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Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

61 points by headalgorithm 8y ago

lkrubner 8y ago
I'd be more comfortable if it said "Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics". Writing "Quantum Monism" makes too many assumptions about where the Monism is. What if the Monism is a layer down from the quantum layer? Or 10 layers down? Or a million? It's also possible that "down" is the wrong word. Or perhaps there are constituent parts to the Monism. Indeed, what is really meant? If the monads are like Church functions in the Lambda calculus, and if they therefore struggle with the problem of incomparability, and they are linked to some comparison function, it is possible they trace an ellipsis in a space created by their interaction of their comparability. So then it would be more like, "steps going around", rather than "layers down".
andrewflnr 8y ago
Hossenfelder's actual argument about beauty has definitely gotten lost somewhere along the way. According to [0], she ends her book with > The next breakthrough in physics will occur in this century. It will be beautiful. She's objecting to a very narrow interpretation of "beauty" driving physics, not elegance in general, a distinction this article's author seems unable to see. Anyone who publicly makes an argument dependent on a distinction between ideas that aren't distinct in the mainstream is going to have an uphill battle at best. [0] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314
- fouc 8y ago
  Good read. >If your standards are low enough, yes. But I don’t think we should compromise on this idea of post-empirical physics. I think that’s appalling, really appalling… If there was any bit of experimental evidence that was decisive and in favor of the theory, you wouldn’t be hearing these arguments. You wouldn’t. Nobody would care. It’s just a fallback. It’s giving up and declaring victory. I don’t like that at all. I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima.
  - 77pt77 8y ago
    > I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima. That and maybe also human cognitive ability limits.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      Wisdom lies in paradox as the Taoist say. Language is a gross reduction of reality and has a hard time expresssing non-local concepts. Our inability to philosophically explain QM and classical physics in a consistant way is a good example of that. My guess is that there are concepts which require the ability to express perspectives of reality we arent able to grok because they requira a non-local (no now, no me, no it) interpretation. Language cant express non local phenomena from the perspective of non-local and so language cant express “truth” but humans can experience it.
      - zwkrt 8y ago
        Wittgenstein teaches us that we invented language to solve a particular set of problems. Depending on which book of his you read, language is designed to either: - talk about the configuration of objects in relation to each other in space and time. - perform social functions and to describe the actions humans take in the social world. In either case, I think it is totally clear that you are right and there are just certain sets of concepts that human language is fundamentally unsuited for. I think this is why some mathematical concepts are so abstruse; for example, I know that I can interpret a matrix as a twisty-rotatey-stretchy operation, but it is almost impossible for me to look at a matrix and understand what it is going to do except in the simplest cases. If foundations of QM are non-local (which they appear to be), we might have to take a long time to understand how best to communicate what is going on.
        phayes 8y ago
        > If foundations of QM are non-local They're not. Non-locality is an artifact of certain interpretations / modifications of QM (where it isn't simply a misconception). See e.g. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424011 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424011 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2120 https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2120 or the QBism intro https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5253 https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5253 or Ray Streater's old EPR webpage https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/EPR.html https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kc... or Gell-Mann's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAw-xXCcM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAw-xXCcM8 or...
lkrubner 8y ago
Also, I'm annoyed that a science magazine would be careless in its wording: "it is infamous for its weirdness such as Schrödinger’s cat existing in a limbo of being half dead and half alive." The cat is 100% alive and also 100% dead. However, it has 100% chance of resolving to just one state once you look at it.
- nategri 8y ago
  Darn near 100% of attempts to describe quantum mechanics with English sentences end up far from their target. To paraphrase the protagonist of A Serious Man: "No one understands the cat. The math... the math is what's important."
  - jMyles 8y ago
    Actions have consequences. In this office, actions have consequences. Not just physics. Morally. Very possibly my favorite Coen bros film.
- goldenkey 8y ago
  FYI, this belies the distinction between mixed states and pure states. A mixed state can be classical and yield the same posterior distribution of observations as a pure quantum state.
- Ma8ee 8y ago
  No, it isn’t 100% of either. It’s just not meaningful to use those words in this context. The only thing we know is that the cat will be alive or dead to certain probabilities when the box is opened. We use the wave function to calculate those probabilities, but any statements about the cat’s actual reality before we open the box is pure metaphysic.
- gotocake 8y ago
  Scientific American hasn’t been a science magazine for years. At best it’s a “science communication” magazine, at worst it’s a mix of incompetence and agendas, even if they are often agendas I agree with. It’s not worth the read anymore, and far better alternatives exist.
pjc50 8y ago
What's a monism? Is it a monoid in the category of endofunctors?
- rosser 8y ago
  A monism, in this context, is a metaphysics with one fundamental substance. In "physicalism" or "materialism", that stuff is "matter". In "panpsychism" or "idealism", it's "consciousness".
  - vokep 8y ago
    Is it not all information regardless? What makes matter different from consciousness? sounds like different terms for the same fundamental thing: stuff that exists. The matter term comes from the fact the stuff is just stuff that exists The consciousness term comes from the fact that we can see stuff that exists But these are both just observational terms of 'stuff that exists', and it seems that anything existing at all is at the core of the issue (as opposed to what exists, in reference to the 'fundamental substance').
    - zwkrt 8y ago
      The tricky part of philosophy is that sometimes it attempts to overstep the bounds from 'what we can know based on data we can collect' (i.e., 'information') and 'what the fundamental concept/ontology/etc actually is'. The distinction is subtle, but one way to think about it is that you can never know somethings true nature only by investigating it scientifically--this will give you all the 'hows' but none of the 'whys'. Whether or not it is always appropriate to ask 'why' is another matter. I have a shaky and unfounded belief that asking 'why' questions about fundamental physics will not yield interesting results. In programming we make monisms all the time. Think of Unix's "everything is a file" or Java's "Everything is an object". A monism is nice because it asserts that fundamentally there is some single common denominator underlying all emergent behavior. That being said, physicists are usually happy to do the calulations and get the expected results without needing a fundamental philosophy regarding the workings of the entire universe.
- 8y ago
will_brown 8y ago
>As it stands, quantum monism should be considered as a key concept in modern physics: It explains why “beauty,” understood as structure, correlation and symmetry among apparently independent realms of nature, isn’t an "ill-conceived aesthetic ideal” but a consequence of nature descending from a single quantum state. They can call it monism...but it sounds like they are just describing the spatial dimensions. 0D Point (quantum/singularity/Planck unit), then 1D line, 2D square, 3D cube...as a direct consequence of nature/math it’s got structure, correlation, and symmetry (aka their definition of beauty). Is there any physicist who doesn’t think dimensions are a key concept of physics?
- gus_massa 8y ago
  No, spatial dimensions have a very specific meaning. The universe has 3 big special dimensions and 1 temporal dimension (and perhaps 8 or additional "small" dimensions.) Here monism means another thing, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure that it even mean anything at all. The important thing is if it is possible or not to find any experiment that can refute the existence of monism. (It's easier to be a little less technical and ask for and experiment that confirms the existence of monism.) If no experiment can confirm of refute it, then it is outside the realm of physics and can't do anything to save it.
  - neltnerb 8y ago
    I believe roughly he's saying that we are a universe experiencing itself that is intrinsically a single quantum state. It has never made sense to me to separate the observer and the experiment, it's weird to suggest the observer is somehow more classical than the experiment, both are just evolving together in time as a quantum system. The idea of "collapse" makes no sense, there is no observer separate from the experiment, and instead the question of why we experience what we call "collapse" the way we do comes up. Practically, it makes more sense to me. How can our experience of consciousness be real? What does it mean to be conscious? Can we numerically measure free will? Are those answerable questions under this framework? Just let's not talk too much like that to the pop-gurus...
    - 8y ago
wwarner 8y ago
I'm really sensing that the pendulum is swinging fast toward experiment and verification and away from theorizing and interpretation. Dark energy, dark matter and Hawking radiation/Unruh effect are among the testable problems facing theoreticians these days. While I personally share the author's preference for a single unified universe to a multiverse, it seems like proving it true or false might not apply.
phayes 8y ago
"Both monism and many worlds can be avoided, but only when one either changes the formalism of quantum mechanics—typically in ways that are in conflict with Einstein’s theory of special relativity—or if one understands quantum mechanics not as a theory about nature but as a theory about knowledge: a humanities concept rather than science." Tut-tut. There's nothing "humanities rather than science" about the understanding that QM is 'just' probability theory https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0601158 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0601158 https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/noncommutative-probability/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/noncommutative-probabilit... https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0002049 https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0002049 https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+probability https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+probability applied to mechanics (and interpreted sensibly, as it is in any 'neo-Copenhagen' or 'pragmatist' interpretation). Grandiose and/or bizarre 'psiontology' is easily avoided.
- natalyarostova 8y ago
  Saying a physical phenomena is 'humanities rather than science' is such a stupid statement. Reality is just a complex computer.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    > Reality is just a complex computer. > stupid statement.
    - natalyarostova 8y ago
      Humanities is distinct from science, to the extent that it's information generated by a specific life-form (humans), and is specific to our specific language and hardware we evolved and implemented. Studying a great novel, or moral dilemmas, are ultimately about how we process, transmit, and infer information generated by other humans, and shared through extremely high-dimensional, but less structured, contexts, such as language, novels, literature, etc. To say a physics phenomena is more 'humanities' is a strange statement, and it's hard to understand what they are getting at.
mitchtbaum 8y ago
Closest I can find for a wiki article is at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/ from Calosi. Perhaps Quantum Monism fits in with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_building_(particle_physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_building_(particle_physi... to replace any given standard model.
keyle 8y ago
Every week or so there seems to be a new exciting theory/article on HN about the universe etc. I'm always looking forward to them and read them with passion. There are two types though, the ones that make sense, and the ones I can't grasp. This is the latter :/
- justinpombrio 8y ago
  FYI, that's not because it went over your head, it's because this article is vague and incoherent. Almost all popular articles on physics are. If this interests you, I strongly recommend learning the very basics of quantum mechanics. It will involve math, but the math doesn't need to be very complicated. And you will learn how the universe is fundamentally different than you thought, in a way that these popular articles hardly even hint at. There are many introductions, but I've found the lesswrong one to explain things well, while using as little math as necessary (read: no calculus required): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FSwbFpDsca7uXpQ2/quantum-explanations https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FSwbFpDsca7uXpQ2/quantum-ex... Feynman's book QED is also an excellent introduction, while requiring only a bit more math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Light_and_Matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Lig...
- knowThySelfx 8y ago
  Quantum Mechanics always makes me wonder about "reality". Its very exciting.

61 points by headalgorithm 8y ago

I'd be more comfortable if it said "Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics". Writing "Quantum Monism" makes too many assumptions about where the Monism is. What if the Monism is a layer down from the quantum layer? Or 10 layers down? Or a million? It's also possible that "down" is the wrong word. Or perhaps there are constituent parts to the Monism. Indeed, what is really meant? If the monads are like Church functions in the Lambda calculus, and if they therefore struggle with the problem of incomparability, and they are linked to some comparison function, it is possible they trace an ellipsis in a space created by their interaction of their comparability. So then it would be more like, "steps going around", rather than "layers down".

andrewflnr 8y ago

Hossenfelder's actual argument about beauty has definitely gotten lost somewhere along the way. According to [0], she ends her book with > The next breakthrough in physics will occur in this century. It will be beautiful. She's objecting to a very narrow interpretation of "beauty" driving physics, not elegance in general, a distinction this article's author seems unable to see. Anyone who publicly makes an argument dependent on a distinction between ideas that aren't distinct in the mainstream is going to have an uphill battle at best. [0] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314

fouc 8y ago
Good read. >If your standards are low enough, yes. But I don’t think we should compromise on this idea of post-empirical physics. I think that’s appalling, really appalling… If there was any bit of experimental evidence that was decisive and in favor of the theory, you wouldn’t be hearing these arguments. You wouldn’t. Nobody would care. It’s just a fallback. It’s giving up and declaring victory. I don’t like that at all. I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima.
- 77pt77 8y ago
  > I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima. That and maybe also human cognitive ability limits.
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    Wisdom lies in paradox as the Taoist say. Language is a gross reduction of reality and has a hard time expresssing non-local concepts. Our inability to philosophically explain QM and classical physics in a consistant way is a good example of that. My guess is that there are concepts which require the ability to express perspectives of reality we arent able to grok because they requira a non-local (no now, no me, no it) interpretation. Language cant express non local phenomena from the perspective of non-local and so language cant express “truth” but humans can experience it.
    - zwkrt 8y ago
      Wittgenstein teaches us that we invented language to solve a particular set of problems. Depending on which book of his you read, language is designed to either: - talk about the configuration of objects in relation to each other in space and time. - perform social functions and to describe the actions humans take in the social world. In either case, I think it is totally clear that you are right and there are just certain sets of concepts that human language is fundamentally unsuited for. I think this is why some mathematical concepts are so abstruse; for example, I know that I can interpret a matrix as a twisty-rotatey-stretchy operation, but it is almost impossible for me to look at a matrix and understand what it is going to do except in the simplest cases. If foundations of QM are non-local (which they appear to be), we might have to take a long time to understand how best to communicate what is going on.
      - phayes 8y ago
        > If foundations of QM are non-local They're not. Non-locality is an artifact of certain interpretations / modifications of QM (where it isn't simply a misconception). See e.g. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424011 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424011 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2120 https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2120 or the QBism intro https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5253 https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5253 or Ray Streater's old EPR webpage https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/EPR.html https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kc... or Gell-Mann's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAw-xXCcM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAw-xXCcM8 or...

lkrubner 8y ago

Also, I'm annoyed that a science magazine would be careless in its wording: "it is infamous for its weirdness such as Schrödinger’s cat existing in a limbo of being half dead and half alive." The cat is 100% alive and also 100% dead. However, it has 100% chance of resolving to just one state once you look at it.

nategri 8y ago
Darn near 100% of attempts to describe quantum mechanics with English sentences end up far from their target. To paraphrase the protagonist of A Serious Man: "No one understands the cat. The math... the math is what's important."
- jMyles 8y ago
  Actions have consequences. In this office, actions have consequences. Not just physics. Morally. Very possibly my favorite Coen bros film.
goldenkey 8y ago
FYI, this belies the distinction between mixed states and pure states. A mixed state can be classical and yield the same posterior distribution of observations as a pure quantum state.
Ma8ee 8y ago
No, it isn’t 100% of either. It’s just not meaningful to use those words in this context. The only thing we know is that the cat will be alive or dead to certain probabilities when the box is opened. We use the wave function to calculate those probabilities, but any statements about the cat’s actual reality before we open the box is pure metaphysic.
gotocake 8y ago
Scientific American hasn’t been a science magazine for years. At best it’s a “science communication” magazine, at worst it’s a mix of incompetence and agendas, even if they are often agendas I agree with. It’s not worth the read anymore, and far better alternatives exist.

pjc50 8y ago

What's a monism? Is it a monoid in the category of endofunctors?

rosser 8y ago
A monism, in this context, is a metaphysics with one fundamental substance. In "physicalism" or "materialism", that stuff is "matter". In "panpsychism" or "idealism", it's "consciousness".
- vokep 8y ago
  Is it not all information regardless? What makes matter different from consciousness? sounds like different terms for the same fundamental thing: stuff that exists. The matter term comes from the fact the stuff is just stuff that exists The consciousness term comes from the fact that we can see stuff that exists But these are both just observational terms of 'stuff that exists', and it seems that anything existing at all is at the core of the issue (as opposed to what exists, in reference to the 'fundamental substance').
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    The tricky part of philosophy is that sometimes it attempts to overstep the bounds from 'what we can know based on data we can collect' (i.e., 'information') and 'what the fundamental concept/ontology/etc actually is'. The distinction is subtle, but one way to think about it is that you can never know somethings true nature only by investigating it scientifically--this will give you all the 'hows' but none of the 'whys'. Whether or not it is always appropriate to ask 'why' is another matter. I have a shaky and unfounded belief that asking 'why' questions about fundamental physics will not yield interesting results. In programming we make monisms all the time. Think of Unix's "everything is a file" or Java's "Everything is an object". A monism is nice because it asserts that fundamentally there is some single common denominator underlying all emergent behavior. That being said, physicists are usually happy to do the calulations and get the expected results without needing a fundamental philosophy regarding the workings of the entire universe.
8y ago

will_brown 8y ago

>As it stands, quantum monism should be considered as a key concept in modern physics: It explains why “beauty,” understood as structure, correlation and symmetry among apparently independent realms of nature, isn’t an "ill-conceived aesthetic ideal” but a consequence of nature descending from a single quantum state. They can call it monism...but it sounds like they are just describing the spatial dimensions. 0D Point (quantum/singularity/Planck unit), then 1D line, 2D square, 3D cube...as a direct consequence of nature/math it’s got structure, correlation, and symmetry (aka their definition of beauty). Is there any physicist who doesn’t think dimensions are a key concept of physics?

gus_massa 8y ago
No, spatial dimensions have a very specific meaning. The universe has 3 big special dimensions and 1 temporal dimension (and perhaps 8 or additional "small" dimensions.) Here monism means another thing, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure that it even mean anything at all. The important thing is if it is possible or not to find any experiment that can refute the existence of monism. (It's easier to be a little less technical and ask for and experiment that confirms the existence of monism.) If no experiment can confirm of refute it, then it is outside the realm of physics and can't do anything to save it.
- neltnerb 8y ago
  I believe roughly he's saying that we are a universe experiencing itself that is intrinsically a single quantum state. It has never made sense to me to separate the observer and the experiment, it's weird to suggest the observer is somehow more classical than the experiment, both are just evolving together in time as a quantum system. The idea of "collapse" makes no sense, there is no observer separate from the experiment, and instead the question of why we experience what we call "collapse" the way we do comes up. Practically, it makes more sense to me. How can our experience of consciousness be real? What does it mean to be conscious? Can we numerically measure free will? Are those answerable questions under this framework? Just let's not talk too much like that to the pop-gurus...
  - 8y ago

wwarner 8y ago

I'm really sensing that the pendulum is swinging fast toward experiment and verification and away from theorizing and interpretation. Dark energy, dark matter and Hawking radiation/Unruh effect are among the testable problems facing theoreticians these days. While I personally share the author's preference for a single unified universe to a multiverse, it seems like proving it true or false might not apply.

phayes 8y ago

"Both monism and many worlds can be avoided, but only when one either changes the formalism of quantum mechanics—typically in ways that are in conflict with Einstein’s theory of special relativity—or if one understands quantum mechanics not as a theory about nature but as a theory about knowledge: a humanities concept rather than science." Tut-tut. There's nothing "humanities rather than science" about the understanding that QM is 'just' probability theory https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0601158 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0601158 https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/noncommutative-probability/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/noncommutative-probabilit... https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0002049 https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0002049 https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+probability https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+probability applied to mechanics (and interpreted sensibly, as it is in any 'neo-Copenhagen' or 'pragmatist' interpretation). Grandiose and/or bizarre 'psiontology' is easily avoided.

natalyarostova 8y ago
Saying a physical phenomena is 'humanities rather than science' is such a stupid statement. Reality is just a complex computer.
- colordrops 8y ago
  > Reality is just a complex computer. > stupid statement.
  - natalyarostova 8y ago
    Humanities is distinct from science, to the extent that it's information generated by a specific life-form (humans), and is specific to our specific language and hardware we evolved and implemented. Studying a great novel, or moral dilemmas, are ultimately about how we process, transmit, and infer information generated by other humans, and shared through extremely high-dimensional, but less structured, contexts, such as language, novels, literature, etc. To say a physics phenomena is more 'humanities' is a strange statement, and it's hard to understand what they are getting at.

mitchtbaum 8y ago

Closest I can find for a wiki article is at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/ from Calosi. Perhaps Quantum Monism fits in with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_building_(particle_physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_building_(particle_physi... to replace any given standard model.

keyle 8y ago

Every week or so there seems to be a new exciting theory/article on HN about the universe etc. I'm always looking forward to them and read them with passion. There are two types though, the ones that make sense, and the ones I can't grasp. This is the latter :/

justinpombrio 8y ago
FYI, that's not because it went over your head, it's because this article is vague and incoherent. Almost all popular articles on physics are. If this interests you, I strongly recommend learning the very basics of quantum mechanics. It will involve math, but the math doesn't need to be very complicated. And you will learn how the universe is fundamentally different than you thought, in a way that these popular articles hardly even hint at. There are many introductions, but I've found the lesswrong one to explain things well, while using as little math as necessary (read: no calculus required): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FSwbFpDsca7uXpQ2/quantum-explanations https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FSwbFpDsca7uXpQ2/quantum-ex... Feynman's book QED is also an excellent introduction, while requiring only a bit more math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Light_and_Matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Lig...
knowThySelfx 8y ago
Quantum Mechanics always makes me wonder about "reality". Its very exciting.