Laws of Nature workshop: what can we tell from the program?

Marcelo Gleiser is very famous around here. He usually appears to talk about about science in general in the biggest TV networks of my country. He also wrote several books too. But he always insisted on string theory.

So, I am kind of surprised that he forfeited strings, hmm...

 

Thanks again Marcus for bringing attention to interesting things.

Sounds like a really good workshop. I hope that they will put them up as videos afterwards like they sometimes do, I'd be very interested to heard the updated opinions on some of those people and hopefully those that have somewhat contradicting opinons will comment each others talk in a way that can be constructive. I'm happy to see smolin there, I was worried that he abandoned his evolving law idea as there's still no book and no new talks/papers on the topic.

Looking forward to this.

/Fredrik

 

Any of those talks online ? I would love to hear what Unger has to say..

 

They are indeed.

http://pirsa.org/C10001"

EDIT: You might want to add this to the original post for interested readers.

 

I'm surprised more people don't know about PIRSA. It's a great resource and virtually all talks at PI are on there.

Will the book be at at a more technical level? Or is it more directed towards popular science? I'll definitely be checking out their talk now.

Also, I know Rob Spekkens is writing a book on interpretations of quantum mechanics that I hope is published soon.

 

Re: Gravity/gaugefield/Higgs unification bid by Lisi-Smolin-Speziale

Right off the bat, let me state I'm at the University of Waterloo and have spent a bunch of time at PI so I know quite a bit about PIRSA and use it all the time.

As for what angle, I've taken philosophy of science (with Doreen Fraser I might add) and have dabbled into interpretations of quantum mechanics. Check out the course by Emerson and Laflamme which is up on PIRSA. That course has influenced me quite a bit. In fact, I most identify with the viewpoints of Chris Fuchs. I do believe that a solid understanding of the fundamentals of our theories to really understand what is going on. Being able to simply postulate some Lagrangian is all well and good, but I don't think it is always the right path.

As for my interests, I'm still an undergraduate, but I am doing gravitational research right now and am enjoying it quite a lot. As for where I'll end up, who knows. I think it is very important to keep an open mind and being exposed to the vast ways of doing science has been helpful.

 

Indeed it is. I've been very lucky to have an in at PI. It's a great place to work and the people who come through are amazing. It's opened a lot of doors. Same with the IQC. Having both so close to campus is excellent. Especially since I want to do theoretical work, I can interact with the best and brightest. As for gravity research, it's mostly just a simple "do this calculation" type thing, i.e. here is some metric we want to try, go grind through the calculation and see the result. Simple work, but it's somewhere to start. In fact, one of my supervisors is at this conference. For sake of privacy (not that's it hard to work out) I won't mention who.

So as not to derail this topic I watched Smolin/Unger presentation. I was able to follow some of it, but not all. I have very little knowledge of the subject area and many of the problems they bring up I either can't see as problems or am unclear as to why they bring them up. Obviously they are going to publish a book on the subject, but do you know of any literature available to check out?

 

I just got around to to watch this talk!

I'm happy to see that Smolin is still thinking about this, and it was also the first time I've seen Unger. He is an interesting character and his personality seems to be quite different than Smolin's :) Very interesting to see and hear him speak.

Since I've seen the other talks and are already quite tuned in on their main message, for me the most interesting part of the talk was that it revealed a couple of points where Smolin and Unger don't quite agree.

1) It's on the issue to what extent there exists in some sense a priviliged moment of the present, such as a kind "global time" or not. Unger didn't seem to think that these implies such a thing, and I'm personally more with Unger on that point. I think Smolins seems to have a different view here.

What Unger means with "reality of time" is not quite the same thing as thining there is a preferred time or global time. That makes good sense to me, but I have a feeling Smolin has some other idea there which I don't understand how he sees that as consistent with Ungers points.

2) Similary they seemed to a differ a bit is wether the past is more real than the future.

I think it was a good talk, but they did not provide much more progress on how to make this into a new framework than the past talk from Smolin. It seems the main point is still to convey the idea that the old newtonian framework has limitations.

The last talk from smolin on evolving laws, I only listened to the mp3 and didn't see the video, but I detect one voice in the audience, from a lady that this time made an analogy with chess games, and the same voice(?) made a point in the old talk about theories and laws are like tools for interacting with the open subsystem that smolin couldn't elaborate but he said the thought unger might. Was this the same lady like I think? and did they really interpret her question right this time?

I'm not sure who she is, I had a feeling she was a philsopher rather than physicists but I'm interested to know if someone knows who she is, and wether she happens to have some own papers on this.

/Fredrik

 

They sort of presenting philsophical arguments, based on observations about scientific development, also analogies to biology and social theory, that part of the framework that dominates in physics, called the newtonian paradigm, may not be as viable as we think.

But as Smoling also pointed out, this "strategy" implicit in the newtonian scheme, is certainly worth a try! but this is what more or less everyone has been doing up until know, and still this issue with unification of forces as well as qm and gr is still open. There are several problems of current attempts, that originate (in their view) from this "flawed schema". This is the idea of multiverses some people engage into as a way to solve problems, also landscape problems, "initial value problems" etc.

I think before one can appreciate their ideas, one has to somehow see the difficulties of the current scheme, and their idea is that MAYBE alot of the problems are due to that the scheme is wrong.

I've read all Smolins books and listed to only some of this talks. Maybe only one talk isn't enough. But another one is this one: http://pirsa.org/08100049/

It's the "old" talk I referred to in my previous post.

/Fredrik

 

If anyone else wants to be sherlock, I just checked the time stamps and the female in the audience is

1) on the video at 01:17:46 on the latest video.
2) on 49:55 on the mp3 of the the the old "evolution of time" talk

Maybe it's two different persons, but my ear and the type of question suggested it is was possibly the same person?

/Fredrik

 

The first talk (i.e. the latest talk) it looks like Jenann Ismael.

 

Thanks! I checked her website http://homepage.mac.com/centre.for.time/ismael/ [Broken]

I skimmed some of her papers and it seems to be more pure philosphy, rather than just using sound philosophical arguments as a guide to reconstruct a new mathematical framwork.

(Compare to E.T JAynes work for reconstructing the axioms of probability in his book "Probability theory - the logic of science"; that is still a "philosophical book" in my view, but not PURE philsophy, it's still physics and mathematics).

I wonder how much mathematics that are in Roberto Unger's work. After all, any quantiative prediction, must incorporate computations somehow. I'd be quite interested to see what mathematical formalism that would follow from Ungers pretty clear verbal reasoning.

I think we need to combine the skills of beeing able to perform a sound analysis of the situation with the skill of beeing translate that into some kind of mathematical models; even if it's not of the eternal rigid type that they object to.

/Fredrik

 

I'm not sure which arhives to look for this work? I guess what I hope to find is a mathematical model for social interactions including decision theory of the individuals or something like that?

I found he has some websites

(1) http://www.robertounger.com/
- I'm not sure if it's my connection or a temporary problem but almost all links on that page are broken? I get nothing out of it.

(2) http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/
- but that pages loads empty for me? maybe it's a sevier problem?

(3) http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/index.html?id=75
- there are some references to books and such but I find no online material for skimming.

Does anyone know what a "social theorist" do? Do they work out mathematical models for group dynamics for computer simulations of groups, societies, economical systems etc? What archives would one find that?

/Fredrik