This started when I made a comment at Creek Running North, the web log of Chris Clarke, a freelance nature and science writer. My latest comment:
Rob: I like poetry, including Chris’. My heart wags a joyous tail at his “tendency to stop at a glimpse of a piece of broken glass, in awe of the sheer fractal bravado of existence.” But then it gets a terrible jolt: this is supposed to be explained by quantum mechanics! By someone who knows darn nothing about quantum mechanics! This doesn’t fall under the purview of the Poetic License Board. This is in the unprintable-comments department.
Chris writes: “Quantum mechanics… does not repudiate what classical physics knew about how the universe operates: it explains why the world operates the way classical physics describes it.” — The claim that quantum mechanics does not repudiate what classical physics knew about how the universe operates, is false. Ask any physicist. The claim that it explains why the world operates the way classical physics describes it, is equally false, not least because the world doesn’t operate the way classical physics describes it; it operates the way quantum physics describes it — whatever that means.
Regarding homeopathy. I am at least as much an empiricist as Chris. My 30 years experience with homeopathy testifies that homeopathy works. I live in India, where homeopathic medicine and consultation is incredibly cheep and often free — nobody earns much with it. It is taught alongside with allopathic medicine and widely used. Millions of Indians have had the opportunity to compare homeopathic and allopathic treatments and, based on their experience, have concluded that homeopathy often works better than allopathy and without the harmful side-effects. I haven’t the faintest inkling of how homeopathy works or could possibly work, and I don’t think anybody else has. But it would be the height of hubristic folly to claim that because of this it cannot work. Is there nothing more to be learned? Is there no future for science?
Chris seems to be claiming that I seem to be claiming that “at its root quantum physics negates all empirical observation.” I must have gotten this wrong, considering that I am virtually the only interpreter of quantum physics who takes seriously the only empirical evidence that we have — the correlations between measurement outcomes — and tries to make sense of them, instead of trying to “save the materialistic appearances”.
In his report on the Tucson 2004 conference on consciousness (Journal of Consciousness Studies, December 2004) Charles Whitehead remarked that “major areas of relevant science are increasingly neglected or ignored… A study of ‘elite scientists’ revealed that evidence has no effect on belief or disbelief… No matter how thorough your controls or how many zeros you have in front of your p value, disbelievers still demand ‘better proof’… Thomas Kuhn didn’t go far enough. Scientists do not simply fail to treat anomalies as counter-instances; they deny their very existence. Anomalies tend to get swept under the carpet until there are so many of them that the furniture starts to fall over… If there were any shift in our own world-view, much of what we call ‘evidence’ would decamp from the old paradigm to the new in a most disloyal manner.”
There is no future for materialistic science. (Some people call it “scientific materialism”, but obviously there is nothing scientific about a dogma such as materialism.) Let’s recall how science got to where it is.
Newton found an algorithm that made it possible to calculate the gravitational effects of matter on matter. (He also famously refused to make up a story purporting to explain how, by what mechanism or process, matter acts on matter.)
While the (Newtonian) gravitational action of one object on another depends on the simultaneous positions of the two objects, the electromagnetic action of matter on matter is retarded: effects are later than their causes. This made it possible to transmogrify the algorithm for calculating the electromagnetic effects of matter on matter into a mechanism or physical process by which matter acts on matter. Later Einstein’s theory of gravity made it possible to also transmogrify the algorithm for calculating the gravitational effects of matter on matter into such a mechanism or process. Our hope to become omniscient-in-principle by limiting What Exists to mathematically describable states and processes seemed close to fulfilment.
This vainglorious hope is in part a reaction to outdated religious doctrines (it is better to believe in our potential omniscience than in the omnipotence of someone capable of creating a mess like this world and thinking he did a great job) and in part the sustaining myth of the entire scientific enterprise (you had better believe that what you are trying to explain can actually be explained with the means at your disposal, however limited they are).
Quantum mechanics has completely upset that applecart. (There are always people who refuse to get it, just as there are always people with conspiracy theories about special relativity.) All we now have is mathematical tools for calculating the probabilities of possible measurement outcomes given actual outcomes. If there is such a thing as a mechanism or process by which actual outcomes determine the probabilities of possible outcomes, nobody knows anything about it.
Planck’s constant sets the scale of Nature’s fuzziness. In the theoretical limit in which this tends to zero, the quantum laws, which correlate measurement outcomes statistically, degenerate into the classical laws, which correlate events deterministically. Because they correlate events deterministically, they can be given a causal interpretation. We can speak of physical causes and physical effects. But we do not, in this limit, obtain a mechanism or process by which physical causes produce physical effects. All we get is an algorithm for calculating the effects of given causes. In the good old classical times, it was possible to get away with the pretence that this algorithm corresponds to a physical entity in its own right. One could pretend, with a certain measure of consistency, that the electromagnetic field, for instance, is locally generated by charges here, that it mediates electromagnetic interactions by locally acting on itself, and that it locally acts on charges there. With quantum physics, such sleights-of-hand no longer work.
At my website I draw certain conclusions from the way quantum mechanics assigns probabilities to measurement outcomes, which is all we have to go by. Although Chris’ comparison of my conclusions with Nazis from Alpha Centauri aiming cheese rays at the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is way over the top, it raises an issue. He relies on Montana geologists (preferably with tenure) to tell him whether the cheese ray thing might not be as wacked out as it sounds. What else can he do? In my case he has to rely on the verdict of a physicist (preferably with tenure). And there’s the rub. To help you understand how the situation in physics differs from that in Montana geology, I invite you to read this article by Dennis Dieks (Professor of the Foundations and Philosophy of the Natural Sciences at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, Utrecht University) on “The quantum mechanical worldpicture and its popularization“.
Equally relevant is a more recent article by Piet Hut (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ), Mark Alford (Dept. of Physics, Washington University), and Max Tegmark (Dept. of Physics & Kavli Inst. for Astrophysics and Space Research, MIT) entitled “On math, matter and mind“.
The gist of both papers is that if you ask a physicist about the quantum-mechanical world picture, the answer you get is as unpredictable as the time of decay of an instable nucleus. Hut, Alford, and Tegmark conclude that “non-physicists reading this paper… should be deeply suspicious of any self-proclaimed popularizer or other ambassador claiming to speak on these matters on behalf of the consensus of the theoretical physics community.” There simply is no consensus. Dieks puts it this way:
“Most physicists have no clear conception of the interpretation of their most basic theory, quantum mechanics. They are largely unaware of the exact nature of the problems in giving a detailed and consistent account of the physical meaning of the theory; and if they are aware, they often don’t care very much. Only very small numbers of researchers have given serious thought to the interpretational problems of quantum mechanics, and have expressed more or less detailed points of view. As can perhaps be expected from the statistics of small numbers, the diversity of opinion is large. Very different ideas have been put forward, none of them supported by great numbers of physicists.”
Dieks again: “The sheer difficulty of the situation, in which the only thing that is certain is that familiar concepts do not work, surely is one central element of the particular situation in quantum mechanics.”
And yet there are people who think our knowledge of the world is sufficient to claim that homoeopathy (and many other “anomalies”) can’t work! I am reminded of Christian Morgenstern’s Palmström.
Die unmögliche Tatsache
Palmström, etwas schon an Jahren,
wird an einer Straßenbeuge
und von einem Kraftfahrzeuge
überfahren.“Wie war” (spricht er, sich erhebend
und entschlossen weiterlebend)
“möglich, wie dies Unglück, ja- :
daß es überhaupt geschah?“Ist die Staatskunst anzuklagen
in Bezug auf Kraftfahrwagen?
Gab die Polizeivorschrift
hier dem Fahrer freie Trift?“Oder war vielmehr verboten,
hier Lebendige zu Toten
umzuwandeln, -kurz und schlicht:
Durfte hier der Kutscher nicht-?”Eingehüllt in feuchte Tücher,
prüft er die Gesetzesbücher
und ist alsobald im Klaren:
Wagen durften dort nicht fahren!Und er kommt zu dem Ergebnis:
Nur ein Traum war das Erlebnis.
Weil, so schliesst er messerscharf,
nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.
The Impossible Fact
Palmstroem, old, an aimless rover,
walking in the wrong direction
at a busy intersection
is run over.“How,” he says, his life restoring
and with pluck his death ignoring,
“can an accident like this
ever happen? What’s amiss?“Did the state administration
fail in motor transportation?
Did police ignore the need
for reducing driving speed?“Isn’t there a prohibition,
barring motorized transmission
of the living to the dead?
Was the driver right who sped…?”Tightly swathed in dampened tissues
he explores the legal issues,
and it soon is clear as air:
Cars were not permitted there!And he comes to the conclusion:
His mishap was an illusion,
for, he reasons pointedly,
that which must not, can not be.
(German original translated into English by Max Knight)
You write “The claim that quantum mechanics does not repudiate what classical physics knew about how the universe operates, is false”.
Later, you write “In the theoretical limit in which this [Planck's constant] tends to zero, the quantum laws, which correlate measurement
outcomes statistically, degenerate into the classical laws, which correlate events deterministically”.
In fact, this is (regardless of Chris’ intent), what I understood Chris to mean. Actually, if I recall correctly from my days as a practitioner, this was assumed, but not fully demonstrated.
Much of your criticism, it seems to me, comes down to a matter of semantics, as for example with that highly problematic (to me) word
“explain”. I don’t think any theory “explains” anything. At best, it describes a class of events in an elegant, economical fashion. Still, we do use the word to denote a supposed peeling-away of one layer of mystery, and often harbour the illusion that we are thus closer to the Truth.
“Most physicists have no clear conception of the interpretation of their most basic theory, quantum mechanics. They are largely unaware of the exact nature of the problems in giving a detailed and consistent account of the physical meaning of the theory; and if they are aware, they often don’t care very much.”
I agree wholeheartedly. I was one of them!
Comment by Rob G — August 12, 2006 @ 3:25 pm
There is always so much more to be said…
Classical physics is an approximate theory, obtained by ignoring the fuzziness of physical quantities and useful wherever that fuzziness may be ignored (i.e., whenever the molecular, atomic, and subatomic structure of matter is irrelevant). This sounds harmless enough, not least because much the same words are used in both classical and quantum physics. The meanings of these words, however, differ dramatically between the two theories, so much so that Feynman (in the first section of his famous lecture series) emphasized that philosophically we are completely wrong with the approximate law.”
Quantum mechanics most definitely repudiates what classical physics knew about how the universe operates, for the entire conceptual scheme within which classical physics operated has undergone a sea change. Even the familiar concept of causality now belongs to the category of appearances — it has been demoted to a secondary quality in the sense of Locke. It belongs, not to the underlying physics (not even in the sceptical sense of Hume), but only to the stories that the underlying physics allows us to invent to give meaning and structure to our lives.
You don’t think that any theory “explains” anything. This is obviously true at the deepest level of inquiry, where we ask, inter alia, for the meaning of the whole charade. Yes, we are pealing away layers of mystery, but what we find in the end is not the Truth but the Ultimate Mystery — the same that reveals itself in a million ways, e.g., through a piece of broken glass as the sheer fractal bravado of existence.
What saddens me is the attempt to reduce this Mystery to a bunch of physical laws. Like a Greek tragedy, the materialistic story has its aesthetic appeal and cathartic usefulness, but there are other stories much more beautiful and wholesome and at least equally consistent with the empirical data.
Comment by koantum — August 13, 2006 @ 3:20 am