On 19 Nov 2014, at 17:06, Richard Ruquist wrote:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 6:40 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 18 Nov 2014, at 18:34, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Maybe Schrodinger's Wave Equation doesn't interfere either, only
other worlds do,
> ?
!
>> and maybe the wave equation is just a way, and certainly not the
only way, humans have of describing that interference between worlds.
> Indeed,
Then why the "?" ?
Probably because I did not parse well the sentence above, and the
term "world" is a but fuzzy in this context. But I guess we are OK.
> You know positivist physicians still alive? Who?
Every physicist alive uses both Heisenberg's Matrices and
Schrodinger's Wave;
OK, and other pictures and formulations of QM too.
none use Positivism or any other school of philosophy because no
philosophical franchise is of the slightest help in doing what
scientists want to do, figure out how the world works.
I disagree. The collapse axiom, which is still in amost textbook,
and which is used by bad pedagog to avoid hard question, is a
philosophical axiom relying on a religious belief: the belief that
there is only one physical universe, and that we are unique.
The collapse hypothesis is correct if we need to conserve the total
energy and information in the universe.
From quasi zero information, you can generate without adding any
information, all informations. Just split an observer and put them in
front of 1 or 0, and repeat. Similarly, the MW (quantum) view of the
vacuum generates all the physically consistent possibilities, without
spending one bit. The collapse seems on the contrary to generate bit
from nothing. But the collapse is only in the eye of the partial
subsystem, as we can read of (the diaries) of the observer in the
terms of the waves (this in any base). I suspect it is like that for
energy too.
Bruno
Richard
Some physicists used it as a rule of thumb, and as a way to not do
philosophy, but of course, that is eventually like a use of God-gap
type of explanation.
> In math and physics, it is frequent that two apparantly different
theories are equivalent,
Yes, just like Heisenberg's Matrices and Schrodinger's Wave, they
both tell a story with a identical plot they just use different
symbols in the vocabulary of mathematics to do so, just as 2 books
about World War 2 tell the same story but use different symbols in
the vocabulary of the English language to do it; however neither
book about World War 2, no matter how good, is World War 2. I said
it before but it's worth repeating, maybe we should take seriously
and think through the implications of what mathematicians have been
saying for years, mathematics is a language.
Mathematics use a mathematical language, but is not a language
itself. You can use different language to describe a similar
mathematical reality. You can use the combinators, or the sets, to
*represent* the natural numbers, and admit quite different axioms,
but you will get the same facts, for example that the number of ways
to write an odd natural number as a sum of four square is given by
24 times the sum of its odd divisor. Like the product scalar does
not depend of the orthonormal base, in linear algebra, the truth of
the arithmetical statements do not depend on the theory and language
used to describe them. It is the same for computer science, which is
actually a branch of number theory. Some machines will stop on some
input independently of the language used to describe those machines
and input.
> but that does not make the thing described into a convention or
language.
True. A electron is not a convention or a language, but what about
a description of the electron written in a particular dialect of
the language of mathematics, like the Schrodinger Wave Equation?
Yes Schrodinger's Equation does a good job describing the behavior
of a electron, but Dirac's Equation does better, and Feynman's sum
over histories even better. And some equations do a terrible job
describing the electron even though the are grammatically correct
sentences in the language of mathematics, that is to say they are
logically self consistent. So maybe you can not only write true
descriptions of the electron in the language of mathematics maybe
you can also write the equivalent of a Harry Potter novel in the
language of mathematics. Maybe Cantor's infinities and the Real
Numbers are mathematical Harry Potter novels. Actually I kinda
doubt it but maybe.
Sure. but may be electron are only useful fiction to get the voltage
right for the working of my fridge. Here math and physics are alike,
and it asks some familiarity with the subject to develop an
intuition of what might be conventional and what might be a deep
truth independent of the subject.
> On the contrary, it points on something real beyond the language.
But that's exactly what I was getting at, maybe it points to
something real beyond the mathematics.
I was meaning "it points on something real and mathematical beyond
the language.
I don't insist that is true, maybe mathematics is more than just a
language, but maybe not, I believe it's worth thinking about.
Unlike philosophers who are always certain but seldom correct I
just don't know.
The choice of a theory might be conventional, but some truth will
not depend on that choice. And with computationalism, I explain that
even physics is "theory independent". You can use the axiom of
arithmetic, or the axiom on combinators, and the existence of 24, or
of electron, will not depend on it. A bit like most truth in linear
algebra don't depend on the choice of the base.
It is not a convention that 17 is prime. It really means that you
cannot divide 17 to make some rectangle from it. If math was
conventional, there would not be any conjecture, like the Riemann
hypothesis, or the twin prime conjecture. Then Gödel's theorem
justifies that the arithmetical truth is beyond all possible
theoretical formalization of it, and this, imo, gives grain to
realism in math, against conventionalism.
Bruno
John K Clark
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