Modern Physics Understood as an Unrecognized Kuhnian Revolution

[RUTA]

People often claim on Physics Forums and in the foundations community proper that quantum mechanics is “incomplete.” Indeed, Lee Smolin recently wrote [1, p. xvii]:
I hope to convince you that the conceptual problems and raging disagreements that have bedeviled quantum mechanics since its inception are unsolved and unsolvable, for the simple reason that the theory is wrong. It is highly successful, but incomplete.
What motivated Smolin to make this claim is the same reason that Einstein thought quantum mechanics was incomplete, i.e., quantum mechanics doesn’t provide values for unmeasured observables, which is called “no counterfactual definiteness” (see this Insight on Zeilinger’s delayed choice experiment and Hardy’s device or this...

Continue reading...

 

[fresh_42]

Interesting read and certainly worth a discussion. I'll have to say that English isn't my nature language, so I might have misunderstandings and certainly a lack of expression in my answers.

However, I do not see how you deduced a paradigm shift, i.e. it remains unrecognized by me. Yourself closes with (only one quotation of many I could have cited):

What I’m sharing in this Insight and its many citations is the way I reveal an underlying coherence and integrity of modern physics to my students.

But isn't coherence an indicator, if not the definition of a constant paradigm? The only trace of a possible shift I could find is Wilczek’s "all-at-once-view", which to me sounds a bit like a resignation, i.e. raising the status quo in the rank of a revolution. This would in my opinion contradict Kuhn's concept fundamentally, as you can apply such a perspective to any paradigm, and so redefine the evolution of science by a sequence of revolutions without times in between, instead of a sequence of periods with constant paradigm.

 

[EPR]

Excellent post. I envy your strong physics background but sadly you are no neuroscientist and will not further this inquiry into the relevant field. The world we see is mostly created - colors, taste, smell, cold and hot, tones we "hear" etc. are all brain inventions - phobias, manias and higher order brain states are inventions too. It's tempting to think of the outside world in terms of those easily available everyday brain inventions but as you've noticed(and the whole of the physics foundations community) - it's just plain wrong. The world is not naively classical.

When the brain lacks information(99% of the time), it supplements it with confabulations and inventions generated by itself. The brain tends to show a strong ability to generate confabulations out of electromagnetic frequencies('colors'), chemical reactions('taste', 'smell'), energy and speed of moving particles('temperature')... etc. We are just scratching the surface of the relationship between the sensation of how 'matter' arises and what matter really is(interpretation-dependent nowadays). While 'matter' seems different under scrutiny, so does everything else we perceive - cold/hot/'color'/taste/sounds etc.
In other words, we do not discover reality objectively, but we largely invent it subjectively. It is subject to the neural apparatus of the organism and much less a body of objective knowledge of a classical reality.

 

[EPR]

It's almost funny that scientists put great efforts into finding color and they find no color but electromagnetic frequency. They look for sound and they find no sound but periodic oscillations of air pressure. They look for heat but find different kinetic energies. They look for matter and they find no hard matter to speak of but Hilbert spaces, degrees of freedom and abstract mathematical descriptions... Representation is not a copy of the environment, nothing in the environment is what it seem under scrutiny. Look around in your room - there isn't 1 object that is what it naively appears to the senses you speak of. It's safe to say that no matter how brilliant a physicst you are, you will never understand the 'physics' without understanding how the brain operates.

 

[RUTA]

It's almost funny that scientists put great efforts into finding color and they find no color but electromagnetic frequency. They look for sound and they find no sound but periodic oscillations of air pressure. They look for heat but find different kinetic energies. They look for matter and they find no hard matter to speak of but Hilbert spaces, degrees of freedom and abstract mathematical descriptions... Representation is not a copy of the environment, nothing in the environment is what it seem under scrutiny. Look around in your room - there isn't 1 object that is what it naively appears to the senses you speak of. It's safe to say that no matter how brilliant a physicst you are, you will never understand the 'physics' without understanding how the brain operates.

Read chapters 7 and 8 of our book Beyond the Dynamical Universe. See also this paper. We discuss at length the hard problem and do not fall into the physicalist camp.

 

[EPR]

Thanks for the links. I find it strange that someone as brilliant as Einstein would fight to recover the 'world' of the senses(the epr debate) - how naive of him... This is the same as trying to recover the notion of 'color' from physics and then failing. Of course you can't recover 'smell' either or even the 'Moon' or the 'cat'. The closeset true picture of the outside world today is that of QFT and the emergence of classicality within the limit of the knowable. If a tree fell in the forest... no it never made a sound. There could have been air pressure waves(at most). We as observers cannot detach ourselves from the environment for we the observer are the environment as such. Einstein was no doubt a strong mind but fell miserbaly in the naive realism trap. No wonder Bohr won that one easily even by introducing hard to reconcile concepts such as 'particles'(which are not really there and aren't really 'moving'), nonlocality, unrealism etc.

 

[PeroK]

Thanks for the links. I find it strange that someone as brilliant as Einstein would fight to recover the 'world' of the senses(the epr debate) - how naive of him... This is the same as trying to recover the notion of 'color' from physics and then failing. Of course you can't recover 'smell' either or even the 'Moon' or the 'cat'. The closeset true picture of the outside world today is that of QFT and the emergence of classicality within the limit of the knowable. If a tree fell in the forest... no it never made a sound. There could have been air pressure waves(at most). We as observers cannot detach ourselves from the environment for we the observer are the environment as such. Einstein was no doubt a strong mind but fell miserbaly in the naive realism trap. No wonder Bohr won that one easily even by introducing hard to reconcile concepts such as 'particles'(which are not really there and aren't really 'moving'), nonlocality, unrealism etc.

The arrogance of this post is astonishing!

 

[EPR]

I didn't mean to belittle the great accomplishments of a genius like Einstein to society and science. Yet it stikes me that he also said "We can't solve problems by using the same thinking which created them". We are trapped in the past successes of classical physics and its inherent limitations and this creeps up everywhere. That being said, Einstein was a genius. Everyone is wrong sometimes.

 

[RUTA]

To be honest, I'm surprised by the topics posted in response to this Insight. In all the publications linked therein, my colleagues and I are pointing out epistemological facts (like Einstein's quote), empirical facts (like the light postulate and violation of Bell's inequality), and mathematical facts (like average-only conservation in recovering the QM correlation function for the Bell states). From there, we simply show how all these facts can be reconciled by assuming adynamical explanation (via stationary action or conservation principles, for example) is fundamental to dynamical explanation (via causal mechanisms acting in time-evolved fashion); this is also a fact, whether you choose to subscribe to it or not. In other words, our point is simply an analytic truth that brings coherence and integrity to modern physics. Nonetheless, it is revolutionary to consider adynamical constraints as fundamental to dynamical laws. Two of our book reviewers admitted they could not consider such a radical deviation from Newtonian mechanistic thinking, for example. That's all the Insight is summarizing, I wasn't trying to provoke historical debate or discussion about the hard problem of consciousness, at least not here

 

[DarMM]

Thanks for the links. I find it strange that someone as brilliant as Einstein would fight to recover the 'world' of the senses(the epr debate) - how naive of him... This is the same as trying to recover the notion of 'color' from physics and then failing. Of course you can't recover 'smell' either or even the 'Moon' or the 'cat'. The closeset true picture of the outside world today is that of QFT and the emergence of classicality within the limit of the knowable. If a tree fell in the forest... no it never made a sound. There could have been air pressure waves(at most). We as observers cannot detach ourselves from the environment for we the observer are the environment as such. Einstein was no doubt a strong mind but fell miserbaly in the naive realism trap. No wonder Bohr won that one easily even by introducing hard to reconcile concepts such as 'particles'(which are not really there and aren't really 'moving'), nonlocality, unrealism etc.

Two points:

First: None of this stuff about the world of the senses or conciousness really has anything much to do with @RUTA 's insight.

Second: I think you're really underselling the minimalism of what Einstein was hoping for here. He wasn't hoping that under QM there was some world corresponding to intuitive human perception. Rather in Copenhagen QM (generalizing a bit to modern terminology) we have as a primitive element:
$$Tr\left(\rho E\right)$$
The probability for some macroscopic system to react in manner $E$ (represented mathematically by a POVM element) due to the influence of a microscopic system, our knowledge of which is encapsulated in $\rho$. Obviously it is very odd to only have a description of the microscopic in terms of reactions in the macroscopic. All Einstein was looking for was a description of the microscopic itself.

 

[DennisN]

In other words, we do not discover reality objectively, but we largely invent it subjectively. It is subject to the neural apparatus of the organism and much less a body of objective knowledge of a classical reality.

...yet I, you, all other humans, all other animals and all inanimate objects are perceived as attaining the same acceleration (disregarding drag) when freely falling from a higher position to the ground. That seems pretty objective to me; gravity, as only one example, does not seem to have anything at all to do with any neural apparatus of organisms.

But,

None of this stuff about the world of the senses or conciousness really has anything much to do with @RUTA 's insight.

...so I won't comment on this any further.

 

[bhobba]

To be honest, I'm surprised by the topics posted in response to this Insight. In all the publications linked therein, my colleagues and I are pointing out epistemological facts (like Einstein's quote), empirical facts (like the light postulate and violation of Bell's inequality), and mathematical facts (like average-only conservation in recovering the QM correlation function for the Bell states).

I made no comment because I also believe, like Einstein did, QM is incomplete eg nobody believes the standard model is valid beyond the Plank Scale. There are other reasons as well - what the Dickens is going on when not observed - QM it's silent on it. It may be nature is just like that - but the history of science shows things that are not known are usually eventually clarified. Of course that often leaves other issues as well.

Thanks
Bill

 

[RUTA]

I made no comment because I also believe, like Einstein did, QM is incomplete eg nobody believes the standard model is valid beyond the Plank Scale. There are other reasons as well - what the Dickens is going on when not observed - QM it's silent on it. It may be nature is just like that - but the history of science shows things that are not known are usually eventually clarified. Of course that often leaves other issues as well.

Thanks
Bill

Hi Bill, hope you're staying safe!

There are certainly those who believe QM will turn out to be like thermodynamics, which worked very well and was later "explained" by stat mech. Someday we will realize that QM is just a theory that predicts behavior "on average," like temperature and pressure, via "principles." Stat mech explains the principles of thermodynamics using laws of motion for the individual constituents. Einstein called this the difference between "principle" and "constructive" theories. Here is a famous quote from Einstein:

We can distinguish various kinds of theories in physics. Most of them are constructive. They attempt to build up a picture of the more complex phenomena out of the materials of a relatively simple formal scheme from which they start out. Thus the kinetic theory of gases seeks to reduce mechanical, thermal, and diffusional processes to movements of molecules—i.e., to build them up out of the hypothesis of molecular motion. When we say that we have succeeded in understanding a group of natural processes, we invariably mean that a constructive theory has been found which covers the processes in question.

Along with this most important class of theories there exists a second, which I will call “principle-theories.” These employ the analytic, not the synthetic, method. The elements which form their basis and starting-point are not hypothetically constructed but empirically discovered ones, general characteristics of natural processes, principles that give rise to mathematically formulated criteria which the separate processes or the theoretical representations of them have to satisfy.

Thus the science of thermodynamics seeks by analytical means to deduce necessary conditions, which separate events have to satisfy, from the universally experienced fact that perpetual motion is impossible. The advantages of the constructive theory are completeness, adaptability, and clearness, those of the principle theory are logical perfection and security of the foundations.

The theory of relativity belongs to the latter class.

In my Insights on Bell state entanglement and the Mermin device, I'm just supplying a "principle" for that QM phenomenon -- conservation per no preferred reference frame -- an articulation of empirical and mathematical facts. You can actually derive the Bell states from that principle, just like you can derive time dilation and length contraction from no preferred reference frame (whence the postulates of SR). Physicists have long since abandoned a constructive explanation of the light postulate and have become content with its explanatory power. Likewise, we may never find a concordant constructive explanation of "conservation per no preferred reference frame," in which case we will just have to be content with its explanatory power :-)

 

[bhobba]

Hi Bill, hope you're staying safe!

Hi Ruta

Nice to hear from you.

We are doing very well out here in Australia because we took strong action early, and didn't have active cases nobody knew about very early on. The studies in California about those with antibodies was eye opening. At the moment our R0 is very very low - nearly 0. But of course you can still get local outbreaks, and when that happens - watch out:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw...ralled-at-newmarch-house-20200507-p54qq8.html

Getting back to the physics - yes there is, IMHO, likely another theory underlying QM, but I am not so sure it will be in terms Einstein would like - we will need to wait and see,

I have now read your paper, and yes it is interesting. Regarding the speed of light thing it is often difficult to get across to newbies the speed of light occurring in the theory is simply the fixing of a constant that occurs naturally. It's the speed of light for all sorts of experimental and theoretical reasons, but light isn't really what the theory is about.

Thanks
Bill

 

[evi7538]

most fundamental fact about our dynamical “sense experiences” is that they cannot provide a favored perspective on the “real external world,” not that they are explicable in dynamical fashion. And, as it turns out, that means our dynamical “sense experiences” are only fundamentally explicable in adynamical fashion

There is no doubt about that. The question is: what existential/ontic modality could we ascribe to these invariants? In other words, do they exist as any physical realities or any real modalities of external physical reality, or are they only invariants of mathematical models describing the reality, or perhaps being used in computing the sense experiences (for example in computational or theoretic-informational ontological interpretations)? Is the adynamical 4D universe real, or is it only a very convenient to use mathematical model that removes confusions and inconsistencies in our understanding? In the latter case the invariants do not represent any ontic modalities of the external reality, they only serve as means to preserve a certain consistency in the patterns of dynamical sense experiences. Understanding them as ontic modalities of physical reality is definitely possible and very appealing, but it is not the only alternative. My personal preference is not to draw any ontic conclusions and not to ascribe any mathematical constructs as real modalities to the external physical reality until there is a sound experimental evidence of their real existence (which I don't see to be possible for any mathematical concept in physics).

 

[RUTA]

There is no doubt about that. The question is: what existential/ontic modality could we ascribe to these invariants? In other words, do they exist as any physical realities or any real modalities of external physical reality, or are they only invariants of mathematical models describing the reality, or perhaps being used in computing the sense experiences (for example in computational or theoretic-informational ontological interpretations)? Is the adynamical 4D universe real, or is it only a very convenient to use mathematical model that removes confusions and inconsistencies in our understanding? In the latter case the invariants do not represent any ontic modalities of the external reality, they only serve as means to preserve a certain consistency in the patterns of dynamical sense experiences. Understanding them as ontic modalities of physical reality is definitely possible and very appealing, but it is not the only alternative. My personal preference is not to draw any ontic conclusions and not to ascribe any mathematical constructs as real modalities to the external physical reality until there is a sound experimental evidence of their real existence (which I don't see to be possible for any mathematical concept in physics).

You might be interested in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339697133_Re-Thinking_the_World_with_Neutral_Monism_Removing_the_Boundaries_Between_Mind_Matter_and_Spacetime my colleague and I just finished for a special issue of Entropy, "Models of Consciousness." I'm the physics half of the team, but the hard problem of consciousness long ago convinced me that science wasn't sufficient to finish my worldview :-)

 

[evi7538]

You might be interested in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339697133_Re-Thinking_the_World_with_Neutral_Monism_Removing_the_Boundaries_Between_Mind_Matter_and_Spacetime my colleague and I just finished for a special issue of Entropy, "Models of Consciousness." I'm the physics half of the team, but the hard problem of consciousness long ago convinced me that science wasn't sufficient to finish my worldview :-)

Thank you, RUTA, this is a very interesting paper, your attempt to bring together the radical empiricism of W. James with the adynamical 4D blockworld approach to physics is very appealing and makes a lot of sense. Apparently I did not understand your treatment of adynamical global constraints in my previous post, I now have a better understanding.

I do have one question though regarding the first philosophical part of the paper. In your representation the most ontologically fundamental level of reality is the “Neutral Pure Presence”, which you interchangeably call “formless consciousness”. Bit does not it make your platform to be implicitly idealistic, not in the traditional sense of idealistic monism, but as a sort-of a more contemporary reformulation of it? I understand that calling it “neutral monism” would be more consistent with historical development of James/Russel’s philosophy which they themselves positioned as “neutral”. Still, claiming that the Neutral Pure Presence is not inherently “mental” does not automatically make it entirely “neutral”. Yes, it is neutral with respect to the traditionally understood dichotomy of material and mental. However, it is still “consciousness”, or more precisely, “awareness” as an ever-present invariant or substratum of any conscious experience. Obviously, there must be a common most fundamental "substratum" to all POs for them to be able to interact, and your choice of the substratum seems to be the "Presence", "formless awareness", rather than some other kind of noumenal substratum of unknown entirely neutral nature. This is a very natural parsimony to adapt because, first, it does not call for any additional hypothetic metaphysical reality other than what we already have available in the empirical data of conscious experience, and second, it would otherwise run again into the hard problem of consciousness requiring an explanation of how awareness with its ability to experience qualia could emerge from a neutral substratum that lacks any awareness. But would not it bias your platform towards idealistic monism rather than towards the neutral one? Of course the question is purely linguistic and there is nothing wrong with calling it neutral, it’s just a matter of more clear positioning of your view within a proper category of ontologies.

On another note, the Neutral Pure Presence ontology based on radical empiricism is not new, in fact it is very ancient with origins in early Buddhism and particularly in the Dzogchen school of Buddhism. In case if you don't know that already, you would be amazed to find how similar the worldview outlined in the ancient Dzogchen texts (such as Longchen Rabjam’s “The Treasury of Dharmadhatu” or "The Treasury of Abiding") is to W. James worldview, although of course they are presented in the framework of entirely different cultural content with entirely different practical purposes (which is spiritual practice as opposed to philosophical study for W. James). The core point of Dzogchen (and Buddhism in general) was that the empiricism and the Neutral Pure Presence (which is called “Rigpa” in Dzogchen) is not only a more adequate cognitive way of perceiving the reality, but it is also psychologically beneficial and spiritually transformative. This due to the fact that the sense of separate self (as a seeming subject of the experience of seeming objects), which is a cognitive basis of ego with its complex of egoic behavioral patterns, gets dispelled and transcended with clear understanding of its nature as simply a fabricated mental construct that does not refer to any actually existent entity of a "separate self". Disintegration of a false sense of separate self and discovering the underlying unity and non-duality of the reality of the Neutral Pure Presence leads to the disintegration of the egoic mentality and egoic cognitive and behavioral patterns in the course of the spiritual practice.

The Western philosophy rediscovered it in the works of Hume, James, Mach and Russel, although approaching it from purely philosophical point of view. But there have not been any attempts to reconcile this ontology with physics until recent years. Your variant is one of them and it looks very promising. The other one is Donald Hoffman’s conscious realism with his theory and mathematical model of interacting conscious agents, but he tries to use a different mathematical platform.

 

[RUTA]

I have to agree that NPP strikes me as somewhat more "mental" than "physical," since as you point out it represents "experience" even though it is "bare." Silberstein and I also acknowledge the ideas ancestry in Eastern philosophy. That is only briefly mentioned in this last paper, but we provide much more on that in our book "Beyond the Dynamical Universe." I'm the physicist on the project, so I'm probably too philosophically naive to comment further :-)

 

[Elias1960]

Thanks for the links. I find it strange that someone as brilliant as Einstein would fight to recover the 'world' of the senses(the epr debate) - how naive of him... This is the same as trying to recover the notion of 'color' from physics and then failing.

The quote seems a little bit out of context, thus, creates an IMHO misleading impression. One should not forget that at that time positivism/empiricism was much stronger, it was, essentially, the establishment philosophy. So he concedes what has to be conceded to the empiricists, namely that without any sense experiences science would be dead. But then what follows inside is essentially the modern, Popperian priority of theory:

As a matter of fact, we are dealing with freely formed concepts, which, with a certainty sufficient for practical use, are intuitively connected with complexes of sense experiences in such a manner that, in any given case of experience, there is no uncertainty as to the applicability or non-applicability of the statement. The essential thing is the aim to represent the multitude of concepts and theorems, close to experience, as theorems, logically deduced and belonging to a basis, as narrow as possible, of fundamental concepts and fundamental relations which themselves can be chosen freely (axioms).

 

[RUTA]

Please refer only to Open Access sources.

See "Re-Thinking the World with Neutral Monism: Removing the Boundaries Between Mind, Matter, and Spacetime" we just published in a Special Issue of Entropy, "Models of Consciousness." Hopefully they fix some typos and put me back into the Dept of Physics soon :-)

 

[Elias1960]

With that understanding of consciousness and physics, we can posit the following axiomatic basis for physics: ...
Axiom 2: For all of physics, the perceptions of any particular PO do not provide a privileged perspective of the Physical. This is known as “no preferred reference frame” (NPRF).

So you want to exclude all the theories of physics which have a preferred frame from physics? Really?

Moreover, this is done based on a trick. Theories with a preferred frame can as well be formulated in a covariant way (Kretschmann's objection) so that they don't favor particular POs too.

 

[RUTA]

So you want to exclude all the theories of physics which have a preferred frame from physics? Really?

Moreover, this is done based on a trick. Theories with a preferred frame can as well be formulated in a covariant way (Kretschmann's objection) so that they don't favor particular POs too.

All we do is organize empirical and mathematical facts into a particular explanatory hierarchy. You are free to choose another hierarchy and/or choose other names for those facts, but you cannot ignore the facts.

 

[Elias1960]

All we do is organize empirical and mathematical facts into a particular explanatory hierarchy. You are free to choose another hierarchy and/or choose other names for those facts, but you cannot ignore the facts.

The fact is that Kretschmann's objection shows that theories with a preferred frame don't have to favor particular POs too. This is a fact, and it is you who ignores it.

The naming convention shows that the aim is to reject theories with a preferred frame.

To "organize" something "into a particular explanatory hierarchy" sounds quite innocent too, but behind it is the downgrading of the established scientific explanations and their replacement by "explanations" which no classical physicist would have accepted as an explanations.

Given that the replacement of religious, astrological and other mystical "explanations" by explanations which fulfill scientific standards (which you name "dynamical") was an essential and important part of the scientific revolution itself, your attempt to revert to downgrade those scientific explanations raises my suspicion that it is anti-scientific.

 

[RUTA]

The fact is that Kretschmann's objection shows that theories with a preferred frame don't have to favor particular POs too. This is a fact, and it is you who ignores it.

The naming convention shows that the aim is to reject theories with a preferred frame.

To "organize" something "into a particular explanatory hierarchy" sounds quite innocent too, but behind it is the downgrading of the established scientific explanations and their replacement by "explanations" which no classical physicist would have accepted as an explanations.

Given that the replacement of religious, astrological and other mystical "explanations" by explanations which fulfill scientific standards (which you name "dynamical") was an essential and important part of the scientific revolution itself, your attempt to revert to downgrade those scientific explanations raises my suspicion that it is anti-scientific.

Do you think the postulates of SR are anti-scientific? We’re simply advocating a principle approach to physics a la that of SR. See this https://sciencemetro.com/news/what-do-most-people-misunderstand-about-einsteins-theory-of-relativity/. You may disagree with the approach, but it is based strictly on empirical and mathematical facts, just like SR. I think most physicists consider SR to be legitimate science.

 

[PeterDonis]

To "organize" something "into a particular explanatory hierarchy" sounds quite innocent too, but behind it is the downgrading of the established scientific explanations and their replacement by "explanations" which no classical physicist would have accepted as an explanations.

Given that the replacement of religious, astrological and other mystical "explanations" by explanations which fulfill scientific standards (which you name "dynamical") was an essential and important part of the scientific revolution itself, your attempt to revert to downgrade those scientific explanations raises my suspicion that it is anti-scientific.

Do you think the postulates of SR are anti-scientific?

Everyone, please bear in mind that forum rules do not allow claims or arguments about one particular interpretation being "right" or "wrong" or "scientific" or "anti-scientific". Technically we are talking about interpretations of SR at the moment, not QM, but the same principle applies.

 

[Elias1960]

Everyone, please bear in mind that forum rules do not allow claims or arguments about one particular interpretation being "right" or "wrong" or "scientific" or "anti-scientific".

Do you think the postulates of SR are anti-scientific?

No. What I suspect to be anti-scientific is not the spacetime interpretation, which is, as well as the Lorentzian interpretation, a legitimate interpretation. It is also not to start to develop some theory based on principles. Principle theories are legitimate physical theories, and may be very helpful.

What I suspect to be anti-scientific is the attempt to redefine the meaning of explanation. Is "this was in agreement with the position of Venus and Saturn at the date of his birth" an explanation? It is certainly not what you name a "dynamical explanation". You argue to extend the class of acceptable explanations. And I have yet been unable to identify anything in your extended class of explanations which would exclude astrological explanations.

I hope you understand that I classify attempts to revive the legitimacy of astrological explanations as anti-scientific. You are not explicitly doing it, and I don't suspect that you want to do such things. But I think this would be a side effect, and an unavoidable one given the general criteria which makes explanations acceptable in your approach. (Which don't exist, or at least I have not been able to identify them.)

Essentially, this is my challenge to your approach to explanations: Explain how your approach rejects astrological explanations. Given that the traditional scientific rejection (no dynamical explanation) no longer works, this is at least a problem of your generalization which you have to solve. Not?

 

[RUTA]

No. What I suspect to be anti-scientific is not the spacetime interpretation, which is, as well as the Lorentzian interpretation, a legitimate interpretation. It is also not to start to develop some theory based on principles. Principle theories are legitimate physical theories, and may be very helpful.

What I suspect to be anti-scientific is the attempt to redefine the meaning of explanation. Is "this was in agreement with the position of Venus and Saturn at the date of his birth" an explanation? It is certainly not what you name a "dynamical explanation". You argue to extend the class of acceptable explanations. And I have yet been unable to identify anything in your extended class of explanations which would exclude astrological explanations.

I hope you understand that I classify attempts to revive the legitimacy of astrological explanations as anti-scientific. You are not explicitly doing it, and I don't suspect that you want to do such things. But I think this would be a side effect, and an unavoidable one given the general criteria which makes explanations acceptable in your approach. (Which don't exist, or at least I have not been able to identify them.)

Essentially, this is my challenge to your approach to explanations: Explain how your approach rejects astrological explanations. Given that the traditional scientific rejection (no dynamical explanation) no longer works, this is at least a problem of your generalization which you have to solve. Not?

Our approach is based on empirical facts, just like special relativity. Everyone measures the same value for Planck's constant h regardless of their SG magnet orientations relative to the source --> "average-only" conservation. Everyone measures the same value for the speed of light c regardless of their velocity relative to the source --> time dilation and length contraction.

I don't study astrology, so I don't know what empirical principles they advocate and what follows from those principles observationally.