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Dmitry67
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In 1915? (Schwarzschild's solution for the interior of the black hole)
But what happens inside the horizon is not falsifiable...
But what happens inside the horizon is not falsifiable...
Dmitry67 said:In 1915? (Schwarzschild's solution for the interior of the black hole)
But what happens inside the horizon is not falsifiable...
I think he means "the future" in the strict metaphysical sense that "the future" is always yet to be, even if there are events in it that will become "the present".Dmitry67 said:Well, there is a difference.
If I predict that tomorrow day will be 2 hrs shorter for mysterious reasons is falsifiable. Just wait until tomorrow. In fact, you can not provide any contreexample immediately for some theories, so you need to make an experiment - you need some time to prepair it. Even to provide a contreexample you already know from the past experience takes some time, you need to open your mouth and say some words.
So NOTHING is falsifiable IMMEDIATELY, in a t=0 interval.
But for the black hole you will NEVER know... This is a difference...
Dmitry67 said:Well, there is a difference.
If I predict that tomorrow day will be 2 hrs shorter for mysterious reasons is falsifiable. Just wait until tomorrow. In fact, you can not provide any contreexample immediately for some theories, so you need to make an experiment - you need some time to prepair it. Even to provide a contreexample you already know from the past experience takes some time, you need to open your mouth and say some words.
So NOTHING is falsifiable IMMEDIATELY, in a t=0 interval.
But for the black hole you will NEVER know... This is a difference...
Of course. An object that satisfies an equation (or system of equations or other type of condition) is usually called a solution. And the Schwarzschild metric does indeed satisfy Einstein's field equations. (at least in the [itex]0 \neq r \neq 2GM/c^2[/itex] region)Dmitry67 said:Nobody even calls the Schwarzschild (Kerr) equation a HYPOTESIS. It is called a SOLUTION. Feel the difference? :)
Hurkyl said:Of course. An object that satisfies an equation (or system of equations or other type of condition) is usually called a solution. And the Schwarzschild metric does indeed satisfy Einstein's field equations. (at least in the [itex]0 \neq r \neq 2GM/c^2[/itex] region)
Again I can coach another "future hypotheses can't benefit humanity in the past" e.g. we will not today benefit from assuming Maxwell's equations will hold 100years from now.Dmitry67 said:Ok, agreed, this is a good point. Still there is a problem
I agree that some suicidal experimenter can verify the laws of physics inside the black hole (any volunteers?). But the humankind will NEVER benefit from his research.
It is an important rule but not to be used mindlessly. Its purpose in the tool bag of the theoretician is to excise non-operational hypothesizes (such as the existence of a luminiferous ether.) It is perfectly operational to discuss what our hypothetical astronaut would see as he passes into a BH. For this test of operationality it is sufficient that one hypothetical astronaut could in principle test it. Once we agree that this is the case then we needn't actually sacrifice such an astronaut nor require he have the ability to tell us what he's observed. We have shown the hypothesis is operationally meaningful.if we DO accept the falsifiability as an important rule, we should STOP all blah-blah-blah about the interior of the BH until... well, except for the kamikadze researches.
jambaugh said:It is an important rule but not to be used mindlessly. Its purpose in the tool bag of the theoretician is to excise non-operational hypothesizes (such as the existence of a luminiferous ether.) It is perfectly operational to discuss what our hypothetical astronaut would see as he passes into a BH. For this test of operationality it is sufficient that one hypothetical astronaut could in principle test it. Once we agree that this is the case then we needn't actually sacrifice such an astronaut nor require he have the ability to tell us what he's observed. We have shown the hypothesis is operationally meaningful.
It is perfectly operational to discuss what our hypothetical astronaut would see as he passes into an alternative branch of reality. For this test of operationality it is sufficient that one hypothetical astronaut could in principle test it. Once we agree that this is the case then we needn't actually sacrifice such an astronaut nor require he have the ability to tell us what he's observed.
Dmitry67 said:I agree with you. I even think that the importance of that tool is overestimated.
Max Tegmark used this example to illustrate that 'parralel universes' must have at least the same status as the interiors of BH.
In both cases we have gravity/QM operating smoothly Outside of the BH/In out branch of reality.
In both cases nothing magical happens on the Horizon/during the Quantum decoherence. Both processes are described mathematically.
So I can just replace few words in what you had said:...
jambaugh said:1
First explain what you mean by "parallel universes" and explain how to go about getting your astronaut to traverse them.
If you are thinking of something silly like Everett's many worlds then ... well I can say a lot (and have) about that. Everett's many worlds are by definition not operationally meaningful and thus should be called a Everett's many-worlds model instead of an interpretation.
2
We know how to enter a black hole, you just fall in. If you're thinking of a Kerr black hole e.g. worm-hole then there are some issues about crossing the second horizon... but let that be.
In which case his worlds are mathematical constructs and not physical per se...Dmitry67 said:1 Well, in Everetts interpretation Many Worlds is an axiom.
...
Again this "interpretation" is not operational and so should be called "model". I understand quantum decoherence...= irreversible entanglement with the episystem. I wouldn't call "many worlds" a consequence. There is still an implicit assumption=axiom. Decoherence does not contradict the Copenhagen interpretation so it can't be said to imply any other interpretation.I believe in a modern interpretation, Many Worlds based on the Quantum Decoherence
So the Many words are the consequence, not an axiom:
Max Tegmark
http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646v2
Different from what? You are getting "entangled" in counterfactuals. The "you" that does "something" is distinct from the hypothetical " you' " who does "something different". The second can't communicate with the first any more than Tom Sawyer can communicate with me. Tom Sawyer is a fictional character, ...So in order to go into a parralel universe we need to do something different based on the random QM event.
And I assert that "No, a demon can see the future and picks the outcome to be consistent with QM's predictions and what he knows about future experiments on the quantum system ... just because he wants to be nasty...oh yes and he has big red horns and a curly black mustache". How is my hypothesis less non-falsifiable than yours?For example, if I see a dead Shroedinger cat, then another me is watching the alive one.
2 It is an offtopic, but could you explain or point to the right place... what are the problems with the second horizon?
jambaugh said:=Again this "interpretation" is not operational and so should be called "model". I understand quantum decoherence...= irreversible entanglement with the episystem. I wouldn't call "many worlds" a consequence. There is still an implicit assumption=axiom. Decoherence does not contradict the Copenhagen interpretation so it can't be said to imply any other interpretation.
However, decoherence by itself may not give a complete solution of the measurement problem, since all components of the wave function still exist in a global superposition, which is explicitly acknowledged in the many-worlds interpretation. All decoherence explains, in this view, is why these coherences are no longer available for inspection by local observers.
Dmitry67 said:Well,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence
So, after QD we have 1/2 alive cat + 1/2 dead cat. These cats don't interefere.
You have a choice: to assume that both cats do exists (Multiworlds), or to invent some new mechanism (like wavefunction collapse) to explain why the whole universe had randomly but consistently chosen one particular branch.
In that case you whould deal with the Ocamms razor (why do you need it if everything is already explained without it?) Your mechanism will be non local and you will have to answer questions like 'as QD is not immediate, at what moment the second branch dissapear? Why any particular branch is chosen? You say, randomly? What is a probability? Bayesians or Frequentisits? Why? et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...
And why? Why do you need all that weird stuff? Just because the very idea of parralel universes is so weird? because it is so easy to assume that space,or time are infinite, but for some reason we can not aqssume that WE exist in the infinite number of copies?
jambaugh said:The "many worlds" are many worlds of possibility. Its no different from standard classical probability.
Actually no. My view is that both "worlds" are conceptual, symmetry restored. But we pick the conceptual world which fits our experience. Experience is singular and so there's nothing with which to define a symmetry.Dmitry67 said:I am trying to make my posts short as it is not mathematics and words 'space', 'time', 'probability' mean different things for different people. So,
If you see it that way then for you the world in not symmetric, because one branch (say, dead cat) is a 'real' one while another one was just a 'lost opportunity'. For me it is symmetric.
At the quantum level I deny "reality" all together. It is exactly the assumption of an objective reality with objective state which leads to all the problems conceptualizing QM.So your view looks like exactly like a Multi-World observed using a so called frog's view (a view of an observer, as Max Tegmark defines it). We are almost on the same page, you just deny or ignore the 'bird's view' so you analyze only one branch of reality.
jambaugh said:Actually no. My view is that both "worlds" are conceptual, symmetry restored. But we pick the conceptual world which fits our experience. Experience is singular and so there's nothing with which to define a symmetry.
(Actually there is, and that is the covariance group describing the relationship between different observers' experiences. But that again is all within a single reality.)
Dmitry67 said:Interesting. Actually, it was my very first thought when I learned about the Quantum Decoherence.
But then I had decided that if our consciousness chooses somehow one particular path every time then there are 2 options:
1. consciousness of all other humans magically falls into the same path. So we are always 'all together' and there is only one history of the mankind.
2. assumption #1 is too artificial, hence, consicousness of other people who surround us fell into different branches of reality. Hence most of the humans who surround us are P-zombies ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie )
For that reason I decided that our conscious actually split every time (may be qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia is actually a feeling of being split? )
Regards
It seems to me that you've read too many flaky "interpertations" of QM. Study the Copenhagen at least to the point of understanding it before you pick another based on non-issues
Dmitry67 said:Sorry, once enlightened you can not go back to the nightmare of the Copenhagen interpretation :)
I don’t hope I can make you change your mind, I just don’t understand how you can live with such inconsistent theory.
You clam that “My view is that both "worlds" are conceptual, symmetry restored” . Then you say “But we pick the conceptual world which fits our experience. Experience is singular and so there's nothing with which to define a symmetry.”
In the first sentence you claim that it is symmetric, in the second – that our experience is not. So you must introduce some kind of symmetry-breaking mechanism. Otherwise you can not get an asymmetric state from a symmetric one!
Copenhagen is beautifully consistent with the role of science...pay attention to what happens and don't introduce prejudices based on what you think of as "reality".Copenhagen is awful, but at least they have a name of that beast – R-process. In your interpretation I don’t see it at all.
But you must read the first person pronouns in the appropriate context.Regarding the consciousness, I just explicitly named it. You can hide behind the words “we” or “experience” if you believe that the word “consciousness” it too much abused in QM philosophy, but in general it is the same.
Finally, you did not explain how “we” (multiple people with multiple experiences) “pick the conceptual world” consistently, so many people opening the box all experience the same state of cat inside.
jambaugh said:The conceptual states are symmetric=equally imaginary. Neither ceased to exist. Neither conforms exactly to the quantum actuality because both are classical constructs, i.e. object based ontological models. The model doesn't cause the outcome. We pick the model best conforming to actuality. But the mental reality-models are categorically different from the physical actuality. All of them are fictions...but like parables they are useful fictions. Just because we derive truths from Aesop's fables doesn't mean we actually believe that "the crow and the pitcher" or "the fox and the grapes" were historical events.
Copenhagen is beautifully consistent with the role of science...pay attention to what happens and don't introduce prejudices based on what you think of as "reality".
But you must read the first person pronouns in the appropriate context.
Science=Empirical Epistemology
Epistemology=How We come to know.
You can't separate the observer from the language because the language is operational=about what we do.
It is because 1) the physics student begins learning classical physics where the language, although operationally meaningful in the classical domain, is coached in non-operational terms namely objective states of reality... and 2) quantum theory broaching that domain wall requires us to now work in explicit operational terms "what we do" "what we see" that the student can fall into the trap of thinking the "we" are necessary for the physical processes to occur.
Now it is only that quantum theory is explicitly phenomenological in its description and we can't and shouldn't use language which assumes privileged knowledge. We only talk about "what we see and do" or at least "what we can see and can do in principle". It is very hard to step out of the old objective state mind-set. We can invent all sorts of bazaar rationalizations (a.k.a. interpretations) to allow us to preserve it. But to understand QM we must let that go.
Copenhagen in its essence simply says that we don't need any further interpretation beyond the "what we see and do" phenomenology. Probabilities are probabilities of what we will see happen not of states of reality. Mode vectors express modes of production of quantum processes and do not express states of reality of objects.
We experience a "meow" and so reject the model which fails to predict a "meow"
or
We experience a stiff lifeless cat and reject the model which predicts.
But we still remember both models and so both still exist. They existed (in our heads) long before the cat entered the box.
Now let me ask you to reconcile delayed choice experiments with Many-worlds. When does the world split? Similarly there is a time-reversed "delayed choice" call it "advanced choice" when does the world split then?
Finally if we cannot experience these many worlds how can we grant them other than imaginary status in the context of science. How is belief in these worlds other than a religion?
Fine. But it's going to look just like an ordianry analysis:WaveJumper said:Well said. I am also very interested how MWI would address the delayed choice experiment.
jambaugh said:1
Now let me ask you to reconcile delayed choice experiments with Many-worlds. When does the world split? Similarly there is a time-reversed "delayed choice" call it "advanced choice" when does the world split then?
2
Finally if we cannot experience these many worlds how can we grant them other than imaginary status in the context of science. How is belief in these worlds other than a religion?
The key point to remember is that parallel universes are not a theory, but a prediction of certain theories. For a theory to be falsifiable, we need not be able to observe and test all its predictions, merely at least one of them
Fine, now take out Occam's razor and chop away all those MW's and you still have decoherence occurring when the photon interacts with the reception device. Don't work with wave-functions, work with the more general description of density operators which can describe both sharp and non-sharp modes. Decoherence then is just the entropy of the photon increasing (entanglement with environment).Dmitry67 said:In MWI the decoherence occurs when photon hits the reception device. MWI does not have any problem with the 'delay' because in it wavefunction never collapses. In MWI wavefunction has a real physical sense while the particle behaiviour is just a result of the decoherence.
Fine but by the same arguments you get many-worlds with classical probabilities long before QM was ever invented...that is unless you insist on a deterministic clockwork universe. So the primary issue is determinism.(Note that if you observe an outcome of an experiment from very far away, for example, open a box, then you are not decoherenced until you see at least few photons from the box.
Contraqry to Copenhagen with it 'magical' collapse decoherence is a process explained purely using the QM... )
So photon goes thru both slits, hits whatever device, et voila...
If you chose what device will be detecting based on some truly random quantum generator, then you have 2 branches of reality, one with screen and another with 2 telescope.
Finally you get the following branches:
* Branch-Telescopes
*** Photon hit telescope A
*** Photon hit telescope B
* Branch screen
*** Position (X,Y)
*** ... etc etc
2 Max Tegmark answers you question in the following way:
Then he compares the predictions of QM without an explicit wavefunction collapse with how we deal with interiors of the block holes. We can not test directly if GR equations are correct inside the horizon, but as it works everywhere else, so we assume there too.
Another analogy he provides: Hubble spaces. We can not observe what is outside of our cosmological horizon, but we also assume that physical laws work there.
So if we ahve a solution of 2 non-interactive cats, how can we deny the existence of the second one just based on the fact that we can not observe it? Nature provides us a way how we can test the interference when there is no much irreversibility involved, so why should we assume that another branch magically 'dissapear'?
Occam's razor isn't a dynamical law. It can't make a physical system spontaneously jump from one state to another.jambaugh said:Fine, now take out Occam's razor and chop away all those MW's and you still have decoherence occurring when the photon interacts with the reception device.
The key point to remember is that parallel universes are not a theory, but a prediction of certain theories. For a theory to be falsifiable, we need not be able to observe and test all its predictions, merely at least one of them
would be correct if it saidwe need not be able to observe and test all its predictions
but we do need to be able to in principle test any of its predictions.we need not observe and test all its predictions
jambaugh said:That is positively wrong. A theory is falsifiable through its predictions and in no other way. The statement would be correct if it said but we do need to be able to in principle test any of its predictions.
Just as, if I am willing to sacrifice the blood, sweat, and billions of dollars, I can build a super-duper collider to test predictions of the standard model, I can also sacrifice my future by jumping into a black hole to verify the extension of GR into the interior of the event horizon. It is operationally meaningful to talk about what an astronaut might see if he crosses the event horizon of a black hole. We can describe how to go about choosing either to do this or not do this.
But this is mathematics. It is not extrapolation of what is or what happens but rather extension of constructs within our imagination. And we can likewise construct "number systems" which have non-associative addition or arbitrarily weird mathematical universes.Dmitry67 said:P.S. I think there is more fundamental principle.
Mathematics started from the addition of the stones (natural numbers). The reversed operation, substraction, was not "closed", so people invented the negative numbers.
multiplication forced people to invent rational numbers, then irrational and transcendental numbers, then complex numbers.
In all cases we 'extend' or 'extrapolate' what we see here and what we can test to what we can't test.
Certainly. It would be a matter of engineering with known materials (as opposed to say building Larry Niven's ring world which required some super-metal). That and an immense amount of time and resources.You say, billion dollars, super puper colliders, what's about particles at Planks mass? You say that In principle you can build such collider, bigger then solar system? Does that claim have any physical sense?
Nobody plans to jump into a black hole. No articles are delayed until whe have the very first kamikaze astranaut. Instead, we extrapolate GR to what is inside the black hole. In the same way we did for the negative numbers. If it works outside - it works inside!
jambaugh said:Math and science began diverging at that time. Math was understood to be "virtual" and knowledge about mathematical constructs must begin with undefined terms and axioms. Science contrawise developed as an epistemological disciplinedistinct from pure reason.
jambaugh said:Certainly. It would be a matter of engineering with known materials (as opposed to say building Larry Niven's ring world which required some super-metal). That and an immense amount of time and resources.
jambaugh said:Without this restriction the door is open to the wackiest of "theories" and arguments e.g. "how much does God weigh?" and "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin". We've (or most of us) have moved beyond such speculation outside of science's empirical domain.
Falsifiability is a concept in science that states that for a hypothesis or theory to be considered scientific, it must be able to be proven false through empirical observation or experimentation. This means that there must be a way to test the hypothesis and potentially disprove it.
Falsifiability is important because it allows for the advancement of scientific knowledge. By being able to test and potentially disprove hypotheses, scientists can refine their theories and come closer to understanding the truth about the natural world. It also helps to distinguish between scientific and non-scientific claims.
Abandoning falsifiability means that a hypothesis or theory is no longer able to be tested or disproven. This can happen when a theory becomes too vague or broad, making it impossible to design experiments that could potentially disprove it. It can also happen when a theory is so well-supported by evidence that it is considered highly unlikely to be false.
There is ongoing debate about whether or not falsifiability has been abandoned in modern science. Some argue that certain fields, such as psychology and economics, have theories that are difficult to test and potentially unfalsifiable. However, others argue that these theories can still be tested through different methods and that falsifiability is still a crucial aspect of scientific inquiry.
If falsifiability is abandoned, it can lead to a lack of rigor and credibility in scientific research. Without the ability to test and potentially disprove theories, there is a risk of accepting unproven or even false claims as scientific truth. This can also hinder scientific progress and the advancement of knowledge in a particular field.