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Is the Schrödinger Equation True?

• brummm 6y ago
  The article touches upon something that I think most people that learn about physics don't realize. The models physicists use to describe nature do NOT exist in reality. They are mere concepts that work well to describe natural phenomena. My favourite example for this is the electron. Does an electron how we describe it in quantum mechanics exist in nature? The answer is no. The electron is a model construct we have made up that describes natural phenomena. Nothing more. This is where non-experts that didn't study physics get confused when they read that an electron is a wave but also a particle. All of these concepts are just physical models that again do not exist in nature. But they describe different aspects of nature pretty well. And so we assign them a meaning beyond what the mathematical or physical model contains, a part of reality.
  • sideshowb 6y ago
    Physics isn't special in this regard, though. All conscious thought is about models, abstractions and filing things away in boxes. I might think this post of mine starts with the letter P, but if I made the http request by hand, starting it by sending the utf8 encoding of P to the network card won't work, because I need headers. On the other hand if my child tried to render the opening P I'd ask her to not draw on my phone screen please.
    • gammagurke 6y ago
      Physics is slightly special in that it tries to optimise for mathematical simplicity rather than ease-of-conscious-thought. If we find a simpler or more predictive model for the electron, physicists will happily abandon the model we currently have, while nothing will destroy our brain's model of 'what I type is what is sent'. Conscious thought isn't even required for the process of physics, we only use it because it is the only thing we have to approximate the mathematical reasoning that physics does require.
      • sideshowb 6y ago
        Definitely agree with your first sentence, I was thinking it's special somehow just not in the way we perceive models rather than 'reality'.
    • eyelidlessness 6y ago
      > Physics isn't special in this regard, though. Yep. I immediately started thinking about how this “real”/“not real” dichotomy applies to programming. We write programs that confidently declare not only that they’re defining facts for the purpose of the computation, but transferring them and interoperating with other such stated facts. But they’re all abstractions, they’re all convenient fictions we use to describe, model and hopefully send electricity through minerals to achieve the result we defined. Even stepping a bit away from the physics involved, just considering the humans who do lithography and are closest to reality, their mental model and work is still an approximation of that reality that’s effective at their level of abstraction. And this doesn’t just apply to human-mechanics interaction. It’s something my messed up brain thinks about with human-human interactions all the time. We have mental models of how the electrical impulses travel through our fellow animated bags of meat, but they’re not just approximations they’re often very flawed. But we still interact and we hopefully don’t become overly obsessed with the underlying details we don’t and probably can’t fully grasp.
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    > The answer is no Well technically I think the answer would he "We don't know" instead. We don't have anything better than the standard model - the perceived clash between wave and particle is resolved by a more general theoryz for example.
    • brummm 6y ago
      Yeah, that was just an example. And to be fair, with regards to the standard model, we know the standard model is not fully correct and we still don't have anything better.
  • thomasahle 6y ago
    This all depends on your philosophy and definition of reality. When you get into stuff as far from everyday life as electrons, our intuitive definitions don't work very well. Most scientists, I think, use some definitions along the lines of "Reality is whatever appears in our best models/explanations of our observations of the world". If all observations of electrons we have ever made obey some law, we say that's the real behaviour of electrons. If we find out it doesn't always work, we realize reality is something more complex, and at some point hopefully we find out what it is.
  • analog31 6y ago
    >>> The article touches upon something that I think most people that learn about physics don't realize. The models physicists use to describe nature do NOT exist in reality. They are mere concepts that work well to describe natural phenomena. Indeed, having completed a graduate degree in physics, by the time you've been introduced to a different model of the electron for the third or fourth time, it begins to sink in.
  • jbotz 6y ago
    The world that see you when looking out through your eyes doesn't exist in reality either. It's just models your brain puts together from some sensory stimuli (photons hitting your retina), but they aren't real, they are mere concepts that happen to work well enough that you may manage to live long enough to procreate... they were made by evolution, and evolution doesn't care if it's real so long as it works well enough. I don't think it's meaningful to say that the electron described by QM doesn't exist in nature... something exists in nature and all we can ever do is describe it with a model.
• aeternum 6y ago
  >Mathematical models such as quantum mechanics and general relativity work, extraordinarily well. But they aren’t real in the same sense that neutrons and neurons are real Why not? When you really get down to it, aren't both neutrons and neurons ultimately also models? When most people think of a neutron, they think of a classical particle, yet we know experimentally that there is no such thing.
  • uoaei 6y ago
    Yeah the author is assuming that "neutrons" have definite boundaries and are unambiguously distinguishable from the soup they inhabit. This is not the case. This is a simple example of how hard quantum mechanics is to think about.
    • jiggawatts 6y ago
      Neutrons are countable with integers. Waves -- even in classical mechanics -- are not "countable", and are best represented in physical models with a continuum, such as field of real numbers. They're fundamentally different. Quantum Mechanics glosses over this difference because when it was developed, this was too hard to deal with. A lot of people who briefly studied QM at an undergraduate level assume that it "keeps going" and is applicable to all small-scale processes. In reality, it is not applicable to a wide range of phenomena, including explaining why particles come in countable units. Similarly, the "infinite size" of electron clouds or the probability distributions of particles such as neutrons are a mathematical shortcut that was explicitly called out as such in the first QM papers. After a century, people just forgot and assumed that QM has a direct correspondence to reality, when it is a simplified abstraction designed to be analytically tractable. Lastly, many people think that QM predicts that EM waves come in "countable" units called photons. This isn't true in general, and again, was called out as a simplification for the treatment of the emission and absorption of EM waves by atomic matter specifically. Atoms have electron orbitals that can take on only specific values, hence they can only absorb or emit EM waves with specific values. This is not a property shared with free particles or other fields that interact electromagnetically. QM pedagogy needs to be rethought from the ground up, because nobody seems to be learning QM, but instead they're internalising a limited model they don't actually understand.
• hawkice 6y ago
  The author of this piece says he was struggling to understand complex conjugates. If you don't understand what that is, please read the wikipedia, so you can contextualize his level of familiarity with the material he speaks about. I don't think the author is being dishonest. But that admission is extremely striking to me. [edit: Can some admin give me guidance on how to make the point I'm clearly trying to make? I'm not sure how to make this point without being discourteous.]
  • kowlo 6y ago
    > [edit: Can some admin give me guidance on how to make the point I'm clearly trying to make? I'm not sure how to make this point without being discourteous.] not an admin, but seems like you made your point
  • ajkjk 6y ago
    I mean.. if their problem is not understanding the math of conjugation at all, then yes, they're pretty elementary and are going to have trouble with QM. But if their problem is not being able to stomach the "just-because" explanations that every QM resigns to using to explain wtf complex conjugation has to do with reality, then I completely, totally sympathize. Learning QM consists of learning to silence your objections to the fact that none of the things you're being asked to believe make any sense. It gets somewhat more scrutable when you deal with relativistic QM, where, at least, the terms in Schrodinger equation start to make intuitive sense (it's the first couple terms in the Taylor expansion of E psi = sqrt(p^2 + m^2) psi = m sqrt(p^2/m^2 + 1) psi = (m + 1/2 p^2/m)psi ), but then spinors enter the picture and all intuition goes out the window again.
    • groby_b 6y ago
      I'd maybe swallow this explanation for complex conjugates as applied to QM. (They're still extremely useful for e.g. circuit analysis, as a practical application) But it's not just complex conjugates, but eigenvectors as well. Also spectacular: "the square root of a negative number, which by definition does not exist" Uh. That's a complete lack of connection to anything beyond 10th grade math. Maybe not the ideal foundation for criticizing QM. And yes, I get the complaint that QM comes with a lot of "if you just hold your nose and accept this", and intuition doesn't really work for it - but that's hardly a valid criticism by itself, outside of saying "well, this is hard to understand". And the idea that a mathematical model isn't perfect and as a result of that can't be true really just betrays a complete misunderstanding how models work. This piece boils down to "I don't understand it, and so it can't be correct".
• ukj 6y ago
  One of the interesting questions (without any satisfactory answers) in Philosophy is “How does language relate to the world?” Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps language is just a tool we, humans, use for thinking and representing our knowledge. Mathematics is a language... Mathematical objects need not exist anywhere else but in the Mathematician’s head.
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    If you read Wigner's famous essay, you can make an argument that if not the mathematics itself, there is some kind of structure which is mathematical if not symbolic.
    • ukj 6y ago
      Sure. Any argument for structuralism is countered by non-structuralist/post-structuralist.
      • mhh__ 6y ago
        That's sounds like philosophy, I'm out!
        • ukj 6y ago
          And just one post back you recommended a Philosophical essay ;)
          • mhh__ 6y ago
            It was partly a tongue-in-cheek dogwhistle to the physics crowd, but I do sort of feel that even the essay I cite is useless - interesting, yes. I (and I have tried) really struggle to see what the point is in learning all these philosophy terms when it usually or always ends up being unfalsifiable or a overly proud euphemism for yet another concept. To take a specific example, I'm curious what post-structuralism actually means as applied to the structure I was trying to refer to - there are certain symmetry groups that seem to apply everywhere we look, but the actual structure is itself isn't a symbolic concept in the same way the standard model is.
• cygx 6y ago
  Compared to physicists, engineers are humble. Well. Anecdotally, when there's open house at the physics department, the guys that will tell you how quantum mechanics and/or relativity are wrong tend to have a background in engineering. Also note that not everyone subscribes to what the article calls the 'Gospel of Physics': Quite a few of us are well-aware that the map is not the territory...
• el_nahual 6y ago
  Reminds me of course of the great anecdote attributed to quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli: "a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong'."
• lordnacho 6y ago
  Not sure I agree with him. What does something being real mean? It's got to mean that observations are consistent with the description of that something. That's actually all we can do, check that observations aren't disagreeing with what the model said. So if an electron is a tiny little thing that is deflected by a magnetic field, has a certain mass, etc, then it's real insofar as we observe those qualities. In the same way if Santa Claus isn't real, it's because there's issues with the evidence. This doesn't preclude there being a better model of course. Observations can get more sophisticated, revealing that your model needed adjustment. Or parsimony can drive and someone finds a way to describe multiple phenomena at once, eg electromagnetism. As for why mathematics is great at describing nature, it's because there's loads of it, since it's an extensible system of logic. Someone somewhere is going to find a way of describing how asteroids go round, and being a kind of logic there's no way you would say it wasn't math, regardless of what exactly it was. Epicycles are math too, despite not being the exact right way to think about it.
  • millstone 6y ago
    Physical theories often go beyond just predictions, and attempt to specify a correspondence between a formalism and physical reality. Quarks are an example. Quarks were conceptualized as a mathematical simplification, and only later were recognized as real physical things - or at least as real as protons. In QM we have physical quantities (an electron's mass) and unphysical quantities (an electron's phase). But there's open questions, like the wavefunction - can that be placed in correspondence with reality? We don't really know. This is the "ontic" vs "epistemic" debate.
    • lordnacho 6y ago
      But isn't that just the theory happening to be "right"? If you have some thing that describes how nuclear physics works, and it happens to predict a particle that turns out to do what was predicted, that means the particle is real in the sense of being described accurately? Reminds me of tunnelling. That's one of those "it's weird but the equation should work on the other side of the barrier" situations, lo and behold stuff goes through the barrier.
• prof-dr-ir 6y ago
  > If physicists adopt this humble mindset, and resist their craving for certitude, they are more likely to seek and hence to find more even more effective theories, perhaps ones that work even better than quantum mechanics. Why thank you, Mr. Science Communicator. Such a tremendous insight that all I needed was a mindset to find, eh, quantum field theory? (Apologies for the sarcasm, but - really?) (Also: no disrespect intended to (other) science communicators.)
  • EmreCe 6y ago
    That bugs me also, there were abundance of unexplained findings while QM being developed. They were weeding out theories. Now the things we are looking for requires international efforts like CERN for finding Higgs. We won't have any better unless some one finds a way to make smaller accelerators and better detectors.
• deleted 6y ago
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• lmm 6y ago
  The Schroedinger Equation is the most true thing I've ever encountered. It is clear, simple, obvious in its correctness; the greatest piece of physics since Maxwell. Once you've understood it it becomes almost impossible to imagine that the universe could possibly work any other way. (Contrary to this article's claim, the equation describes the behaviour of Helium atoms perfectly well; it's a failure of our imagination or exertion that we can't find closed-form stable solutions, not a fact about the equation itself). So this kind of complaint seems utterly wrongheaded. People hold quantum mechanics to some ridiculous standard, far higher than any other physical theory. Did they really expect that the behaviour of the very small would be exactly like that of everyday macroscopic objects? Do they enjoy the mysticism of pretending that it's complex and hard to understand when it's really nothing of the sort? Frankly I think an honest approach to QM would present it as something banal and obvious.
  • FeepingCreature 6y ago
    This is also the thrust of the original LessWrong Quantum Physics Sequence. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FSwbFpDsca7uXpQ2/quantum-explanations https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FSwbFpDsca7uXpQ2/quantum-ex... > In the coming sequence on quantum mechanics, I am going to consistently speak as if quantum mechanics is perfectly normal; and when human intuitions depart from quantum mechanics, I am going to make fun of the intuitions for being weird and unusual.
    • KirillPanov 6y ago
      > This is also the thrust of the original LessWrong Quantum Physics Sequence Thanks for linking to this! Absolutely agree with his gripes in the first article about the traditional historically-oriented introduction to QM confusing students. The rest of the articles (still reading them) appear to be pretty much the route taken by Feynman's _QED_ book (which, of course, is fantastic). It's also very interesting how his 1960's Feynman Lectures books seem to tell the student "QM is confusing and weird and hard and scary" roughly every ten pages or so, whereas by the 1980's with _QED_ he dropped the fearmongering language.
      • 6y ago
• ordu 6y ago
  I personally came to a conclusion, that "true" is not a word to apply to a physics equation. Truth is a mathematical abstraction, which is useful often, but to speak about truth we need to assume as given some other truths and call them axioms. In this sense almost anything could be true given the right axioms. The article seems to be confused and mixes ideas like "true", "real" and "valid". Math statements might be true. Physics theories might be valid. What is real is a deep philosophical question and the answer... well, it depends...
  • onethought 6y ago
    There is truth outside of mathematics, as philosophers have fought toiled with this idea. Famously Descartes with his root of skepticism being a kind of Identity/Existence truth. I mean in some ways Mathematics is just like a completely made up world that is internally consistent so saying it is "truth" is the same as me saying "in a made up world where truth exists, truth exists"
    • blamestross 6y ago
      Descartes based his entire concept of the existence of truth on the fact God exists and doesn't hate him. I don't think we have any good arguments for the existence of truth or even consensus reality beyond simple pragmatic acceptance of it as an assumption without evidence.
      • onethought 6y ago
        Not quite true. He used it as proof of gods existence. But his logical premise holds, and has yet to be countered in any meaningful way. Our awareness of our existence proves our existence.
        • blamestross 6y ago
          Sure but I wasn't questioning my existence. Only yours and everybody and everything else's. Descartes still would need to believe in God in order to believe in you. It doesn't seem like a particularly good argument.
• LetThereBeLight 6y ago
  >If physicists adopt this humble mindset, and resist their craving for certitude, they are more likely to seek and hence to find more even more effective theories, perhaps ones that work even better than quantum mechanics. I don't believe that most modern physicists dispute that the equations we use are anything more than models. For example, you won't go to a seminar on microrheology and have a physicists point out in disgust that the presented derivation is "wrong" because it used Newton's second law without the relativistic component. While this is perhaps an extreme example, it is the case that we often have to ignore certain effects/make certain assumptions to make equations solvable and interpretable. If we believed that our physics equations represented some "absolute truth," then we would never allow ourselves to make these sort of assumptions in the formulas we derive.
• GuB-42 6y ago
  I think you should watch/read Sabine Hossenfelder. She is cold, methodical, and notably critical of the search for mathematical beauty. She is pretty clear about the fact that reality is what we observe, and equations are just a tool we use to make models.
• frongpik 6y ago
  I've seen a clever mathematical trick that derives the Schrodinger equation out of GR. As you know, there's this invariant interval thing: ds2 = c2 dt2 - dx2 - dy2 - dz2. The trick was to add a small oscillation multiplier to ds2, so it would become ds2 exp(a cos wt) = ... Mixed with lorentz transforms, this yields the static SE and mixed with GR tensors stuff this yields the time dependent SE. I can't judge if this trick is physically sound.
  • jl2718 6y ago
    This seems to be a more reasonable approach - derive a relation from a law of conservation. Starting from the differential form is fraught with indeterminism. Assuming this works, I wonder about maxwell’s equations. I assume they would have to be consistent with a conserved electromagnetic quantity added into this. Gravity?
• steve76 6y ago
  Think of heat transfer. Conduction, surfaces are in contact. Convection, a fluid medium is in contact. And radiation, what's that medium? How does heat from the sun warm the earth, with no medium in between? If nature has a mind, it's not a good one. The medium for radiation is nature's ability to speed up and slow down it's clock. Just like an inflated tire will always find the leak, nature's always going to take the easiest way. Not having a mind, or having the worst mind possible, means you're going to do anything to take the easy route. This is special relativity. The tendency is to elevate spacetime to something mystical. Instead, you need to go lower, blur and know no distinction between frequency and intensity. Coupled with the photoelectric effect of radiation hitting the entire object and not just a point of focus, and Brownian movements driving increasing entropy, meaning atoms exist but there's nothing really special on their boundary, you have a general principle. The object is in a bath of radiation particles acting everywhere. Brightness equates to an internal clock ticking fast. For every geometry with a specific boundary, there's a thermal topology just skimming the surface, that of infinite thermal dimensions. Hopefully that helps with Hilbert spaces. Because this principle acts anywhere and everywhere, nature "goes to the tape" and will even change the record, everything around it faster than you can look at it, if that's the path of least effort. How we get to atoms: Prior to Planck and Einstein, Newton's medium of radiation was just temperatures really close together. Under Newton's model, a closed closet full of cast iron pots and pans would end up with one burning bright hot, hot enough to swallow the sun, and everything else turning into black holes. Planck fixed this by saying if something is to exist, it has a capacity to absorb heat before it starts radiating it out. Using the speed of light, which goes back to Galileo, and the kinetic theory of gases which relates temperature to dimensionless probability, you have a limit on how small something to be. It's incredibly small, bringing the photon to a cosmic level if the Planck length is the size of a photon. So particles aren't intuitive, not little grains of sand to build things out of. Anything with a discrete start and an end works even if it's purely thermal relating to an internal voltage on the medium of clock speed. What makes an atom? They're always the same despite weight or lattice or grains. Any smaller means lightening's shooting out. Instead of counting what's inside or measuring all points of contact, just use that radiation topology to describe, or even define it completely. Likely nature is what does this. Why this matters: What if the holographic universe theory is right, and through technology we lower that distance to around the sun or even the earth? What if string theory is right, and we increase the effective size of the string to the earth or the sun? What would that look like? Instruments inside the sun, whose orbit is a galactic one. If that is a matter wave that's following that orbit, and the other side of the interference pattern is the boundary of a black hole, that looks a lot like dark matter. Control that with another larger black hole, and another "data ground" to a therapeutic imaging machine, how could a tumor evade that? Dump more tech into that concept, get it big enough to microwave an incoming asteroid, humans are invincible on a cosmic scale.
• 8bitsrule 6y ago
  It's a lovely mysterious incantation, like the (worked-over by Heaviside) Maxwell equations. But (used much like Latin), they don't speak to any human beings except those that have the leisure and capacity to learn all that math ... and then to acquire a voluminous mental store of evidence to apply it to. Real truth is plain. Newton's equations are approachable, closer to human experience and comprehension. Feynman's diagrams, perhaps a step in the right direction. True? Science is not math; it has no proofs. A 'theory' is the expression of a model that's stood the test of time - but one piece of evidence can force it to be re-built. Science forces us to search for and adapt to the new. Feynman said, "When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it."
  • qart 6y ago
    > Science is not math; it has no proofs. A couple of the earliest things I recall proving in physics classes: 1. acceleration due to gravity on earth g is the same ~9.8 m/s² for all objects whose mass is negligible compared to the mass of the earth. 2. if it weren't for atmospheric drag, thrown projectiles fall at velocities much smaller than the escape velocity would trace a parabolic curve. In what sense were these not proofs?
    • j7ake 6y ago
      Your statements about the world provide a theory that can be used to do an experiment to support or disprove your theory, but there is nothing that can prove that theory like proofs in a mathematical theorem. Scientific theories are used to support a wide range of phenomenon, but are later superceded by better theorems that can encompass more phenomena. Experimental evidence can provide support for the theory, can disprove a theory, but cannot prove the theory. Unrelated to mathematical proofs, but there are counter examples for each of your statements. 1. The acceleration due to gravity on earth is not constant, it varies depending on location (easy to experimentally refute that it's not 9.8 everywhere). For example, being on mount everest versus at sea level in the Arctic would give different rates of acceleration. Adding a tilde in front of 9.8 m/s^2 doesn't help make the statement look like a proof. 2. Given that acceleration due to gravity is not constant, then the trajectory will no longer be a parabolic curve.
• tasty_freeze 6y ago
  > The “laws” of physics, Wigner adds, have little or nothing to say about biology, and especially about consciousness, the most baffling of all biological phenomena. Starting with the laws of physics, no, we cannot in practice calculate a consciousness. But we also can't inspect a lottery machine and predict the balls which come out either. Nobody thinks the latter is is because lottery machines also contain magic, yet so many people think that of consciousness. Could consciousness involve extra-physical explanation? Sure. But there there is an equal amount of evidence that lottery machines do too (i.e., none).
  • BobbyJo 6y ago
    I dislike this comparison. The reason we can't explain consciousness isn't because it complex or because there are too many variables for us to track and predict, as in the case of the lottery machine, but because we haven't decided what we mean when we say 'conciousness'. Pretty much any component of consciousness one may think of can be explained in isolation as a simple material system. Self-reflection, continuity, response to stimuli, etc. When people talk about magic, they are referring to the strangeness of subjectivity, and what it is at a very fundamental level. I think a better analogy is being a Greek philosopher and trying to understand what matter is. No tool at the time can measure things in a way that would meaningfully lead them to an answer, nor did they have any theories where matter could be related to something they could study. So when we are confronted with the same situation, I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that we, like them, are missing a massive piece of the puzzle. Calling it magic feels kind of right when it's something so large and consequential.
    • tasty_freeze 6y ago
      I agree everyone has a different definition for consciousness. But I'd argue that you could take any one of them and my argument would still apply. One of my favorite books is "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" by Oliver Sacks [1]. It contains a number of amazing cases of neurology where someone has suffered a brain injury and the facade of our apparently sophisticated consciousness is exposed a bit. For example, a guy who suffered a stroke and became blind, but was unable to accept it, so he lied to himself and rationalized all the resulting outcomes. The rest of his brain was 100% normal, was an articulate, intelligent person in all other regards. But he would confabulate extraordinary excuses to maintain his belief system. That story just drives home how much we as humans are capable of rationalizing. I don't recall if it was that book or another that describes Capgras delusion [2] where a person sincerely believes that someone they know intimately, say a parent or spouse, has been replaced by a doppleganger, but are otherwise fully rational. They can even state that it sounds crazy, but nevertheless it is true. Or a form of it where they feel this way about themselves, leading them to believe they are dead yet still animate, is the Cotard Delusion [3]. What causes it? When one looks at their mother, an array of neurological connections to associated feelings and memories are activated; apparently in these cases, that doesn't happen in the normal way, and rather than concluding that something went wrong in their heads, they experience as this person in front of my looks identically to my mother but must be someone else and that is why those feelings are not arising. The point of these two small examples is that our experience of consciousness and "me-ness" is a self-consistent facade, not nearly as deep as we feel it is, as site-specific injuries can result in profound flaws in that system. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/1491514078 https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/149151407... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard_delusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard_delusion
• hikerclimber 6y ago
  its false.
• drumbaby 6y ago
  They say to to a physicist a cow seems to be a sphere, to the first approximation. Well, this article seems to be misleading drivel, to a first approximation. Why are people supposed to waste their time reading this?
• jl2718 6y ago
  Toss a ball in the air and watch it spin. You ask why it spins and I tell you that it is because god is multiplying its state by a quarternion. Is that true? An equation can be perfectly descriptive without explaining anything, and just as easily used in a patently incorrect or at least unverifiable explanation. A new physics learner may be uncomfortable with this notion, as everything up to that point was taught as cause and effect, no difference between explanation and description. As in the example, the description could take a different form. God could use matrices. Or you could say that god prefers to minimize the lagrangian. Or you could simulate with finite element analysis and say that it is an emergent phenomenon of many points of mass all following a set of rules. Questions for each explanation abound. I think at the bottom of all of this there has to be an admission that the universe works in this particular manner because it wouldn’t exist for us any other way, and we do exist, so it must.