Recent content by metacristi

Coming from a former communist country I second the idea you mentioned here, namely the negative (overall) impact of the communist ideology on the development of Science. Lisenkoism is just one aspect here. For example when I was younger I skimmed through some books from the communist era (from...

Theories are 'free creations of the mind', to paraphrase Einstein, and it does not have any importance where they come from (dreams, sudden inspiration, religious beliefs, pondering on the consequences of accepted theories and so on are equally valid sources). What really count in science is the...

If we were to follow rigidly the falsificationist account of what is science then it's metaphysics. But then we should include in the same category superstring theory and so on. Personally I think things are much more complex. There is an interesting article in Scientific American Special...

By the way I was reading a few days ago the comments to this blog post (https://tjoresearchnotes.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/guest-post-on-bohmian-mechanics-by-reinhard-f-werner/), a lot of disagreement there something which could only reinforce in me that perennial question 'Do we really...

One objection heard quite often is that Bohm's theory cannot be made compatible with Relativity in a profound sense, I only stressed that it can at limit if we relax the requirement of Lorentz invariance to apply solely to observations (explicit non locality cannot be used for superluminal...

To conclude Bohm's pilot-wave interpretation is definitely realist in nature. It has some problems (for example it requires a reformulation of SR to admit the absolute simultaneity of all inertial systems, fully possible see for example Cushing 'Philosophical concepts in physics', chapter 23.4...

In the book 'The undivided Universe. An Ontological interpretation of QM' (written together with Hiley) Bohm (chapter 1) writes in non equivocal terms about his goals at this level, namely to provide an ontology to QM. Determinism / indeterminism (usually framed in causality / acausality...

The limits of free speech are usually set in the laws, there is incrimination for lying under oath, calumny, promoting proved harmful treatments and so on. However in the free societies, having a healthy level of secularism, there is no incrimination for blasphemy and this is the sense in which...

Lubos Motl has a good blog entry on this: http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/did-homer-simpson-calculate-correct.html . Unfortunately Homer was off target. Interesting Motl's suggestion that Singh himself is behind the equations written by Homer (if really so I would have expected more from him...

The idea that Nature conspire somehow to produce the results observed in Aspect, Gisin, Zeilinger and so on type of experiments (which do not necessarily involve strong determinism but only the existence of some pre-determinism at Planck level, no counterfactual definiteness in the experiments)...

Einstein's dream is definitely a degenerative scientific program (at least it seems so at this moment in time). But locality (via the idea that nature conspire somehow - strong determinism at Planck level is one radical version - to produce the results seen in Aspect et altri types of...

Well one can still argue that we deal with 'non-classical correlations' without any 'action-at-distance' involved. How can Nature conspire, in non-classical ways, to produce the appearance of action-at-distance is another thing but I wouldn't take lightly the 'conspirational hypothesis'...

He reffers to the usual (widely used) conception of realism which postulate that a Mind Independent Reality is at least in principle knowable, in the sense that it is possible to "describe it in precise words and details". Yet he can be seen as being still a supporter of a form of ontological...

Superdeterminism is basically just another label for strong determinism (no matter the ultimate nature of consciousness), that is if we could 're-run' somehow the Universe from the beginning exactly the same things would happen* (the additional assumption that there are no non-local connections...

The weaker sense of determinism implies that all events have causes (Bohm's interpretation implies primarily this, not necessarily predetermination) whilst the stronger sense implies predetermination of all events (aka strong determinism, superdeterminism etc). Realism is a broad philosophical...