Philosophy Now Forum

Compatible..?

Quantum mechanics does not commit to an ontology at least in the Copenhagen interpretation where uncertainty and probability rule rather than the classical mechanics of Einstein and Newton, relativity does, that's another reason it is not currently possible to unify general relativity and QM in a particle model, but possible to do so in a probabilistic wave model, hence field theory.

As regards the ontology of GR thread, is there any indication that either GR or QM are wrong, what are they and do you think other interpretations will solve the classical/stochastic problem or will a better understanding of Higgs, assuming what we are currently seeing is a Higgs boson of course, there is no certainty even there..?

blagg can you answer a question for me please .are black hole centres eventless and if so are they the centres relative..if you dont know please speculate.

I'm not sure that GR demands any ontological commitment. Although the field equations are expressed in terms of distortions in the 'fabric' of (Minkowski 4D) spacetime, you don't need to believe that the fabric exists for the equations to work. Newton made essentially that point by declaring 'hypotheses non fingo' with regards to his own laws of gravity.
Both GR and QM describe what happens extremely accurately, but while as you point out, people using QM rarely make any ontological claims, most assume that the events they witness are happening to something. You may well be right about a probabilistic field theory, but I would expect any waves to be in a medium. Part of the excitement of Higgs as I understand it, is that the Higgs field is claimed to be such a medium.

jackles wrote:blagg can you answer a question for me please .are black hole centres eventless and if so are they the centres relative..if you dont know please speculate.

I am sure blaggard can answer your question, but I am wondering, "by eventless" do you mean the event horizon of a black hole whereby (theoretically anyway] an observer watching someone approach an event horizon sees them fall slower and slower as the light delay increases.

yes ginkgo thats exactly what i mean..all four forces and time and space go into an event vent to an indistinguishable noblocality.so can they black hole centres be moving.

jackles wrote:blagg can you answer a question for me please .are black hole centres eventless and if so are they the centres relative..if you dont know please speculate.

Well nobody knows if black holes even exist as no one has ever seen one, but assuming they do and it's not something more exotic, like massive clusters of dark matter or what not, some say that it is a stasis point in space and no time flows at the singularit, I on the other hand don't believe in infinities being real as the break the laws of thermodynamics for a start, so I suspect time approaches 0 rather than equals 0, but tbh who really knows? Everything is relative, so yes it is relative, and would be even if time froze. Infinite density in an infinitesimal space throws out the integral infinity x infinity which makes absolutely no sense, when you meet with a paradox in physics it usually means either you are making faulty assumptions or you are making progress, I believe you can resolve the infinities by making something = to 0 but this is just a fiddle, would be better if they dispensed with using concepts in physics equations, some people even question renormalisation saying it is dubious but I think personally it makes sense to discount things that can't happen.

you cant have a nonlocal point in space because space is always local to energy.so theres a nonlocal surface in there somewhere just like there is in consciousness.

Well it helps in say field theory to think of every point in space being attached like a ball on a stick model. move one ball and it effects the other, so every point in space is affected by gravity which is never 0.

Non local just means removed spacialy from x so it depends how you want to define it. Local is interaction between two local phenomena, and hidden variables are some sort of process we cannot see that affects the model, whilst Bell's Aspect forbids local real phenomena from explaining quantum mechanics, non local hidden variable theories such as Bohmian mechanics are allowed.

yes my point here is .is there or is there not a gravity event horizon in your opinion.event means energy event so event horizon means energy horizon.gravity is energy so gravity horizon.nonlocal means just that no location or no energy.location and energy are the samething.no energy equals no location.

do you have any philosiphy then blag.any religious view.

I'm quite fond of Camus asburdism I'd say amongst my favourite philosophical works are L'etranger, and The Myth of Sysiphus. Existentialism works for me as a personal philosophy, I stop short of Nietzsche's ideas of nihilism but I agree with the general anti religious sentiment in as much as I do not want to see it abolished but would have shared its view that it is obsolete, if not the whole general reduction or destruction of societal institutions and more especially those of authority which are archaic and redundant. I am agnostic so religious wise I am most closely drawn to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, because it has Pirates and Ninjas, and would definitely approve of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag for example and well I am a Blaggard.

Right now we are doing "surgery with telegraph poles", our equipment to understand the lower lvls of quantum isn't fine enough, our machinery needs a thousand fold finer sensetivity and such. When we can detect on such low lvls where we potential can find Super Strings, then we get our answers, but that's far far into the future.

Else I don't believe in the randomness, and if it's removed from the sholar books, SRT and Quantum can indeed be merged.

HexHammer wrote:Right now we are doing "surgery with telegraph poles", our equipment to understand the lower lvls of quantum isn't fine enough, our machinery needs a thousand fold finer sensetivity and such. When we can detect on such low lvls where we potential can find Super Strings, then we get our answers, but that's far far into the future.

Else I don't believe in the randomness, and if it's removed from the sholar books, SRT and Quantum can indeed be merged.

Agreed frankly I think it will never happen because it's all just fairy tales, but I agree on the principle that far into the future we will have the right tools, which is what is maddening about String theorists, super string theorists, or whatever they want to make up they actually are, are fundamentally not scientists unless they have evidence, philosophy will survive about 5 minutes in science and that atm is all string theory is, fairies at the bottom of the garden, it's not even wrong so it's worthless practically. Is it worthless in other analogous fields where it is not a grand theory of everything probably not, but as theory of everything it is so far worth as much as half a cent, which is what I would pay for anyone's opinion. I don't think that there is any idea that is wrong, but is it science, there's the rub?

As regards the ontology of GR thread, is there any indication that either GR or QM are wrong, what are they and do you think other interpretations will solve the classical/stochastic problem or will a better understanding of Higgs, assuming what we are currently seeing is a Higgs boson of course, there is no certainty even there..?

Theoretical physics is fascinating, and sexy, and it inspires the imagination.

But the raw data coming out of the laboratories really paints a boring picture of our universe. For all the data we have actually collected, our universe really seems like a collection of particles zipping around in a void.... a boring vanilla 3-dimensional void. Even as far as CERN is concerned, the Higgs mechanism is a (rather bland) result discovered in the 1960s regarding symmetry breaking of scalar fields. In other words, the Standard Model expected there to be a particle to fill that empty seat.

Interferometry labs have still not detected gravity waves of any kind.

Underground neutrino labs have not detected any W.I.M.P.'s

Exotic models (such as maximally supersymmetric theories) are looking more tenuous every day.

A recent experiment tried to measure the shape of the electron, and the scientists really expected it to be oblong in one dimension like a flattened pea. The experimental data showed the most boring result -- that the electron is a perfect sphere.

“Even as we are proud to have confirmed the prediction of the Standard Model, we are frustrated that this much more sensitive measurement did not expose problems with the Standard Model which must be there at some level”

You can almost hear the research scientist sighing from an emotion of ennui. The phrase: "confirmed the Standard Model" is repeated time and time again in the publications coming out of the labs.

It should also be noted that Hawking radiation is still conjecture, even while the vast majority of scientists believe it must be real. (Stephen Hawking has not received a nobel for this reason.) Hawking radiation requires some strange beast called "negative energy" in conjunction with the regular "positive energy" we all know and love. The Negative Energy moves towards the singularity of the black hole, causing it to lose mass, while the Positive Energy radiates away from the outside of the event horizon. It sounds sexy, but it is still conjecture.

This should cause the reader to pause whenever you get caught up in the excitement of the Holographic Principle. Because that principle is derived from the thermodynamics of event horizons.

As an final, depressing note on this situation, see this sentence from wikipedia:
No experimental result is widely accepted as contradicting the Standard Model at a level that definitively contradicts it at the "five sigma"

Nice info thanks, I haven't had time to keep up with the pop science mags and physics world and so on so am I bit out of the loop.

It's people who write pop science that give everyone the impression that strings are a viable theory instead of not even really a testable hypothesis, that there is something super mysterious about quantum mechanics, which is certainly odd but hardly shocking if you understand it well enough, that physicists are cool cats whizzing around in Feraris drinking champagne and wot not. This sexing up of the subject whilst it has opened up the sphere to the public and made physics sexy as you say, also gives the unwarrannted impression that the standard model is somehow dull and doesn't have the magic of say string theory or loop quantum gravity et al. This is not the case IMO just because the scientists got it right and have been doing so for quite some time now, is not boring it's what at grass roots science is all about, sure many times it gets it wrong, but give it a break when it gets it right. People expect the universe to be exotic, Scientists expect Occams razor to apply at least they hope it will, ie that which is most parimonious is more likely to be true, although as quantum mechanics has so aptly demonstrated over the planets revolving around the sun type models of Plank etc, it is not always the case. In the 19th century some scientists were declaring physics dead because evrything had been explained classically, or at least almost everything, turns out when you look more closely at light it gets a little strange... The mainstream doesn't sell pop science mags copies though, so although the vast majority are quite pleased about the attention, they are probably chuckling wryly at some of the more way out ideas.