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I bet you didnt know that
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And just when I think I'm starting to get a handle on things.......!
I guess the short take away is that nobody has a handle on these things. There is a lot we don't know, the concepts we do know only stretch so far and there might even be things we cannot know.
The funny thing is even a superpowerful AI won't know. If it really is the case that some things can't be understood mathematically and an AIs mind is made of maths (the Boolean operations in the computer circuitry), then it can't know either.
And with that non-explanation I'm off for another long while. :pac:0 -
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Sorry, your job is explaining things to dopes like me now. Get back here!*
My regular reaction when reading Fourier's posts.
And this is a good thing. Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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Weirdly I find myself reading it and I'm fine with it all. I'm more like "I thought this thread was for stuff I didn't know"
But then again, I'm into proper science, you're into engineering.
I'm not into science at all. It might as well be written in Chinese as far as I'm concerned.0 -
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Well I'm not! I can explain it and I know it, but I don't get it. That stuff might lie outside science, that there might not be fundamental building blocks to the world, that maths might not be universal and might just be in our heads....Weirdly I find myself reading it and I'm fine with it all.
I mean I like science as well, but this stuff was a shocker when I learned it toward the end of my doctorate. I wasn't far off poor Spongebob in Wibbs's image when I learned it first. I remember being in Spain when some of it was explained to me. The professor just went "And so we see that most likely there are things outside scientific comprehension". A Spanish fella sitting next to me just said "What the **** are we learning man?"0 -
Well I'm not! I can explain it and I know it, but I don't get it. That stuff might lie outside science, that there might not be fundamental building blocks to the world, that maths might not be universal and might just be in our heads....
I mean I like science as well, but this stuff was a shocker when I learned it toward the end of my doctorate. I wasn't far off poor Spongebob when I learned it first. I remember being in Spain when some of it was explained to me. The professor just went "And so we see that most likely there are things outside scientific comprehension". A Spanish fella sitting next to me just said "What the **** are we learning man?"
so the more you learn about this stuff the more you realise we actually know very little?0 -
And with that non-explanation I'm off for another long while. :pac:
This is exactly how I end most of my work meetings:DThat stuff might lie outside science, that there might not be fundamental building blocks to the world, that maths might not be universal and might just be in our heads....
Surely there must be - whether people will ever be smart enough to comprehend what exactly they are is a different matter - but all this "stuff" must be made of something.........mustn't it
Jaysus, I've just had the weirdest bout of deja vu typing that.
You better not have me stuck in some time warp fourier!!0 -
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The idea is that everything is not made out of fundamental building blocks common to all objects, roughly speaking you could see it as rejecting the idea that there are a few "basic lego pieces" to the world and everything is just them put together in a certain way. Also there is serious doubt that without such building blocks the world can still be understood mathematically.sbsquarepants wrote: »Surely there must be - whether people will ever be smart enough to comprehend what exactly they are is a different matter - but all this "stuff" must be made of something.........mustn't it
I'll just finish off (probably back March-ish) with some quotes, just so you know I'm not feeding you nonsense. I've converted some jargon to normal-ish English, indicated by [].- Robert Wald, Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Physics, University of Chicago:
[The preceding] may appear paradoxical to readers who are used to thinking [that] the notion of particles has objective significance...the notion of particles [is merely] introduced as a convenient way of labeling states in certain situations
- Terry Rudolph, Professor of Quantum Physics, Imperial College London, also Schrödinger's grandson:
By correctness he means actually exist, i.e. that energy, momentum, anything like particles, etc actually exist. He ends with a section on how every concept in our theories might be just useful to our minds, but not the truth.I talk about the physical properties of a photon as if they were as tangible as any of the physical properties of the human scale objects in the room around me. They are not.
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For thousands of years the radical view was that [the world could be explained as] the motion of microscopic constituents. This perspective eventually won out, and has served science incredibly well - it is hard for me to let go of
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I have no confidence in the "correctness" of any of the physical properties our theories are premised on. - Roland Omnes, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics Paris:
[This] could mean that quantum mechanics has reached an ultimate limit in the agreement between a mathematical theory and physical reality
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Physical Reality and [Human Logic and Mathematics] are intrinsically different
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To assume that reality can be known arbitrarily well in principle [by scientific theories] is [false]
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Some aspects of reality are not covered by [mathematics and human logic] - Jeffrey Bub, Professor of Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, University of Maryland:
It seems rational to accept that if [quantum mechanics] has it right, the nature of reality, the way things are, limits the sort of explanations that a physical theory can provide.
- Neils Bohr, Nobel Prize Winner:
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.
- Directly addressing what you said, Christopher Fuchs, Professor of Physics Boston:
You do physics as you have always done it, but you throw away the idea “everything is made of [some fundamental objects]” before even starting
EDIT: Note popular books portray Einstein as objecting to randomness in QM. We know from letters to Wolfgang Pauli that he didn't care about this. He was actually more trying to see if the above "failure of science" was correct0 - Robert Wald, Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Physics, University of Chicago:
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sbsquarepants wrote: »Surely there must be - whether people will ever be smart enough to comprehend what exactly they are is a different matter - but all this "stuff" must be made of something.........mustn't it
This question brushes up on the topics of "primitive ontologies" in the philosophy of physics.
One view among physicists is that a physical theory must make claims about what fundamentally exists (primitive variables), and how these fundamentally existing things behave (nomological variables).
But (as Fourier's references imply) this is increasingly becoming a minority view. Instead of describing reality in terms of a primitive existence, modern physicists often speak about reality in terms of the properties it exhibits to us.
[edit] - This is a great bit of writing by Werner Heisenberg on the wrinkles QM has introduced to our intuitions about reality. Specifcially page 74 of 91 "Language and Reality in Modern Physics"
http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Heisenberg,Werner/Heisenberg,%20Werner%20-%20Physics%20and%20philosophy.pdf0
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