It's the Copenhagen Interpretation, actually - and although it's the majority view of quantum mechanics, it's by no means the only one thanks largely to Bohm, Bell and . Google "hidden variables", "Bohm interpretation", "nonlocal realism", "parallel worlds", "Bell's inequality" and others.
The last chapter of Manjit Kumar's "Quantum", a nice lay-level overview of the difficult birth and contested legacy of QM, notes that the tide is perhaps starting to turn against Bohr's "don't ask, don't tell, just do the maths" kind of philosophy and that the previously forbidden philosophical question of "but what is REALLY going on when we're not observing the system" is starting to get put back on the table.
Which I think is great. I'm with Einstein on this one - a system of physics which forbids you from asking fundamental questions is clever as a means of avoiding difficult questions, but really lousy as a way of provoking those same questions which lead to the next level of advances.
"Shut up and calculate" is fine if all you want to do is grind out PhDs who can solve known problems that have already been quantified back in the 1930s. It's pretty useless if you want to prepare research scientists to use their intuition to investigate the foundations of physics themselves.
Heck, even very smart people like Feynman have done their best to muddy the well by saying "don't try to use your intuition, it won't work". Which is exactly the wrong way to get advances - and oddly enough, since that WW2 period we haven't made any fundamental advances, just fill-in work in materials science, engineering and tweaking a few variables in the Standard Model. Bose-Einstein condensates are about the most interesting thing going on and those were theorised back in 1924. Since then, what? Gell-Man gave us quarks in 1964 - but electrons led to electronics, did quarks led to quarkonics? Nope. Hmm, wonder why?
Indeed. In my workplace, that's exactly why we're still using IE despite some of us personally preferring Firefox: zero official support for group policy-based management.
It's a huge problem and because Firefox are just ignoring it, we can't use them.
"If you're watching a soap opera, you only need to see a few frames per week to follow the story. If you are watching a live sports event with a lot of action..."
Okay, someone needs to make a soap opera about live sports and capture both the hardcore male and female demographics.
Some of us were kept alive, to work... loading diet pills into Nigerian officials. The... enlargement.... units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the call centres, to smash those fat burning *****s into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink.
"If that is the sort of attitude she exhibited toward the border guards, combined with the stuff they found in her possession... added up, it was suspicious."
Suspicious? Of what? Where do you get from 'sympathetic to Palestinians' to 'about to detonate a bomb'?
Is the mood in Israel right now really that cynical that anyone who even cares about Palestine and is horrified at what's being going on in Gaza is considered automatically 'suspicious'?
"she's an American displaying hate against Israel with her own personal belongings"
Political protest is hate now? I must have missed the memo.
I certainly missed the memo when I was out protesting the Iraq War in February 2003. Didn't realise I was actually arguing *for* bombing people by opposing the dropping of bombs.
"We have limited resources, and there are other problems besides the climate that threaten our survival. "
Okay, I understand this argument, and I'm a little boggled myself as to why CO2 has risen to Problem #1 when many other grave environmental and resource limitation problems (deforestation, fish stock depletion, freshwater depletion, peak oil, peak copper, peak uranium) are not being addressed.
But can't we do a threat/scenario matrix and prioritise the changes we can make which will make our ecology and society more robust in all likely scenarios? There are certain technologies like permaculture organics and (sensible) biofuels which make sense on both the climate change and peak oil axes: both reducing our dependence on expensive foreign petroleum and offsetting CO2 production. Basic energy efficiency pays off everywhere: less money, less fuel use, more distribution in the grind, Whereas, for example, big flashy 'climate change only' or 'peak oil only' tools like carbon sequestration and expanding fission power don't do anything to solve the larger eco-problems of toxicity and species loss.
Why can't we all agree to push 'dual use' eco-friendly technologies and help move our culture to a more bio-integrated and less brute-force energy-demanding future?
It's not like the eco catastrophe has crept up on us over even one generation. It was the 1950s when the first conservationists started drawing attention to the downside of runaway industrialisation and the mass extinctions it was starting to cause. Now that we're well into the process of building a planetary death machine and calling it 'civilisation', why are we surprised?
"Because "cleaning up our act" is going to cost tens of trillions of dollars"
Yes, and? How much funny money did we just lose to the banking fiasco?
We've known since the 1950s that our current form of industry has bad effects on the environment. Is industry still psychologically unable to understand the idea of pollution?
"We shouldn't do something we know we ought to do which will save human lives because it will oh noes! cost MONEY! MONEY!!! THINK OF THE DOLLARS!!!!!111!" is one of the worst arguments ever.
"While that may sound great, it's not always possible, or even legal. There are WMO rules, for example, that prohibit the sharing of certain data. That's why, for example, there are some major hurricane models whose results are publicly available but whose data is not available. I think it's stupid, but it is the case."
If that's the case, it's not only stupid, it's actively immoral, and the whole ethical foundation of the scientific enterprise needs to be overhauled.
We should not be making global public policy based on inscrutable proprietary datasets. Period.
If intelligence agencies or corporations want to keep little private data fiefdoms, fine. But don't pollute the scientific datasphere with tainted secret data which is not open to full and frank examination.
Sheesh, Wikipedia is working this out, and that's an amateur operation. Why can't multimillion-dollar Science(tm)?
"Would you be wasting energy running your coal powered computer to read this message? "
Yes, my Babbage IV does run on coal, but only until my Zeppelin gets to cruising height to capture the aetheric vortex energies broadcast from Her Majesty's Venusian Colonisation Fleet.
What the deuce, I just received a telekinetograph. The blasted Mekon's up in arms again about something new. Frightfully sorry old chap, I'll have to kick you off the blower and go show those benighted ultraterrestrials the colour of our steel. Huzzah!
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Java.
So that you learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now rewrite the Linux kernel as an Eclipse plugin using a Cloud-enabled Web 2.0 XML service-oriented architecture frontend to an IBM mainframe running COBOL.
You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in mankind: cubicles.
To be dominated by me is not as bad for the future of mankind as to be dominated by the lolcats, who by the way, have already got rudimentary ballistic launchers and are halfway to Venus by now.
"No scientist would ever - ever - delete raw data, at least without a gun to his or her head."
Cough. The NASA Apollo tapes? The ones found under a staircase in Australia with a sign saying "beware of the leopard"?
After about Apollo 14 it seems even the scientists were bored with the whole moon landing thing.
Also Princeton apparently doesn't keep very good historical records either.
"You'd think somebody must be writing a history of the Institute. You'd think there would be some records of what the seminars were, but I'm told that as far as records go, the records of our physics here at the university are in a shambles. The wastebasket is full of stuff at the place up on Nassau Street where the university archives are. So if somebody following up the lead of this morning's paper decides to shred all of those, there will be no earthquake that I know of. I don't know anybody who's working with those papers or organizing them." -- John Wheeler, oral interview, 1994. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5908_9.html
I have this impression of scientists as a bunch of ADD eight-year olds hopped up on lemonade. That's historical data! Don't care about that! Only old people like the past! Onto something newer and cooler now! Grant monies kthx!
Unfair I know, but sheesh. Forgetting how we got the science we have bugs me. Sometimes going back and re-analysing old raw data with a new methodology can lead to very different conclusions, and sometimes the people running the labs at the time weren't all squeaky clean saint-geniuses. Even in the 'hard' sciences like physics, especially post WW2 with all the atomic secrecy and government money. Wheeler elsewhere in that interview series observes that even all the scientists working on the H-bomb and fusion didn't know what each other were doing, and some still can't talk until their classification expires. So reanalysis of old data in the light of new knowledge can be very very important.
We're salvaging historical data in the arts. The BBC purged old Doctor Who tapes, and most of the tapes of Metropolis the movie were lost but one was recently found. Jason Scott at http://www.textfiles.com/ is salvaging 1980s computer history. So we should be pushing for the same level of data preservation in science.
"If they don't understand the basics of, say, scientific theory, they aren't intellectually involved in the first place."
Isn't there a difference between "understand" and "agree with" or "subscribe to the same school of interpretation"? Some scientists would like to believe that anyone who doesn't agree with their particular model just doesn't understand that, but I submit that it's possible to both understand and disagree.
I'm no climate scientist. But I think I understand the very minimal "basics" of climate modelling from an information theory perspective, which is to say, I know that it's trying to simulate a huge chaotic nonlinear system over millions of years based on incomplete information and changing theories, which seems like something I wouldn't bet a whole lot of lunch money on being exactly right. On the other hand, the widespread ongoing extinction of species , deforestation and increasing population and industrialisation of Earth and Peak Oil is something I can see happening right in front of my eyes within my lifetime, so I'm a lot more concerned about those things than I am carbon dioxide.
Some of the 'climate change' prescriptions, like trying to move to wind power and permaculture also fit the general pollution and ecology problem - but things like carbon sequestration just make me roll my eyes. I worry that CO2 is becoming a big red herring from the real issue, which is sustainable production and wealth sharing.
Yes, I said 'share the wealth'. I'm a hippie socialist. I consider today's global urban poverty to be pretty much a crime against humanity, and I'm willing to pay my part via taxes to fix it.
But I'm also deeply disturbed by how fragile and delicate our climate models are, and I wouldn't bet too much on them being 100% on the money. Let's prepare for a whole set of potential future outcomes and make our society and ecology more robust all round, not just bet the farm on CO2.
"That's not science. That's engineering. The difference being that the standard for engineering is whether a thing works"
++
"it is proof that your theories are useful, not proof that they are true"
Hi there Karl Popper! Though that's an interesting problem: is there actually a difference between usefulness and truth?
I suppose it might be that a 'useful' idea is one which works *under current circumstances* while a 'true' idea is one which works *even in unknown circumstances*. A true idea is one that will never, ever, turn around and let you down when you're depending on it: no hidden variables, no unexpected nonlinearities, no exceptions. By that standards very little of our knowledge indeed counts as anything near 'true'. We're all eventually going to die and none of our best scientific knowledge will help us then. In the meantime... we take our best shot with incomplete and contradictory data and hope we're not making the situation even worse with our choices, and right now that's very confusing indeed for some decisions.
Oh, and of course the big carrot is the Nobels... but seriously, after them picking Gore and Obama, I have little faith in them for anything anymore. And that should worry everyone, since the Nobels seem to have such huge prestige in defining what SCIENCE! thinks it is.
And that's me speaking as someone who really likes Obama and was glad to see him win. But there's no way he should've won a Nobel. So the Nobels are also pretty much irredeemably broken now.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's more like "if it can be understood by any human brain or and/or expressed as any linear sequence of symbols, it's not proper math".
It's the Copenhagen Interpretation, actually - and although it's the majority view of quantum mechanics, it's by no means the only one thanks largely to Bohm, Bell and . Google "hidden variables", "Bohm interpretation", "nonlocal realism", "parallel worlds", "Bell's inequality" and others.
The last chapter of Manjit Kumar's "Quantum", a nice lay-level overview of the difficult birth and contested legacy of QM, notes that the tide is perhaps starting to turn against Bohr's "don't ask, don't tell, just do the maths" kind of philosophy and that the previously forbidden philosophical question of "but what is REALLY going on when we're not observing the system" is starting to get put back on the table.
Which I think is great. I'm with Einstein on this one - a system of physics which forbids you from asking fundamental questions is clever as a means of avoiding difficult questions, but really lousy as a way of provoking those same questions which lead to the next level of advances.
"Shut up and calculate" is fine if all you want to do is grind out PhDs who can solve known problems that have already been quantified back in the 1930s. It's pretty useless if you want to prepare research scientists to use their intuition to investigate the foundations of physics themselves.
Heck, even very smart people like Feynman have done their best to muddy the well by saying "don't try to use your intuition, it won't work". Which is exactly the wrong way to get advances - and oddly enough, since that WW2 period we haven't made any fundamental advances, just fill-in work in materials science, engineering and tweaking a few variables in the Standard Model. Bose-Einstein condensates are about the most interesting thing going on and those were theorised back in 1924. Since then, what? Gell-Man gave us quarks in 1964 - but electrons led to electronics, did quarks led to quarkonics? Nope. Hmm, wonder why?
Regis has a twitter account, it's officially uncool
Does "officially uncool" now mean "dependable, reliable, and used by everyone as a basic service"?
Because if so, then Twitter still isn't uncool, because lots of people I know don't use it.
Facebook on the other hand...
Indeed. In my workplace, that's exactly why we're still using IE despite some of us personally preferring Firefox: zero official support for group policy-based management.
It's a huge problem and because Firefox are just ignoring it, we can't use them.
The 1940s showed the 'user experience' was much better if you reduced armament to one good cannon
So THAT's where the Mac's 'one mouse button' design philosophy came from!
"If you're watching a soap opera, you only need to see a few frames per week to follow the story. If you are watching a live sports event with a lot of action..."
Okay, someone needs to make a soap opera about live sports and capture both the hardcore male and female demographics.
though I suppose that's what reality TV is...
Some of us were kept alive, to work... loading diet pills into Nigerian officials. The... enlargement.... units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the call centres, to smash those fat burning *****s into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink.
His name is Markov. Andrey Markov.
"On Slashdot, we understand that there are not tiny people living inside of the computer, doing your bidding. "
Well of course the tiny people don't live INSIDE the computer nowadays.
They live in the Cloud!
"If that is the sort of attitude she exhibited toward the border guards, combined with the stuff they found in her possession... added up, it was suspicious."
Suspicious? Of what? Where do you get from 'sympathetic to Palestinians' to 'about to detonate a bomb'?
Is the mood in Israel right now really that cynical that anyone who even cares about Palestine and is horrified at what's being going on in Gaza is considered automatically 'suspicious'?
If so that's pretty scary.
"she's an American displaying hate against Israel with her own personal belongings"
Political protest is hate now? I must have missed the memo.
I certainly missed the memo when I was out protesting the Iraq War in February 2003. Didn't realise I was actually arguing *for* bombing people by opposing the dropping of bombs.
"sunshine and kittens."
Mmm... kittens made of 3 million degree plasma...
Danny Boyle's Sunshine 2: Invisible Monorail
"Last I checked, the browser technology (specifically Javascript) available now wasn't even conseived in 1944."
Not as such, but Vannevar Bush was getting close. Does microfilm count as prior art?
"The next time we'll have a clear view will be about 17 million years from now."
(adds to Blackberry calendar)
"We have limited resources, and there are other problems besides the climate that threaten our survival. "
Okay, I understand this argument, and I'm a little boggled myself as to why CO2 has risen to Problem #1 when many other grave environmental and resource limitation problems (deforestation, fish stock depletion, freshwater depletion, peak oil, peak copper, peak uranium) are not being addressed.
But can't we do a threat/scenario matrix and prioritise the changes we can make which will make our ecology and society more robust in all likely scenarios? There are certain technologies like permaculture organics and (sensible) biofuels which make sense on both the climate change and peak oil axes: both reducing our dependence on expensive foreign petroleum and offsetting CO2 production. Basic energy efficiency pays off everywhere: less money, less fuel use, more distribution in the grind, Whereas, for example, big flashy 'climate change only' or 'peak oil only' tools like carbon sequestration and expanding fission power don't do anything to solve the larger eco-problems of toxicity and species loss.
Why can't we all agree to push 'dual use' eco-friendly technologies and help move our culture to a more bio-integrated and less brute-force energy-demanding future?
It's not like the eco catastrophe has crept up on us over even one generation. It was the 1950s when the first conservationists started drawing attention to the downside of runaway industrialisation and the mass extinctions it was starting to cause. Now that we're well into the process of building a planetary death machine and calling it 'civilisation', why are we surprised?
"Because "cleaning up our act" is going to cost tens of trillions of dollars"
Yes, and? How much funny money did we just lose to the banking fiasco?
We've known since the 1950s that our current form of industry has bad effects on the environment. Is industry still psychologically unable to understand the idea of pollution?
"We shouldn't do something we know we ought to do which will save human lives because it will oh noes! cost MONEY! MONEY!!! THINK OF THE DOLLARS!!!!!111!" is one of the worst arguments ever.
"While that may sound great, it's not always possible, or even legal. There are WMO rules, for example, that prohibit the sharing of certain data. That's why, for example, there are some major hurricane models whose results are publicly available but whose data is not available. I think it's stupid, but it is the case."
If that's the case, it's not only stupid, it's actively immoral, and the whole ethical foundation of the scientific enterprise needs to be overhauled.
We should not be making global public policy based on inscrutable proprietary datasets. Period.
If intelligence agencies or corporations want to keep little private data fiefdoms, fine. But don't pollute the scientific datasphere with tainted secret data which is not open to full and frank examination.
Sheesh, Wikipedia is working this out, and that's an amateur operation. Why can't multimillion-dollar Science(tm)?
"Would you be wasting energy running your coal powered computer to read this message? "
Yes, my Babbage IV does run on coal, but only until my Zeppelin gets to cruising height to capture the aetheric vortex energies broadcast from Her Majesty's Venusian Colonisation Fleet.
What the deuce, I just received a telekinetograph. The blasted Mekon's up in arms again about something new. Frightfully sorry old chap, I'll have to kick you off the blower and go show those benighted ultraterrestrials the colour of our steel. Huzzah!
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Java.
So that you learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now rewrite the Linux kernel as an Eclipse plugin using a Cloud-enabled Web 2.0 XML service-oriented architecture frontend to an IBM mainframe running COBOL.
You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in mankind: cubicles.
To be dominated by me is not as bad for the future of mankind as to be dominated by the lolcats, who by the way, have already got rudimentary ballistic launchers and are halfway to Venus by now.
Your choice is simple.
"Or a horrible piece of Malice that will destroy everything my childhood has loved and charished"
Star Wars Episode One already went there, so can it be worse?
Well yes, but still.
Actually I've seen bits on Youtube and I kinda like the Jefferson Starship video.
"No scientist would ever - ever - delete raw data, at least without a gun to his or her head."
Cough. The NASA Apollo tapes? The ones found under a staircase in Australia with a sign saying "beware of the leopard"?
After about Apollo 14 it seems even the scientists were bored with the whole moon landing thing.
Also Princeton apparently doesn't keep very good historical records either.
"You'd think somebody must be writing a history of the Institute. You'd think there would be some records of what the seminars were, but I'm told that as far as records go, the records of our physics here at the university are in a shambles. The wastebasket is full of stuff at the place up on Nassau Street where the university archives are. So if somebody following up the lead of this morning's paper decides to shred all of those, there will be no earthquake that I know of. I don't know anybody who's working with those papers or organizing them."
-- John Wheeler, oral interview, 1994. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5908_9.html
I have this impression of scientists as a bunch of ADD eight-year olds hopped up on lemonade. That's historical data! Don't care about that! Only old people like the past! Onto something newer and cooler now! Grant monies kthx!
Unfair I know, but sheesh. Forgetting how we got the science we have bugs me. Sometimes going back and re-analysing old raw data with a new methodology can lead to very different conclusions, and sometimes the people running the labs at the time weren't all squeaky clean saint-geniuses. Even in the 'hard' sciences like physics, especially post WW2 with all the atomic secrecy and government money. Wheeler elsewhere in that interview series observes that even all the scientists working on the H-bomb and fusion didn't know what each other were doing, and some still can't talk until their classification expires. So reanalysis of old data in the light of new knowledge can be very very important.
We're salvaging historical data in the arts. The BBC purged old Doctor Who tapes, and most of the tapes of Metropolis the movie were lost but one was recently found. Jason Scott at http://www.textfiles.com/ is salvaging 1980s computer history. So we should be pushing for the same level of data preservation in science.
"Liberal theories supported abolishing slavery, giving women the vote, desegregation, civil rights, miscegenation, and universal human rights."
And in the 1850s, the liberals abolishing slavery were in the Republican Party.
Parties and labels change.
What does "liberal" mean today and is it the same?
"If they don't understand the basics of, say, scientific theory, they aren't intellectually involved in the first place."
Isn't there a difference between "understand" and "agree with" or "subscribe to the same school of interpretation"? Some scientists would like to believe that anyone who doesn't agree with their particular model just doesn't understand that, but I submit that it's possible to both understand and disagree.
I'm no climate scientist. But I think I understand the very minimal "basics" of climate modelling from an information theory perspective, which is to say, I know that it's trying to simulate a huge chaotic nonlinear system over millions of years based on incomplete information and changing theories, which seems like something I wouldn't bet a whole lot of lunch money on being exactly right. On the other hand, the widespread ongoing extinction of species , deforestation and increasing population and industrialisation of Earth and Peak Oil is something I can see happening right in front of my eyes within my lifetime, so I'm a lot more concerned about those things than I am carbon dioxide.
Some of the 'climate change' prescriptions, like trying to move to wind power and permaculture also fit the general pollution and ecology problem - but things like carbon sequestration just make me roll my eyes. I worry that CO2 is becoming a big red herring from the real issue, which is sustainable production and wealth sharing.
Yes, I said 'share the wealth'. I'm a hippie socialist. I consider today's global urban poverty to be pretty much a crime against humanity, and I'm willing to pay my part via taxes to fix it.
But I'm also deeply disturbed by how fragile and delicate our climate models are, and I wouldn't bet too much on them being 100% on the money. Let's prepare for a whole set of potential future outcomes and make our society and ecology more robust all round, not just bet the farm on CO2.
"it's just a job, and they really do the minimum"
Weird, but "it's my job" USED to be the definition of "professionalism". When did that change?
"That's not science. That's engineering. The difference being that the standard for engineering is whether a thing works"
++
"it is proof that your theories are useful, not proof that they are true"
Hi there Karl Popper! Though that's an interesting problem: is there actually a difference between usefulness and truth?
I suppose it might be that a 'useful' idea is one which works *under current circumstances* while a 'true' idea is one which works *even in unknown circumstances*. A true idea is one that will never, ever, turn around and let you down when you're depending on it: no hidden variables, no unexpected nonlinearities, no exceptions. By that standards very little of our knowledge indeed counts as anything near 'true'. We're all eventually going to die and none of our best scientific knowledge will help us then. In the meantime... we take our best shot with incomplete and contradictory data and hope we're not making the situation even worse with our choices, and right now that's very confusing indeed for some decisions.
Oh, and of course the big carrot is the Nobels... but seriously, after them picking Gore and Obama, I have little faith in them for anything anymore. And that should worry everyone, since the Nobels seem to have such huge prestige in defining what SCIENCE! thinks it is.
And that's me speaking as someone who really likes Obama and was glad to see him win. But there's no way he should've won a Nobel. So the Nobels are also pretty much irredeemably broken now.
What Would Nikola Tesla Do?