George Ellis Knocks Physicists for Knocking Philosophy, Falsification, Free Will
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
We can't build a collider bigger than the surface of the earth TODAY.
We had not gone outside of the earth, but that does not mean that in the future they wont.
That "we already know everything about the world" had been said for long. It was said to Socrates centuries before Jesus was born, and it was said to the inventor of the microscope(why do we need something to see everything we already know bigger?).
The interesting part is that we don't know what we don't know. E.g we know 0 about the real cause of gravity.
Yeah, I'm sure the processor that so eloquently addressed tons of issues in his interview also knew that. The thing is the possibility of doing it tomorrow is not that big either. We are more like to regress or kill everybody (from nuclear war to bacterial resistance), than to conquer the universe. And even if we did fan out to the Solar system planets, the logistics stil look bad for us. Plus, some things we investigate approach physical limits, so no amount of "larger colliders" or "more energy" will help us with those.
>That "we already know everything about the world" had been said for long.
There's nothing about saying something and being wrong for a long time that precludes it eventually being true.
Plus, it's not like we actually have said that "we know everything about the world" for a long time. Most societies, from ancient Egypt to Greece, to medieval times and renessaince and so one, believed there are tons of mysteries to be solved and things to be explained, and worked on finding things out. Yes, even the during the so called "dark ages" (mediaval times) they did that, math and other kind of sciences, from medicine to cartography, was practiced strongly even then. The common misconception about those ages thinking "they know everything" is just an old wives tale -- often just based on the sayings of some fundamendalists.
[...] George F. R. Ellis, the physicist-mathematician-cosmologist, an authority on the Big Bang and other cosmic mysteries. [...]
Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?
Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.
Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.
Also, the comments he makes on determinism are nonsense, and resemble the claims of creationists. A computer can't arise from the laws of physics because it had a designer? By transitivity, this implies human beings could not have been the result of bottom up physical processes either. Is what way is this claim scientific or testable?
"there is a group of people out there writing papers based on the idea that physics is a computational process. But a physical law is not an algorithm. So who chooses the computational strategy and the algorithms that realise a specific physical law? (Finite elements perhaps?) What language is it written in? (Does Nature use Java or C++? What machine code is used?) Where is the CPU? What is used for memory, and in what way are read and write commands executed? Additionally if it’s a computation, how does Nature avoid the halting problem? It’s all a very bad analogy that does not work."
This just seems really poorly reasoned out. What does the halting problem have to do with it? Total non-sequitur. Why can't the physical laws merely be a kind of cellular automata? No need to solve any halting problems. Things interact iteratively, new states arise, some of those states lead to more complex forms, etc.
Since cellular automata have been proven to be universal, that means in principle, any thing that is computable can be carried out, and therefore, all of classical computer science fits perfectly in this view without having to invoke some kind of Penrose-like "the universe solves non-computable functions" magic.
If you asked Ellis how planets or galaxies formed, he would not say "What algorithm caused star/galaxy/solar system formation", or "how does the computer solve N-body problems of trillions of elements". There's no need to posit a designed algorithm for these things, merely that the system interacts with itself in ways that evolve towards these structures, that human beings produce higher level mathematical models to predict and manipulate more easily.
I don't think any scientist working today works under the delusion that our theories are anything but models.
This. I think this is a key point that the general population doesn't understand. And it leads to debates like this. The debate itself is moot because the debate would be a non-issue if all sides understood this point.
This is a leap in logic.
Science has a lot of "we don't know" answers. They only really came to light in the 20th century however, after the enlightenment had already so thoroughly captured academia and philosophers in general there was no going back. The enlightenment had also already caused so much death, corruption (resulting in economic disasters) and severed heads, of course, that it was getting swiftly kicked out of government as well, and serious government funds were going to the restoration of the churches' position in society (that only partly worked because of the sheer numbers of clergy killed by said government). So a massive rift between academia and general society opened up, and I'd say it's still mostly there.
But after all the hubhub around enlightenment and the switchover of academia, ever more "we don't know" type answers kept coming in. But philosophers are famous for ignoring practicalities, whether we're talking ancient, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment or modern era philosophers. And thus the story that science has all the answers and that it isn't possible that scientific theories have serious shortcomings. In practice, I would say that scientific theories are merely "the best available" theory.
And of course, there's the little matter of these theories being used against religion. Big bang theory is rather important. But, let's compare inflation and the speed of light. That can't possibly be right ... (yes I know it explains another "bigger" inconsistency, but I think reasonable people should agree at a rather high cost). Evolution theory. Oops ... higher animals don't evolve through mutation. And the trend towards that evolution works, not on a species level but more on a group, or "group of groups" level. The trend that you can split the genes that are unique to humans in 2 groups : about 30% that come from known bacteria, and 70% we don't know where they came from, but they sure as hell did not come from mutation. And let's just not go anywhere near climate science, or you'll notice just how biased hacker news is, when, of course, there is legitimate criticism against climate science that could mean the whole thing is just simply wrong.
Now of course, most of these are interesting questions. So you have some criticism, great ! Let's do some research. But of course, part of the criticism comes from groups that want to push religion (and we're in the west, in the middle east it works entirely different) or government policies. Like in the middle ages and during the renaissance, science is an important source of government policies, and this of course means that politicians can't ignore universities or just leave them be.
The enlightenment is a great and horrible thing. It's the new religion. Can't go spoiling that with "we don't know".
But you do this having a weak grasp on the very concepts for which you claim inconsistencies or inadequacies, sprinkled with a dash of anti-intellectual falsehoods/misinformation.
This is probably why you got downmodded, not that you didn't have a larger point with showing how common beliefs are common beliefs, whether they be from science, rhetoric, cultural tradition, or religion; and that media or governments (or other institutions representing the "will of the people") often color the inquiry that can ultimately shape and theoretically improve these commonly held beliefs.
Actually, the catholics do say, "we don't know" quite regularly. You can, of course, debate whether those questions are `popular'. Eg existence of aliens, splitting of souls for identical twins.
Start listening for the words "but now we know..." -- it comes up all the time, and definitely does not sound like "these are just models".
Science has given us a lot of wonderful improvements in the world, but it also has a lot of hubris.
See this? This is why I've developed a major skepticism that the field of Philosophy is actually on to anything at all these days. A field that's really finding out about the world should be able to get by without denying the existence of knowledge outside itself.
Pretty crappy given his declared respect for philosophical foundations.
"Q: You are a Christian, more specifically a Quaker. Does your faith have any effect on your scientific views, or vice versa?
Ellis: It may affect to some degree the topics I choose to tackle (...)"
He just wants to remain religious. Good that the interviewer didn't miss that question.
On another side, it's interesting that one of the books by the interviewer is: "Horgan, John and Reverend Frank Greer (2002). Where Was God on September 11? (A Scientist Asks a Ground Zero Pastor). San Francisco: Browntrout Publishers." Why "scientist" when the Wikipedia article on Horgan cites his education as "Columbia University School of Journalism (1983)" I don't know.
But I look at statements like the ones in this article--that we've probed pretty much everything we can probe--and I think, what have we learned? Aren't the best estimates now that dark energy makes up 68%, dark matter 27%, and normal matter 5% of the mass-energy of the universe?
If the dark stuff does not interact electromagnetically, then wouldn't we need gravitational observatories to probe 95% of the known universe? Which are in their infancy. We haven't reliably detected one gravity wave yet, let alone probed all frequencies.
Like I said, I'm not a physicist, but when 95% of the known universe is a mystery, it seems early to call the game.
The exciting thing is that it has often been followed by huge breakthroughs -- if I remember correctly, the last time it was widely believed that we had it all figured out was at the turn of the 20th century, just before Quantum Physics and General Relativity were discovered.
I'm still patiently waiting for string theory to die and us to start working on something that we can actually do experiments on.
You might already be able to do experiments that would confirm or deny string theory, but we haven't been able to work out the math in sufficient detail to come up with one.
The thing about physics is that the deeper we get into the nature of the Universe, the stranger it looks.
In the special theory of relativity, Einstein didn't just do strange things to physics. He had to work with a sort of mathematical object -- Minkowski space -- that most mathematicians either had never heard of or ignored, because they thought it was too weird. Turns out we live in Minkowski space.
And when he worked with Hilbert on the general theory, they had to go and study Elie Cartan's tensor calculus to make sense of things, and then bring that into Minkowski space. The enterprise spawned a new kind of mathematical notation -- the Einstein repeated index summation convention.
And when Dirac tried to quantize the special theory he found himself in the unruly situation of taking the square root of the gradient operator -- the square root of a derivative! The solution relied upon an anticommuting algebra now called the Clifford algebra, represented by Dirac matrices.
And when Feynman wanted to quantize action, he had to take an integral over paths. When Schwinger studied particle[1] propagation, the integrals went from the paths of one particle to the paths of all possible particles and particle creation events.
When you bring in gravity, the absence of any sort of repulsive action of the field and the number of degrees of freedom mean that any attempt to apply the path integral leads to infinite energies and infinite numbers of particles.
String theory appeared as sort of a way, essentially, of restricting the "impact" of new particles by attaching an energy term to the "shape" of the particle. For simplicity particles were 1D manifolds. This led to the Nambu-Goto action.
Then they had multiple dimensions, and Witten called it M-theory. It's not going away: you always end up with something like this to fix gravity.
In any case, it's not string theory we can't test. It's quantum gravity period. Perhaps another issue is that string theory doesn't work well with QCD, which itself isn't rigorous, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#Yang....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_quantum_field_theo...
http://chaosbook.org/fieldtheory/
[1]: There aren't actually any particles, but it makes the math easier to think about.
I'm sure we're not saying anything that hasn't been said literally millions of times before half-drunk at countless frat parties.
You see, the problem is that people think of the evolution of an omniscient deity as a strict linear progression from cause to effect, but actually it's more like a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff.
:P
The issue is that these scientists are focusing on some strands in the web of causation that actually exist, and ignoring others that are demonstrably there – such as ideas in our minds, or algorithms embodied in computer programs. These demonstrably act in a top-down way to cause physical effects in the real world. All these processes and actual outcomes are contextually dependent, and this allows the effectiveness of processes such as adaptive selection that are the key to the emergence of genuine complexity."
"they should stop indulging in low-grade philosophy in their own writings."
I think Dr. Ellis needs to take his own advice on this one.