A New “Theory of Everything”: Reality Emerges from Cosmic Copyright Law
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563
Edited to steal more screenspace/add context:
Authors:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120402224250/http://193.189.74...
http://edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marletto
You may also be interested in this paper:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantu...
> Once you have eliminated the impossible,” the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes famously opined, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
This is terrible advice, even more so when mentioned in a scientific publication. This recommendation is the antithesis of what the scientific method is about and a text book example of an argument from ignorance.
You don't pick an explanation because you have run out of ideas to explain a phenomenon, for the simple reason that there might be other explanations you have not considered.
The time to believe something is when there is evidence to back it up.
"Once you have falsified every other possible hypothesis, whatever hypothesis remains is the one we'll promote to a theory."
Holmes' is not saying you get to just make things up - he's trying to explain that instead of trying to prove something directly, inverting your perspective and falsifying as many incorrect interpretations ("the impossible") should always work - even if yo don't understand why.
That quote is an incredibly efficient summarization of the scientific method's core philosophy that (because you can't prove a positive), you falsify wrong hypothesis instead.
I disagree and I'll repeat what I said above: this is the antithesis of the scientific method. It's faith based and it opens the door to accepting hypotheses that have zero evidence to back them up. Follow this reasoning and you can just make things up.
It still involves a rigorous logical reasoning, not accepting something because you're running out of ideas.
This is still based on falsifying the hypothesis; prediction is one of the useful tools by which a hypothesis can be experimentally tested. If a prediction ends up being incorrect, you're left with the null-hypothesis. It's entirely possible that the null-hypothesis may not be particularly useful, but it - as Holms said - "must be the truth".
At it's core, the scientific method is simply proposing ideas, and testing them. As zombie-Feynman said. "everything else is bookkeeping"[1].
So, what? You just stop once you eliminate the known possibilities?
That last possibility REQUIRES experiment, investigation and thought to verify. If you discover a new possibility then you apply the process again.
The approach is not a one-shot deal, you MUST keep applying it. The current laws of physics are models that we use to explain what we observe and (if the model is good) predict what we might observe.
This by no means implies that that the models describe what's really going on. It is possible to have a model that describes a system that works but is not complete. The deeper we dig, the more we learn.
The fictional quote was meant to describe a deductive approach to investigation, not a rigid method. How often did Holmes dig up new facts and change his mind after eliminating possibilities?
Many mutually conflicting models can be created to describe the same properties of the same system.
We have no way of ever finding the "truth".
You can describe the laws of physics like little gremlins who follow a book of laws that happens to be the laws we know, and the predictions and observations we have will match the gremlins theory.
It doesn't make the existence of tiny gremlins real.
Really a shame that they went for such a strangely click-baity title for what was otherwise a good article, though. This has nothing to do with Copyright and nowhere does the article even attempt to hold up the terrible metaphor.
Given that the axioms they choose are powerful enough, this approach should yield falsifiable results, because if a result turns out to be false, then one of the axioms will turn out not to apply.
http://motls.blogspot.no/2014/05/constructor-theory-deutsch-...
That said, if someone like David Deutsch publishes such theories with grand predictions, they deserve criticism.
Looks like someone is getting into OOP:
// Defined
(new Kettle()).boil(new Water());
// Exception
Universe.createEnergyFrom(null)
It's obviously a speculative theory, but it's a welcomed endeavor, since the field is sorely lacking conceptual frameworks to make sense of scientific advances.
Link to the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563
Imagining an unobservable multiverse might be a useful way to think about a problem, and it might lead to an elegant way to make predictions, but all we can conclude from that scientifically is "the universe behaves as if there were a multiverse". There's no need to assert that such a multiverse actually exists, and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor.
If the article wants to argue that sometimes describing observable behaviour in terms of unobservable entities is neater than the alternative, that's entirely reasonable. But it seems to me that it's trying to argue that the existence of a multiverse is something unfalsifiable that's still scientific, and I don't agree with that at all.
But maybe I'm just misunderstanding something, I don't know that much about theoretical physics after all.
That depends on your particular formulation of Occam's Razor. If you're looking at "amount of stuff", it's hard to beat "my experience behaves as if there were a universe".
This is hardly a grand "Theory of Everything" and a lot more like a messy rule book of exceptions and edge cases, that attempts to cover all rules for classical and quantum systems.
The paper probably makes more sense than the explanation of it.
The word 'constructor' may have been used in niche places before it was adopted by the language but I've never seen it used outside of it.
> For instance, a kettle with a power supply can serve as a constructor that can perform the task of heating water.
kettle power_supply water : (water * heat)
> You simply say that the task of creating energy from nothing is impossible.
first_law : (Null -> energy) = _|_
> In principle, everything possible in our universe could be written down in a big book consisting of nothing but tasks
This sounds like an enumeration (eg. a Goedel numbering) of programs, or alternatively of a (program, runtime) quarter-plane.
> The collaborators then go on to define the concept of a “superinformation” medium that encodes messages that specify particular physical states—in this case, one in which copying is impossible
Sounds like substructural type systems and linear (or affine) types.
It's used quite a bit in the construction industry.