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Physics Envy

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There must be an opposing critique by now about physics having all the mathematizing one could hope for and yet no clear ontology of QM. Petabytes/day at CERN, several dozen QM interpretations with math and statistics, and yet the most popular take on QM is operational, and the others are so beyond experimental capability it won’t be settled in our lifetime.

At least other domains have ontology as primary (physics used to too!)

> no clear ontology of QM

Isn't that by "design"? Ontology of QM is an inherently philosophical topic, and is of little interest to working physicists.

Ontology was central to past physical theories like of Newton or Aristotle though. Why is ontology inherently philosophical? (I mean in the natural philosophy way it is sure, but I don’t think you mean just that). I don’t see biologists getting by with operational theories for a hundred years. It seems less “by design” and more like without choice. A retreat. Even GR has light cones and events as real physical objects of the theory.

> Ontology was central to past physical theories like of Newton or Aristotle though

Yes, physics has origins in philosophy. Philosophical notions that could be formulated mathematically and tested experimentally became physics, and the rest became metaphysics. And, in the 21st century, metaphysics is of zero importance to working physicists. Only a few physicists would even be able to accurately describe what "ontology" is.

> Even GR has light cones and events as real physical objects of the theory.

Events and light cones are just convenient words/phrases for mathematical definitions, e.g., an event being the 4-vector (t, x, y, z). They don't have any further philosophical significance.

It’s no coincidence the discoverer of nonlocality John Bell insisted on clear beables (ontology) of the theory. It’s not philosophy to posit what exists. Be careful because doing it your way may require future disentangling as mathematical existence and physical existence are usually quite dissimilar. Only using mathematical definitions for physical theories is bound to create future tangles. And who knows when the next Bell will come along to disentangle the operational mess.

Engineering, at least the ME and EE kind, is kind of a middle ground. Some physics/math envy in the sense that we usually have to use fudge factors to make our designs work in real life.

Of course we're too busy making stuff to spend a lot of time on envy...

Excellent. I'm glad to have a name for that thing I'm criticizing every time I see the word "isomorphism" in a humanities text.

Heh. Inflection point, exponential growth, evolve, ...

It's status envy all the way down.

"These chemicals crystallize into the same shapes, what should I call my exciting new observation? I know, I'll translate the concept into Ancient Greek, let's see. 'Isomorphism' hey? That sounds very respectable and grand - perfect!".

Could it be that such a term has a well-defined (as far as it's possible in the respective field) meaning in the humanities?

Both times it was like: we define it this way in this paper. I didn't get the feeling it was a general usage thing. The definitions given were plenty rigorous, it's just that there weren't any other morphisms lying around that the author needed to disambiguate between. "Equivalence" would've done just as well.

I think the humanities are important, I just think it would be a better PR move to resist the urge to style them after anything else.

Counterpoint: https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/09/why-my-fellow-physic...

"... positivist scientists accept a mistaken image of natural science so it can be applied to the social sciences."

Just don’t mention maths envy to physicists.

You don’t tell me about math envy and I won’t mention how the Dirac Delta Function was invented, deal? :-P

Loose use of the dirac delta is a give away trait of a physicist. While a mathematician will spend pages to justify its use

Physicists don't have math envy; that's an invention of people who are jealous of physicists' "untrained" acumen.

Next we'll hear of "computer science envy" because physicists employ programming in their research. It would be equally absurd, of course.

The joke goes that biology is just applied chemistry, and chemistry is just applied physics, with physics just being applied maths.

Yeah, I know the joke. It’s an amusing one, but probably not for the reason some math people think.

there is not much of a clear distinction between high level math and physics anymore. they are blurred

I think this phenomenon detracts from important debates about what kind of mathematics is most appropriate in certain fields. I think there's certain predictable regularities to be found in different fields, but the way they might best be modeled isn't always the same, and holding up more "reduced", lower level fields as examples becomes sort of a red herring in a lot of ways. It's one thing to point out that certain types of math are inappropriately reductionistic, or cannot be applied due to inappropriate axiomatic assumptions; it's another to outline an alternative.

I hate this framing so much. "Ah you wish to quantify things you observe to establish relationships, how very envious-of-physics you must be".

If one wants to say that a given model is bad for the data, fair cop, but just say that. Ffs.

One of the use cases of studying math is the ability to quickly identify and fend off mathematical complications. In one example I could help a student of medicine tear down a wall of inappropriate statistical nonsense.

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