Simple Minded wrote:Typhoon wrote:Simple Minded wrote:Typhoon wrote:That the physical universe operates according QM at the fundamental level has now been established by experiments.
The local reality objections of Einstein and others are now D.O.A.
Whether people are comfortable, or not, with this empirical reality is frankly irrelevant.
The problem for many people it that QM is different from their everyday macroscopic experience.
Anyways, to understand QM, one should as a minimum understand
the double-slit experiment.
A very sensible explanation, yet also very religious sounding. Perhaps reality is determined primarily by one's faith.
Which mountain are you climbing or descending...... right now?
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
Not sure how it is "very religious sounding".
I'm not aware of any religion based on statistically significant empirical evidence acquired under reproducible conditions.
Rather all religions that I can think of are based on metaphysicals claim that require belief, or in my case, a suspension of disbelief.
A set of historical irreproducible results.
....
It's a problem as old as civilization. Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that
My previous comments were made somewhat tongue in cheek,
So I gathered.
Simple Minded wrote:
but this is exactly what I was eluding to. To those who have made the effort and expended the discipline, Calculus, Differential Equations, or QM is understandable, and useful as tools to obtain further understanding of the world.
The "scientific expert" can make the same claim to the less experienced/less practiced outsider as the "religious expert." "Duplicate my hours of study (or prayer) in my field of expertise, and you will agree with my perspective."
Agreed.
Simple Minded wrote:To expect the concert pianist, and the figure skater, who both have 20,000 hours of practice in their respective fields, to agree is naïve.
Now to the outsider/less studied, what to think when QM experts or the religious experts disagree?
Climate science for example. Different lines of reasoning, seem very similar to different types of faith. Disagree, get excommunicated, and hopefully, there is another church down the road that will accept your thinking.
One major difference between QM and "climate science" is that the former is based on lab experiments with the degrees of freedom highly constrained whereas the latter is based entirely on observational data with many known and unknown degrees of freedom. In other words, many labs can perform and/or reproduce the same QM experiments whereas there is only one earth and that one earth is a dynamic driven nonlinear system far from thermodynamic equilibrium. I.e., a system with many known unknowns and probably even more unknown unknowns.
Simple Minded wrote:The answer of course is that "science is never settled" but simply the best available method with our current level of understanding/information/practice/tools. As you have noted, "experts" have a lousy track record in predicting the future. QM at work? (tongue in cheek)
Funding, politics, and the desire for fame muddy the water. The recent article someone posted that the "popular views change when the rock stars of current accepted opinion die" was an excellent example.
Agreed.
It is interesting that three very different fields currently have "rock star" problems.
The first is HEP theory, high energy elementary particle physics theory, wherein a group of people who have devoted their professional careers to string theory, a hypothesis with no testable predictions after 30 years of intense effort, go around promoting string theory as an established scientific theory to the lay public*.
The second is astrophysics theory, wherein a group of people who have devoted their professional careers to big bang theory, a hypothesis with known multiple problems, go around promoting multiverses as a solution and as an established scientific theory to the lay public.
The third is "climate science", wherein a small group of no-rate scientists have managed to raise a weak speculative hypothesis, mostly likely nothing more than an artifact of systematic biases in data analysis and of gross underestimation of statistical and systematic uncertainties, to the level of a global quasi-religious dogma with fanatical adherents among the lay public. It is here that one encounters scientists being regarded as an infallible priesthood.
As for QM, it has passed all precision experimental tests to date.
The rival local reality theories have not,
and can thus be ruled out, and no one has proposed, despite nearly a century of criticisms, another viable alternative theory to QM. So until someone does, I'll stick with QM and leave the supposed philosophical questions and objections to others.
*Some of these proponents hubris is of an entirely new level in that they advocate rejecting the scientific method in that string theory need not make and pass testable experimental predictions.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.