. Nobody would care. It’s just a fallback. It’s giving up and declaring victory. I don’t like that at all.
I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima.
That and maybe also human cognitive ability limits.
Language is a gross reduction of reality and has a hard time expresssing non-local concepts. Our inability to philosophically explain QM and classical physics in a consistant way is a good example of that.
My guess is that there are concepts which require the ability to express perspectives of reality we arent able to grok because they requira a non-local (no now, no me, no it) interpretation. Language cant express non local phenomena from the perspective of non-local and so language cant express “truth” but humans can experience it.
- talk about the configuration of objects in relation to each other in space and time.
- perform social functions and to describe the actions humans take in the social world.
In either case, I think it is totally clear that you are right and there are just certain sets of concepts that human language is fundamentally unsuited for. I think this is why some mathematical concepts are so abstruse; for example, I know that I can interpret a matrix as a twisty-rotatey-stretchy operation, but it is almost impossible for me to look at a matrix and understand what it is going to do except in the simplest cases. If foundations of QM are non-local (which they appear to be), we might have to take a long time to understand how best to communicate what is going on.
They're not. Non-locality is an artifact of certain interpretations / modifications of QM (where it isn't simply a misconception). See e.g. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424011 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2120 or the QBism intro https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5253 or Ray Streater's old EPR webpage https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kc... or Gell-Mann's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAw-xXCcM8 or...
What is interpreted is mostly the consequence of that philosophically (i.e. what does that mean).
I've seen a few alternatives like electrical universe theory which tries to take the spookiness out of QM but so far no other theory reconsile both clasically and QM and the two are proven to the extent that anything can be proven. Classical physics is not proven more than QM. You could easily reverse your argument starting with QM and saying classical physics doesn't prove locality.
* Your last remarks suggest you haven't read those Werner refs and don't know what is meant by the term "classical" as I've used it here - it's a reference to the structure of (general) probability state spaces, not to classical physics per se - and you should substitute "(naively) realist" for "classical" in the above.
% And those familiar with the probability theoretic aspects (see my links in a comment in a different thread here, or Tom Banks's teaser: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/2011/... ), probably won't want to do that. For example, the reason violations of Bell-type inequalities occur in QM is mundane from this perspective: "What on earth did you expect?! You have observables that don't commute! Use the appropriate inequality." https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/0375-9601(87)90075-2
The problem of interpretation is at the reconciliation phase that's what I care about.
Tut-tut. There's nothing "humanities rather than science" about the understanding that QM is 'just' probability theory
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0601158 https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/noncommutative-probabilit... https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0002049 https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+probability
applied to mechanics (and interpreted sensibly, as it is in any 'neo-Copenhagen' or 'pragmatist' interpretation). Grandiose and/or bizarre 'psiontology' is easily avoided.
> stupid statement.
Studying a great novel, or moral dilemmas, are ultimately about how we process, transmit, and infer information generated by other humans, and shared through extremely high-dimensional, but less structured, contexts, such as language, novels, literature, etc.
To say a physics phenomena is more 'humanities' is a strange statement, and it's hard to understand what they are getting at.
Is it? According to who?
They can call it monism...but it sounds like they are just describing the spatial dimensions.
0D Point (quantum/singularity/Planck unit), then 1D line, 2D square, 3D cube...as a direct consequence of nature/math it’s got structure, correlation, and symmetry (aka their definition of beauty). Is there any physicist who doesn’t think dimensions are a key concept of physics?
Here monism means another thing, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure that it even mean anything at all. The important thing is if it is possible or not to find any experiment that can refute the existence of monism. (It's easier to be a little less technical and ask for and experiment that confirms the existence of monism.) If no experiment can confirm of refute it, then it is outside the realm of physics and can't do anything to save it.
It has never made sense to me to separate the observer and the experiment, it's weird to suggest the observer is somehow more classical than the experiment, both are just evolving together in time as a quantum system. The idea of "collapse" makes no sense, there is no observer separate from the experiment, and instead the question of why we experience what we call "collapse" the way we do comes up. Practically, it makes more sense to me.
How can our experience of consciousness be real? What does it mean to be conscious? Can we numerically measure free will? Are those answerable questions under this framework?
Just let's not talk too much like that to the pop-gurus...
For example some years ago many people believe that it was possible to unify all the forces using the SU(5) group. It was a very nice theory, people like it, sadly experiments disagree. The idea that the universe is a single quantum state can't differentiate between the current standard model and the SU(5) model.
I really hate that the weak force only acts on left handled particles. Experiments disagree with my preferences. The idea that the universe is a single quantum state can't differentiate between the current version and the version where the weak force affect all particles.
So, how can be the idea that the universe is a single quantum state imply that the universe laws are beautiful?
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Nobody like the collapse and the almost magical properties of the observer (the observer can be a machine, it's not necessary a human). Anyway, it's very useful if you can shut up and do the calculations. I vote that the answer to the problem is something something decoherence. It's still a research topic (not my topic), so we have to wait a few years/decades/centuries to be sure.
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I think that "conscious" is like "alive". It's not magical. It's just an useful classification of some aggrupation of matter following the laws of physics.
It's also possible that "down" is the wrong word. Or perhaps there are constituent parts to the Monism. Indeed, what is really meant? If the monads are like Church functions in the Lambda calculus, and if they therefore struggle with the problem of incomparability, and they are linked to some comparison function, it is possible they trace an ellipsis in a space created by their interaction of their comparability. So then it would be more like, "steps going around", rather than "layers down".
The matter term comes from the fact the stuff is just stuff that exists
The consciousness term comes from the fact that we can see stuff that exists
But these are both just observational terms of 'stuff that exists', and it seems that anything existing at all is at the core of the issue (as opposed to what exists, in reference to the 'fundamental substance').
In programming we make monisms all the time. Think of Unix's "everything is a file" or Java's "Everything is an object". A monism is nice because it asserts that fundamentally there is some single common denominator underlying all emergent behavior. That being said, physicists are usually happy to do the calulations and get the expected results without needing a fundamental philosophy regarding the workings of the entire universe.
I'm always looking forward to them and read them with passion. There are two types though, the ones that make sense, and the ones I can't grasp. This is the latter :/
If this interests you, I strongly recommend learning the very basics of quantum mechanics. It will involve math, but the math doesn't need to be very complicated. And you will learn how the universe is fundamentally different than you thought, in a way that these popular articles hardly even hint at.
There are many introductions, but I've found the lesswrong one to explain things well, while using as little math as necessary (read: no calculus required):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FSwbFpDsca7uXpQ2/quantum-ex...
Feynman's book QED is also an excellent introduction, while requiring only a bit more math:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Lig...
Perhaps Quantum Monism fits in with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_building_(particle_physi... to replace any given standard model.
"it is infamous for its weirdness such as Schrödinger’s cat existing in a limbo of being half dead and half alive."
The cat is 100% alive and also 100% dead. However, it has 100% chance of resolving to just one state once you look at it.
To paraphrase the protagonist of A Serious Man: "No one understands the cat. The math... the math is what's important."
Very possibly my favorite Coen bros film.
Are you referring to New Scientist?
I completely agree with you about SciAm. I like quantamagazine myself. Though most science journalism is very, very bad these days. I'm guessing because not much is going on in the sciences; most of the research is pretty bad as well.