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HOW PHYSICS DOCTRINE MORPHS ON A TIME-SCALE OF DECADES
Henry Flynt 16
IX 2005
© Henry A. Flynt, Jr.
Acknowledgement is due to Dr. Jacques Mallah, whose information resulted
in numerous corrections regarding the physical specifics in this memo. The views expressed here, as well as any
factual mistakes, are the sole responsibility of the author. Some of what Dr. Mallah said in his private
communications of July-August 2005 has primary-source value and appears here in
attributed paraphrases. Two Scientific American articles by Max Tegmark, February 2001 and
May 2003, conveniently summarize recent developments and confess the foibles
(if you will); we find ourselves referring to them several times. See the References.
A. The Division of Physics
into Camps
B. Twenty Questions and
Clarifications Regarding Neo-Modern Physics
C. Laws of Motion of
Physical Doctrine
D. Physics on Consciousness
E. Epilogue: Method
A. The Division of Physics
into Camps
One important thing which the laity may not know is that
physics does not enjoy a consensus.
Many questions divide physicists into camps.
Three interpretations of quantum mechanics are in play,
Copenhagen, many-worlds, and pilot wave.
Much of the folklore of quantum mechanics, e.g. Schrödinger’s cat,
issued from the Copenhagen interpretation.
The folklore loses its vividness in the other interpretations, but the
latter are even more counter-intuitive, which is presumably why they took so
long to catch on. (We say this as an
“anthropological” observation; there is no question of advocating
Copenhagen.) The many-worlds
interpretation (hereafter MWI) requires the world, and every observer, to split
incessantly. Allowing the human individual
to die in one world while living on in another, MWI annuls the identity of the
self. It would seem to be the very
multiplication of entities frowned on by the old empiricism. Notwithstanding, MWI now has the momentum in
the profession.
Experiment got rid of the hidden variables speculation in
quantum physics. Otherwise, experiment
cannot decide between the interpretations.
In that respect alone, physics has moved beyond the empiricist age. Also, the application of cognitive
parsimony, which (as we just said) would seem to be to the disadvantage of MWI,
proves to be a matter of facility with trick arguments.
Tegmark-Wheeler 2001 reports that at a gathering of
ninety quantum physicists at Cambridge University in 1999, a poll found them
qute divided on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. No less than fifty physicists chose
“undecided.”
Tegmark-Wheeler 2001 also says that different physicists
understand a given interpretation in
different ways. If one reads the
official expositions of Schrödinger’s cat and Wigner’s friend, relative to the
Copenhagen interpretation, each exposition construes them differently. Moreover, a typical author sneeringly
remarks that the other authors are popularizers who have misunderstood the
experiment. There is a question for
Copenhagen of whether a wavefunction can only be collapsed by a conscious
(human) observation. Different
Copenhagen adherents may answer this question differently.
Schrödinger’s cat
It is necessary to dwell on Schrödinger’s cat. This is not an introduction for those who
know nothing about the famous thought-experiment. We have just mentioned discrepancies in the official expositions
(relative to the Copenhagen interpretation).
The present author refuses to take the blame for the discrepancies. The discrepancies are in expositions we have
no responsibility for; they reflect slippage in the subject-matter itself. We will give a composite impression of the
material, but we cannot claim to get it right, because there may be no such
thing as getting it right when every official take is different.
We find that despite the hundreds of thousands of words
which must have been written on this topic, nobody has thought to make basic
modifications to the experiment which would further clarify principles. Many expositions are not clear that we have
a sample with a fifty per cent probability of one emission in one hour. So the run-time is one hour. The physicist looks through the observation
window at t = one hour, and it is then that the cat’s state becomes a
fact. So the Geiger counter ought to be
attached to a timer as well as to a poison trigger. That way, there is a definite time at which the decay both did
and did not happen. If the observation
which collapses the wavefunction is substantially after that time, it underlies
how far Copenhagen goes in denying that there is a fact of the matter prior to
the moment of observation.
Why does Copenhagen say that physics cannot be about what
really happens, only about human observations?
Not because Bohr had a sudden attack of positivism or solipsism,
although those tendencies may have conditioned the interpretation. Evidently the idea is that something happens
at the quantum level which is nothing like what we see and for which we have no
reasonable picture. (The wavicle is
maddeningly this and that both.) Since
“what really happens” doesn’t make sense, we black-box it and only attempt to systematize our observations. Bohr does
not so much deny reality as take an illicit composite of the classical world
and human consciousness as reality.
To arrive at Schrödinger’s cat. The point is that the cat is not a measuring device, i.e. the cat is not considered to be
conscious. If the cat were considered
to be conscious, it would itself collapse the wave function. (By observing that it remains alive if it
does so?—it has never been spelled out precisely.) That is exactly what would happen if a human were substituted for
the cat.
Since the cat is not conscious, the radium atom is in a
superposition of decaying and not decaying, there is a correlation between the
state of the radium atom and the Geiger counter, and there is a correlation
between the state of the Geiger counter and of the cat. That leaves the cat in a superposition of
alive and dead. Inconsistent
descriptions of the state of a macroscopic system are possible. There is no fact of the matter whether the
cat is alive or dead.
Wigner’s friend is about the observation of observation.
The sealed room with the cat is inside another sealed room where
Wigner’s friend is located. Wigner’s
friend looks through the inner observation window. Does he collapse the wavefunction, or is there a correlation
between the state of the cat and the friend’s brainstate? Does Wigner have to look through the outer
observation window and observe his friend’s reaction to the state of the cat to
collapse the wavefunction? Wigner
asserted that the latter is absurd; we do not exist with superposed
brainstates. Thus, Wigner concluded, it is precisely the first conscious
observation that collapses the wavefunction.
This is the source of the tenet that a conscious observer is precisely
what is required for a measurement.
All the same, Wigner’s view is said to be unpopular. Again, we refuse to take the blame for the
disarray. Nor are we going to spend the
rest of our lives searching for the definitive exposition. We don’t want to underestimate physics; all
the while, it is not our purpose to rescue physics from its own disarray.
To extract something from the disarray, Copenhagen
“probably” requires a conscious observer as measuring device. But that means that the mystics who caught a
ride on Copenhagen were in the right!
That must have been thoroughly distasteful to some of Copenhagen’s
adherents. Then they would have had to
deny that the cat or any living creature could be brought to a superposition of
alive and dead. Again, I disavow all
responsibility for making it make sense.
Any impression on the layperson’s part that physics is fiercely lucid is
the product of a snow job. Physicists
are typical, fallible ideologues bashing about in subject-areas which shut out
the layperson and which happen to correlate to intimidating technological
successes.
Science has unprecedented predictive power
quantitatively. It has vastly enlarged
the range of phenomena which an explanation has to explain. For all that, I repeat, scientists are
typical, fallible ideologues bashing about in their specialized
subject-areas. We will see how easily
they discard layers of their own orthodoxy.
‘science’ is a pretentious word to which “scientists” are not
entitled. Anyone who wishes to learn
what I have to teach needs to assimilate these lessons.
Other divisive questions
When Copenhagen was the only orthodoxy, one talked about
its implications and how well they were elucidated. But now that a competing interpretations is starting to prevail,
it is possible to acknowledge, or confess, that Copenhagen is a runaround, and
that misgivings were always on record somewhere. Explicit nonunitary collapse of the wavefunction is not good
physics. J. M. Jauch, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1968)
from page 38, is perfectly clear that the Copenhagen interpretation doesn’t
make sense. Yet in 1968, which is late
(two years before Zeh publishes decoherence), Jauch is not ready to bail out.
Tegmark-Wheeler 2001 make an observation important for
our argument. They note that the
quantum textbooks early on list Copenhagen’s explicit nonunitary collapse as a
fundamental postulate. They say that
this threw generations of students into confusion.
So we can underline what we began to say earlier about
the pretension of physics to scientificity.
Physics has intimidating technological successes, long since embedded in
pervasive institutions, and physics has immense institutional momentum as a
result. For all that, the custom of
being triumphal about the state of physics as an intellectual endeavor is
unwarranted. Just now, they admit that
for the last many decades, students have been browbeaten with a runaround. “Shut up and calculate,” the students were
told.
Just now we are told, “MWI has arrived to save the day,
now all is right and good.” I don’t have to endorse that. I propose, for reasons to be spelled out
below, that just as a previous layer of orthodoxy has been jettisoned, a
present layer will be jettisoned by 2025 or 2035.
Interpretation of quantum mechanics is only one of the
questions that divides physics into camps.
As physics is presented to the laity, wormholes are frequently presented as an oddity turned up by
physics, like black holes. (The
technical term for them is Einstein-Rosen bridges.) But their reality is far from universally accepted.
The big crunch
is another oddity which only a minority take seriously. That is why it is quite risky for a thinker
who is only an amateur of physics to base a new round of speculation on a
just-announced catchy idea. It is
catchy that the big bang would have a big crunch as its mirror image, but if
the universe is supposed to restart from the big crunch, that may not be good
physics.
Professional preference has swung to the view that the
universe is infinite in extent. That
means that the infinitely dense universe “at the beginning” was also infinite in extent. Nevertheless, this spatially infinite
universe expands. (What expands is a separation
factor.) For all that, the finite
convex universe may not have lost all its adherents.
Physicists who think that physics must take a position on human mentation differ as to whether human
consciousness is a computer—and find themselves entangled in Anglophone
academic philosophy’s treatment of consciousness and the self.
Multiple universe speculation doesn’t only mean MWI. We are guided on this topic by Tegmark
2003. Evidently there is a silent
majority of physicists that doesn’t want to believe in time travel and that
doesn’t want to believe in one or another of the multiple universe
speculations.
There are also individual theories which receive a great
deal of publicity which the audience of physicists doesn’t necessarily
endorse. Paul Steinhardt’s cyclic
universe, for example.
The point is that famous junctures in modern physics—from
Schrödinger’s cat to time travel to the career of the physical totality
(universe?)—look quite different to those in different camps. These junctures have no consensus
implications.
One can ask: what
is so well-established that if you don’t believe it, you are a crackpot? That is a special question with a selective
answer. For example, there was a Big
Bang in the sense that the region of the universe we can see (the Hubble
volume) used to be far smaller and hotter than it is now. You are a crackpot if you don’t believe in
that. (But see below.)
One reason why different interpretations are in play is
that, as we already intimated, physics has simply outgrown positivism and
falsifiability. (Mallah becomes quite
clear on that.) No matter how clear it
becomes that Copenhagen is bad physics, it cannot be removed by experiment. (Except that some sources say it has been!)
We make issues of points on which different physicists
have different views. Thus, some
physicists can dismiss our points by saying “that doesn’t affect me.” But if there are celebrated physicists who
are committed to the positions at issue, that is enough.
The division of physics into camps is quite bad news in
the perspective of the laity. As the
laity understands scientificity, it is not science if every scientist believes
something different about the subject-matter.
B. Twenty Questions and
Clarifications Regarding Neo-Modern Physics
1. For decades we were told that
relativity meant finite convex
space. E.g. the universe is a balloon
with patches (galaxies) which is being blown up. (In the analogy, the universe is the balloon, the spherical
surface—not the gas interior!) They
said that because the Lemaitre model won out after opposition, after the cosmic
red shift was discovered. Since this is
ancient history, one has to cite chapter and verse:
Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General
Theory (orig. 1916, many editions; English 1961), page 109 QC6.E5
The Universe and Dr. Einstein (1948), page 93 QC6.B33
George Gamow, One Two Three … Infinity (orig. 1947)
Q162.G23 pages 294-6. Leaves it
undecided whether the universe is finite or infinite, but he devotes his
explanation to the “finite unbounded” case.
In short, it was drummed into
us that finite convex space is the solution that matters.
What are we to make of that
historical period, now that finite convex space has been pronounced
stupid? (What Eddington believed,
pre-Lemaitre, is vindicated.) It is
even arguable that the closed universe is bad physics (denies time a preferred
direction).
2. If the universe is expanding anyway, why has the cosmological
constant (whose purpose was to guarantee homogeneous isotropic solutions to
relativity) been retained?
Well, as of the year 1990, the
CC had been discarded:
“when it was realized that the
universe was expanding and that there were solutions without the cosmological
term that fit the current observations, the motivation for inclusion of this
term disappeared and it is now not usually included” page 598 of Encyclopedia of
Modern Physics, ed. Meyers (1990).
Subsequent to 1990 the
empirical evidence showed that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. So the cosmological constant was brought
back.
3. Has the universe been recently conceded to be anisotropic, on the
basis of empirical evidence? The claim
that the universe has a “top-to-bottom” axis around which radio waves
rotate. Nodland and Ralston in Physical Review Letters, 21 April
1997. Einstein wanted the universe to
be isotropic.
4. Clarification.
(Abstracting from whether the Big Bang applies only to our Hubble
volume) There are two versions of the Big Bang, finite universe and infinite
universe. If the universe is infinite
now, it was infinite at the outset.
Otherwise it is finite and began as a point. In both cases, It began infinitely dense. Either an infinitely dense point or an
infinitely dense infinity. What expands
in either case is distances between things.
(There is a scale factor to which distances between things is
proportional, and the scale factor goes from zero to postive finite.)
The infinitely dense point is
in classical GR. I find it striking
because in classical mechanics, such infinities are regarded as highly
distasteful.
5. Was there a Big Bang? The
expositions are very casual about whether the Big Bang is the whole shebang, or
is only a local event, or didn’t happen.
Let us make the alternatives
explicit. Is the Big Bang the inception
of Being, or only of our Hubble volume?
No uniform answer. The authors
don’t much care what the reader infers on this score.
Mallah says that everybody
agrees that our Hubble volume was formerly far smaller in extent, and hotter,
than it is now.
OK, (i) how does this far
smaller universe square with the spatially infinite initial universe? (ii) It is not clear how the Hubble volume
concept works at the universe’s beginning. [to make internal divisions of “all
that expands”]
The notorious (?) Paul
Steinhardt denies that “the very early universe” (our Hubble volume?) was the
inception of Being. In fact he now says
that the Big Bang was a collision of two universes. (Rockefeller University, 10 May 2005.)
[Caution: Paul Steinhardt has the most often
misspelled name I have ever seen.]
6. Has the Big Crunch
(EVERYTHING has a single end at some future time) been disavowed? Steinhardt and a few others: NO.
The “mainstream”: YES. That leaves an always infinite universe whose
scale factor grows forever, sometimes frantically. That seems thoroughly asymmetrical, rather Faustian, actually.
7. Tegmark 2003 on chaotic
inflation, the multiverse, and “bubbles.”
Tegmark makes the multiverse’s
spatial extention sound like you take an infinite line and paste another
infinite line on “the end” of the first, etc. etc. Is it supposed to be like a
collinear sequence of Euclidian lines?
There is no such thing.
8. For decades the Copenhagen interpretation was orthodoxy, and top
scientists racked their brains over the collapse of the wavefunction. Now, Copenhagen has been pronounced
stupid. What does it tell us, that the
top scientists made such a mistake for so long?
Let us note that Dictionary of Physics (2004), vol. 4, page 1867 “still”
calls MWI one of the most controversial interperetations of quantum-mechanical
formalism. MWI, the Dictionary
says, is criticized as an interpretation that itself requires an
interpretation.
Laymen do not realize that physics keeps a theory in play when it
has major credibility problems. And
that physicists cannot agree what has a major credibility problem.
9. The term wavicle appeared in early popularizations of quantum
physics. I assume it referred to the
original theoretical picture of the electron etc.—not to the double slit
experiment etc. which motivated the picture.
The wavicle = “the Copenhagen electron”? Some authors would have avowed as late as the Nineties [Dick
Hoekzema] that the wavicle was still maddening. In Tegmark 2003, the wavicle is being treated as an experimental
datum that demands belief in branching universes. Instead of being “dissolved” into something “sensible,” the
wavicle becomes the pillar on which the “controversial” interpretation rests.
Maybe my point is subtle, but
it is that an interpretation becomes
so customary that it becomes a fact; it is treated as an experimental datum on which further speculation can be
founded. I make an issue of it because
the development of physics is like climbing a tree. They’re stuck in the tree; they can’t climb back down.
10. Clarification. Once MWI came to the forefront, decoherence
became an important part of the story.
Quantum mechanics allows mixtures of mutually exclusive physical states,
resulting in the well-known interference effects on the microscopic level. There are thought experiments which magnify
mixed states, or superpositions, to the macroscopic level. In Copenhagen, we don’t see superpositions
because the human observation collapses the wavefunction. In MWI, we don’t see them because the
slightest disturbance from “the environment” “kills” the mixed states, and each
classical state survives in a separate world along with the human
observer. Decoherence is like an assault
on the states, killing the mixed states.
[Decoherence makes the branches, worlds, independent of each other, and
so, approximately, substitutes for wavefunction collapse.] It was “discovered” not in the laboratory,
but as an implication of the Schrödinger equation, by Zeh in 1970.
For all that, plenty of
physicists regard collapse of the wavefunction as a real process which is not
yet explained.
11. Clarification. Tegmark’s
2003 exposition of the many-worlds interpretation. It begins with a wavefunction for one “world,” then introduces
the concept of branching worlds. It is
extremely misleading because it suggests that the many-worlds totality is a
surveyable tree graphically—even suggests that “now” is the tree’s vertex.
Surely there is “always” an infinity of worlds.
For all that, we are told that
the number of worlds does increase, continually. (What, ordinally?—surely not cardinally.) [More technically, the wavefunction spreads
out in configuration space in a clumpy way, and the clumps are the worlds.]
If Tegmark started with one
world so that the reader can identify with the situation, it is a disaster as
far as giving a realistic idea of what MWI says.
12. Let us ask one last question before we bar the Copenhagen
interpretation forever. Given the
Copenhagen interpretation. How about Schrödinger’s roulette? Substitute the physicist for the cat. It can be more like revolver roulette if the
probability of decay is one in six. The
physicist is under general anesthesia for the critical hour, then is awakened
by a timer on the IV, identically collapsing the wave function in an
unpredictable way. Either he is
instantly dead because he observes that he is dead—or he has instantly rescued
himself from a twilight existence.
Let the physicist be kept
under anesthesia for one hour after the Geiger counter apparatus is
automatically inactivated. Then let him
be awakened by timer. Now he establishes
that he has been dead for one hour by observing that he is dead.
Physics won’t be able to exclude ghosts from its ontology.
The “out” that the physicist
collapsed the wavefunction at the moment of decay, during unconsciousness, does
not deserve a reply.
[[It will not do to say that
the physicist collapsed the wavefunction while he was unconscious. If one believes that, then the cat collapsed
the wavefunction and there never was any cat superposition.]]
There is already a different
suicide physics in connection with Schrödinger’s cat and MWI. The notion is that a lethal quantum event
always produces a branch in which a copy of oneself survives. So somebody built a suicide machine to try
it. He didn’t consummate the
experiment.
13. Speaking of Hubble volumes, Tegmark says that (at the quantum
level) there are 10^10^118 of them with
temperatures below 10^8 kelvins. That seems to imply that they are culled from
a finite set of Hubble volumes.
Otherwise the Hubble volumes with “low enough” temperatures are zero per
cent of the total, a.k.a. infinitely
rare. Is that exactly what Tegmark
is saying?
14. Expansion of the universe
(‘universe’?): is it being accounted
for separately by the cosmological
constant and by quantum mechanics? What
became of the cosmological constant discrepancy as between observation and
quantum physics?
The reference is Dictionary of Physics (2004), vol. 1, page
474! The dictionary presents is as a
major “unsolved problem.”
It should be called a disproof
of the master theories. But physicists
don’t use that sort of language, hoping that somebody will find a way to dance
around the discrepancy.
15. Has quantum gravity been solved to the general satisfaction? NO.
16. Regarding the well-worn Einstein twins paradox. We are told that the apparent slowing of one
clock relative to the other is mutual. There is a case in which the returning twin
is younger than the one who stayed put; evidently that depends on the
travelling twin reversing direction.
However:
i. In a closed finite
universe, it seems that one twin would be able to travel and return to the
other twin’s “fixed” location without making an about-face.
ii. Special relativity
propounds that human consciousness ages
at the same rate as the body’s physiological processes. That is crucial, because it commits special
relativity to the recognition of irreversible processes like aging and
deterioration. Is the claim that both
twins age identically? What if the
traveling twin travels as in (i)? If
one twin ages more than the other, it can’t be mutual.
17. How many cases are now
recognized which qualify the light-speed limit? We can mention three.
—quantum mechanics, the EPR
effect.
—bubble separation in the
expansion of the chaotically inflationary multiverse.
These two are said not to
count; in them nothing travels faster
than light.
—Einstein-Rosen bridges
(wormholes). Apparently that does belie
the light-speed limit. But some
physicists don’t believe in wormholes.
I don’t like fundamental
axioms which have a long list of important exceptions (even if the exceptions
can be depreciated).
18. Multiple universes have
been widely espoused to get rid of ontological asymmetry. So it’s no longer necessary to worry about
the latter?
Isn’t the underlying motive
for removing ontological asymmetry that the latter has intimations of
intelligent design? (“the multiverse
hypothesis … invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and
design” Cardinal Christoph Schönborn,
“Finding Design in Nature,” NYT 7 July 2005)
Then a Hegelian irony
arises. Multiple universes are
correlative to an extreme Platonic absolutism regarding mathematics: the perceptible world is only a flawed copy
of an ideal world, and there are an infinity of ideal worlds. What is the value of getting rid of God by
switching in Platonic absolutism? Who
supplied the definition of God.
19. To understand this
question we have to be clear that there are other multiple universe theories
besides MWI—and even that Tegmark says that MWI has been obviated by other
multiple universe theories.
Are time travel and multiple
universes being foregrounded in the popularizations because the science fiction
constituency wants them to be true? Is
reality a popularity contest? Is there
is a silent majority in the profession which doesn’t want to believe these
things, and doesn’t want to believe in negative kinetic energy? YES.
20. What happened to empirical testability in this subject-matter?
Experiments which compel
revisions in the theoretical picture are being performed all the time. All the same, speculation more and more
outruns testability. Trick arguments are
used which undercut the autonomy of the “court of experiment.”
If many-worlds is adopted to
repel Creationism—if that’s the empirical test—why wouldn’t physics adopt
Creationism to repel many-worlds? It’s
not an empirical test; it’s ideological pre-selection.
Jacques Mallah propounds
explicitly, and at length, that falsifiability is overrated: even that falsifiability doesn’t exist, and
that falsifiability would impose intolerable strictures on us. Mallah accepts a theory as testable if the
test can be performed a million years from now.
Beyond all that, a given
theory is not put to a once-for-all test.
The theory comes up short and is then doctored. This is obscured by the triumphal way
physics is presented.
C. Laws of Motion of
Physical Doctrine
From time to time, I produce a review of the state of
play at the high end of physics, where physics does not mind being perceived as
crazy. (The Wheeler end, if you
will.) Two of my last exercises of this
nature were “The Disintegration of Possibility” and “Quantum Chromodynamics as
of 1992.”
Obviously I am going to base my assessments on what the
publicism presents as the latest truth.
(I am not a physicist—never mind my “idea for an idea” about
<relativity of the vacuum> in the late Eighties, never mind Schrödinger
roulette.) But then my assements become
dated, they become inoperative to a certain extent. That is because whatever the latest truth is, it is sure to have
been severely revised in twenty or thirty years. I could conclude that it is hopeless, that I will always be
caught fighting the last war.
But let us not be so quick to conclude that there is
nothing to be learned here. Physicists
are absolutists. They announce that
they have arrived at the final and ultimate truth, or are just one step short
of it. (The Dream of a Final Theory.)
And yet: if you believe what
they say at any one point in time, they will deride you a few decades later for
having believed that. The candor of
Tegmark-Wheeler about Copenhagen is untypical.
It is more typical for them to “forget” that they once taught what you
believed.
There is an opportunity here to discern laws of motion of physical doctrine.
0. There is an assumption which has been internalized to the
point that physicists do not realize that it is an assumption. In the middle ages, scholarship presented
proposed answers in the format of debates.
It was the immensely influential Francis Bacon who got that practice
abolished. Bacon said that giving equal
time to opposing theories and to objections slowed progress. He introduced the convention that the best
available explanation, no matter how inadequate, must be presented in
scientific expositions as the truth. Only when the professional consensus is
ready to change should the existence of a contending theory be admitted. So it was that Copenhagen was propped up for
decades.
1. The icons which initiated modern physics do not change. We call them the Master Theories. The doctrinal changes which concern us here
come about because the Master Theories get
massaged and retouched to throw up interpretations which revoke previous
interpretations.
The lay reader needs to be told that Einstein did not
deliver a dispensation which was simply unassailable. That he basically had no
use for quantum mechanics suffices to make that point. In addition, Einstein’s successive
formulations came up short on various points, and were doctored, in recovery
attempts. Einstein made a famous
mistake regarding clocks at the equator (which was dealt with in general
relativity). The cosmological constant
has been in and out of relativity several times. If I understand correctly, Einstein favored the hidden variables
bail-out of quantum mechanics; it has been discredited by experiment. The light-speed limit really does have to be
qualified in several distinct cases [especially if one believes in
Einstein-Rosen bridges].
These “problems” are not considered to demand the
disavowal of general relativity.
There is no once-for-all judgment of a physical
theory. If it is popular, then it may
be doctored endlessly as it keeps coming up short. The profession, in its publicism, simply uses concealment to
handle this embarrassment, if you will.
Thus, again, there is a layer of modern physics which is
nominally preserved come what may: the
Master Theories. (For that matter,
classical physics is, in an important sense, retained. All of modern physics is an emendation to
classical physics. Even though
classical physics has been discredited as absolute truth, there is no interest
in starting over. The way the
discipline was configured by the classics has been an enduring feature.)
But if physics
takes its final stand on relativity and quantum mechanics, why are they so
resistant to reconciliation? Couldn’t
that mean that both were ill-conceived?
In other words, it is not that the Master Theories are
fixed targets and are unassailable. On
the contrary, the very division of the creed into two doctrines, relativity and
quantum mechanics, which have been extremely resistant to unification is
blatant evidence that the “science” is makeshift.
[Gary Horowitz, 1999: “We have two wildly successful theories that
have defined 20th-century physics.
These theories are fundamentally incomplete and inconsistent with each
other …” Roger Penrose said that each
theory had internal problems, the strange singularities that form in general
relativity, and the unmanageable infinites that crop up in quantum mechanics.]
All the while, physicists
proceed as if it was God who dictated that it must be relativity and it must be
quantum mechanics—just these two inadequate theories and no others—and who gave
humans the assignment of jamming them together.
We refer back to B.14.
Is expansion of the universe
(‘universe’?) being accounted for separately
by the cosmological constant and by quantum mechanics? What became of the cosmological constant
discrepancy as between observation and quantum physics? Dictionary
of Physics (2004), vol. 1, page 474.
The dictionary presents is as a major “unsolved problem.” It should be called a disproof of the master
theories. But physicists don’t use that
sort of language, hoping that somebody will find a way to dance around the
discrepancy.
But a way can be found to dance around anything. As we should have learned from Hegel, if not
from much earlier sources, doctrine is unstable enough that not only can any
discrepancy be jived away, not only can any two doctrines be united; doctrine will throw up new discrepancies
after you are finished fixing it.
The theory is not really being put to the test, since the response to
falsification of the theory is to doctor the theory. Given that physics is presented triumphally, I suspect that the
well-educated layman doesn’t know about all the doctoring that isn’t called
doctoring.
The immovability of relativity and quantum mechanics is
not good news, it is bad news. At a
certain level, physics cannot bail out.
it is hostage to its history. As
we see with relativity in particular and with the relation between relativity
and quantum mechanics, it will undergo a series of fixes and outright
concealments rather than being reconsidered.
2. Incredibly, scientific method changes faster than the Master
Theories. In the course of the
twentieth century, testability or falsifiability requirements were
dropped. Physicists are more and more
willing to posit unobservable realms to explain what we see. Physics,
which we were told is the nemesis of metaphysics, has converged with
metaphysics. As well, more and more unknowable knowledge is posited.
Max Tegmark
offers, as empirical tests, considerations which hardly count as empirical
tests. Multiple universes have to be
espoused to obviate the extreme specialness of the universe we find ourselves
in (the fine-tuning at the creation).
Then the same argument is presented in another guise. Are multiple universes an excessive theory,
guilty of multiplying entities? No,
because the notion of a parsimonious theory is suddenly reinterpreted via
complexity theory. Multiple universes
require a shorter algorithm for their specification than a single extremely
special case does. So multiple
universes win the cognitive parsimony contest.
Latter-day physicists are discovering the loopholes in
logical positivism, and rushing through those loopholes. To the insightful, it was always
obvious. If positivism was to be
generous enough to science to allow science to do anything it wanted, it would have to allow the unobservable,
the untestable, the unknowable, because they comprise science’s only possible
destination. That is why we have to
be clear about the difference between nuts-and-bolts and the high end. At the nuts-and-bolts level, scientists are
always congratulating themselves on how much they have just now learned. At the high end, science will not be
satisfied until the unknowable is unimaginably greater than the knowable. The
consummation of positivism is: our
infinite ignorance of the unobservable.
Neo-modern physics becomes increasingly grandiose,
increasingly willing to take the counter-intuitive plunge. Time travel’s grandfather paradox, levels
and levels of multiple universes, etc. are embraced.
The doctrine has talked so long that it has talked itself
into reversing its posture. It is
another victory for Hegel, if anyone is interested in how insightful he was.
3. At the level of interpretations, the truth changes beyond
recognition every twenty or thirty years.
It is not that all physicists change their minds at the same time. Rather, what is popular changes. We were told that relativity meant finite
convex space; now that is out the window.
We were told that light speed was the limiting speed of propagation; now
there are numerous qualifications. We
were told that EVERYTHING came from a Big Bang in finite past time. That simple pronouncement, which had Wheeler
and others wringing their hands in public, has either been discarded or been
dissolved in vagueness. We were
promised a Big Crunch; now the dominant group disavows it altogether, leaving a
universe which frantically expands forever.
Generations of quantum physicists racked their brains over the collapse
of the wave function; now we are told there is no such thing. Everett’s many worlds, which for decades was
hidden in the closet, is now the preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics.
It is important to understand how physicists look back at
yesteryear’s interpretations, the ones they have discarded. They do not respect them as if they were
steps on a ladder, understandable mistakes.
That is to say, they do not accord them the respect of classical
physics. Rather, they disavow
professional responsibility for them.
They intimate that those who believed in finite convex space, or the
light-speed limit, or the Big Bang, or wave function collapse were
unprofessional fools. Today’s
physicists typically “forget” their responsibility for putting yesteryear’s
theories in play. Writings of mine
which assumed that “the” Big Bang was a doctrine of the profession would today
be dismissed with a sneer, as if “the” Big Bang were rubbish cooked up by
cranky laymen.
One view of doctrinal formation is the following. New evidence is continually being turned up;
the interpretative revolutions are physics’ way of reconciling new evidence
with the Master Theories. But that is
not an adequate appraisal. The
scientific culture demands veneration of the Master Theories, and at the same time
demands a stream of new sensations.
Personal aggrandizement is welcomed and rewarded. There is a culture which has become the
reverse of the vernacular culture: in
that the counter-intuitive is lionized.
In that respect, physics is like modern art. It is also like modern art in always needing a new
sensation.
[Einstein, commenting on
Schrödinger’s claimed unification of general relativity with field theory in
1947. “From such episodes, the reader
gets the impression that every five minutes there is a revolution in science,
somewhat like the coups d’état in some of the smaller unstable republics.” Not every five minutes, every twenty years.]
I am very much against analogizing a thing to something
unsavory in order to taint the thing.
Having said that, sometimes an analogy can break us loose from our
subservience. I might compare physics
to early twentieth-century Protestant theology or late twentieth-century
Catholic theology. There is a tradition
which must be affirmed; in that sense, it is rigid. At the same time, sensational reinterpretations associated with
celebrity theologians are welcomed by the publicity machine, if not the
churches. Let us spell it out a little
more. The modern world places the
Christian faith under pressure continuously.
There is always something new coming from the outside which threatens to
expose the faith as a cultural anachronism.
At the same time, Christian theology students are egoic, remarkably
so. Perhaps the point is that their
home culture is also European, even if Christianity’s legendary origin was in
West Asia. The unruliness of a certain
number of theology students is almost guaranteed. But that is not the whole story.
What completes the picture is that this or that upstart is lionized and
that journalism, and the “sophisticated” flock, demand new sensations.
A science writer who published a review of physical
science in the latter part of the twentieth century treated physicists as if
they were trendy theologians. John
Horgan, The End of Science
(1996).
The analogy breaks down in that Christendom is clearly
divided between a doctrinal authority and the upstarts. In physics, there is no Vatican to
perpetuate the old. Everything proceeds
by peer review.
So, change in physics is not simply a reflection of more
probing experiments. And change is
never a matter of taking the last step to absolute truth (although physicists
make any number of declarations that it is).
Physicists are locked into a paradigm which includes Newton, Einstein,
and Schrödinger. With that given, they
are going to take new evidence as an opportunity to create a sensation. The institutional enclosure is rigid, but
within it, egos run riot, announcing a new flavor every time you turn
around. They are going to find a way to
create a sensation or a faction with their name on it.
There seems to be another pressure in play: from the public and its taste for
science-fiction. Seemingly, there is a
professional literature on violations of the light-speed limit and time travel
because a popular constituency demands these marvels. In turn, the popularizations foreground multiple universes and
violations of the light-speed limit and time travel to catch the public’s
attention. As the journalists say, most
physicists don’t want time travel and don’t want negative kinetic energy.
Thus, yesteryear’s axiomatic tenets are thrown off the
train. Finite convex space, the
light-speed limit, the collapse of the wave function, “the” Big Bang, etc. etc.
4. Another law of motion.
Wigner is celebrated for remarking in a 1959 lecture on the unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics in physics.
(Now they try to obviate this sort of specialness by positing that all
mathematical structures are realized outside of time and space, usually without
observers.) To Wigner’s aphorism, we
add an aphorism which seems original with us.
The latest thing in mathematics becomes just what is needed to finally
explain the physical world: fifty years
later. The God who started out as a
geometer became a real analyst (in the mathematical jargon), then a matrix
algebraist, then a group theorist, then a topologist, etc. So: a fifty-year lag as between mathematical
fashion and physical fashion.
(Mathematics warm off the
griddle.) Once the new mathematics is
in the textbooks and is being taught routinely, Nature revises itself to need
just that mathematics for its perfect portrait.
There is a qualification to this law. Sometimes an idea which has been available
in mathematics for fifty years suddenly attracts research because of the
prospect of applying it. That is what
the calculus was, presumably. (We now
know that much of the integral calculus had been anticipated by Archimedes in
the lost manuscript on method.)
Fractional dimensions was another example. It got hot just when it was time to apply it.
5. Amazingly, if you will, physicists still subscribe to an
old-fashioned absolutist epistemology.
Platonism is the preferred philosophy of mathematics. (Cf. Max Tegmark.) “Physics is concerned with the absolute, eternal truth, and we
have reached it, or are always about to reach it.” Never has the abolutism been more evident.
We have observed here that physics careens along like
contemporary Christian theology. But
the publicism of physics is intricately crafted, using all the best propaganda
techniques, to deny that—to shape the developments via concealment [amnesia]
and triumphalism [self-congratulation] so that the suspicion of faddishness
does not arise.
Steven Weinberg, Dream of the Final Theory
Sheldon Glashow, New York
Times, 10/22/1989
Alan Lightman, New York Times,
5/9/2000
Brian Greene (Columbia
University) at the World Economic Forum, January 2001. Absolutist and triumphalist both.
°
We may conclude that a few decades from now, physicists
will still pay tribute to the Master Theories—just as the Pope will still claim
to be Christian. However, most of the
current sensations will be disdained as if they had come from cranky
laymen. They will be disdained to the
point that tomorrow’s physicists will “forget” that the profession was
responsible for them. And thirty years
after that, there will be another sweep.
And thirty years after that, another sweep. All the while, they will assert that they have arrived at the
absolute truth, or are just one step short of it. All the while, the mathematics which is new today will prove to
be just what is needed to describe Nature in the next round, or the next round
after that.
That is a diachronic prospect. Actually, we don’t even have to proceed to a diachronic
prospect. If the story is written
properly, there is no consensus at a given time. There is synchronic mutual condecension. There is a lot of it and it cannot be
dispelled by an experiment.
Our diachronic prospect does not predict what physics
will do between 2005 and 2035. In fact,
we are writing this because the directions physics has taken have surprised us. The way the cosmological constant has been
in and out: we were not hands-on enough
to anticipate that. As with Catholic
theology, there is nothing about physics that gratifies us. It is an institutional ideological
negotiation. We pay attention to it
just to substantiate that judgment.
Even though we cannot guess the next sensation, we may be
able to see the channel in which physics flows. We can identify the “intellectual forces” which shape what
physics will do next. Our undergraduate
classroom instruction said that early modern physics was prompted by routine
experiments which had unexpected and startling oucomes. In fact, the history of early modern physics
was almost a history of famous experiments which devastated classical
physics. What the relativity and
quantum physicists did was to reconstitute the received mathematical apparatus to fit these outcomes, upgrading
the apparatus with the last generation’s “new” mathematics.
Are there considerations far beyond individual ambition
which condition the novelties? There
must be. The computer explosion is
widely reflected in the new proposals, both proposals that are accepted and
proposals that aren’t.
We noted that time travel and multiple universes get too
much attention, evidently, because a lay constituency wants them to be
true. Then, “multiple universes” seems
to find its strongest motivation in the menace posed by “intelligent design.” But “multiple universes” is correlative to
the comeback of Platonism, the senescent philosophy of mathematics.
Any project of predicting the course of dominent theories
faces complications. Passé factions can
suddenly rise again. What is more, the
proposals unscrupulously mix from different factions. The latest Platonists (Tegmark;
Rudy Rucker San Jose State University???) may also believe in discrete
reality, whereas Platonism was originally the faction of adherents of
continuity.
°
Let me return to the suspicion that physicists are
choosing interpretations on no other basis than to lock God out. One would imagine that physicists are raving
atheists. But this is another matter on
which I can supply insight about an ideological nuance. Physicists often publish on “human affairs.” What they say gets little attention. That applies most of all to Einstein, but it
applies to plenty of others, such as Weinberg and Witten. Einstein may have vaguely had a reputation
as a diluted theist. Weinberg has a
public role as an “atheist.” But
wait—when I review their forgotten or buried pronouncements on human affairs, I
do not find atheism.
Bertrand Russell and Weinberg may not have (had) the
insight to characterize themselves theologically. They may not have understood that there are carry-overs in their
pronouncements which are theistic or supernatural. The lesson is much more graphic in other cases. When it comes to ideologies, consistency is
not the slightest consideration. People
mix and match according to their interests.
(All the while, they may not articulate their interests; they may not
even have the insight to do so.) Any
endeavor to predict the course of a dominant ideology has to take this into
account.
°
Civilizations get locked into characteristic
follies. When they do, they cannot
correct them (although individuals appear who either sense that there is a
fatal flaw or who anticipate an alternative paradigm). Civilizations stagnate and are then overrun
because of their follies. So it was
with Rome, Byzantium, China, Islam.
Another case of a system suddenly put on the defensive: Catholic Europe at the inception of the
modern era. Catholicism did pay the
price for Bruno, Vanini, Galileo, etc. etc.
But even when a civilization is bested, the corresponding population and
tradition do not necessarily disappear.
Ancient Egypt is only a relic.
Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam and their population bases, however, remain
extant. They have lost in the sense
that control has passed to outsiders; the “people” in question must leech off
of the ideas of outsiders in order to survive.
Tradition ends by disabling its adherents rather than nurturing them.
Science is a civilization thing. Measured against what positivism promised,
it is a folly increasingly—and the folly
cannot be outgrown from inside.
“The West’s knowledge” is ripe for defeat—what is lacking is a challenge
that is not mere regression and obscurantism.
•
D. Physics on Consciousness
So far we have taken a diachronic view of physics. Now we proceed to a long aside. The ontology of physics does not recognize
linguistic meaning (comprehended meanings), consciousness, or
choice-making. Nevertheless, there is a
growing body of physical pronouncements on consciousness and choice-making, as
physicists illicitly try to align
these phenomena with the reigning theories.
[They pontificate about
phenomena which are too unsavory to admit to the ontology.]
It is an unavoidable
by-product of the counter-intuitive character of modern physics. Consciousness is rendered so radically
irrelevant that a way has to be found to re-insert it to placate common sense. Already in special relativity, all moments
of time were said to exist together. “Our consciousness is what moves; it
extends itself along our body’s world-line.
Our experience of the flow of time, our sequential perception of the
instants of time, must be an illusion produced by our inferior nervous system.”
Thereafter, this field of endeavor, which, again, does
not have consciousness and choice-making in its ontology, has made more and
more inferences regarding these topics.
In fact, there are two perspectives on the state of
play. First, that physics draws
inferences about consciousness, whether those inferences are provocative or
not. Secondly, that physics draws
provocative inferences.
To extract the most lessons from the developments, we
should start with some observations about consciousness and the person which
have lately cropped up in analytic philosophy.
1. Searle’s Chinese room is a slightly elaborate thought
experiment in which somebody takes questions in Chinese and returns answers on
the basis of coaching in which the meanings of the characters are never
mentioned. It would prove the
mentalistic character of linguistic meaning.
[I find it hard to believe that somebody could “converse” or
“correspond” so well in Chinese on the basis of syntactic or formal coaching alone.] It asks a human to do what a computer does. Searle says that so used, he would not
suppose that he understood the Chinese.
2. When we sleep
dreamlessly, the self as empirical consciousness vanishes. it reappears upon awaking. That leads materialists to conclude that it
is epiphenomenal, like the light from a light bulb. In particular, a light bulb, unlighted, can be ready to light at
the flick of a switch; it can also be burned out.
One author concludes, when we sleep dreamlessly, the self exists outside of time. If you believe that there is an actually
existing something which exits time and re-enters it periodically, that is a
challenge to physics. On the other
hand, this author, presumably being a physical objectivist, can hardly say that
time in general or time as such stops while one is asleep.
A contrary view.
If the self consists in persistence of the organism’s basis of empirical
consciousness, as well as persistence of subsurface mentation (which happens to
erupt in dreaming), then the self is on the clock even during dreamless sleep.
3. Suppose there is total amnesia of episodic memory which
however allows “the individual” to continue to function in a human way. (Native language, arithmetic, etc. are not
forgotten.) Certain academic authors
say that the one body is inhabited by “a” person continuously, although
identity has been derailed. They say it
explicitly: The amnesiac possesses personhood continuously, but with a second
identity.
4. Certain authors reason as follows. Suppose that a brain transplant could be effected. Then a given person would continue to live,
but in another body. That proves that the person goes wherever
the functioning brain goes. Then,
they say, if the brain ceases to function, the person is extinct. “Death” is the null case of a brain
transplant, they say.
5. About death. We
should never say that a person dies. A person has no corpse. We should say that the person vanishes. If physics included consciousness in its
ontology, would the vanishing of the person be a violation of conservation, or
would it more challenge conservation than the burning out of a light bulb?
6. Suppose there is non-traumatic cessation of consciousness
(sleep, general amnesia, even fainting).
Now suppose there is a trauma to the brain, during unconsciousness, such
that the brain is killed. (Brain
surgery gone bad.)
The person vanishes when the brain is killed,
not at the commencement of unconsciousness, even though the person has been
continuously inoperative from the moment unconsciousness commenced.
According to that one author, from the moment
unconsciousness commenced, the self had exited time. Therefore, the self was outside time at the time that it
vanished.
7. Those who imagine the above cases are mostly trying to
buttress materialism. Potential for
consciousness is what determines that a person exists—but that formulation is
not sharp enough. Better: It is the organic substrate, the brain—not
the psychological states it produces—which
is determinative of the person.
8. But now, one researcher has claimed a demonstration which proves that brain and mind are not
the same.
V. S. Ramachandran of the University of
California at San Diego devised a method to treat a patient with a paralyzed
phantom limb, i.e. a phantom limb which felt paralyzed. The mirror arrangement convinced the patient
that he was looking at his phantom arm when
he was actually looking at his good arm.
The patient was told to relax his hand and open it. The paralyzed feeling disappeared.
How should this case be interpreted? The BRAIN
tricked itself into believing something. Or, the brain did one thing—and the mind
thought another.
Now we are ready to look at pronouncements of physicists.
a. The psychological arrow of time is defined as our subjective sense of
time, the fact that we remember events in one direction of time but not the
other. This arrow can be shown to be a
consequence of the principle that entropy is increasing in one direction of
time. (Thermodynamic arrow.) But see (c).
b. Special relativity propounds
that human consciousness ages at the
same rate as the body’s physiological processes. (Source available.) That
is crucial, because it commits special relativity to the recognition of
irreversible processes like aging and deterioration.
And yet one author tells us
that the self exits time during dreamless sleep. If all of one’s dreamless sleep is subtracted from one’s age, the
figure is markedly smaller.
c. Special relativity
propounds that all moments of time exist together. There is no flow of time or privileged direction of time. Our consciousness is what moves; it extends
itself along our body’s world-line.
(But what about dreamless sleep?)
Our experience of the flow of time, our sequential perception of the
instants of time, must be an illusion produced by our underdeveloped nervous
system. We do not remember the future
in addition to the past because of an organic impairment (or because of some
secondary physical consideration).
(Source available.) But in (a)
above, memory’s orientation was said to be due to entropy.
Moreover: Quantum mechanics now has it that all
possible states (branches?) exist at every instant. The passage of time is in the eye of the beholder. Julian Barbour, The End of Time (2000). But
now time’s illusory passage comes from transiting between branches? [Mallah:
there can be no communication or travel between branches.]
d. Copenhagen says that
reality is constituted by human
observations of observables. Wigner’s
friend and delayed choice are the decisive considerations.
e. The many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics is hypothecated to be connected to free
will. (Visser; Friedman et al. in Physical Review D,
42:1928.) What we call choice-making
is a quantum effect in the human brain
that splits the entire universe. Both
of the alternatives faced by the choice-maker are realized. Is this the same as Barbour’s notion in (c),
or does this notion make the individual responsible for multiplying worlds in a
way that Barbour didn’t?
f. An proposal which may be
marginal is Wolfram’s A New Kind of
Science. Wolfram defines free will
as the human potential to do something unpredictable, linking free will to
cellular automata in this connection.
g. Free will is subject to local constraints imposed by the standard,
local laws of physics. (Meaning that
you can walk anywhere in the room, but cannot levitate? The authors don’t explain themselves.
Physical Review D, 42:1928. What is notable here is that they presume to
pronounce on free will and on how it is embedded in the physical universe.)
h. The observer is a cluster of particles that store and process
information. Max Tegmark, Scientific American, May 2003, page
50. Why doesn’t that take us back to
the purely mechanical definition of an observation which Schrödinger’s cat et
al. were aimed against? It does!
anthropic considerations
i. The appearance of
consciousness presupposes a certain range of physical circumstances. (So
that consciousness rigorously has a physical inverse image.)
j. The reality we see is the
one selected by consciousness’ physical needs.
Physical Review D, 47:5345.
“time-travel” and features of consciousness
k. The Novikov Consistency
Conspiracy decrees that intelligent beings cannot change the past. This affects the philosophical notion of
free will for humans and other intelligent beings. Any being who tried to change the past would be prevented by
physical law from making the change, i.e. the free will of the being would be constrained. Physical
Review D, 42:1928.
°
Jacques Mallah, in private communications, 2005, wrote at
length about the observer and consciousness relative to physics. A paraphrase follows.
… we don’t fully know how to
describe what an observer is …
in classical mechanics there
would be the same problem, except that there it is easy to sweep under the rug
by pretending that our observations are of numbers, rather than conscious
observations that our model should predict the existence of. In other words, if I list the positions and
velocities of all the particles in a classical universe as a function of time,
that wouldn’t explain why we see rocks fall down (except in a few dreams)
unless we know some way positions and velocities give rise to the observations
of minds like ours, and some way of counting how many of those observers are
awake or dreaming so we can assign probabilities.
In QM, improbable things must
occur in some [worlds]branches, and the need to count observers to get
probabilities is more explicit.
I think that observers must be
modeled as computers to properly derive the probabilities in the MWI. What I am trying to do is the opposite of
what most people who connect the two are doing; I am trying to get rid of any
special role for consciousness in physical reality. I bring consciousness in only to explain our observations such as
the probabilities we apparently see in QM.
Aside: I am [continually?] replaced by a later
version of me who is much like me.
Philosophically, identity does not persist over time.
Even in classical mechanics,
long before QM was discovered, there was a sort of Copenhagen interpretation in
which people just thought physics was about predicting experimental results and
should not be used to model the human mind as something given rise to by
physical objects. This still seems
common. Even in classical mechanics,
people talk about how a theory of physics can’t be purely a mathematical model
but must be stated in terms of measurable quantities—in other words,
observation is basic and physical reality as described by math is not, in this
Copenhagen-like view. But with the rise
of computers, there is now a countertrend in which people are realizing that in
a complete theory, humans should be modeled mathematically. If a human is a computer, measurement should
be derived in terms of human consciousness rather than taken as basic, while
some math model is what is basic.
°
As far as I can see, consciousness and choice-making are
being given a brush-off. Each favored
theory finds the secret of consciousness in itself. The purpose is to sweep consciousness under my rug rather than
yours. I see no improvement here on the
pronouncements of early modern materialists like Helvetius and Holbach.
As for the proposals which did not come from physics, I
find Ramachandran’s result obscure. The
notion that the self exists outside of time during sleep does not make any
calculable difference.
•
E. Epilogue: Method
Returning to (3) and (4) of Part II, we may conclude with
some observations on where scientific
method has come.
Hume, Mach, and
the twentieth-century positivists stepped forward to save physics from
groundless speculation by reconstructing its results as frugal collations of
sense-experience. The slogan was “up
from the sense-impressions, collation of sense-impressions.” It was correlative to Hilbert’s
formalism: mathematics is a game with
tangible tokens. As Carnap noted,
positivism allowed a solipsist interpretation.
What the last decades have shown is that physics is a culture unto
itself—that it has viciously overriden the positivist rescuers and their
strictures. Having climbed up the tree
from everyday phenomena, physics will not climb back down and re-launch itself
from everyday phenomena. Modern physics
will always have “false” classical physics as its base. Physics cannot eject ideas which do not have
testable consequences. Testability as
the laity would imagine it is unacceptably confining. The methodological dichotomies whose point is to make one option
more desirable than another can be reversed by trick arguments: frugal ontology versus extravagant ontology,
intuitive versus counter-intuitive, primary datum versus judgment.
The scientistic cliché is: “It is science if it makes predictions and if it can be falsified.”
As to testability, there is no experiment that can
distinguish between interpretations of quantum mechanics. Dyson avowed that string theory is not
testable.
In private communications, 2005, Mallah assailed
falsifiability in principle. To paraphrase:
Popper’s “only falsifiable theories count” school is
empty. Is a theory falsifiable if the
experiment will only be possible a million years from now? Then I won’t see it. But I don’t see any future experiment:
because the self does not persist but is continually replaced. So falsifiability doesn’t really exist.
We must shape our beliefs on what we know. Demanding falsifiability would require
pretending that we shouldn’t believe anything—and that is untenable.
But let us not be dazzled by discourse about whether
falsifiability is even possible or even makes sense. There is a much more basic respect in which falsifiability
doesn’t matter. A theory is not
summoned to court for a once-for-all judgment.
When favored theories come up short, they are doctored. What is more, theories are kept in play even
as they are massively inadequate.
Relativity was subjected to many fixes of the moment. Beyond that, there was the absurdity of
Copenhagen and the irreconcilability of relativity and quantum mechanics.
The other side of this coin is that experiment’s positive
role is really to ensconce favored theories as orthodoxies.
All this is hidden—at least to the lay spectator—because
it is customary to present physics triumphally. Every Scientific American
article ends with a thumping affirmation.
Physics really is massively consequential practically, and physics is
difficult the way it is difficult to give an acceptable performance of the
Tchaikovsky Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. For all that, the “citadel of truth” impression would dissolve if
there were not a massive use of rhetorical devices to downplay the runarounds.
Does physics determine more and more unknowable knowledge? There
are intrinsic limits to our knowledge, says Raphael Bousso of Berkeley: the Big Bang; the Big Crunch. Well, that’s not new; that’s the “crisis of
physics” that accompanied the announcement of the Big Bang. Announcing that the Big Bang is a limit to
our knowledge: does that relieve us of
answering the question “did the laws of nature exist before there was anything
at all?”
The unobservables now include an infinite number of
universes. Only a tiny fraction
(strictly, a zero fraction) of the posited physical realm is observable.
Beyond that, Tegmark repeatedly advances ideological
preferences as empirical evidence.
Empirical evidence, such as it is, shows that our universe has to be
extremely fine-tuned—the symmetry-breaking at the outset had to have an
extremely fine-tuned outcome—to allow our existence. Then there is a crisis of our ontological specialness. It starts looking suspiciously like
intelligent design. Since we can’t have
that, we conclude that our universe is one of an infinite number, the one that
supports life. It’s mere luck in the
sense that there are vastly more failures than successes and we don’t get to
see the failures (we are spoiled). I
reply: this line of argument is not
empirical; it is ideologically biased interpretation.
Similarly when Tegmark rings in Chaitin’s complexity
theory to prove that “infinite universes” is cognitively parsimonious. The ideological bias against ontological
specialness is being presented as empirical evidence.
As to mathematics, ultra-Platonism has won out. Tegmark-Wheeler 2001. “Theories can be crudely organized in a
family tree where each might, in principle, be derived from more fundamental
ones above it. Almost at the top of the
tree lie general relativity and quantum field theory. A theory of everything would have to be purely mathematical, with
no explanations or postulates.”
Ultra-Platonism has become the explanation of the
unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in delineating physical
phenomena. A mathematical structure is
an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. Every mathematical structure has its own
realization or universe. The
realizations comprising this multiverse do not subsist in the same 3D space. They subsist outside of space and time. Most of them are devoid of observers. Once again, most of the physical realm has
been placed beyond observation.
Positivism meant to align philosophy with the triumphs of
science, to humble philosophy before science—and to whittle science down to a
core methodology free of all mysticism.
It has long since become clear that this project is unacceptable to the
scientist.
Special References
References could be multiplied
indefinitely. We give only those of
direct interest.
Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General
Theory (orig. 1916, many editions; English 1961), page 109 QC6.E5
George Gamow, One Two Three … Infinity (orig. 1947)
Q162.G23 pages
The Universe and Dr. Einstein (1948), page 93 QC6.B33
J. M. Jauch, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1968)
Sheldon Glashow, New York
Times, 10/22/1989
Encyclopedia of Modern Physics, ed. Meyers (1990).
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (1992)
S.S. Schweber, QED and the men who made it (1994) QC680.S34
John Horgan, The End of Science (1996)
Alan Lightman, New York Times,
5/9/2000
Brian Greene (Columbia
University) at the World Economic Forum, January 2001. Absolutist and triumphalist both.
Max Tegmark and John A.
Wheeler in Scientific American,
February 2001, “100 Years of Quantum Mysteries”
Dipen Bhattacharya, “Universe
for Breakfast” (June 2001)
Max Tegmark in Scientific American, May 2003
Dictionary of Physics (2004)
Paul Steinhardt, “Einstein, Time, and the Future of the Universe,” Rockefeller University, 10 May 2005, not published.