nabuco said:
Well, I don't claim I understand what is going on, I just think it makes sense to think QM is not telling us there's something fundamentally strange about the universe that we couldn't have known otherwise.
If by "otherwise" you mean experimental observation of phenomona, for me QM certainly adds to the consternation. I can directly observe the duality of light, but then QM goes on to describe it in bizarre probablistic functions. I didn't know before QM that all light and matter exist in various degrees of indeterminism.
In fact, I suspect what QM may be doing is provide a formal proof of our complete inability to understand the world without making unjustified assumptions.
As far as I understand it, the whole of physics is a mathematical construct. I never believed those physical entities called laws, forces, fields, and so on, had any reality to them, I always thought of them as abstractions.
Well, certainly the "word" is not the "thing", but when you say "cat", that's also an abstraction, but you know cats exist. Ditto for gravity, magnetism, etc.
I still remember, in grade school, when our teacher told us that bodies in motion will remain in motion forever unless a force acts on them. I thought that couldn't be true as it went against our ordinary experience of motion, in which things always stop by themselves. He then explained that things stop because of "friction", and even as a child I immediately understood that sometimes you have to invent a fictitious entity to maintain the validity of a fictitious law. It's a wonder that it all works so well, but I still think of the whole structure of physics as nothing but a very clever fiction.
Umm, "friction" is no more fictitious than momentum. If I throw a brick at your head, will you duck, or assert the fiction of the situation? Abstractions are not the same thing as fictions.
It's not a problem of failed imagination, I see it as the result of a very powerful one. Just think what Newton would do if he thought as I did as a child: as soon as he came up with his laws of motion he would think, "nah, this doesn't make any sense unless I invent some additional entities to account for the cases when the laws don't hold, and that would not be right".
This wasn't the case in your example regarding momentum. Friction was not invented as a fudge factor. Friction is the "force that acts on them" that was specifically accounted for in Newton's law.
I do see you point, however, and dark matter and dark energy might turn out to be as fictitious as ether.
So physics is a big pile of laws that are just the product of human imaginations, plus a lot of purely imaginary entities that are required to account for the cases where the laws would otherwise not hold. I'm quite sure the photon is such an imaginary entity. (notice that I mean "imaginary" in the sense that friction is imaginary; the effects of an imaginary entity can be quite real if you assume their existence)
You don't seem to be distinguishing between abstractions like friction and photon, which describe observables, and things like string theory which is far removed from what we can feel confident about.
I hope you can have an idea from the above. Mostly, once we lost the ability to see what we are dealing with (the atomic level), all we were left with was the ability to make assumptions.
If you mean see with the naked eye, I think that's over-doing it. For example, I feel pretty confident that electron microscopes are actually telling us real things at the atomic level. There is a point though, where assumptions are being made which will eventually be overturned. That's integral to learning.
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At a minimum you have to admit that science only explains the universe in general principles; in practice most problems are too complex to be approached scientifically.
Our current scientific explanation of the universe is certainly incomplete, but it is evolving. I'm wary of things that people say are "unknowable", or require "faith". It usually means that applying science would be stepping on a belief system.
I'd say science can be applied to problems of nearly any complexity. It's only when aspects of the problem are intangible (i.e. intergalactic space, additional dimensions, etc.) where science struggles most. I have no doubt that someday the mind will be fully understood, measured, modeled, even though the brain presents a hideous complexity. Consider the progress so far.
But that is only because you are confused. There is a perspective from which it is silly to worry about this stuff, except as an intellectual pastime. But here we're leaving the territory of physics and going into something far more important.
Ya, but as it turns out, this stuff affects my view of my existence as much as classical physics, evolution, neurology, etc. have shaped who I am. I've tried the "don't worry, be happy" approach, and I find it useful in bursts, but as unmaintainable as other theologies I've tried. You're right, of course, this begins to digress, but it does state why I care about QM, and its interpretations.
Fully in agreement with what you write.
