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Javier E

What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology - Ross Andersen - Te... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...251608

cosmology philosophy big bang intelligent life science

shared by Javier E on 20 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • This question of accounting for what we call the "big bang state" -- the search for a physical explanation of it -- is probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology, and there are a couple different lines of thought about it.
  • One that's becoming more and more prevalent in the physics community is the idea that the big bang state itself arose out of some previous condition, and that therefore there might be an explanation of it in terms of the previously existing dynamics by which it came about
  • The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that's very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we're coming out of that
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  • One common strategy for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is, and that we live in a kind of bubble universe, a small region of something much larger
  • Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force
  • That was a physical discovery, a physical discovery of momentous importance, as important as anything you could ever imagine because it knit together the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm into one common physical picture. It was also a philosophical discovery in the sense that philosophy is interested in the fundamental natures of things.
  • There are other ideas, for instance that maybe there might be special sorts of laws, or special sorts of explanatory principles, that would apply uniquely to the initial state of the universe.
  • The basic philosophical question, going back to Plato, is "What is x?" What is virtue? What is justice? What is matter? What is time? You can ask that about dark energy - what is it? And it's a perfectly good question.
  • right now there are just way too many freely adjustable parameters in physics. Everybody agrees about that. There seem to be many things we call constants of nature that you could imagine setting at different values, and most physicists think there shouldn't be that many, that many of them are related to one another. Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature. This is what Einstein meant when he famously said he wanted to understand what kind of choices God had --using his metaphor-- how free his choices were in creating the universe, which is just asking how many freely adjustable parameters there are. Physicists tend to prefer theories that reduce that number
  • You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn't really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don't change -- which is perfectly true -- and then you're always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn't change, because your representations of it don't.
  • physicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say "I don't have the tools to answer a question like 'what is time?' - I have the tools to solve a differential equation." The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.
  • The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.
Javier E

What Does Quantum Physics Actually Tell Us About the World? - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...adam-becker-what-is-real.html

quantum physics theory reality science ontological

shared by Javier E on 11 May 18 - No Cached
  • The physics of atoms and their ever-smaller constituents and cousins is, as Adam Becker reminds us more than once in his new book, “What Is Real?,” “the most successful theory in all of science.” Its predictions are stunningly accurate, and its power to grasp the unseen ultramicroscopic world has brought us modern marvels.
  • But there is a problem: Quantum theory is, in a profound way, weird. It defies our common-sense intuition about what things are and what they can do.
  • The strange implication is that the reality of the quantum world remains amorphous or indefinite until scientists start measuring
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  • Before he died, Richard Feynman, who understood quantum theory as well as anyone, said, “I still get nervous with it...I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.” The problem is not with using the theory — making calculations, applying it to engineering tasks — but in understanding what it means. What does it tell us about the world?
  • From one point of view, quantum physics is just a set of formalisms, a useful tool kit. Want to make better lasers or transistors or television sets? The Schrödinger equation is your friend. The trouble starts only when you step back and ask whether the entities implied by the equation can really exist. Then you encounter problems that can be described in several familiar ways:
  • Wave-particle duality. Everything there is — all matter and energy, all known forces — behaves sometimes like waves, smooth and continuous, and sometimes like particles, rat-a-tat-tat. Electricity flows through wires, like a fluid, or flies through a vacuum as a volley of individual electrons. Can it be both things at once?
  • The uncertainty principle. Werner Heisenberg famously discovered that when you measure the position (let’s say) of an electron as precisely as you can, you find yourself more and more in the dark about its momentum. And vice versa. You can pin down one or the other but not both.
  • The measurement problem. Most of quantum mechanics deals with probabilities rather than certainties. A particle has a probability of appearing in a certain place. An unstable atom has a probability of decaying at a certain instant. But when a physicist goes into the laboratory and performs an experiment, there is a definite outcome. The act of measurement — observation, by someone or something — becomes an inextricable part of the theory
  • Indeed, Heisenberg said that quantum particles “are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”
  • Other interpretations rely on “hidden variables” to account for quantities presumed to exist behind the curtain.
  • This is disturbing to philosophers as well as physicists. It led Einstein to say in 1952, “The theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac.”
  • Competing approaches to quantum foundations are called “interpretations,” and nowadays there are many. The first and still possibly foremost of these is the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.
  • In a way, the Copenhagen is an anti-interpretation. “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is,” Bohr said. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”
  • Nothing is definite in Bohr’s quantum world until someone observes it. Physics can help us order experience but should not be expected to provide a complete picture of reality. The popular four-word summary of the Copenhagen interpretation is: “Shut up and calculate!”
  • Becker sides with the worriers. He leads us through an impressive account of the rise of competing interpretations, grounding them in the human stories
  • He makes a convincing case that it’s wrong to imagine the Copenhagen interpretation as a single official or even coherent statement. It is, he suggests, a “strange assemblage of claims.
  • An American physicist, David Bohm, devised a radical alternative at midcentury, visualizing “pilot waves” that guide every particle, an attempt to eliminate the wave-particle duality.
  • “Figuring out what quantum physics is saying about the world has been hard,” Becker says, and this understatement motivates his book, a thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science.
  • Perhaps the most popular lately — certainly the most talked about — is the “many-worlds interpretation”: Every quantum event is a fork in the road, and one way to escape the difficulties is to imagine, mathematically speaking, that each fork creates a new universe
  • if you think the many-worlds idea is easily dismissed, plenty of physicists will beg to differ. They will tell you that it could explain, for example, why quantum computers (which admittedly don’t yet quite exist) could be so powerful: They would delegate the work to their alter egos in other universes.
  • When scientists search for meaning in quantum physics, they may be straying into a no-man’s-land between philosophy and religion. But they can’t help themselves. They’re only human.
  • If you were to watch me by day, you would see me sitting at my desk solving Schrödinger’s equation...exactly like my colleagues,” says Sir Anthony Leggett, a Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in superfluidity. “But occasionally at night, when the full moon is bright, I do what in the physics community is the intellectual equivalent of turning into a werewolf: I question whether quantum mechanics is the complete and ultimate truth about the physical universe.”
Grace Carey

News at Tipitaka Network - 0 views

www.tipitaka.net/...news.php

dogmatism falsification religion ignorance bias faith dual-causation logic Quantum-Physics measurement Reality Heisenberg uncertainty 5-senses perception

shared by Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13
     
    Finding some interesting and very much TOK articles while I'm working on my religious investigation about the science behind Buddhist beliefs. I found this one particularly intriguing as it discusses why the theory of reincarnation is scientifically sound and why scientists are often narrow-minded and overly trusted. "I was once told by a Buddhist G.P. that, on his first day at a medical school in Sydney, the famous Professor, head of the Medical School, began his welcoming address by stating "Half of what we are going to teach you in the next few years is wrong. Our problem is that we do not know which half it is!" Those were the words of a real scientist." "Logic is only as reliable as the assumptions on which it is based." "Objective experience is that which is free from all bias. In Buddhism, the three types of bias are desire, ill-will and skeptical doubt. Desire makes one see only what one wants to see, it bends the truth to fit one's preferences." "Reality, according to pure science, does not consist of well ordered matter with precise massed, energies and positions in space, all just waiting to be measured. Reality is the broadest of smudges of all possibilities, only some being more probable than others." "At a recent seminar on Science and Religion, at which I was a speaker, a Catholic in the audience bravely announced that whenever she looks through a telescope at the stars, she feels uncomfortable because her religion is threatened. I commented that whenever a scientist looks the other way round through a telescope, to observe the one who is watching, then they feel uncomfortable because their science is threatened by what is doing the seeing! "
Javier E

Science on the Rampage by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...nce-rampage-natural-philosophy

science research physics string theory pseudo-science

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 12 - Cached
  • science is only a small part of human capability. We gain knowledge of our place in the universe not only from science but also from history, art, and literature. Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. “Physics at the Fringe” is what happens when imagination loses touch with observation. Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. The mythologies of Carter and Velikovsky fail to be science, but they are works of art and high imagining. As William Blake told us long ago, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
  • Over most of the territory of physics, theorists and experimenters are engaged in a common enterprise, and theories are tested rigorously by experiment. The theorists listen to the voice of nature speaking through experimental tools. This was true for the great theorists of the early twentieth century, Einstein and Heisenberg and Schrödinger, whose revolutionary theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were tested by precise experiments and found to fit the facts of nature. The new mathematical abstractions fit the facts, while the old mechanical models did not.
  • String cosmology is different. String cosmology is a part of theoretical physics that has become detached from experiments. String cosmologists are free to imagine universes and multiverses, guided by intuition and aesthetic judgment alone. Their creations must be logically consistent and mathematically elegant, but they are otherwise unconstrained.
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  • The fringe of physics is not a sharp boundary with truth on one side and fantasy on the other. All of science is uncertain and subject to revision. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove. The fringe is the unexplored territory where truth and fantasy are not yet disentangled.
kushnerha

Philosophy's True Home - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...philosophys-true-home

new york times areas of knowing philosophy natural sciences

shared by kushnerha on 08 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • We’ve all heard the argument that philosophy is isolated, an “ivory tower” discipline cut off from virtually every other progress-making pursuit of knowledge, including math and the sciences, as well as from the actual concerns of daily life. The reasons given for this are many. In a widely read essay in this series, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle claim that it was philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late 19th century that separated it from the study of humanity and nature, now the province of social and natural sciences.
  • This institutionalization, the authors claim, led it to betray its central aim of articulating the knowledge needed to live virtuous and rewarding lives. I have a different view: Philosophy isn’t separated from the social, natural or mathematical sciences, nor is it neglecting the study of goodness, justice and virtue, which was never its central aim.
  • identified philosophy with informal linguistic analysis. Fortunately, this narrow view didn’t stop them from contributing to the science of language and the study of law. Now long gone, neither movement defined the philosophy of its day and neither arose from locating it in universities.
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  • The authors claim that philosophy abandoned its relationship to other disciplines by creating its own purified domain, accessible only to credentialed professionals. It is true that from roughly 1930 to 1950, some philosophers — logical empiricists, in particular — did speak of philosophy having its own exclusive subject matter. But since that subject matter was logical analysis aimed at unifying all of science, interdisciplinarity was front and center.
  • Philosophy also played a role in 20th-century physics, influencing the great physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The philosophers Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach reciprocated that interest by assimilating the new physics into their philosophies.
  • developed ideas relating logic to linguistic meaning that provided a framework for studying meaning in all human languages. Others, including Paul Grice and J.L. Austin, explained how linguistic meaning mixes with contextual information to enrich communicative contents and how certain linguistic performances change social facts. Today a new philosophical conception of the relationship between meaning and cognition adds a further dimension to linguistic science.
  • Decision theory — the science of rational norms governing action, belief and decision under uncertainty — was developed by the 20th-century philosophers Frank Ramsey, Rudolph Carnap, Richard Jeffrey and others. It plays a foundational role in political science and economics by telling us what rationality requires, given our evidence, priorities and the strength of our beliefs. Today, no area of philosophy is more successful in attracting top young minds.
  • Philosophy also assisted psychology in its long march away from narrow behaviorism and speculative Freudianism. The mid-20th-century functionalist perspective pioneered by Hilary Putnam was particularly important. According to it, pain, pleasure and belief are neither behavioral dispositions nor bare neurological states. They are interacting internal causes, capable of very different physical realizations, that serve the goals of individuals in specific ways. This view is now embedded in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
  • philosopher-mathematicians Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing invented symbolic logic, helped establish the set-theoretic foundations of mathematics, and gave us the formal theory of computation that ushered in the digital age
  • Philosophy of biology is following a similar path. Today’s philosophy of science is less accessible than Aristotle’s natural philosophy chiefly because it systematizes a larger, more technically sophisticated body of knowledge.
  • Philosophy’s interaction with mathematics, linguistics, economics, political science, psychology and physics requires specialization. Far from fostering isolation, this specialization makes communication and cooperation among disciplines possible. This has always been so.
  • Nor did scientific progress rob philosophy of its former scientific subject matter, leaving it to concentrate on the broadly moral. In fact, philosophy thrives when enough is known to make progress conceivable, but it remains unachieved because of methodological confusion. Philosophy helps break the impasse by articulating new questions, posing possible solutions and forging new conceptual tools.
  • Our knowledge of the universe and ourselves expands like a ripple surrounding a pebble dropped in a pool. As we move away from the center of the spreading circle, its area, representing our secure knowledge, grows. But so does its circumference, representing the border where knowledge blurs into uncertainty and speculation, and methodological confusion returns. Philosophy patrols the border, trying to understand how we got there and to conceptualize our next move.  Its job is unending.
  • Although progress in ethics, political philosophy and the illumination of life’s meaning has been less impressive than advances in some other areas, it is accelerating.
  • the advances in our understanding because of careful formulation and critical evaluation of theories of goodness, rightness, justice and human flourishing by philosophers since 1970 compare well to the advances made by philosophers from Aristotle to 1970
  • The knowledge required to maintain philosophy’s continuing task, including its vital connection to other disciplines, is too vast to be held in one mind. Despite the often-repeated idea that philosophy’s true calling can only be fulfilled in the public square, philosophers actually function best in universities, where they acquire and share knowledge with their colleagues in other disciplines. It is also vital for philosophers to engage students — both those who major in the subject, and those who do not. Although philosophy has never had a mass audience, it remains remarkably accessible to the average student; unlike the natural sciences, its frontiers can be reached in a few undergraduate courses.
Javier E

'Oppenheimer,' 'The Maniac' and Our Terrifying Prometheus Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hn-von-neumann-prometheus.html

progress value-neutral science modernity AI nuclear power prometheus knowledge overreach tech research

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.
  • More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.
  • Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”
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  • Something similar might be said about “The Maniac,” Benjamín Labatut’s new novel, whose designated Prometheus is the Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a pioneer of A.I. as well as an originator of game theory.
  • both narratives are grounded in fact, using the lives and ideas of real people as fodder for allegory and attempting to write a new mythology of the modern world.
  • Oppenheimer wasn’t a principal author of that theory. Those scientists, among them Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were characters in Labatut’s previous novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.” That book provides harrowing illumination of a zone where scientific insight becomes indistinguishable from madness or, perhaps, divine inspiration. The basic truths of the new science seem to explode all common sense: A particle is also a wave; one thing can be in many places at once; “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.”
  • More than most intellectual bastions, the institute is a house of theory. The Promethean mad scientists of the 19th century were creatures of the laboratory, tinkering away at their infernal machines and homemade monsters. Their 20th-century counterparts were more likely to be found at the chalkboard, scratching out our future in charts, equations and lines of code.
  • The consequences are real enough, of course. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed at least 100,000 people. Their successor weapons, which Oppenheimer opposed, threatened to kill everybody els
  • on Neumann and Oppenheimer were close contemporaries, born a year apart to prosperous, assimilated Jewish families in Budapest and New York. Von Neumann, conversant in theoretical physics, mathematics and analytic philosophy, worked for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He spent most of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer served as director after the war.
  • the intellectual drama of “Oppenheimer” — as distinct from the dramas of his personal life and his political fate — is about how abstraction becomes reality. The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. For the scientists, it’s something else: a proof of concept, a concrete manifestation of quantum theory.
  • . Oppenheimer’s designation as Prometheus is precise. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces.
  • Labatut’s account of von Neumann is, if anything, more unsettling than “Oppenheimer.” We had decades to get used to the specter of nuclear annihilation, and since the end of the Cold War it has been overshadowed by other terrors. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.
  • Von Neumann, who died in 1957, did not teach machines to play Go. But when asked “what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being,” he replied that “it would have to play, like a child.”
  • MANIAC. The name was an acronym for “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer,” which doesn’t sound like much of a threat. But von Neumann saw no limit to its potential. “If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do,” he declared, “then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” MANIAC didn’t just represent a powerful new kind of machine, but “a new type of life.”
  • If Oppenheimer took hold of the sacred fire of atomic power, von Neumann’s theft was bolder and perhaps more insidious: He stole a piece of the human essence. He’s not only a modern Prometheus; he’s a second Frankenstein, creator of an all but human, potentially more than human monster.
  • “Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement,” Labatut’s von Neumann writes toward the end of his life, “and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
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