DCP: Objectivity is a myth because of quantum spookiness

[Physics Guy]

Peterson's "Physics in Wonderland" piece about relativity is about as good as a lot of popular treatments. It gee-whizzes as they do about lengths and times changing—or rather "seeming" to change. And as usual it is too dazzled by this admittedly surprising phenomenon to think seriously about what it means.

First of all the lengths and times do not merely "seem" to change. They really do change.

The length of a steel bar is determined by the electromagnetic forces among its atoms. The rate at which the spring in a pocket watch unwinds also depends on those forces. Laser rangefinders and atomic clocks are fancier tech, but just as dependent on electromagnetism.

Motion is an important part of electromagnetism. A motionless charge creates an electric field; a magnetic field is generated as well, if the charge is in motion. The magnetic field in turn only affects moving charges. Fields and forces are different if charges are moving.

So the electromagnetic forces between atoms all depend on how the atoms are moving. The result is that a moving steel bar actually shortens in the direction of motion, and a moving spring unwinds more slowly.

Durations and lengths are not geometrical ideals that we can somehow directly perceive: they are measurements that we have to make with material instruments. To say that a football field is a hundred yards long is to say that it is one hundred times as long as this yardstick. To say that this TV show lasts an hour is to say that it lasts sixty times as long as it takes this second hand to tick round this dial. Lengths and durations are comparative quantities, relating things to each other.

Even if you try to cut that unreliable pocket watch out of the basic meaning of time itself, by counting steamboats in your mind to measure time, you will merely be using the chemical reactions in your brain as an even more unreliable pocket watch. Your neurochemistry is electromagnetic as well, and your mental counting will slow in exactly the same way that the second hand does, if you're moving. Everything is electromagnetic, so every possible measurement device will be affected by motion.

This is physics and not Wonderland, after all, though. Electromagnetic stretching and slowing are not individualised, situational phenomena, such that any given yardstick or clock might be doing anything whatever depending on many local factors. All the changes follow a small set of mathematical rules, and the relationship between two different sets of measuring devices depends on only one factor: their relative velocity. Plug that into the formulas, and you have a perfect Google Translate between all the measurements that can be made with each set.

Lengths and durations are relative, in fact, in the same old way that left and right, forward and back, and up and down are all relative.

If I turn left five degrees, and you don't, I'm going to have to adjust every direction heading I tell you; my "45 degrees left" will be 50 degrees left to you. My recipe for "straight ahead" will have to have a little bit of "left" mixed into it, in your kitchen. Nobody's going to say, "Oh, how weird, that crazy guy turned, and now all his directions seem different from what they really are! Fortunately he only turned a few degrees—if he had turned 90 degrees, man, the wild effects would be really dramatic!"

No orientation is objectively true. Direction is intrinsically relative. This is fine, because there are simple geometrical rules to describe exactly how directions relate to each other. In the same way, no state of motion provides the objectively true standard for how long things are or for how long things last. Lengths and times are real but relative, just as directions are. There are simple geometrical rules about exactly how they relate to each other, depending on velocity.

Those geometrical rules are the four dimensional part. Just as turning left mixes left-right and forward-back into each other a bit, so accelerating to the left mixes left-right and future-past into each other a bit. Mathematically, the two kinds of "mixing" aren't identical, but they're similar. Turning to face in a different direction in 3D, and changing velocity, are not even completely separate. Mathematically they fit together into a larger set of (quasi-)rotations in four dimensions.

That abstract pattern of 4D geometry looks so simple, once you can frame it, that you can turn everything around and say that the reason why electromagnetism depends on motion in just the way that it does is because the world is four-dimensional spacetime. Nowadays we usually take this flipped perspective, where Einsteinian relativity becomes the starting point for explaining electromagnetism, instead of being a result of how motion affects electromagnetism. The real story, though, is that both perspectives agree because it all cuts both ways: if 4D geometry determines the form of electromagnetism, electromagnetism in its turn enforces 4D geometry, in everything, perfectly.

Einsteinian relativity is not some kind of higher law that triggers when things go really fast, like an angel appearing to give new commands. Rulers and clocks and human brains are made of atoms, interacting through motion-dependent forces, and the laws of nature that make lengths and times depend on velocity are the same laws that keep your fridge magnets stuck—and your brain neurons firing. We are immersed, all the time.

That's how I teach relativity, anyway, inspired by an essay by the same J.S. Bell who is more famous for quantum things.

[Physics Guy]

The other thing I had to say about Peterson's "Wonderland" post, before I got off on my relativity rant, was that I didn't see him trying to draw any conclusions about God or Mormonism or witnesses or anything. He seems mainly to be giving a mini-lecture about relativity, as I did just now. It's not as though the physicists' union is going to go lean on Peterson for that. Anyone can post about relativity if they want.

He kind of shines a spotlight on his last quote from Guillen, just by making it his closing paragraph; in that closing quote he lets Guillen call the speed of light "sacred" and say that its absoluteness is a mystery. "Sacredness" could be just a rhetorical flourish, and indeed we currently can't derive Lorentzian spacetime from any deeper axiom, but just take it as given. So it's hard to say where Guillen might be going with those statements, let alone what Peterson himself might be be wanting to say.

I can't help thinking that it might be worthwhile for Peterson to give a bit more indication of why he is posting "notes" about relativity. He doesn't have to have any particular reason. If he just learned this stuff and thought it was cool enough to pass on to his readers, that's great. He has an established brand, though, as a Mormon apologist and an Arabic scholar, so I think it's only realistic to expect that many of his readers are going to read his blog within that implicit frame. If he wants to communicate as clearly as possible to as many readers as possible, he should recognize that his blog has a context, and address it. If he's just making an excursion into something unrelated to his usual topics, he could make his post clearer by saying so.

If on the other hand he is working his way towards a book with themes of science and Mormonism, or something, then I think it would be a worthwhile step, even at this early stage of preparation, to try to use his blog to articulate at least something of what he might be trying to say in that book, rather than only rehash some topics that are already covered, in much the same way, in millions of places. If he put out something new, even very tentatively, then he might get some feedback. Even if it was harsh, it would be useful.

Academic writing is famously hard, because it's famously hard to just get going and do it. Making endless notes and postponing the hard work of figuring out what you have to say that's original is the standard way of never getting it done.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Perhaps he should lean into the ‘sacred geometry’ of life in order to craft the narrative there is a designer, a creator, an architect.

- Doc

[Rivendale]

The other thing I had to say about Peterson's "Wonderland" post, before I got off on my relativity rant, was that I didn't see him trying to draw any conclusions about God or Mormonism or witnesses or anything. He seems mainly to be giving a mini-lecture about relativity, as I did just now. It's not as though the physicists' union is going to go lean on Peterson for that. Anyone can post about relativity if they want.

He kind of shines a spotlight on his last quote from Guillen, just by making it his closing paragraph; in that closing quote he lets Guillen call the speed of light "sacred" and say that its absoluteness is a mystery. "Sacredness" could be just a rhetorical flourish, and indeed we currently can't derive Lorentzian spacetime from any deeper axiom, but just take it as given. So it's hard to say where Guillen might be going with those statements, let alone what Peterson himself might be be wanting to say.

I can't help thinking that it might be worthwhile for Peterson to give a bit more indication of why he is posting "notes" about relativity. He doesn't have to have any particular reason. If he just learned this stuff and thought it was cool enough to pass on to his readers, that's great. He has an established brand, though, as a Mormon apologist and an Arabic scholar, so I think it's only realistic to expect that many of his readers are going to read his blog within that implicit frame. If he wants to communicate as clearly as possible to as many readers as possible, he should recognize that his blog has a context, and address it. If he's just making an excursion into something unrelated to his usual topics, he could make his post clearer by saying so.

If on the other hand he is working his way towards a book with themes of science and Mormonism, or something, then I think it would be a worthwhile step, even at this early stage of preparation, to try to use his blog to articulate at least something of what he might be trying to say in that book, rather than only rehash some topics that are already covered, in much the same way, in millions of places. If he put out something new, even very tentatively, then he might get some feedback. Even if it was harsh, it would be useful.

Academic writing is famously hard, because it's famously hard to just get going and do it. Making endless notes and postponing the hard work of figuring out what you have to say that's original is the standard way of never getting it done.

I know some believers in Mormonism that have used the "Photon perspective" in regards to God's time. Although photons do not experience anything, (unless panpsychism is correct) time does not exist from that frame of reference. A photon leaving the sun's surface does not experience the 8 minute journey. Perhaps DCP is trying to shine light on the Mormon theological possibilities that wonderland physics describes.

[Physics Guy]

Right, there are a lot of theological directions that Peterson could be trying to take, starting from physics. A lot of them have been taken before by other people, and have met various kinds of reception. It's not a new line of thought.

I suppose that if I were for some reason getting interested in medieval Arab natural philosophy, to the point where I was spending some time learning Arabic, and if I were keeping up a blog, then I might make a few posts about the neat things I had just learned about Arabic grammar. I'd know full well that nothing I was saying would be new to the world's millions of Arabic speakers, but I might suppose that it would be interesting to a lot of my blog's readers, many of whom would not realistically ever be going to learn Arabic themselves from any better source than me. So sure, I might make a few posts about my basic Arabic lessons.

Maybe I'm oversensitive about this kind of thing, but if I ever did something like that, I'd worry that people might suspect me of overestimating my mastery of the language. I wouldn't want to look like a fool that way. So I'd probably post frequent disclaimers about how I knew I was just a beginner. I'd be uptight like that.

I'd be uptight about another thing, too. If I had mentioned that I was learning Arabic in order to help me write a book, I'd worry that people might suspect me of believing naïve language myths, like thinking that certain ideas can become incontrovertibly clear just by being stated in some particular language. I'd worry that people might suspect me of arrogance, in thinking that I could, with just a few months of DuoLinguo, make a worthwhile contribution on a topic about which many native speakers of Arabic have already written long books. So I'd probably feel compelled to explain just what it was that I thought a modest grasp of Arabic on my part was going to do for my book, and why I thought that the limited fluency that I was realistically going to attain would be enough to achieve my desired result.

Maybe an Arabic philosophy expert would post a comment to endorse my approach, and let me know that a book like the one I planned would be welcome, because there were a few outstanding issues in medieval Arab physics that needed much less Arabic than Arabic scholars generally needed, but a fair bit more physics than they usually knew. That would be encouraging. Or maybe the comments would be less encouraging. That might save me from wasting a lot of time on a basically misguided project.

[drumdude]

I guess this means Dan has officially abandoned the book he promised to write for BYU?

[Gadianton]

Maybe I'm oversensitive about this kind of thing, but if I ever did something like that, I'd worry that people might suspect me of overestimating my mastery of the language. I wouldn't want to look like a fool that way. So I'd probably post frequent disclaimers about how I knew I was just a beginner. I'd be uptight like that.

Yeah but this is apologetics. One of the biggest cultural drivers is overstating mastery of a subject. The apologists built Hugh Nibley up into a mythical creature that no human could slay. As you pointed out elsewhere, the subtext of the lecture on relativity is lowering our expectations of science or lowering our confidence in our worldly perceptions. There was this conference at Yale about 20 years ago the Mopologists were invited to, and it was noted (I believe Rev. Kishkumen himself reported on this one) that the non-Mormon scholars were confused by all the shilling for each other from the Mormon crowd.

I'd be uptight about another thing, too. If I had mentioned that I was learning Arabic in order to help me write a book, I'd worry that people might suspect me of believing naïve language myths,

Yet this is apologetics, and his audience expects him to believe naïve science myths that they feel buttress their faith. Here's the crazy thing: all of these dumb points he's making about the weirdness of science as incongruent to our materialist perceptions are already well known to his followers in the comments section and this is all showmanship.

One more point about Nibley is that Nibley was kind of sneaky in his self-promotion. He was self-deprecating at times, admitting he wasn't an Egyptologist or a philologist. He didn't overtly misrepresent his accomplishments. But you know what they say, the rule of a good story is to show, not tell. He set up the academic world as literally nothing but a bunch of back-slapping windbags. And then here comes Nibley, the outsider, who confounds the Pharisees. But he does that by weaving in and out of various languages and thousands of footnotes -- he ends up being the brilliant outsider, the "lone voice" against the establishment everyone is expecting from the setup.

As one personal example, I had a mission president do a fireside on the Book of Mormon and we were all bringing our investigators to it. This guy was a career salesman, and a great speaker. He gave the most incredible talk I'd ever heard on the Book of Mormon in antiquity. He pronounces Hebrew and Arabic words and phrases and did it all from memory -- no looking down at a paper. The talk was basically lifted from "Lehi in the Desert", yet, not once during his talk did he mention he wasn't a scholar nor did he credit Nibley or ever mention Nibley's name. I was a big Nibley fan pre-mission so I knew. It was pretty uncomfortable because I had an investigator there who was impressed.

[drumdude]

Guillen suggests that “astronomy is arguably the most emotional and spiritual of all the sciences

It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It is only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence

The world is too complicated in all parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone.

The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle — an architect.

If the total mass-energy density of the universe exceeds what general relativity suggests as its critical density, then the size of the universe is finite. “We cosmologists call this a closed universe. One day . . . such a universe will collapse on itself.”

Recent data from the Planck Orbiting Observatory implies that the universe is actually obese; that it has a density far greater than the critical density. If so, our universe is actually finite and closed. In that case, venturing into space is like traveling in circles. After a while, you return to where you started. (143-144)

Unfortunately for Dan, if the Universe collapses on itself then that offers an easy explanation for the origin of the Universe that doesn’t require God. The explanation is that the Universe is merely an endless cycle of eternal Big Bangs followed by Big Crunches. Nothing created, nothing destroyed. Just different ways of expressing zero by adding to the positive and negative sides of the ledger.

[Alphus and Omegus]

He kind of shines a spotlight on his last quote from Guillen, just by making it his closing paragraph; in that closing quote he lets Guillen call the speed of light "sacred" and say that its absoluteness is a mystery. "Sacredness" could be just a rhetorical flourish, and indeed we currently can't derive Lorentzian spacetime from any deeper axiom, but just take it as given. So it's hard to say where Guillen might be going with those statements, let alone what Peterson himself might be be wanting to say.

This is just more quantum woo on the the part of Peterson and his new favorite author. At present, the speed of photon travel in a vacuum is the fastest known, but that really does not mean anything necessarily. The "sacred" claim really should be nothing more than a flourish. They haven't been proven to exist, but if they do, gravitons could, according to some theories, travel faster than light. I would have to defer to your knowledge on this, however, PG.

Peterson seems to be trying to do his usual factual relativism but just with an extra corollary, something along the lines of:

Everything in the mortal experience is finite and relative. We humans are so limited by our perspectives that we cannot truly know the eternal truth. And in fact, the more we learn and the faster we travel, the more we realize that our finitude will prevent us from perceiving the true reality: to see as God sees. Light is sacred and God is sacred. And so thus, God's course is pure light in one eternal round.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," as the Lord told Isaiah. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

It's for this reason that when critics of Mormonism dismantle our arguments and when historians and archeologists dispel our theories, we must realize that just as we cannot know whether electrons are waves or particles, we can assuredly know that our warm feelings about the Book of Mormon mean that its truth will someday be shouted upon the housetops and that every Gemli shall bow and every Gadianton shall confess.

I hope Peterson isn't intending to make such a silly argument.

[Alphus and Omegus]

Maybe I'm oversensitive about this kind of thing, but if I ever did something like that, I'd worry that people might suspect me of overestimating my mastery of the language. I wouldn't want to look like a fool that way. So I'd probably post frequent disclaimers about how I knew I was just a beginner. I'd be uptight like that.

Yeah but this is apologetics. One of the biggest cultural drivers is overstating mastery of a subject. The apologists built Hugh Nibley up into a mythical creature that no human could slay. As you pointed out elsewhere, the subtext of the lecture on relativity is lowering our expectations of science or lowering our confidence in our worldly perceptions. There was this conference at Yale about 20 years ago the Mopologists were invited to, and it was noted (I believe Rev. Kishkumen himself reported on this one) that the non-Mormon scholars were confused by all the shilling for each other from the Mormon crowd.

The purpose of apologetics is not to find the most correct answer to difficult questions, it's to provide a bunch of half-baked answers to difficult questions. You can choose whatever you want to believe. Do your own research.