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Physics is trying to fit reality to an equation, it is not reality itself. We don't know what an atom "is", we just know how it behaves with high precision. If

Physics is trying to fit reality to an equation, it is not reality itself. We don't know what an atom "is", we just know how it behaves with high precision. If the simplest and most consistent math is a non-physical pilot wave, I don't think this really matters if it lets you calculate something more easily or correctly. I don't personally know how to use them (my five QM courses used traditional techniques) but if they give useful results it hardly matters if they're "real". My good friend did his undergraduate thesis by noticing that Clebsch–Gordan coefficients could be used to describe grain boundary orientations in polycrystalline materials. Doesn't mean grain boundaries have spin. It's just math that was convenient and worked well.

jfengel 7y ago
There's a lot to be said for shutting up and calculating. If I were a physicist, I might subscribe to that myself. Since I can't calculate myself, I try to remain agnostic even to that extent. That said, physics advances do sometimes come from asking "What if X is real?" The positron and electron spins are both poster children for that. Instead of just shutting up and calculating, people focused on the part of the calculation that seemed to imply the existence of an unobserved thing. We could, in fact, have kept going with a physics in which positrons were merely calculation conveniences; that physics is valid. But we might not have discovered the Standard Model that way. So I'm of two minds... and in a lot of ways, I'm not really entitled to be of any minds, since my formal education stopped at undergrad, and I'm no longer capable of doing even that much math. I get leery when people with even less education want to "understand" without doing any of the math, because I fear that the best of explanations will only mislead them.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I'm not sure I understand why you see this as a dichotomy. Sometimes inspiration comes from a weird idea, sometimes it falls out of mathematical analysis. It's not like it is exclusive, everyone thinks a bit different thankfully. Like your example of the positron and electron seems fine; math and experiment in a cycle of discovery. You wouldn't know to look for a positron if you didn't study the electron experimentally and try to come up with some math for it.

jfengel 7y ago

There's a lot to be said for shutting up and calculating. If I were a physicist, I might subscribe to that myself. Since I can't calculate myself, I try to remain agnostic even to that extent. That said, physics advances do sometimes come from asking "What if X is real?" The positron and electron spins are both poster children for that. Instead of just shutting up and calculating, people focused on the part of the calculation that seemed to imply the existence of an unobserved thing. We could, in fact, have kept going with a physics in which positrons were merely calculation conveniences; that physics is valid. But we might not have discovered the Standard Model that way. So I'm of two minds... and in a lot of ways, I'm not really entitled to be of any minds, since my formal education stopped at undergrad, and I'm no longer capable of doing even that much math. I get leery when people with even less education want to "understand" without doing any of the math, because I fear that the best of explanations will only mislead them.

neltnerb 7y ago
I'm not sure I understand why you see this as a dichotomy. Sometimes inspiration comes from a weird idea, sometimes it falls out of mathematical analysis. It's not like it is exclusive, everyone thinks a bit different thankfully. Like your example of the positron and electron seems fine; math and experiment in a cycle of discovery. You wouldn't know to look for a positron if you didn't study the electron experimentally and try to come up with some math for it.