SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

[Physics Guy]

... once through this short 48 minute video and several sources

This may be where we have a disconnect. 48 minutes is an eternity!

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I don’t like watching videos for information. It’s harder in video to skim through the fluff to find the content than it is in text, and a YouTube video on a subject one knows is bound to be mostly fluff even if it’s as concise as the general audience can absorb. Can you summarize what Hossenfelder says?

Um, well, Sabine is a physicist who is a very popular popularizer of physics and produces well done, tightly scripted videos, but okay. Summary: the multiverse ideas are not science because they are not testable and/or the assumptions that have to be made are more complex than the thing being explained and/or they are too simple and/or they postulate unobservables. They are no different than postulating God. May be true, may be false, but out of the purview of science.

Sabine Hossenfelder is awesome. I’m subscribed to her channel. I watched this one yesterday about A.I. chatbots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0

crap is gettin’ real, yo. Also, if you like Hoss have you subscribed to PBS Spacetime? Matt O’Dowd is great. I mean, I don’t understand crap from any of these people, especially when they start explaining equations, but I’m fairly certain something is lodging in my brain because I get tension headaches from their material. Heh.

- Doc

[Philo Sofee]

... once through this short 48 minute video and several sources

This may be where we have a disconnect. 48 minutes is an eternity!

Lol, O.K... I bet you take that long to get through a physics book or learn calculus or study the relationship of the moon's gravitation in relation to Mars, earth, etc. it's fascinating how folks learn... if videos aren't for you, then they aren't for you...

[bill4long]

I completely agree regarding videos. If you can't make a written version of your argument then it's either not a very good argument or it doesn't really matter to you.

That doesn't apply to Hossenfelder, however. She definitely can write well.

I would put my video as evidence showing you are pretty much wrong... once through this short 48 minute video and several sources, one sees the argument is VERY STRONG, and it actually does matter to us all. So instead of reading a paper I would write that takes you 48 minutes, this 48 minute video accomplishes the same thing. And I can't be p[lagiarizing Marquardt, you get to hear his own view from himself. That's pretty doggone good direct evidence straight from the horse's mouth - i.e., hard to refute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLJxXh5Vafo&t=1191s

Might I remind everyone that Popper wasn't God. He had a particular philosophy of science, which, I might say, most people who are into science pretty much agree with. But not necessilary in all cases. His philosophy of science is just that: philosophy. Same for Occam. Good guiding prinicipal, but not a totalitarian position by any means. At the end of the day, humans can, and will, eventually transcend every "rule." It's built into human nature. And I like it.

P.S. A mouse just knocked over a beer can in my kitchen. I gotta go take a look. If I'm not back in 5 minutes... wait longer.

[bill4long]

,,,

[DrStakhanovite]

The fact that many quite different natural phenomena could all be explained with molecules wasn't enough to convince everyone that molecules really existed, because the consistency of molecular explanations was itself consistent with the idea that molecules were just mathematical placeholders that were required, kind of grammatically, by our Newtonian explanatory framework. It would be decades before anyone could in any sense see a molecule directly.

Your comment about mathematical placeholders reminded me of Ernst Mach’s belief about the reality of atoms. I’ve encountered similar sentiments that are reminiscent of Mach about the relationship between math and physics :

The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena, like the function of mathematics. Gradually, however, as the intellect, by contact with its subject matter, grows in discipline, physical science will give up its mosaic play with stones and seek out the boundaries and forms of the bed in which the living stream of phenomena flows. The goal which it has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts.

Related to this, Hossenfelder remarks:

The big problem with multiverse ideas is that physicists mistake mathematics for reality.

I thought that was an interesting remark to make, given the development of modern physics. For example, think about how our understanding of the electron has changed over the decades; you start with Thomson’s electron in the famous ‘Cathode Rays’ paper, which is not the electron in the aforementioned 1905 relativity theory, which is not the electron in Bohr’s quantum theory, which isn’t the wave mechanics of Schrodinger, which isn’t the excited Fermion field in quantum field theory. Each advancement was preceded and enabled by mathematics.

she continues:

The problem with the testable models of multiverse ideas is that they think just because a hypothesis is testable it is also scientific. This is not what Popper meant. He said if it isn’t testable, it isn’t science. Not ‘if it’s testable, then it's science.’

Compare that with what Popper wrote:

Now in my view there is no such thing as induction. Thus inference to theories, from singular statements which are ‘verified by experience’ (whatever that may mean), is logically inadmissible. Theories are, therefore, never empirically verifiable. If we wish to avoid the positivist mistake of eliminating, by our criterion of demarcation, the theoretical systems of natural science, then we must choose a criterion which allows us to admit to the domain of empirical science even statements which cannot be verified.

But I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation. In other words: I shall not require of a scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and for all, in a positive sense; but I shall require that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience. (p.18)

The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Routledge Classics, 2006.

I don’t think Hossenfelder captures what Popper actually believed.

Isn't that a good example of Popperian science?

I’m inclined to say that it isn’t, determining the numerical properties of molecules in a multitude of circumstances is more akin to overdetermination through demonstrative (and maybe eliminative) induction.

Anecdotally, anyway, I think a lot of working scientists think that that was what Popper said; it's not just Hossenfelder and me. Nobody is all that excited about falsificationism; it's more that people are happy to have a name to drop in order to escape labored arguments about what seem like common-sense points. Scientists are sometimes interested in the philosophy of science, but as a side interest that might as well be orchid-growing for all its relevance to their day-to-day work, because what science seems to mean in the philosophy of science is mainly the stuff that is established in textbooks, whatever that may be.

In the U.S. there is a bit more overlap. I can think of three different physicists who teach in philosophy departments despite not having any background in philosophy, because their research interests are more aligned with departments that specialize in the philosophy of physics. David Albert at Columbia is one example I am most familiar with (probably because I thoroughly enjoyed him taking Lawrence Krauss apart like a butcher).

One of my friends from my undergraduate years recently got a PhD in the history and philosophy of science and works in the private sector consulting on experiment design and ethics committees.

But anecdotes aside, I’m kind of amused that scientists bring up Karl Popper. Just one of those weird flukes of history that he sticks in the mind more so than others.

[Physics Guy]

Concerning mathematical placeholders versus reality, I think the history probably runs through continuum mechanics, which includes fluid dynamics but also the theory of deformable solids. This was and is taught in terms of "infinitesimal pieces of matter" which aren't supposed to be real. One simply thinks of continuous stuff as a dense pack of tiny cubes, whose size is "if they're not small enough, make them smaller". We still teach that way today, with the added reverse condition that the tiny cubes nonetheless be big enough to include very many molecules, and if they're not big enough, make them bigger. Molecules are actually so small that there is plenty of room for a wide range of cube sizes between small enough and big enough. Anywhere from nanometers to millimetres generally does it. The little cubes are entirely fictitious, and are explicitly not supposed to represent any real structure in matter. It's a constraint on the validity of the theory, that you have to be able to make the cubes bigger or smaller and not change any results. They are only a way of thinking about matter.

Concerning Hossenfelder's views about math versus reality: she's a high-energy theorist, so she knows that the theory has been through a series of mathematical incarnations. In physics education, at least, ontogeny usually recapitulates phylogeny. We learn theories in historical sequence, not out of any real devotion to history, but because an appropriately sanitised history provides a gentle uphill slope through the concepts. This teaching tradition distorts history to serve current theory and also distorts current theory by framing it with past misconceptions, but it's a lot easier to take over that ready-made syllabus than to think out a new teaching strategy for oneself.

Hossenfelder's point about math being mistaken for reality in the thin-air upper reaches of high-energy theory is arguable but not trivial. She's written a controversial book about it, though I haven't read it. I have my own views, having come out of high energy a couple of decades ago. There are things to be said for mathematical elegance as a guide to truth, but the principle has been pushed too far for too long. Dirac misled people with his dictum that it is more important to have beauty in your equations than to have them fit the experiment. He could say that, because of the unbelievable way he cooked up the Dirac equation and predicted the positron, but he was incredibly lucky. It doesn't usually work that well.

My concern about the methodology of high-energy theory in the past half-century is not so much that math alone is unreliable as that it is unimaginative. How can it be unimaginative, when it is only limited by the human imagination? That's exactly how. People aren't creative enough to make big discoveries by mathematical speculation. We need hints from observation and experiment. Their absence is why high-energy theory has been boring as well as barren for so long. The impression one gets from popular media that high-energy theory is constantly effervescing with radical new ideas is completely bogus. It's only effervescing with the desire to project that image. All of its radical new ideas have been kicking around for decades.

Concerning Hossenfelder on Popper, are you perhaps misreading her "testable" as "verifiable"? For whatever reason, Popper's idea that testing is about falsifying rather than verifying is pretty well known in physics. "Falsify" sounds weird, so people don't often say it, but it's definitely not right to imagine that when people talk about testing theories they are assuming that testing verifies or justifies.

[Popper] said if it isn’t testable, it isn’t science. Not ‘if it’s testable, then it's science.’

I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience.

Popper doesn't say, "if", here. He says, "only if". This seems to be identical to Hossenfelder's summary.

In general I think one can interpret scientific reasoning too narrowly. It seems to me that it can quite easily be both Popperian and inductive at once, in different ways. A paper can, for instance, inductively determine the size that molecules must have, if they are real. The inference from all the diverse data of the common molecular size, as a theoretical parameter, is the same inductive process, regardless of whether or not one is reifying molecules. Finding that molecular sizes had to be wildly different to explain different experiments would have been a Popperian falsification of molecular reality. Finding that similar molecular sizes suffice to explain many experiments doesn't have to confirm or verify that molecules are really there. If one notes that divergent sizes would have disproven real molecules, but admits that convergent sizes don't prove them, then one has written a Popperian paper about molecular reality that is inductive about the theoretical parameter of molecular size. I submit that this is a typical situation for a scientific paper.

[malkie]

By the way, creating universes is now even easier - assuming, of course, that you have a iPhone But what self-respecting universe splitter would be caught with an Android phone - or should I be asking in what possible universe a universe splitter would not have the apple device?

https://cheapuniverses.com/universesplitter/

Tough decision? There's no need to choose —
Split the universe and do both!
"The functioning of this app is in complete
agreement with the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics." -
--Garrett Lisi, PhD, Theoretical Physics

Would an iPhone user please get the app, and create for me a universe in which the app will work on my Moto phone - TIA!

[bill4long]

By the way, creating universes is now even easier - assuming, of course, that you have a iPhone But what self-respecting universe splitter would be caught with an Android phone - or should I be asking in what possible universe a universe splitter would not have the apple device?

https://cheapuniverses.com/universesplitter/

Tough decision? There's no need to choose —
Split the universe and do both!
"The functioning of this app is in complete
agreement with the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics." -
--Garrett Lisi, PhD, Theoretical Physics

Would an iPhone user please get the app, and create for me a universe in which the app will work on my Moto phone - TIA!

According to the many-worlds interpretation of QM, everytime I make a choice, I create a new universe. Good God Almighty, I never knew I had such power! Now, if I can only figure out how to ____

Folks, the interpretations of QM are not science. What one accepts on the matter is a consequence of one's philosophy that comes first.

I am right there in the Copenhagen interpretation. Not because of science. But because of the primary fact of my existence is: my consciousness. I will never allow the productions of mere reason to overthrow that which is primary. Those who do, I suspect are not conscious. I call it the way I see it. The NPCs walk among us.

[malkie]