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Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#291

Post by knightoffaith »

bugbuddy wrote: post #231
NegativeLatency wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might need to define your terms more specifically/clearly to be able to get an answer to this. There's always the layman vs scientists definition of true. Like I think most people would say we know gravity exists, but in actuality we don't really know what gravity is, but we can measure how objects behave and make useful predictions about our world and universe because of that, with it lining up with othe…

I am going to get downvoted into oblivion again for asking this follow up question but that’s what I live for. What is the line between Physics, a scientific endeavor, and Metaphysics, a philosophical one? Please set my transparency as high as you can. I totally deserve it. Let me fade into oblivion.

Broadly speaking, philosophers of science don't think there's a generic answer to what differentiates scientific inquiry from not-scientific (or pseudoscientific) inquiry. Popper put forward the criterion of falsifiability (if it's falsifiable, it's science, otherwise, it's not science), but after Kuhn and Feyerabend's arguments, philosophers generally drifted away from thinking there's some hard-and-fast rule to differentiate science and pseudoscience.

If you're interested in these issues, you might enjoy Chalmers' What is this Thing Called Science?, an introduction to the philosophy of science that addresses issues like these. Or a primary source like Feyerabend's Against Method, quite a fun read, though maybe not one that many philosophers of science today would give their full-throated endorsement of.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#292

Post by andrewflnr »

snowwrestler wrote: post #262
andrewflnr wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users of this site who pay attention to how science is actually practiced, and not the oversimplified cartoon version they teach us in school, know that the boundary between a "theory" and a "hypothesis" is rather blurry. For instance, have you ever noticed how it's called "string theory" despite having no real evidence for it? Have you ever heard anyone, let alone a real scientist, complain about this nomenclature?…

String theory is supported by a ton of evidence in that it can produce many predictions and hypotheses that match observed data. That’s why it’s called a “theory” and why people continue to study it. What’s missing is a test that would produce evidence that would allow us to distinguish between string theory and competing theories. But that’s not nearly the same thing as saying it has “no real evidence.”

In fact that's exactly what I meant by saying it has "no real evidence". Otherwise you could claim the totality of the universe as evidence for your pet Theory of Everything as long as it's not actually falsified yet, including but not limited to a theory where fundamental particles are fairies who use slide rules to decide how to interact.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#293

Post by yazzku »

JimmyRuska wrote: post #216

Sounds like it's just a Haskell thunk but as a probability wave Lazily evaluated until there's a probability it has to interact with something. Since you can never really see the value of the actual function, but only see what it looks like when it's forced to evaluate a computation in some context, an interaction, you can never get a precise definition of the function

Control.Monad.Random

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#294

Post by lostemptations5 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #245
nojvek wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s essentially asking why is the speed of light 299,798,452 m/s or the gravitational constant 6.67x10-11 Nm2/kg2 I’m sure a universe could work with those constants varied but that’s the one we have in our universe. There could be hypothetical universes with protons being half of electron and atoms would have twice the protons. However the fundamental constants are just that. A number that allows us to reason about…

> It’s essentially asking why is the speed of light 299,798,452 m/s or the gravitational constant 6.67x10-11 Nm2/kg2 No, because those constants are entirely arbitrary. The curiosity here is that you have multiple numbers lining up , only separated by small integers.

They are arbitrary in the sense that we could just change them and the universe wouldn't fl appart -- or are they derived from aonething deeper.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#295

Post by lisper »

tarruda wrote: post #138
lisper wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't (at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method). This is a very common bit of religious propaganda, and it is 100% wrong. Intelligence has some very specific and readily identifiable characteristics. In particular, it has high Kolmogorov complexity [1]. This is what distinguishes intelligence from other forms of complexity, like chaos or the decimal expansions of irrational numbers. And the…

> at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method All the information you have comes from your five senses. Isn't some kind of faith necessary to believe that the scientific method would lead to an accurate understanding of reality?

That depends on what you mean by "an accurate understanding of reality." One can observe empirically that the scientific method converges towards something which enables you to predict the outcomes of experiments more and more accurately is it converges. Whether you want to call that "an accurate understanding of reality" is a terminological quibble, but it seems like an apt label to me.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#296

Post by lisper »

dist-epoch wrote: post #111
lisper wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't (at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method). This is a very common bit of religious propaganda, and it is 100% wrong. Intelligence has some very specific and readily identifiable characteristics. In particular, it has high Kolmogorov complexity [1]. This is what distinguishes intelligence from other forms of complexity, like chaos or the decimal expansions of irrational numbers. And the…

If we live in a simulation, there is a simulation creator. Serious physicists agree that the simulation hypothesis is a possibility, so you are the unscientific one saying that believing there might be a creator is believing in the Tooth fairy.

Of course the simulation hypothesis is a possibility. So is the tooth fairy. And both of those hypotheses have the same amount of supporting data. (Actually, the tooth fairy has more because people really do get money when they leave teeth under their pillows.)

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#297

Post by jiggawatts »

DonHopkins wrote: post #236
jiggawatts wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantum mechanics is a religion with mathematics instead of just holy texts. Several studies have been done into whether practicing theoretical physicists using QM in their everyday work agree on the most basic tenets of the field. Spoiler: they disagree on every aspect while simultaneously assuming that their opinions are correct and that everyone else agrees with them. That’s how religions work, not how science doe…

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Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#298

Post by lisper »

msla wrote: post #154
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being, just as it does to assert the opposite. The only thing we can truly say based on the data is "we don't know for certain at this time".

And here you're equivocating on the word faith. In your post, "faith" either means "accepting best current evidence and logic" or "believing that there's a supernatural explanation without any evidence whatsoever" and it can't rightly mean both, because those definitions are incompatible.

No. Recall the statement I was responding to:

> it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being

That is false. It does not require faith to assert this, any more than it requires faith to assert that the tooth fairy does not exist, simply because neither the tooth fairy nor ID have any supporting evidence. Actually, the tooth fairy does have some supporting evidence, namely, that people do sometimes get money when they leave teeth under their pillow. There is no evidence for any process with high Kolmogorov complexity at the root of creation. None. Zero. In the absence of any such evidence, it requires no faith to assert that whatever is at the root of creation is not intelligent.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#299

Post by ryandamm »

timeagain wrote: post #268
megmogandog wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which fine tuning arguments are you referring to? As I understand it, 'fine tuning' is simply a fact of the universe: that the fundamental constants have values that allow for the emergence of complexity, and that even slight changes to those values would lead to homogeneous and featureless universe. I don't have the physics background to demonstrate this for myself, but I believe it. To then reason from that fact to…

Ok here’s the problem. What hubris does it take to assume the fundamental constants could be changed? Just because they appear in math equations doesn’t mean they can be twiddled and tweaked like programming variables. We have no prior knowledge or justification to believe any constants have been “tuned”, because we have no justification in suggesting other possible values. We could just as easily say that life on ea…

You're not entirely wrong that it's unscientific, I think we're answering metaphysical questions. (It seems like questions of "why" ends up unerringly in either metaphysics or religion at some point.)

That said, I believe the chain of logic (haven't watched the PBS video yet) is simply that were these fine-tuned constants to take any other value, there wouldn't be intelligent life to observe them. If the values were to be anything outside a narrow range, they would remain unobservable by entities within that hypothetical universe, and because we are making an observation we are implicitly sampling from the distribution of observable values. It's a Bayesian metaphysical argument?

That sounds like it presumes a multiverse, but I don't think you need an infinite number of universes or a god for that to be true... that said, it does purport to explain how fine-tuning doesn't violate certain (metaphysical?) principles of science that call for "naturalness" (which a friend once told me boils down to "all unitless constants should be either 1 or 0 otherwise it's inelegant" or something): the fine structure constant is what it is because otherwise nothing would exist to observe that it was 1/139 or 42 or whatever.

I hope this is even slightly more satisfying to read than it was to write.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#300

Post by lisper »

ncneieixk5 wrote: post #87
lisper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are objectively wrong. It requires no faith. There is simply no evidence for an intelligent being at the root of creation, no data that cannot be explained with much simpler mechanisms than intelligence. The proton is complicated by human standards, but it still is nowhere near as complicated as intelligence. You can't have a conversation with a proton.

where did all these building blocks come from then? you still know nothing

That's not true. I know that the fundamental processes that occur in our universe can be described by simple mathematical laws, so there is no need to posit anything as complex as an intelligence to explain them. Yes, it's possible that there is an intelligence there, just as it is possible that the tooth fairy exists. But mere possibility is not enough to make a good scientific hypothesis.
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