Ktulu Post #64:
I think that was a good post and I broadly agree with most of it. Although slight differences in the use of language might lead some to think that we disagree (or maybe we do disagree!). For clarity, I would like to put my slight spin on some of the things you've said:
Concepts such as dark matter, dark energy, are scientific because we can observe their effects on the natural world.
You're saying that we infer their existence because we indirectly observe their effects on other more directly observable things. I agree, but point out near the bottom of this post, in my reply to Quotidian, that this principle applies to other more directly observed things too.
There have always been conflicting ideas throughout the history of science, the only difference is that we have learned to discard unscientific ideas.
I agree with the implication that the important difference between science and mysticism is that scientific ideas, no matter how much they resemble mythologies, are ultimately always subject to rejection by observation.
But I would emphasise that unscientific ideas are rejected only from the possibility of
analysis by the scientific method. Others will point out that there are other ways of thinking about the world, and I cannot logically deny that because I cannot ever know how much I do not know. I think that a lot of the resentment of science, and perception of its arrogance, stems from a failure to explicitly acknowledge this obvious fact as a starting point. I genuinely believe that it
is obvious to most people who we call scientists. But I think they often forget that most people don't seem to be aware that one of the founding principles of the scientific method is: "I AM NOT SURE".
Who knows? It may turn out that science is indeed the only way to understand the world. But that is not the starting point. And even if it were the endpoint, I don't think we'd ever reach it.
I apologize for the length of the post.
Don't. There wasn't much in it that was superfluous. And I always like a Feynman quote.
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Quotidian:
But some things will forever be unobservable. Or, to put it another way, observation does not go all the way down.
See my description of the nature of observation, further down. Summary: Observation never goes all the way down.
I suggest this has already happened. That is why we have these contradictory scientific models which are completely at odds with each other.
I think we have always had contradictory scientific models which are at odds with each other and we have always had scientific models that describe the same phenomena in completely different ways. They compete to accurately describe observations in the simplest way.
...But now, as I am pointing out, science seems to have gone beyond the 'bounds of nature'. In all kinds of ways, science is positing forces, or fields, or worlds, or strings - and many other things - which are also not observable and may never be observable...
See again my account of observation below. BUT:
I take your point about a possible paradigm shift in science, or at least physics. I think it can be seen in some of the utterances of the generation of physicists who did not grow up entirely in the new paradigm - who straddle the divide - from Bohr to Feynman.
Feynman again:
we always have had a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that quantum mechanics represents. At least I do, because I'm an old enough man that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me ... every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there's no real problem. It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem.
I agree with you that to throw out (from science) all of the creativity and imagination of the world's mythologies is wrong, just as it is wrong to throw out the whole of anything based on an assessment of just some, and not all, of its characteristics. (Popularly known as "throwing the baby out with the bath water"). So I hope that perhaps we will, in the coming age, see a greater understanding and reconciliation between these two parts of our nature that might sometimes be called inspiration and empiricism.
It seems, from Leonardo to the Victorian age, that the pendulum did indeed swing decisively in one direction and the result was a crystalising out of these two human traits from the solution in which they were previously happily mixed. There was the steam-powered certainty of science, a victim of its own industrial success, and the imagination of (for example) the Romantic poets and artists, diametrically opposed to each other. Maybe we are finally emerging from that now into an age which can recongnise the equal importance of both without an irrational or contextually-inappropriate attachment to either.
But I would not conclude that physics has in fact
always rejected
all of mysticism and now is having to embrace
all of it. There are many different mythologies containing many different strange, inspiring and wonderful ideas. One of their common themes is imagination of things that are far beyond everyday human experience - the transcendant. Given that as it progresses physics moves on to considering things that are further and further from everyday experience, it seems to me natural that it would, in some ways, converge with mystical ideas. But the crucial difference remains: there will always come a point when the scientific idea must correctly predict a new observation while not contradicting existing observations.
When the physicist Murry Gell-Mann contemplates the piece of theory that he has called "The Eightfold Way" he is perhaps drawing some interesting comparisons with Bhudism but he still has to keep in mind that its purpose is predictive. I'm not a scholar of Bhudism, but I don't think that prediction of observations is the purpose of the "Eightfold Path".
I think, even for the narrow purposes of science, that throwing out the baby with the bath water is wrong, but we should still throw out the bath water.
So it's 'OK' if science thinks like that. But if 'religious people' do it - then woe betide unto them. They are being superstitious.
It's ok for anybody to think up any zany ideas they like. But as soon as they start to claim that those ideas could be used to predict observations, they have to specify what observations they would predict and how the observations could, in principle, be made.
Isn't it [the law of gravity] that 'Newton's law of universal gravitation states that every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.'
The point I was trying to make was that the laws of nature are created by us to describe observations. We
observe the observations. We
manufacture the laws. We do not observe the laws. This is demonstrated by the fact that the laws are replaced, or upgraded, when new observations come to light. This is what I mean when I say that we do not observe the law of gravity. This is illustrated by the fact that your description of the law of gravity includes the word "every". It applies to "every piece of matter". i.e. it is proposed to apply to a potentially infinite set of objects. It is impossible to observe an infinite set of objects in finite time.
We perhaps fancy that these laws which we keep upgrading and replacing are striving towards some kind of eternal, perfect ultimate law which we discover rather than manufacture. Maybe. But we will never know that because we will never know if we have found it because we cannot ever know how much we do not know.
BUT: The wider point, and the one that I think it is
crucial to understand, is that this does not
just apply to the things that we normally think of as laws -
it applies to everything apart from observations.
When we think we are being scientists we often divide the world into two concepts: the laws and the "things" which they describe. This leads us to believe that, for example, an electron is firmly in the latter category and the laws of quantum electrodynamics (for example) that describe that electron's behaviour are firmly in the former category. If we wish to understand the world,
this is the wrong way to look at it.
When considering an electron, what we actually observe are a whole host of indirect things: light being emitted by a phosphur screen in a cathode ray tube; the observed consequences of electricity; the solid surfaces of objects; tracks in a cloud chamber; lines drawn on a computer screen; printouts of numbers etc. So are we
really observing the electron? Yes we are, as long as we are crystal clear about precisely what it means to observe something and we never forget it. We are making many different diverse observations and seeing a pattern that connects all of those observations. That pattern is what we call an electron.
So the electron, just like the law of gravity, is a model to describe, predict and tie together a set of observations. If we wish to understand the world, this is how we have to view all of the things in the world. They are constructs to describe observations. We can, if we wish, say that we are observing them, but only as long as we are absolutely clear what that means.
I have been pointing out the way in which we indirectly infer the existence of an electron. But I only used this as an example because the indirectness of the observations is very clear. The same principle applies to things we think of as being perceived much more directly. When I look at the keyboard in front of me, am I viewing a keyboard or am I viewing a load of photons of light that I assume, from their behaviour, have bounced off a keyboard? When I touch the keyboard, am I feeling a keyboard or am I feeling an electrostatic repulsion which I assume to be caused by the presence of a keyboard? Answer: I am viewing and feeling a keyboard (duh!), so long as I am clear about what this act of viewing and feeling really involves. Just like the viewing of the electron, it involves making a model from the patterns in a diverse set of observations.
So even my keyboard is the same as the law of gravity!
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Obviously, in everyday life, we don't have to take this view. But we do when thinking about the subtle properties of very, very, indirectly observed concepts like electrons or the Big Bang or Parallel Universes or even more indirectly inferred models-to-tie-together-observations. We have to remember them because we have to try not to make assumptions about the models and be willing to adjust them if new observations come to light. If we fail to think as I have described, we then tend to start thinking that these things like electrons have a fixed character that cannot be adjusted in the light of new experience. This can safely be said to be true in the case of keyboards, but not in the case of electrons and certainly not in the case of parallel universes.
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A Poster He Or I:
Metaphysics only forces itself upon science to the extent that science embraces metaphysical methodologies, not to the extent that hypotheses involve metaphysical principles.
I
think I agree with this. I
think it means that all natural laws and generalized models are metaphysical, in the sense that they are not empirical observations. They are generalisations that purport to say something about those observations.
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Quotidian's next post:
I think the Many Worlds Interpretation, and indeed the multiverse, is forever unobservable. Strictly speaking they are not even natural. If you say 'well it depends on what you mean by natural', then you're moving the goalposts. If 'natural' means 'whatever turns out to be true', then actually it doesn't really mean very much, does it? It is not as if it has actually delimited anything.
Personally I wouldn't really bother with trying to define "natural" because it is, in my view, too open to misinterpretation and being understood differently by different people. i.e. the goalposts aren't firmly anchored so it's too
easy to move them. I would use the word "observable". And, as I've said, the things that science deals with can be said to be observable only with a very clear understanding of what that means. There is a real sense in which the laws and other models of physics are not observed but are inferred from observations.
So, this is a 'tidy explanation', partially on the grounds that it provides ammunition against the argument from the anthropic principle. We will consider an one kind of metaphysical idea, because it can be used against another kind of metaphysical idea, that points in a direction scientists don't much like. How 'scientific' is that?
On the face of it, not very! I don't see the purpose of postulating the existance of multiple universes with different laws of physics as an explanation of the fine tuning of the physical constants in our own universe. I think it is a mis-application or misunderstanding of the concept of probability.
This reminds me of a Feynman quote from his lecture on QM "The next question was - what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward."
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