> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of xponentrob > Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 11:06 PM > To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion > Subject: Re: It's confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations > > > >Ummmmm....yeah. Though I have to admit I'm left wondering if you are >talking about questions in the "soft" sciences (which can seem a bit >arbitrary to my mind and subject to change for a variety of reasons), or >if you are referring to "ultimate" questions that lay people tend to >think physics aims for. (Just for clarity, I think we both agree when it >comes to the subject of "Truth")
I was thinking more of the latter, but the former also helps bring the problem into perspective. Take psychology. We don't really know what people are thinking. Experts in the field of psychology have been fooled by people who outgamed them. Still, empirical observations are made, and models of those observations (say fivethirtyeight's vote prediction) can prove quite accurate. > > OK thanks! > I'm not sure I understand your statement in that case. Fleishman and Pons > observations were certainly called into question, as were their > methodologies.Same with, say, creationists. So offhand I would expect that > the reliability of observations is important, but recognise that you could > be defining "observation" in a way I am not. I think I am defining "reliable" differently, partially because I'm rather familiar with the debates of the time when physics emerged. Pons and Fleishman made unrepeatable observations. Creationists use bad technique in evaluating phenomenon. But, Pons and Fleishman's problems were not the uncertainty of the empirical and only a small subset of creationists use idealism to question observations (as Berkley (sp) did). We can make detailed models of the empirical and have rigorous standards for good, repeatable experiments. But, we don't worry about what is really there, we "shut up and calculate". In a real sense, this Feynman statement is a culmination of what makes physics what it is. > > I recall that years ago there was a very lengthy thread here that dealt > with metaphysical questions of the ultimate reality and why such > philosophical discussion is pretty much meaningless. Actually, I'd argue that meaning is one of those metaphysical questions that cannot be determined empirically. I love the statement in the first preface to the Critique of Pure Reason on this. "HUMAN reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer." > > > > Thus, I take exception with a science magazine which states that the > > authors > > pet interpretation has been proven by a new discovery, when it hasn't. > > Something has been demonstrated. I agree it is open to interpretation. I > can think of other explainations that might satisfy the observations, >leakage from tiny higher dimensions frex. None of that is needed. Just standard E=m works (I'm using good physicist units here where c=1. :-) ) That's what's frustrating for me; the New Scientist makes standard QM theory out to be a startling new discovery. The theory dates back to at least the early 30s. Nothing has been demonstrated except that QCD works numerically. If they failed with computers 100x as powerful, and everyone did, then that would be something new, because QCD would have been falsified. > > > > > > One real problem, from my perspective, is that the average layman is > > trying > > to fit modern physics back into a classical box. To paraphrase one > > prominent physicist from the 20s when asked to comment on the > correctness > > of > > someone's hypothesison a theory he thought was horrid, "Right? Right, he > > isn't even Wrong." This is what the first two paragraphs of the New > > Scientist article remind me of. > > > Last year everything was all about strings (again), but the article seems > to ignore all that and doesn't reference. That's at a layer below what was covered in the article...where theorists try to reconcile GR with QCD and the Electroweak...there strings (and now fuzzy space if 2 year old last reading of John Baez's online "This Week In Mathematical Physics" is current enough). Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
