On 19 Nov 2014, at 18:41, Richard Ruquist wrote:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
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.
Since MWI is deterministic, all possibilities that can possibly ever
happen can be known ahead of time and stored in a 4 dimensional
space for each universe. The actual physical space is recorded and
embedded as causal lines in the 4D mathematical space. Quantum
mechanic random selections during energy-conserving wave collapse
make those lines fuzzy, but distinct, for the most part.
The problem is that I cannot even understand what is the collapse,
doubly so in the relativistic context, and it seems to me that it uses
a lot of energy, because it erases a lot of information.
I have not yet seen a theory of collapse which makes sense. It is like
saying that when an observer look a particle, suddenly QM get wrong,
when QM explains exactly what happens, and why the observers will
believe at first sight to collapse a wave.
(and then my point is that if we use computationalism in that
reasoning, as Everett did, we have to justify the wave itself, from a
refinement of the relation between machine and their mind). We must
explain why an universal unitary transformation (rotation) win the
measure game at the bottom. We need the equivalent of Gleason theorem
for some classes of number relation. I am open to the idea that string
theory can give clues, but then the Monster munshine itself must be
explained in term of the material hypostases. Theoretical Physics
looks too much already to Number Theory, but with computationalism,
you can see that this again masks the role of consciousness, which is
the ultimate projector, the one which differentiates and believe in
collapse. The fire in the equation are explained by the personal
memories, especially those who are not communicable by the subject
(the qualia).
Bruno
Richard
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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