exchemist

I was, I now realise, playing with Rovelli's idea that QM entities only become "real" in the course of an interaction. In between, who knows? We say an electron has a charge, mass, spin etc. because when it interacts, that's how it behaves. But how can we know if it has a continuous existence in between? There's a wave function that describes how it will interact, but that's just maths.

Your own citation points out the energy cost of training data is enormous. So your figure is clearly misleadingly low. Mine was based on an article about LLMs in the Financial Times. Glad you agree how bad Chat GPT is, though. 😄

I think Pauli's statistical thermodynamics argument would knock just about any hidden variable theory on the head though, wouldn't it? If there's some hidden variable that makes some "bosons" different from others, then we would not get the Stat. TD phenomena we observe. Furthermore, if you pull down the entire structure of QM, which you would by abolishing the (observationally successful) concept of non-commuting operators, you leave science with less than it has now, rather than more.

Yeah. And that enquiry has used 10,000 times as much electricity as a simple web search engine, to come up with that useless crap.

Yes we have to thank a Persian, writing in Arabic during the Abbasid Caliphate, at the time of Charlemagne, for algebra.:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jabr)

Matter and But is not true of any material entity as well? Are not all their properties aspects of them that are manifest only in an interaction with something else?

Nothing in QM "breaks causality" either though. I think that's overdramatising it. One simply has phenomena whose incidence (in space or time) is not precisely predictable: the spots on a screen as a diffraction pattern builds up, or nuclear decay processes, for instance. They have a proximate cause, but one can't predict their time/position of occurrence exactly.

I'd agree with @TheVat that observation of nature is the mother of science. Systematic observation was what got science started. Physics is arguably the most fundamental of the sciences, but not their mother in any historical sense. A great deal of science was, and is, done with little or no mathematics. Physics relies on it very heavily of course, but even in physics one has to define the concepts that are related in mathematical expressions first. Which has to be done in words, not mathematics. Electric charge, force, energy, mass, velocity etc.....are all concepts that need to be understood through words, before you can go on to write equations about them.

I see that as well as admitting openly he is trying to gain "a majority" of Trumpies on the board of the Federal Reserve, Trump is now attempting to prosecute George Soros. I presume this is to stop Soros bankrolling Democrat senators and congressmen at the mid terms.

Not sure what you mean. Yes, c applies to space, because it is a vacuum. Inside a crystal you have space but also a lot of electrically charged matter that is polarised by the light, altering its phase velocity.

But for relativity you need the speed of light, which has a particular physical value, which in turn implies particular physical values for permittivity and permeability of space. Though that does not matter for relativity calculations of course, only c itself. But the very fact that c is a particular, finite number means space has physical properties.

Yes but my point is space seems not to be just volume. It has measurable physical properties and even energy. It is not just mathematical, it is physical.

I'm not sure that is right. I read an interesting paper on Bohm's hidden variable theory here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.04002 The conclusion says:- We have shown that examination of the logic of von Neumann’s argument leads to the conclusion that the existence of hidden variables capable of allowing the exact prediction of all physical quantities would mean that quantum mechanics in its present form would have to be false, that is, the existence of hidden variables would contradict quantum mechanics, and their inclusion requires a vastly modified theory. Of course, this follows already from the fact that physical quantities represented by non-commuting operators must satisfy an uncertainty relation. Another powerful argument against hidden variables has been presented by Pauli. In a letter to Fierz he wrote ([18, 19] Pauli to Fierz, Jan. 6, 1952, p. 499, no 1337): " I want to call special attention to the thermodynamics of ensembles, consisting of the same type of subensembles (Einstein-Bose or Fermi-Dirac statistics). What is important to me is not the energy values but the statistical weights, further the indifference of the thermodynamic-statistical reasoning to the “wave-particle” alternative and Gibbs’ point that identical or only similar states behave qualitatively differently. If hidden parameters exist, not only on paper, but determine a really different behavior of different single systems (e.g.particles)— according to their “real” values—so must—completely independent of the question of the technical measurability of the parameters—the Einstein-Bose or Fermi-Dirac statistics be completely disrupted. Since there is no basis to assume that the thermodynamic weights should be determined by only half (or a part of) “reality”. Either two states are identical or not (there is no “similar”) and if the ψ function is not a complete description of single systems, states with the same ψ function will not be identical. Every argument with the goal of saving the Einstein-Bose and Fermi-Dirac statistics from the causal parameter mythology must fail because it - taking into account the usual theory in which the ψ function is a complete description of a state—declares the other half of reality to be unreal." So basically, this paper is saying Bohm's theory is unhelpful to physics, because: 1) if it were correct, that would entail throwing out most of existing QM, i.e. the fundamental concept of observable properties being extracted from the wave function by Hermitian operators, some of which do not commute, which as it stands accords perfectly with observation. So that would take us backwards, not forwards. 2) As Pauli points out, Bohm's theory would render QM incapable of correctly predicting the differences in thermodynamic behaviour between ensembles of bosons and fermions (see section I have highlighted in red). This is a fundamental idea in particle physics, predicted by QM and observed in practice. 3) Also, as the abstract notes, Pauli described Bohm's theory as "an uncashable cheque", in that it has no observable consequences, i.e. it is useless as a scientific theory.

Since we are talking physics in which a degree of precision in terms is required, rather than our vague British notions of Indian cuisine, I suggest a fairer comparison would be to ask “what is an electron?” I suspect you and I could produce a fairly credible and concise answer to that. But space? Rather harder.

Yes this is intriguing but, being untestable it's metaphysics rather than science. I think the issue of what space - or the vacuum- "is", is however far from trivial and quite hard to answer, as it does seem to have evolved considerably as physics has developed.

Nearly all pollution I think, since we have had almost no fogs in London at all since about 1960. I remember one smog as a small child, maybe in 62 or 63, but that's all. Foggy days are about one per year now and never last more than a day or so.

Fog in London is vanishingly rare. In the past it was due to atmospheric inversion combined with the smoke from coal fires.

Observational evidence is that quantum indeterminacy is real. How do you account for that?

I've just told you where the error is.

What silly rubbish. Getting AI to dress it up is just putting lipstick on a pig. The fact that the law of cause and effect operates at the macro level is not proof that a certain degree of indeterminacy can't exist at the quantum level.

Well that's a really good question and I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer. It certainly seems to have some properties, so it's not just a total absence of anything. Apart from its electromagnetic properties connected to the speed of light, it also, according to QFT, has zero point energy. It can, in places, possess, or be permeated by, fields of various kinds. It can, according to GR, possess non-trivial mathematical properties too. But at the same time it is not material. I believe Einstein at one point said it could be thought of as a kind of aether (there were aether theories around not long before he did his work on relativity) though he was keen to stress not of a material kind. I'm tempted to say it just is what it is, or better, it seems to be what it seems to be. And on that basis we just get on with it. Perhaps a bit like the "shut up and calculate" school of interpretation of quantum mechanics. Again, there are here more questions to which science doesn't really have an answer. Perhaps the real philosophical point here is that the job of science is to construct models of the physical world which enable us to predict how it will behave. In the poplar imagination, science tells us all what physical reality actually is. But in fact its aims are more modest: to model physical reality without claiming to have the whole truth about it. This is very clear in my own discipline, chemistry, in which because we deal with messily complex systems (atoms with lots of electrons, molecules with lots of atoms and so on), we often have more than one model for the same thing. We choose the model appropriate to the task, knowing that all the models are only approximations to the real situation. It is also clear from the history of science that one model may be superseded in time by another. We have no way of knowing whether or when the last of the Russian dolls may have been opened.

Well I agree it is all a bit mysterious why the order is the way it is and why the various fundamental constants have the values they do. Why does the speed of light have the value it does, or equivalently, why should the dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability of the vacuum take the values they do? Ditto the fine structure constant. And so on. There is a school of thought that attributes this to the Anthropic Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Personally I'm not a huge fan of it but it's not a silly idea. But I don't see why this kind of intrinsic order in the cosmos has to be located in space, exactly and I'm not sure what it means to state that it is. It's a property of the cosmos, certainly.

I wouldn't do this if I were you. They don't like people restarting closed topics here. We can perhaps continue to debate the distinction between science and metaphysics in the Philosophy section, if you like, but your polymorphic whatevers are done, I suspect.

Ah but it's not up to you to determine what are the "right questions", is it? What you are asking is not physics but metaphysics. It is not the job of physics to answer philosophical questions, though many physicists do in fact also ponder the philosophical implications of their theories in their spare time. So while you may be frustrated that nobody in physics wants to pick up the baton and ask where the observed order* in nature comes from, perhaps you should instead ask the people who do deal in such issues - the metaphysicians. (Your own attempt at answering this, by the way, gets us nowhere, since if the order in nature is intrinsic to every "polymorphic unit" of spacetime, you can then equally well ask how that came about. In the end one always reaches a limit at which one has to admit "we don't know". *I prefer the term "observed order" to "laws" for a couple of reasons. First, because it stresses the central role of observation in science. Second, almost all the "laws" are man-made interpretations of what we observe, named after the human beings who first formulated them. They are often approximations or simplifications derived from limiting cases and as such are often not followed exactly in most real situations.

Nope that is not a question being widely asked in physics, so far as I am aware. By the way, deploying the buzzword "paradigm" doesn't alter that. As I told you 3 years ago, it is always possible to dream up metaphysical questions that science can't answer. That's because science has boundaries to its field of enquiry, set, as I've explained to you before, by the need to tie theory to what can be observed in nature. So if no "progress" is being made on the metaphysical question you raise, it is for the simple reason no one, so far as I know, is trying.