6 ms·

While I don't like this ~guy's~ woman's disdainful, superior tone, I do think his complaint has merit. Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about stra

• brian-armstrong 8y ago
  His?
• krastanov 8y ago
  It is "her" complaint, not "his". This is Sabine Hossenfelder, a well known theorist (mostly for her outreach/popularization work). And you are misrepresenting this"taboo" you are talking about. Thinking about what quantum mechanics "means" is how we got breakthroughs in quantum computing and theoretical computer science. Similarly, there is plenty of exciting deep theoretical work in particle physics beyond the smashing particles together type of experiments.
  • tbabb 8y ago
    Oops, my mistake on the gender- Sabine is not a super familiar name. (Still dislike the tone, though; don't care how famous she is). I also think the taboo has lifted a bit, as it's now possible for mainstream physicists like David Deutsch and Sean Carroll to build their careers on quantum foundations work. But I still think the physics community has a lot of baggage from the second half of the twentieth century to let go of.
    • mannykannot 8y ago
      It is not clear to me in what way the tone of your post differs from that of the article.
      • tbabb 8y ago
        Here's a snippet: > Another comment-not-a-question I constantly have to endure is that I supposedly only complain but don’t have any better advice for what physicists should do. > First, it’s a stupid criticism that tells you more about the person criticizing than the person being criticized. These feel closer in tone to "personal attack" on her critics to me than a discussion of their ideas. There is also discussion of ideas in the article, which I have no problem with. But snippets like that feel like unnecessary salt that doesn't add anything. While her critics are (I agree, mostly) wrong, there is no reason to call them stupid.
        • jgamman 8y ago
          i think its one of the classic logical fallacies - you can't disagree with me unless you have a better idea. it's a false dichotomy in the sense I can think you are wrong without further explanation. unless there's expt evidence but most of this is opinion-based so it's not open to that sort of progress.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
• twtw 8y ago
  Sabine Hossenfelder is a woman.
• walrus1066 8y ago
  'Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas.' There is certainly no shortage of these! What we are short of, are ideas that are: - falsifiable - testable by experiment, with current technology
  • naasking 8y ago
    Maybe we're short on those precisely because the strange ideas aren't given enough attention. Bell's Theorem was a landmark result that didn't come out of the Copenhagen interpretation, but because John Bell was fascinated by the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation. The point is, unconventional perspectives give you new ways of looking at a problem that can yield new experiments.
    • dwaltrip 8y ago
      That could be the case. I think the bigger issue is that many unsolved questions today are difficult to explore without expensive, highly-sophisticated equipment and larger teams of people.
• empath75 8y ago
  > suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like the many worlds interpretation) in favor of the obviously-wrong Copenhagen interpretation. They’re just interpretations and they all work equally well and produce the same predictions. It makes no sense to call any of them obviously wrong. It’s personal preference.
  • tbabb 8y ago
    Copenhagen is wrong to the degree that any theory can be called wrong. It posits specific physical events (collapse) which are not only unsupported by evidence, and not only contradicted by evidence (delayed choice quantum eraser experiments), and not only logically self contradictory (when it is not too vague to make concrete statements about the phenomena it is explaining, it is circular-- our theory of electrons cannot include scientists (or the macroscopic world in general) as a fundamental element, when scientists themselves are explained in terms of electrons), but ontologically inferior to many worlds, which explains all the same phenomena without adding any new suppositions (and no, the extra worlds are not extra suppositions, they are natural predictions that arise by simply following well verified quantum laws to their natural conclusion, by treating the environment as a quantum mechanical system of particles).
    • ymolodtsov 8y ago
      MW might be simpler in the way it arises but while it produces the same results it doesn’t really matter. And it definitely has enough supporters to ruin the “stubborn physicists” hypothesis.
  • perl4ever 8y ago
    Is it possible though, that Copenhagen is wrong in a similar manner to epicycles that give the correct numerical answer? That's the impression I get as a non-physicist, that yes it's kind of an aesthetic preference, but on the other hand aesthetics are important and sometimes are pivotal in finding new insights. Ugly may not be completely objective, but it isn't completely arbitrary either.
    • 8y ago
• twtw 8y ago
  quote from previous post that is potentially relevant to your dislike of the "superior, disdainful tone": > later someone sent me a glorious photoshopped screenshot (see above) which shows me with a painted-on mustache and informs us that Sabine Hossenfelder is known for “a horrible blog on which she makes fun of other people’s theories.” > The truly horrible thing about this blog, however, is that I’m not making fun. String theorists are happily studying universes that don’t exist, particle physicists are busy inventing particles that no one ever measures, and theorists mass-produce “solutions” to the black hole information loss problem that no one will ever be able to test. All these people get paid well for their remarkable contributions to human knowledge. If that makes you laugh, it’s the absurdity of the situation, not my blog, that’s funny. http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/10/dear-dr-b-what-do-you-actually-live-from.html?m=1 http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/10/dear-dr-b-what-do-y...
• andrepd 8y ago
  >Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. Physics of today would be unrecognisable to a scientist at the start of the 20th century. Indeed the physics of 1935 would be unrecognisable to a scientist at the start of the 20th century. Our understanding progressed enormously AND it did so because people put forward radical theories in complete rupture with the established, 300-year old classical mechanics. There was no "traditionalist resistance" to it after it became apparent that classical mechanics failed to explain phenomena that quantum theory did explain. >am astonished at how aggressively physicists resisted and suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like the many worlds interpretation) in favor of the obviously-wrong Copenhagen interpretation [emphasis mine] Ahahaha, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. There is nothing "obviously wrong" about the standard Copenhagen interpretation (unless you have some new insight you would like to share), nor was there any suppression of ideas. Many debates have been waged in the past ~100 years, and many alternative interpretations have been put forward, like Bohmian theory, superdeterminism, or "shut-up-and-calculate". >decided that it was meaningless to ask any deep questions about what QM actually meant Physics, indeed all science, studies observable reality. Any "deep" questions about why or about things not measurable, quantifiable, or empirically observable, are by definition outside the scope of science. It is therefore as unreasonable as complaining about why don't geologists study epistemology. The answer is the same: it's outside the scope of their study. I also don't like that your phrase seems to imply that what physicists study is not "deep" as opposed to your philosophical questions. There are many deep and beautiful ideas in physics.
  • tbabb 8y ago
    > There is nothing "obviously wrong" about the standard Copenhagen interpretation Can you tell me how to calculate whether a system of particles will cause another system of particles to collapse or not? Can you tell me under what circumstances a system of particles will evolve unitarily or not? Can you shade the region of the spacetime diagram of EPR where the wavefunction is collapsed? How about in a delayed choice quantum eraser experiment? If you tell me "you're not allowed to ask those questions" (or "hm, I never thought of that!"), then you're directly illustrating the complaint here about physics! The common narrative is that Copenhagen, many worlds, and the other interpretations of QM are all equivalent, but they are not. Copenhagen adds an extra physical event-- collapse-- where the wavefunction is suddenly nonunitary. The burden is on Copenhagen to tell me how and when this happens, and in fact to prove that it happens at all. Many worlds, on the other hand, predicts the same phenomenon-- the apparent collapse of a wavefunction to an eigenstate-- without adding unitarity violation, or any other phenomena at all beyond the normal, extremely well-verified mechanics of multi-particle system scattering; it merely treats the environment is a multi-particle quantum system. Many worlds is the null hypothesis (no, the extra worlds are not extra suppositions, they are predictions of known physical laws), and the burden is on Copenhagen to show that unitarity violation exists, and the burden is extremely high (possibly insurmountable?) for EPR and eraser experiments. When Copenhagen was devised, most believed that there was some "underlying state" in QM, and that measurement told you something about what the underlying state was. Bell's theorem should have sent a shockwave through the community which forced everyone to reevaluate fundamental assumptions and self-correct wrong ideas. But by accident of history, John Bell was too shy to publish in a major journal, and no one even read his result for four years. The implications of Bell's theorem were slow to diffuse through the community, and so the disruptive moment of reckoning that should have happened never came. By the time it was well-accepted, the narrative in physics had become "you're not allowed to ask about what quantum mechanics means, just shut up and calculate", and so the cognitive dissonance was cast aside. Annealing this attitude and this misstep away is taking excruciating decades. EDIT: I also don't mean to imply that there aren't deep and beautiful things in modern physics. There are! But physics is concertedly avoiding asking deep questions in areas where (I strongly believe) it is most important. The claim that "the meaning of QM is outside the scope of science" is exemplary, I think, of that attitude.
• PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself. -- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa" Heisenberg and others knew that, I'm sure many current scientists do too, but going by output, the situation is dire, the intertubes are full of people talking about being "unbiased" or "objective" even about human matters, when not even the hard sciences are truly objective! It's like people simply agreed that because they're not religious or whatever, they're now correct. If they are wrong about anything, since they supposedly are on the side of science, they can be sure that will be corrected, so they can consider themselves correct even today. Before you know it, you have superstitious people who think their superstition constitutes the absence, the opposite of superstition. We went from Heisenberg to a chemistry teacher cooking crack while his assistant gets all bug-eyed about the power of "science, bitch!". Or this "critique" of the game Soma I saw recently, where the Youtuber mentions that "people who are smarter than you and I are saying the universe might be a simulation". What I see is people booby-trapping everything with stupidity.. making things so stupid, and then glorifying that, that injecting even a lick of seriousness into anything would cause massive offense, hurt a lot of egos. To me it's the analog of religious fundamentalists going to church 20 times a day to get hyped and primed with caricatures of those not of their flock, and fantasies of how great it's all going to be when those are gone. But I'm not sure I can blame physicists for that. I don't know enough about what they do, I see what "everyone" else is doing, and that's horrid by itself. It's not the job of physicists to ask deep questions about what it all means, it's the job of everybody.