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You can consider a "lack of an electron" as the same thing as an "Electron hole quasiparticle". The problem is this only holds 100% true in the abstract though

You can consider a "lack of an electron" as the same thing as an "Electron hole quasiparticle". The problem is this only holds 100% true in the abstract thought and specific mathematical frameworks (and their formulas) you are working in. While you can do the math, and get the right results, it does not necessarily make it real outside of the human brain. The majority of quasiparticles are just another way of looking at things. Some are totally human creations, others are combined effects, and some emergent phenomena.

gradys 11y ago
> While you can do the math, and get the right results, it does not necessarily make it real outside of the human brain. Following this same logic, nothing is necessarily real outside of the human brain. No experiment you can do, including simply observing human-scale events with your eyes, necessarily tells you anything about the "real" world. Everything that has ever been done in science amounts to doing the math and getting the right results. This is a rift in the philosophy of science: is science telling us real things about the real world, or is it just producing models that happen to fit data generated from experiments? I take the latter position, but rather than concluding from this that I should no longer use the term "the real world", I find it more useful to simply redefine "the real world" to be the set of models that are consistent with data generated from experiments. This means that if multiple models that explain the same phenomenon are all consistent with the data, all of the models are equally "real".
- baq 11y ago
  one interesting related question is "is math real?" does math exist without human brain? i mean there's a reason why mathematicians prefer the word 'discover' instead of 'invent', but can something that theoretically could exist without a universe to belong in be real? there's a lot of interesting reading at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics if you've got time to spare.

gradys 11y ago

> While you can do the math, and get the right results, it does not necessarily make it real outside of the human brain. Following this same logic, nothing is necessarily real outside of the human brain. No experiment you can do, including simply observing human-scale events with your eyes, necessarily tells you anything about the "real" world. Everything that has ever been done in science amounts to doing the math and getting the right results. This is a rift in the philosophy of science: is science telling us real things about the real world, or is it just producing models that happen to fit data generated from experiments? I take the latter position, but rather than concluding from this that I should no longer use the term "the real world", I find it more useful to simply redefine "the real world" to be the set of models that are consistent with data generated from experiments. This means that if multiple models that explain the same phenomenon are all consistent with the data, all of the models are equally "real".

baq 11y ago
one interesting related question is "is math real?" does math exist without human brain? i mean there's a reason why mathematicians prefer the word 'discover' instead of 'invent', but can something that theoretically could exist without a universe to belong in be real? there's a lot of interesting reading at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics if you've got time to spare.