If only physicists were a bit more curious about philosophy…
It's a good idea, but how could they be, in fact ?
Why not? What do you mean?
A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
361–370 of 455 posts
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main thing I didn't like about it was pretending it's all scientists involved and not philosophers. The article talks mostly about Huw Price—and from phrases like "Scientists, including Price", you'd think he's a scientist. He's an Australian philosopher. He was my professor for a couple of philosophy-of-science-related courses at Sydney Uni 20 years ago. He started the Centre for Time there I believe. He's a gre…
This is not entirely correct. I can't say on this "retrocausality" stuff in particular, but more generally in quantum foundations, there are a lot of philosophers with a very solid physics/math background who have a better understanding of quantum than most physicists. I find quantum foundations to be not very interesting personally, and I doubt it will have much relevance 20 years in the future, but some philosopher…
> This is not entirely correct.
Which part? I didn't say or mean to imply philosophers are not worth taking seriously—if that's what you meant—just that philosophers are not scientists, and in particular, Huw Price is not a scientist. Uncontroversial, I would've thought.
An article titled "A growing number of scientists.." that then misrepresents Price as being a scientist, is the thing that's wrong, seems to me. Maybe it did that because "A growing number of philosophers.." wouldn't have anything like the same click-appeal.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Carroll's argument This assigns credit to Carroll.
It merely says that Carrol argued. The idea within the argument was no means assigned to her but used to make/support it.
Sean Carroll is a man, and look up the possessive apostrophe while you're at it!
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think Carroll can take credit for the idea of the arrow of time being emergent from a local entropy initial state. Roger Penrose proposed that as far as I know, when Carroll was probably a high schooler.
Roger Penrose proposed that as far as I know, when Carroll was probably a high schooler. No. At least as early as Arthur Eddington when Penrose was a twinkle in his dad's eye.
Thanks didn't know he'd made that argument although I knew he made the connection between entropy increasing and arrow of time.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Philosophers professing to be scientists has been troubling me more and more the past few years. Scientists professing not to be philosophers has been troubling me more and more the past few years.
Why does it bother you? As Richard Feynman said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Sure, lots of what scientists do, including Feynman, involve an implied philosophy. It is easy to read https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm or https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm and extract a lot of important philosophical ideas from them. But I have yet…
That, apart from the first line, seems like a pretty generic/off-topic "I don't get philosophy and it's stupid" rant that could equally well be pasted under any story involving philosophy.
I don't see how it relates at all to the comment you replied to, which I thought was a good one.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine that the vast majority of people working at a place like vice don't understand the distinction between soft and hard sciences, don't care about the distinction, or are bitter about the distinction.
Philosophy isn't anywhere on the Mohs scale of sciences—it's not a science at all. Each philosopher has their own idea about what philosophy is, but I'm not aware of any who think it's a science. That's one way to tell the difference—a philosopher asking "what is philosophy?" is doing philosophy. A physicist asking "what is physics?" is doing philosophy, philosophy of science. Actually it's mostly philosophers who as…
I guess you could say philosophy is a protoscience.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#367So what? I'm assuming that some people have some models of physics based on equations, and those don't happen to be of the kind where the state for some t T. Ok, great - does that predict or explain or simplify anything interesting about the observable universe?
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's difficult to see how such a hypothesis could be tested either experimentally or observationally. Sounds more like metaphysics? Stars shine until they run out of fuel, and the age of a star - the status of its fuel, the buildup of fusion products - happens as time passes. Life on planets taps into the flow of sunlight from the star (and/or the flow of heat and chemical energy from the a hot planetary core) to gen…
Alain Aspect tested it with his delayed choice quantum eraser, didnt he ? ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect%27s_experiment ) At least in France we take as fait accompli that causality is non trivial and that objects are non local at best: either you can consider objects as one despite immense distance between them, or you accept information passed between them in reverse time. Both are hard to swallow.
No, he didn’t. The “delayed choice quantum eraser” is something else - and it’s not about the flow of time either.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#369>A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
A growing number of people in general are becoming more superstitious, and more easily convinced of even more incredible occurrences.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philosophy isn't anywhere on the Mohs scale of sciences—it's not a science at all. Each philosopher has their own idea about what philosophy is, but I'm not aware of any who think it's a science. That's one way to tell the difference—a philosopher asking "what is philosophy?" is doing philosophy. A physicist asking "what is physics?" is doing philosophy, philosophy of science. Actually it's mostly philosophers who as…
I guess you could say philosophy is a protoscience.
Exactly this, all the other sciences were a philosophy before they grew and got 'codified'.