6 ms·

"We just need to innovate" K.

ibeckermayer 7y ago
In this case, though, the idea that we need to resolve inconsistencies is the correct diagnosis and shines a light on the incredible failure of the prevailing institutions. Take for example the idea that a photon is both a particle and a wave. This dogma has been force fed to students for decades without the glaring inconsistency being resolved, or even pointed to as a thing that needs resolving — something is either a particle or it’s a wave; if we observe properties of both, then we need a physical explanation for how one becomes the other. Something can’t be two distinct things. Logically, all I’m pointing out is that “A is A”. Yet my perspective that there is an unsolved inconsistency here is considered heretical. “Shut up and calculate” is the reigning dogma.
- Scarblac 7y ago
  A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both.
  - ibeckermayer 7y ago
    Fair point, so then let me reframe the inconsistency as: there’s a phenomena that appears exhibits properties of both a particle and a wave but it can’t be both. So what is it? And the criticism of mainstream thought in physics would be: its wrongfully dismissive of my question, and ignoring the important job of looking for the answer.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
      No, the mainstream physics reply is "It's a quantized excitation of the electromagnetic field." since that's a perfectly reasonable reply to a perfectly reasonable question.
      - shuspect 7y ago
        "Height field" is mathematical model of land. Electromagnetic filed is mathematical model of what?
        cygx 7y ago
        Electromagnetism is a U(1) gauge theory. If you take the accompanying classical geometry at face value, there's hidden state at each point in space, like some sort of dial. The absolute position of the dial is irrelevant, but the gauge potential tells you how the dial turns as you move from place to place. The electromagnetic field strength is something called curvature of the corresponding 'connection'. The mathematics are a bit involved, but morally speaking, I would say it tells you how the turning of the dial varies across space.
        shpeedy 7y ago
        So, EM field describes strength of EM force in every point of mathematical model. Nature of EM force is unknown. Right? Let's talk about nature of EM force. Analogy: look at a typical tropical cyclone. It rotates. Is it rotating because a unknown property of an air molecule? No. It rotates because our planet rotates, while air molecules are just trying to keep their positions. I.e. it's rotation of planet + inertia of molecules. Is it possible that EM force is happens because our local space is moving trough global space by non-linear trajectory, so it just non-linear trajectory of local space + inertia of rotating and vibrating particles?
        Koshkin 7y ago
        Not exactly only mathematical, though - you can feel it as you walk across.
        shpeedy 7y ago
        I feel also air field (wind), height field (land), light field (photons), and so on.
    - pixl97 7y ago
      How about "it's a thing that does not have an analog at the macro scale in which humans exist, therefore any explanation that does not use terminology from our daily lives will be unsatisfactory"
      - brutt 7y ago
        It has analog at macro-scale: it's a particle surrounded by a wave. Double split experiment is reproduced in macro almost decade ago!
  - phkahler 7y ago
    >> A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both. But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. They have decided that having math that can predict the outcome of experiments is enough. They're not wrong, but it feels rather unsatisfying. IMHO there have been a couple avenues worth exploring that are being largely ignored.
    - frenchyatwork 7y ago
      > But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. It depends on what you mean by that. What they've given up on is trying to find some sort of anthropocentric analogy. It's understandable that this is unsatisfying, since analogies are fundamental to how we understand things. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that a good analogy will exist.
      - ibeckermayer 7y ago
        We shouldn't be looking for analogies, we should be looking for theories consisting of precise concepts that directly explain what is happening in the universe.
        Koshkin 7y ago
        Ultimately, math is the only "explanation" that physics will ever offer.
      - phkahler 7y ago
        >> Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that a good analogy will exist. That's no reason not to try. If there IS an objective reality I think it deserves a better description than just the math which characterizes its behavior.
        frenchyatwork 7y ago
        If would be tremendous if someone can come up with one, I'm sure they'd be quite popular, but good analogies don't grow on trees.
- senderista 7y ago
  Your perspective isn’t “heretical”, it’s ignorant. The “paradox” has been resolved since 1930 or so, in the form of quantum field theory.
- nwallin 7y ago
  That inconsistency was subject to an immense amount of scrutiny by thousands of scientists for over a hundred years. Albert Einstein received a Nobel Prize for resolving the inconsistency. The theory that ultimately resolved it is called quantum mechanics. That's no longer an inconsistency. Better examples would be the inconsistencies between general relativity, which demands curved spacetime, and quantum mechanics, which prohibits curved space. This is a very real inconsistency at the heart of modern physics. Many, many people are actively working on solutions for it. Search for Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything for more information. Candidate theories include string theory and its derivatives, loop quantum gravity, etc. There are plenty more. The problem is that designing experiments for these theories is Hard. Big-O Capital H Hard. My flight's about to board, maybe I can expand on it during my layover. Dark matter is another example. Observations of the speeds and orbits of stars in galaxies and galaxies in galactic clusters are not consistent with our measurements of their masses. Plenty of candidates for dark matter have been and are continuing to be tested. Candidates include MOND, which supposes that our theories of gravity need to be modified when acceleration is astronomically low. We have designed experiments to support or disprove these theories and most of the results have landed on the side of disproving them. (search for "bullet cluster" or "dark matterless galaxies") Another candidate is MACHOs. ("MAssive Compact Halo Object") Basically the universe is teeming with small black holes, brown dwarfs, loose planets unassociated with any star, basically a lot of stuff we can't see. We have designed and executed experiments to search for these, but the results have concluded that there are insufficient such objects to explain the inconsistency. The third candidate with traction is WIMPs, or "weakly interacting massive particle". Basically theorizing that there are other types of unobserved particles that have mass but do not interact via the electromagnetic force, which makes them very difficult to observe. There was hope that neutrinos could explain all these, especially when it was demonstrated that neutrinos have mass. However, experiments trying to bound the mass of the neutrino have shown they are not nearly massive enough to explain the observations. Experiments are ongoing to find these particles, but have yet not discovered anything we can't already explain. However, there's a problem: maybe they're just too difficult for any experiment to observe. In that case, we might be SOL. These are just two examples. All of science are all the other examples. The idea that this person is the only person probing inconsistencies is pure hubris. It's not a useful starting point for a conversation, unless the point of the conversation is to talk about how awesome you are and how much everyone else sucks. Which is all I got from this article.
- krastanov 7y ago
  We have a pretty good and intuitive explanation of what a photon (or other particles) is. It is an excitation of a quantum field and quantum fields stem from the underlying symmetries of space and time. It is incredibly powerful, incredibly simple, and incredibly illuminating idea, but it requires you to learn a couple of new words that humans did not need in their vocabulary when they were inventing agriculture. I am very comfortable claiming this is much simpler than any particle-related intuition as it requires way fewer "axioms". The difference is that you arbitrarily happen to have a mental image of what a particle is, but that does not make particles simpler. As a mental exercise, try to rigorously define what a particle is according to your intuition and explain why we should expect them to even exist.
- axilmar 7y ago
  Personally I am not convinced a particle is a wave until collapsed. There is nothing in the double slit experiment that definitely proves that. It may be that light particles bounce off something and change trajectory and create the illusion of there being a wave. In the double slit experiment, if you rotate the slit 90 degrees, the interference pattern is rotated 90 degrees in the same direction. Doesn't this prove there is no wave involved? If you make the slits larger, the pattern changes, and then vanishes. If you make the slits circular, the interference pattern becomes circular. If you make the slits triangular, the inteference pattern becomes triangular itself. All these things tell me that particles are not waves at any point, they just bump to something and take a different trajectory. When, in the same experiment, a light detector is placed, and the interference pattern disappears, this does not mean the wave goes away and there is a collapse to a single particle; it means the detector produces particles that don't bounce off something. What if the detector is placed near the particle beam emitter? has it ever been tried? I don't know. If placing the detector near the emitter makes an interference pattern reappear, then we certainly have no collapsing of any wave. What if we put the slits very close to the emitter? do we get the same inteference pattern? what if we put the slits further away from the emitter? does the interference pattern change? if yes, then we certainly have no wave. And something else regarding quantum entanglement: how can we be sure that the particles are not created with their properties in such a state that they appear entangled when they are measured? why do we assume there is a communication between the particles on the fly rather than the two particles having relatable but not connected properties? we just assume that due to the other assumption that particles are waves and they collapse. Finally, how do we know that matter attracts matter and it is not the void that pushes matter into clumps? how do we know that the actual distance between the furthest points in the universe is the same as it ever was, and simply new positions are created within the same distance? and these positions are what push matter to clump together? I'd love to sit down with an honest physicist to research these types of questions, a physicist that cares more about answering these types of questions than hunting for grants and fearing to go against the status quo, but it seems only crackpots are willing to do that.

In this case, though, the idea that we need to resolve inconsistencies is the correct diagnosis and shines a light on the incredible failure of the prevailing institutions. Take for example the idea that a photon is both a particle and a wave. This dogma has been force fed to students for decades without the glaring inconsistency being resolved, or even pointed to as a thing that needs resolving — something is either a particle or it’s a wave; if we observe properties of both, then we need a physical explanation for how one becomes the other. Something can’t be two distinct things. Logically, all I’m pointing out is that “A is A”. Yet my perspective that there is an unsolved inconsistency here is considered heretical. “Shut up and calculate” is the reigning dogma.

Scarblac 7y ago
A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both.
- ibeckermayer 7y ago
  Fair point, so then let me reframe the inconsistency as: there’s a phenomena that appears exhibits properties of both a particle and a wave but it can’t be both. So what is it? And the criticism of mainstream thought in physics would be: its wrongfully dismissive of my question, and ignoring the important job of looking for the answer.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
    No, the mainstream physics reply is "It's a quantized excitation of the electromagnetic field." since that's a perfectly reasonable reply to a perfectly reasonable question.
    - shuspect 7y ago
      "Height field" is mathematical model of land. Electromagnetic filed is mathematical model of what?
      - cygx 7y ago
        Electromagnetism is a U(1) gauge theory. If you take the accompanying classical geometry at face value, there's hidden state at each point in space, like some sort of dial. The absolute position of the dial is irrelevant, but the gauge potential tells you how the dial turns as you move from place to place. The electromagnetic field strength is something called curvature of the corresponding 'connection'. The mathematics are a bit involved, but morally speaking, I would say it tells you how the turning of the dial varies across space.
        shpeedy 7y ago
        So, EM field describes strength of EM force in every point of mathematical model. Nature of EM force is unknown. Right? Let's talk about nature of EM force. Analogy: look at a typical tropical cyclone. It rotates. Is it rotating because a unknown property of an air molecule? No. It rotates because our planet rotates, while air molecules are just trying to keep their positions. I.e. it's rotation of planet + inertia of molecules. Is it possible that EM force is happens because our local space is moving trough global space by non-linear trajectory, so it just non-linear trajectory of local space + inertia of rotating and vibrating particles?
      - Koshkin 7y ago
        Not exactly only mathematical, though - you can feel it as you walk across.
        shpeedy 7y ago
        I feel also air field (wind), height field (land), light field (photons), and so on.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    How about "it's a thing that does not have an analog at the macro scale in which humans exist, therefore any explanation that does not use terminology from our daily lives will be unsatisfactory"
    - brutt 7y ago
      It has analog at macro-scale: it's a particle surrounded by a wave. Double split experiment is reproduced in macro almost decade ago!
- phkahler 7y ago
  >> A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both. But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. They have decided that having math that can predict the outcome of experiments is enough. They're not wrong, but it feels rather unsatisfying. IMHO there have been a couple avenues worth exploring that are being largely ignored.
  - frenchyatwork 7y ago
    > But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. It depends on what you mean by that. What they've given up on is trying to find some sort of anthropocentric analogy. It's understandable that this is unsatisfying, since analogies are fundamental to how we understand things. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that a good analogy will exist.
    - ibeckermayer 7y ago
      We shouldn't be looking for analogies, we should be looking for theories consisting of precise concepts that directly explain what is happening in the universe.
      - Koshkin 7y ago
        Ultimately, math is the only "explanation" that physics will ever offer.
    - phkahler 7y ago
      >> Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that a good analogy will exist. That's no reason not to try. If there IS an objective reality I think it deserves a better description than just the math which characterizes its behavior.
      - frenchyatwork 7y ago
        If would be tremendous if someone can come up with one, I'm sure they'd be quite popular, but good analogies don't grow on trees.
senderista 7y ago
Your perspective isn’t “heretical”, it’s ignorant. The “paradox” has been resolved since 1930 or so, in the form of quantum field theory.
nwallin 7y ago
That inconsistency was subject to an immense amount of scrutiny by thousands of scientists for over a hundred years. Albert Einstein received a Nobel Prize for resolving the inconsistency. The theory that ultimately resolved it is called quantum mechanics. That's no longer an inconsistency. Better examples would be the inconsistencies between general relativity, which demands curved spacetime, and quantum mechanics, which prohibits curved space. This is a very real inconsistency at the heart of modern physics. Many, many people are actively working on solutions for it. Search for Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything for more information. Candidate theories include string theory and its derivatives, loop quantum gravity, etc. There are plenty more. The problem is that designing experiments for these theories is Hard. Big-O Capital H Hard. My flight's about to board, maybe I can expand on it during my layover. Dark matter is another example. Observations of the speeds and orbits of stars in galaxies and galaxies in galactic clusters are not consistent with our measurements of their masses. Plenty of candidates for dark matter have been and are continuing to be tested. Candidates include MOND, which supposes that our theories of gravity need to be modified when acceleration is astronomically low. We have designed experiments to support or disprove these theories and most of the results have landed on the side of disproving them. (search for "bullet cluster" or "dark matterless galaxies") Another candidate is MACHOs. ("MAssive Compact Halo Object") Basically the universe is teeming with small black holes, brown dwarfs, loose planets unassociated with any star, basically a lot of stuff we can't see. We have designed and executed experiments to search for these, but the results have concluded that there are insufficient such objects to explain the inconsistency. The third candidate with traction is WIMPs, or "weakly interacting massive particle". Basically theorizing that there are other types of unobserved particles that have mass but do not interact via the electromagnetic force, which makes them very difficult to observe. There was hope that neutrinos could explain all these, especially when it was demonstrated that neutrinos have mass. However, experiments trying to bound the mass of the neutrino have shown they are not nearly massive enough to explain the observations. Experiments are ongoing to find these particles, but have yet not discovered anything we can't already explain. However, there's a problem: maybe they're just too difficult for any experiment to observe. In that case, we might be SOL. These are just two examples. All of science are all the other examples. The idea that this person is the only person probing inconsistencies is pure hubris. It's not a useful starting point for a conversation, unless the point of the conversation is to talk about how awesome you are and how much everyone else sucks. Which is all I got from this article.
krastanov 7y ago
We have a pretty good and intuitive explanation of what a photon (or other particles) is. It is an excitation of a quantum field and quantum fields stem from the underlying symmetries of space and time. It is incredibly powerful, incredibly simple, and incredibly illuminating idea, but it requires you to learn a couple of new words that humans did not need in their vocabulary when they were inventing agriculture. I am very comfortable claiming this is much simpler than any particle-related intuition as it requires way fewer "axioms". The difference is that you arbitrarily happen to have a mental image of what a particle is, but that does not make particles simpler. As a mental exercise, try to rigorously define what a particle is according to your intuition and explain why we should expect them to even exist.
axilmar 7y ago
Personally I am not convinced a particle is a wave until collapsed. There is nothing in the double slit experiment that definitely proves that. It may be that light particles bounce off something and change trajectory and create the illusion of there being a wave. In the double slit experiment, if you rotate the slit 90 degrees, the interference pattern is rotated 90 degrees in the same direction. Doesn't this prove there is no wave involved? If you make the slits larger, the pattern changes, and then vanishes. If you make the slits circular, the interference pattern becomes circular. If you make the slits triangular, the inteference pattern becomes triangular itself. All these things tell me that particles are not waves at any point, they just bump to something and take a different trajectory. When, in the same experiment, a light detector is placed, and the interference pattern disappears, this does not mean the wave goes away and there is a collapse to a single particle; it means the detector produces particles that don't bounce off something. What if the detector is placed near the particle beam emitter? has it ever been tried? I don't know. If placing the detector near the emitter makes an interference pattern reappear, then we certainly have no collapsing of any wave. What if we put the slits very close to the emitter? do we get the same inteference pattern? what if we put the slits further away from the emitter? does the interference pattern change? if yes, then we certainly have no wave. And something else regarding quantum entanglement: how can we be sure that the particles are not created with their properties in such a state that they appear entangled when they are measured? why do we assume there is a communication between the particles on the fly rather than the two particles having relatable but not connected properties? we just assume that due to the other assumption that particles are waves and they collapse. Finally, how do we know that matter attracts matter and it is not the void that pushes matter into clumps? how do we know that the actual distance between the furthest points in the universe is the same as it ever was, and simply new positions are created within the same distance? and these positions are what push matter to clump together? I'd love to sit down with an honest physicist to research these types of questions, a physicist that cares more about answering these types of questions than hunting for grants and fearing to go against the status quo, but it seems only crackpots are willing to do that.