I was very upset when I realized that in my physics degree they had taught me the Copenhagen propaganda as though it was fact. My discomfort with the material brought me to research deeper and then I realized there are so many other interpretations and that the Copenhagen interpretation was only accepted by 30% of the world's physicists (the majority at the time) pilot wave is surpassing Copenhagen currently for the majority of acceptance. But what troubles me the most is that they don't seem to care about finding out what is actually going on, so they have effectively become quantum engineers rather than quantum physicists. We need a little dose of philosophy to slap us back to the process of discovery.
Tim Maudlin is so refreshing to listen to. He is such a clear and incisive thinker on these matters, and he has the degree in Physics to back it up. This is one of the two or three places right now where a field of science desperately needs philosophers like this to analyze the conceptual foundations. I mean, seriously, why would anyone say out of one side of their mouth "quantum mechanics is extremely well verified by scientists in laboratories" and then out of the other side of their mouth say "the best interpretation of that data entails that there are no laboratories or people". It's just cognitive dissonance, and John Bell saw that. Tim Maudlin sees it too and I hope people will listen.
"It would be nice if every student who learned Quantum Mechanics at least got a three page accurate description of the situation, right? If you really want to understand the foundations then you have have classes in foundations. ..Physicists have this idea that because they have a physics PhD they must know all these answers. But then you have to ask well, where did you learn it? It wasn't in your textbooks. You never learned foundations. You never took a course in it. You never read a chapter about it. You never read a book about it. Why do you think you know about it?"
What a great background for this interview. Even the bird's chirping added to the overall production value. Also, the interviewer's questions and follow up questions were as good as the answers received from this clearly learned and passionate academic.
A problem is that physicists start to believe that the mathematics is more real than reality itself and extrapolate backwards to come up with nonsensical ideas about time.
Well yes...everything is an assumption built upon assumptions...I like to think about whether numbers actually aren't a mistake, will they still be around 10000 years from now or will we have more advanced ways of thinking about the universe? It seems likely that they will be around, because they probably have been here for 100,000 years or more but...it isn't a given.
Yeah, like that goofy fuck Albert Something who said that time is inseparably bound up with space, and that a pair of black holes might, in principle, make the kind of signal first measured almost a hundred years later by the LIGO experiment. It's a good thing there aren't more physicists like that guy.
Mathematics is a set of theories. Those theories can be used to explain probability, statistics, how numbers relate, geometry and so on. Then physicists can use these theories in their tries to predict how nature works. The mathematics is just a tool
The "problem with quantum mechanics" has bothered me since my undergraduate days at Berkeley. While taking the fourth course in the undergraduate physics series there, around 1970, I was disappointed to discover that the physics professors and grad students, for whom I otherwise had enormous admiration, did not seem to understand quantum mechanics. I began to suppose that Berkeley was simply not up to speed in this particular subject. Then I spoke with a friend who had been at Cal Tech and had heard Feynman's point of view -- that nobody understands quantum mechanics. I said, "Well, someone must!" and he reiterated the Feynman line. I did not go on with physics as a career, but I have never stopped trying to understand the meaning of QM as a physical theory.
Quantum mechanic would not be so perplexing if we took consciesness as a fundamental property of nature. But that goes against our Materialist world view which states that consciesness derives from matter, rather then the other way around.
When Feynman said "nobody understands quantum mechanics", what he really meant was "nobody has a fully intuitive classical like picture of what is going on in quantum systems". There is merit to the possibility that there may really be no classically intuitive physical picture of quantum mechanics, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't still devote resources to studying the foundations of quantum mechanics,.
I am currently a physics undergrad and will eventually do a Ph.D. and I agree with you that QM is quite complex and a bit hard to grasp only because it does not go with what we think is "normal". Till now I have an issue with the quantum interpretation of spin. I have seen many definitions and asked many great professors. I never found their answer satisfactory. Yet, these definitions work in the realms of our real world. So you can either go with the flow or decide to solve the missing puzzle yourself. In my case, I will go with the flow until I have enough knowledge to tackle things by myself. After that, I vowed that I will solve the missing puzzle in the logic of QM (at least for my understanding)
I think the key to figuring out an actual quantum theory is achieving a better understanding of what time and gravity really are. What I've been thinking about is time is seemingly regarded as a single thing, yes distorted by gravity, but none the less it is still seen as a single universal thing. What if this isn't the case? What if all matter has it's own separate time. That time isn't a property of space it's a property of matter. On a macro scale gravity unifies time making it seem as though it were a property of space. On the quantum scale where matter has very little or no mass gravity is not unifying this material's time with the macro world. In stead very low mass material mostly runs on it's own time and only occasionally has it's time synced to the macro world when it interacts with it. When we observe these low mass particles our interaction syncs them to our shared time and so to us they appear to behave like, well, particles. If we don't observe them then they're flying on their own clock and to us they can now seem like a wave of possibility because where they are and where they are going and how time is unfolding for them is disconnected from our gravity unified time. Same goes for quantum entanglement. Entangled particles connection is they are sharing the same time that is separate from our time. All the spooky action at a distance is because we perceive the particles as interacting instantly, but the interaction is really occurring in a separate time that is unfolding differently than our time. This explains even weird crap like quantum erasure where is appears entangled particles communicate retroactively to behave like a particle or a wave. When we choose to observe the experiment the interaction syncs the particles to our time, but until that happened from the particles point of view neither had yet impacted a detector. When the observation syncs them to our time from the particles point of view they are hitting the detectors at the same time. ..Or maybe I'm totally wrong :)
Well said - Philosophers, physicists and mathematicians need to talk to each other. This is how we get people who are experts in all 3 fields. This is how we get progress and understanding.
A very refreshing attitude. As a layperson I have an intense interest in the boundry area between physics and philosophy so I end up looking for informative lectures and videos on UA-cam. I haven't found very many that don't exploit "quantum wierdness" as if that's what people want to hear.
“Once you start doubting, just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong.” ― Richard P. Feynman
Your too late. They're already thinking about your cats, and know they're hypotheticaly dead and alive. Just don't let any Russian physiologist around dogs🐶. They don't preform thought experiments on them.
The aspirin analogy is awesome and a great way to explain what's missing from current quantum theory. Another would be gravity. Newton's law of gravity told us how to calculate, but it didn't explain what was going on. Einstein's ToGR tells us what the physical underpinnings of the calculable phenomenon are. And, as a bonus, it made for more accurate predictions, especially in more extreme cases. Hopefully a true theory of Quantum Mechanics (as opposed to the mathematical recipes) will provide similar improvements to Quantum calculations. Great video - thanks!
As a physicist, I can say that what the philosopher says at 16:00 is exactly correct. Very reasonable person especially his view on "power". We could not get a job about the foundation of QM simply because it looked hopeless as a question leading to no job.
Great interview. Efforts to silence debate seems to be the norm now, not just in physics but other sciences too and in social topics as well. When someone questions the established thought it feels empowering.
Lambda that’s covered in John’s second letter, ‘2nd John’- where we see report of a loose canon in the church, but despite the bad example set by him there is a hint that they should neither eject nor exorcise him. Mormons would do both, tho.
No, a scientific theory does NOT tell you what things ARE. They never have. One of the big complaints about Newton's theory of gravity when he published it was that it didn't explain what gravity IS. This is the ancient view of theory, not the modern scientific view. Yes, having some kind of intuitive model - an "interpretation" of the theory - is often useful as an aid to understanding the theory, but such interpretations are not scientific and are not predictive. With classical physics, the interpretations tend to be obvious, as we can imagine pool balls colliding with each other exchanging momentum and energy: we can mentally replace pool balls colliding with with gas molecules or vehicles colliding with each other, and it's all pretty much the same idea, even if the real life math is more difficult than the idealized pool balls. The problem with quantum mechanics is that there is no intuitive analogy that works. What is unclear to this professor of philosophy (not physics), is that this problem with quantum mechanics exists for all scientific theories. It exists for gravity, as I pointed out above, and for electricity (what is a "field" really?), and for thermodynamics (no, smashing a coffee cup on the floor doesn't explain "entropy"), and so on. No, we just have mathematical models that make predictions about what we will measure in any specific case. The only difference is that quantum mechanics doesn't have a "just so story" for quantum mechanics that satisfies our curiosity. This is why Feynman had contempt for philosophers of this sort. They mistake the cartoonish "just so stories" that are used to popularize science as being the truly meaningful parts of the theory. They aren't. They're just "cartoon physics", qualitative explanations of what the math says that don't actually explain anything about the physical world, but are emotionally satisfying because they PRETEND to explain the physical world. Scientific theories -describe- the world and how to make predictions about it. They don't explain the world in any sort of ontological way.
I think Philosophy is more important than ever in Physics, to help keep it on track, given the difficult and unintuitive nature of the high hung fruit.
This argument resonates a bit with me. What I have read of Quantum Mechanics strikes me as sort of incomplete; it's all about the *limits* of things, what we *can* know and *can't* know, working backwards from there. I feel like it's like overlaying a picture and tracing its contours, then simply labelling the various blobs as "person", "tree", "car" etc - without bothering to fill in the colors or the shadows. The image is "correct", yes, but there are certain dimensions of it that are missing.
Someone had to tell it at last. This is the real problem with QM in general. To put it in terms of a philological analogy: QM has a lot of syntax but very little semantics.
Very nice interview, thank-you very much. I always appreciate the philosophical approach of Maudlin as opposed to the technical approach of physical science. Maudlin shows very well how philosophy remains very confused about the nature of physical reality even after 100 years of the very successful predictions of quantum science. Philosophy is really a discipline that asks questions without answers, then answers them, and then argues endlessly with other philosophers about the nature of physical reality. I like philosophy but I do not ever expect any answers to questions that have no answers. Why are we here? Why are we here right now? Why is it us and not someone else that is right here right now? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of quantum mechanics? Why is the universe the way that it is? These are all questions that have no answers, but are nevertheless useful to ask and discuss because that is what consciousness does. Consciousness is asking questions without answers and then continuing to find meaning in the endless discourse that follows. This is basically because we cannot always know the limits of what we can know even though we know there are limits to what we can know. We do need to keep asking and answering unanswerable questions in order to find the horizon of answers that we did not expect.
Tim goes wrong at @4:25. He dives into this mistake at @7:00. Bell's inequality falsifies local-realism. In lay terms, this means that (particularly defined) "locality" and (particularly defined) "reality" cannot co-exist. By saying "There has to be some non-locality.", Tim accepts "realism" uncritically. He confirms this when discussing the manifest image. But with critical examination, we cannot (yet) disregard either of those mutually exclusive options. In my understanding of the field, "locality" actually has the more compelling scientific credentials. However, Tim is right about the character of Einstein. Albert was not at ease with considering "realism" falsifiable. And neither is Tim, apparently. General relativity provides the most compelling model incorporating "locality", to date. This must have been poignant for Albert. During his life, Bell inequalities were not yet experimentally tested. They are now. Therefore, while praising the poetic philosophy of Einstein, Tim rejects the crowning work that General relativity is.
That struck me as odd also. His comments on the "manifest image" suggest that he is committed to what Putnam used to criticize under the label "metaphysical realism". Maudlin also seems to speak of time, being either real or illusory, as if Kant never existed. His appeal to the primacy of the manifest image (although correct in a sense) is thus quite unfair even to Sellars who himself had a finer appreciation of Kant.
What he's talking about is the field of "ontology" which is the study of reality. The other two major branches of philosophy are epistemology (how we know what we know) and ethics (i.e. morality).
Sounds like the continuity of Gaston Bachelard warnings on QM teaching : This is one of the rarest and one of the most accurate talks I ever heard on QM, despite the fact I'm physicist. The only other author I know up to now who developed similar arguments was Richard Feynman. And obviously, most of the tools he developed were greedly used by his community, but all of the similar points he developed were quickly forgotten...
Finally someone is telling what I was thinking for years.... And I was always said that I don't understand it because I see quantum mechanics too clearly. Pilot wave team here!
The real problem is not with Quantum theory but with Tim Maudlin not being able to understand it or even science in general. Scientific theories, in general, do not claim knowledge of absolute ontological truths, instead they are systematizations of empirical truths that allow to make falsifiable predictions. So if you look at quantum physics from that point of view, it is an incredible successful theory, despite of its known limitations. So though we know that the existing quantum theory is not the final truth, it is still a _scientific_ theory. None of that seems to matter to Time Maudlin as he starts his attack on quantum physics with a ridiculous statement: 1:04 "tell me what exists in the physical world: Are there particles? Are there fields? Is there space-time? And tell me about those things and then specify some laws about how they behave that tell me how they behave through time." If only Tim Maudlin bothered to open any textbook about QFT, he would find the answer to these questions. For instance, elementary particles are just excitations of the underlying quantum fields. There are also mathematical equations that describe how they interact, so it is not a secret how they behave if you can read the language of mathematics. Moreover, Tim Maudlin seems to be unaware that different interpretations give different answers when it comes to the question of locality or wave-function collapse: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#Comparison
He's fine with it, but the problem is people being stifled who want to dig down to a deeper understanding of QM. He gave the aspirin analogy, that people knew very well what it did, but had no idea why it did it. By reaching a deeper understanding of the "why", you can come to a lot of realizations that weren't discernible through the equations alone.
Key points: - We know HOW but we don't know WHY. This goes for most of physics and its constants. - There might be some non-locality but again, we do not know why. - There are, as a matter of fact, many higher dimensions, that we will never ever get to see, measure or be part of because we cannot. - Time is not an illusion, its just something we live in and cannot avoid. - THERE ARE NO parallel universes, there most likely are multiverses - two very different concepts. My philosophical interpretation is: we know how quantum mechanics work, and we will harness it to our advantage in terms of using it to create objects that improve our daily lives. We do not know why it works and my prediction is that it links to a higher dimension which we will never get access to, thus giving it the illusion that its random, and thus we think life is non-deterministic. However since we will never ever get to contact or measure higher dimensions, this means that we will never know what causes this randomness which could be a non-random phenomenon, so it could be deterministic, but we will never know so in fact it is non-deterministic to us. I personally think that life is deterministic, there is no randomness at our level of dimensions at least, and a being living in a higher dimensions will laugh at us thinking that we have a choice in what happens. To quote a movie phrase: “I think a man cannot know his destiny. He can only do what he can, until his destiny is revealed.” This means that the world gives us the illusion it is non-deterministic, but since we have no clue why there is randomness it actually becomes deterministic at our level of dimensions.
Yes i agree for the most part but i also know that we can...and do contact what u call higher dimensions. Just because some have not, they believe this is true for all. The problem science has is this-to realize any higher dimension, the "material" dimension that we currently occupy is transcended. We move from a material orientation to an energetic one. But science etc. wants to take things from this material level (measurement, statistical prediction, physics etc, etc....even our sense of self) and apply them on the higher one (energy) which is absolutely impossible. Our sense of "time" does not exist in the quantum so neither does our sense of "self"-they are inextricably linked. Trying to understand or use a higher dimension will always fail when using the tools of a lower/different one. This is the same as "A problem cannot be solved by the same type of thinking that created it". True quantum behavior is non-linear, non-personal, non-human centered.... whereas our current understanding is linear and totally human oriented.
Not just you, every normal person in the world wants to know. Only those who want to shut us up so they can have us just admire their mathematical prowess don't want to find out. They'd hate if we knew physically what is happening, then they'd have no more authority. We all want to know, but we'll live with the mathematical explanation if we have to, still hoping it will expose a deeper layer of meaning.
Everyone wants to know, but maybe knowing is not as simple as you or the professor wants it to be. Maybe knowing includes statistical knowledge, probability knowledge. Thinking that nature can be reduced to some easy to get for any human explanation is most likely wrong and can most likely never happen. Trying to simplify also often means certain parts of the thing getting simplified gets lost.
I like what this guy is saying. Mathematics can tell what will happen but not why. Perhaps we lack the cognitive ability to grasp the foundations. We naturally try to relate everything we understand about the quantum realm back to the macro world we are familiar with. But maybe there is a point where foundational realities are completely unrelatable.
The problem with people is that they try to compare behaviour of an elementary particle to behaviour of large objects. It’s as if you try to compare the life of a single person, to a lifestyle of a large family. Single person has more freedom and can do things independently of others. In a family , every member has impact, people co- depend and they behave in regard to each other. Not the best analogy but this is how I understand it. When I was single, I could go out any time, come back any time. Stay all day in bed if I wanted, change my job , suddenly move to a different area, I didn’t depend on anyone . When I got a family, I couldn’t go out without planing, bcz kids depending on me, I couldn’t change my job, I had to think about how it’s going to affect my income bcz I pay for school and in general have more experience, I can’t just change my location I think of areas where good schools are and so on. So as every member of my family, we interact and that restricts what we can and cannot do. This is the simple way of putting it
J.S. Bell posits a hidden variable, λ(t). The problem is that timekeeping, t, varies from location to location. There is no universal cosmic clock, t, that keeps the same time everywhere and everywhen in the cosmos. In the step where Bell cancels out the hidden variable, λ(t), he commits an error. Because twin particles separated in space age at distinct rates, they do not remain in perfect phase-lock synchrony. Instead of perfectly canceling to zero, there should be some kind of residual "beat frequency" that survives to the bottom line in Bell's Inequality. Indeed, in quantum computers, qubits are found to decohere in a matter of nanoseconds.
I would recommend to Tim Maudlin and his audience to look up the Buddhist teachings on emptiness. Particularly Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Riponche's teachings on the phenomena. I think Tim is on to something here. Something that Buddhist Scholars/Masters have resolved through a practice of training the mind to obtain (for lack of a better word) a direct realization of all phenomena.
We need a physical theory in quantum mechanics that predicts how reality works because mathematics won't tell you what caused that prediction though it predicts something very accurate. Mathematics shows you the effect but not the cause. That's why we need a physical theory.
The answer is actually simple. Einstein and Schrodinger were right. There is no such thing as particles in reality. Particles are simply our interpretation of a measurement. We assign mass, location, momentum and spin to measurements of things that are not actually particles. Hence the need to apply the Born equation. The Born equation is simply to particalize the measurement results for us humans who want to interpret the results as the measurement of a particle with a location, momentum, spin etc. The phenomenon (which is actually a wave) has none of these properties in the way us humans interpret it. The cat is dead if the geiger counter detected the phenomenon (that us humans are interpreting as detection of a particle) and not dead if not. There is no collapsing of a wave function or multiverses. It is just our incorrect interpretation of our measurements as particulate when they are actually just waves. Everything is waves, interacting with other waves. There is no locality as there is no particle. Hence the ability for entanglement at an apparent distance; as the waves can interact over a field not across two point locations between two non-existent particles with two non-existent locations.
Give a medieval person a car, and they will easily learn to operate it and make predictions about it. Ask that medieval person what the car is or how it functions in fundamental ways, and that is where we are at with quantum physics.
16:52 -> so true! My application for PhD funding in the foundations of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) recently got rejected. Now I am turning to Solid State to get funding. I am really looking forward to meeting Tim at Saig this July :)
Sascha Lill SL, why not try kickstarter? Put together some of your ideas and create some visualizations etc. This is so,ethimg I certainly would suppoert.
If you can observe yourself then you're just observing perception and belief, an infinite universe can't really observe itself but it can create itself by the belief that it can observe itself from an experience. You can't add 1 to an infinite universe, time is radial so time never ends but it can only recreate itself infinitely, time can never change. This universe is like a movie that replays itself over and over and never changes because that's the only way you could be real for yourself, it's the belief that you can create an experience to observe yourself that brings about your existence, 3 dimensions only exist if a point creates the perception of time which is a square within a square, pi and square are the physics of the universe, we are the energy of perception and belief.
I want to say thank you to Tim Maudlin for presenting rather complex thoughts and ideas in a very clear and concise form. His approach is totally rational and I wish it gains attention and recognition from a much wider audience.
As a fan of science with some understanding of the concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity (but not at all, the math), I just wish I could find a a rigorous, scientific and mathematical analysis of the ideas of Nassim Haramein as conceptually those ideas seem to be rather compelling . But they are also, certainly, mind-blowing which may be why most of the searches I've undertaken to see if his ideas have been seriously considered turn-up either ad hominem attacks or simple dismissal with little if any reasoning as to the basis for the dismissal notwithstanding the detailed science and math which Haramein offers to support his theories.
I found the Theory of Everything. To make the mental leap from Newton to quantum mechanics, we need to give up the preconception determinism: stop complaining that the theory cannot predict WHAT is going to happen. So to get from quantum theory to Theory of Everything, we need to make another conceptual leap and cleanse our mind of another preconception: give up the notion that a theory needs to have any predictive value at all: stop complaining, that the theory is completely useless. So my theory, as stated, goes: I don't know what is going to happen at all. Waiting for the Nobel Prize now. You see physicists? Your almost unattainable Holy Grail was so easy to solve. All you needed to do was to cleanse your mind of harmful preconceptions.
Refreshing interview on the subject. This horse has been beat to death over and over and this guy shares some refreshing perspective and critique of conventional stance on the subject. I really enjoyed this one.
All of the problems found on phisics today may be solved with the aseptense that light multiplies by 10 in such a way light gets back fast. there must to be comunication but fast - They assume a particle may be in one place but wherever too - the solution is clear if light goes by 10 near to infinity fast imagen a band that goes fast and comes fast and that particle is moved forward and contrary now see it when it stops on one side and when stops on the other: no more spookie thing
The objective collapse theory is in fact at odds with the notion of... who am I kidding, go to the medium shot so I can see what the forest man is doing.
Congratulations excellent questions, marvelous answers. At last a professor of philosophy who sounds more like physicist than most Quantum specialists. Epictetus the philosopher said: it is very difficult to learn something you think you already know. This is a huge problem to the Quantum theory physicists and academics.
Significance of Certainty Coordination of Connectivity > Connected Coordination > Actualization To become removed from Chronological time and then to be able to visualize time as non linear so as to bridge connections between specific points of demarcation that create new stable loops without triggering collapses while also understanding the greater cycle of renewal that enables: Α+Ω | Α=Ω | 1=0 | 1+0 | 2020 = Κ:Κ The greatest fear of the usurpers of power is the loss of that power. If persons are limited to the calculations of the finite of what is conceivable/obtainable; their ability to conceive of and then to obtain infinity (that which is infinite, limitless) is directly prevented by their calculated precision.
Although even with delusions of grandeur, QM/QP has produced a lot of benefit and useful work (ie: "shut up and calculate"). But yes, from a theoretical perspective, its still a delusion.
No one looks back at Newtons Laws in embarrassment. Science knows that theories can be wrong and they can either be used to build upon on another theory or it can be discarded entirely. Hence why we keep verifying through experiments because we are not afraid to prove its wrong. Dumb comment.
Scientific Theories have well defined attributes and limitations, requirements. You can announce a theory on anything at all. The theory or laws of Thermodynamics is a completely different animal to the subjective theory of say painting. Quantum Mechanics is peculiar however in the sense that it is a stochastic based theory - non-deterministic in nature. It spews out probabilities and invariably involves counter intuitive concepts - but nevertheless, it has no known counter examples in observation or experimentation that refute its main contentions etc. This does not mean that a deterministic theory will not eventuate in the future that will be able to describe the same "quantum effects" defined today.
The work of Bell showed that any deterministic model must be both nonlocal. More recent work however has managed to separate nonlocality from no ftl signalling, and so in a strange way it can be argued that it doesn't violate relativity. However that then begs the question, if it is possible for causal influences to propagate faster than light, why does nature seem to conspire in such a way as to prevent these causal influences from allowing us to send signals.
Great interview -- it seems QM has become an odd mix of applied math and a religious furor demanding that the statistics and formula be accepted as literal reality...
Agree. These theories are just fairy stories written to match the evidence, and changed whenever the evidence seems to change. Which is okay, but it isn't truth.
Quantum Mechanics yields results that are 100% congruent with physical reality. Therefore it can be accepted as literal reality. What's your problem with it? It's called theory and experiment, and you don't need religious furor to trust it.
There is a problem not being talked about in this interview. That is 'what we can see'. We don't really have the capacity to observe at the sub atomic level. We see after effects of high energy events.. but we can't just look at normal stuff and observe with any real accuracy. This means we are lacking the capacity to 'fill in the blanks' regarding the foundations of QM. If what he says is true, that there is resistance to this type of investigation, it means our knowledge won't be complete until we break the logjam. QM equations predict a lot.. so we are reaping huge benefits.. but until we undergo yet another revolution in the capacity to observe, we'll be stuck (this process is part of the history of science.. where a revolution in observation power = a revolution in understanding).
It is always with a bit of irony that I read about those who deny scientific principles in favor of some hypothesis that just so happens to sit within their own realm of understanding. Theists are often adamant about rejecting Evolution or the Big Bang, and forget (or never realize) that it was a priest who originally developed the hypothesis that the Universe might have arisen like an egg, from some beginning, and that when people learned of this, the whole idea was dubbed the "Big Bang" as a joke! When the hypothesis turned out to have merit, even the Pope was quite happy to think that our Universe most likely had a beginning event, and when people continued to doubt this as an absurdity, he even queried the priest about mandating that people now believe this "Big Bang" as church doctrine! And yet today, most fundamentalists and many theists fight the idea of this "Big Bang Theory" as scientific intrusion into their religious dogma. The same holds true for Quantum Mechanics: I see philosophers who debate that something they cannot comprehend should not be taught and learned as science, when the tools such as the computers being used to document their thoughts and allow an audience to consume their stories contain billions of transistors, none of which would work if it were not for the phenomena of Quantum Mechanics and the electron-tunneling that takes place at every P-N junction within every transistor. Yes, there is a lot that science does not know. In fact, the Mechanism of Action for numerous widely-used drugs is still unknown even today, in this twenty-first century! And yes, up until the early 1970s, this even included aspirin, and today it still includes many drugs. But just because some portion of why or how something works is still unknown, it does not mean that it cannot be quantified to indeed have certain behaviors and properties, just as the theory which attempts to understand the beginning of our Universe, or the equations that accurately describe current flow through chips of silicon. - j q t -
And now you sound like a scientific theist, why do you believe in anything beyond existence, why would you need anything more then the belief that you can observe yourself so that you can recreate the experience that created you. Without perception and belief of existence you couldn't exist, duality is our energy, without finite time you wouldn't be infinite. If something has a beginning it must have an end, time is radial, we could only be real for ourselves if time never changes, the universe will always recreate itself by believing it's observing itself, energy can be no less or no more then its infinite self, you can't add 1 to infinity, the universe can never change but it created itself by the belief in time but time can only exist if time is set as finite radial. I have written this message right now infinitely or it wouldn't be real for me and I wouldn't have my thoughts, the universe is just like a movie that replays itself infinitely.
It is so obvious that "time" does not exist. What exists is change ... in all sorts of phenomenon. But there is no separate existent that is "time". To claim there is ... is just pure assertion with zero evidence of any kind whatsoever. To anyone who claims "time" exists, I say *SHOW ME SOME.* Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will.
Maudlin seriously misrepresents not only the Copenhagen interpretation, but the thinking of the many extraordinary physicists who accepted it. It is by no means some sort of "dogma" foisted on the world by Bohr's charismatic personality, but is in fact the most radical forward looking step not only in science but philosophy itself. What it says, basically, is what should have been evident even to the ancient Greeks but was not: that there is a limit to inquiry, either scientific or metaphysical, beyond which it is no longer possible to go. Bohr said it all when he wrote: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." And, as he demonstrated, and has been confirmed in experiment after experiment, any attempt to "go beyond" his "Copenhagen interpretation" is a step backward, demonstrating a lack of understanding of what is at stake. We need simply to accept that quantum physics is complete in the sense that no over-reaching theory that encompasses everything is possible, both in practical terms and in principle.
I strongly disagree with the idea that QM is not a physical theory. All physicists worth their salt have gone through many late nights worrying about and slowly (over years) clarifying their understanding of the foundations of QM. The “shut up and calculate” story is just that: a story. Professors only use this phrase when they need to end a long classroom debate on interpretation so that progress can be made. They do not expect students to stop paying attention to the foundations and good students never do.
_ How does time differ from an other measurement concept: such as inches, mm, km, grams, etc.? _ Time appears to be in the same conceptual category as all other measurement concepts. It relates to our psychological INTERPRETATION of the memory of events that happened in what we call "the past", and the ideas, hopes and desires that we project into the future, which does not factually exist. _ Thus we invent mathematical systems and conceptual procedures/theories to make us feel that we have some sort of comfort with understanding the world we experience - which in the final analysis is subjective. Even the so-called objective is in the end analyzed and interpreted subjectively. _ Thus Einstein may have actually come to realize towards the end of his life that time actually IS an illusion.
There’s a big difference between the “manifest world” being an Illusion, versus it being Emergent. And I may be wrong, but I don’t think many modern theoretical quantum physicists still accept the former (if they even ever really did?).
I think people get confused about “ time is not real” because they don’t have abstract imagination. Time itself is not a physical property, it just represents the changes which occurs and the changes in comparison to everything around. If things don’t change time looses its meaning. While other 3 dimensions still exist. If you freeze everything , stop every particle from vibration , then time stops. Bcz time is just a representation of how particles interact within the system. Imagine you run a marathon and there are people standing cheering on the left and right and you encouraged to give hi5 to as many as possible. In order to do that you need to run as slo as possible, by other words you change your location less often. Giving hi5 represents particles interacting with environment . Now if you choose to run really fast you’ll not be able to give hi5 to many people bcz you change your location so often your hand reaches only 1 out of 20 people . This represents how time dialation works . If you don’t interact with environment much( with other particles) you get hardly any changes in you. So time slow down for you bcz the particles you are made off don’t interact with environment . If you go to a planet where gravity is very strong, you’ll get squashed, your particles get pushed together , again making it difficult for any changes to occurring. So again time slows for you in comparison with other people who live on another planet with different gravity. The cat in a box is a thought experiment, really not the best example to represent the idea. The idea is you need to make a measurement in order to know what particles are doing. The act of measure is what makes impact. It only works on elementary particles and not on large objects. Uncertainty principle can be explained that in order to know where particle is you need to stop it( measurement ), once it’s stopped it has zero velocity. Now you know location but you don’t know how fast it was going. If you know how fast particle is going then you don’t know location bcz it changes all the time .
He asks some very apparent questions that came to my mind almost immediatly after I learned about this almost shamanistic mysticism of quantum mechanics for the first time. I wonder why this isn't a topic all the time.
Saying that there is space and there is time is misunderstanding what Einstein meant by space-time. They are deeply entwined and cannot be separated. Space-time is just a consequence of how causality behaves and propagates through the different quantum fields, with a limit on its speed.
Gerard 't Hooft is saying the same thing. Quantum mechanics fetishizes mathematics and experimental results, ignoring the fact that QM bears no relationship to the world we experience. It’s as if someone tells you that you’re a multibillionaire but won’t let you see any of the money.
This was or is refreshingly honest and humble. Especially the discussion around celebrity science high jacking the more serious work underpinning the latest theories hypothesis. Very enjoyable. Thank you.
Time is real only in the sense that 'meters' and 'kilos' are real. We did not invent clocks to measure time, but to measure movement. The universe is not a snapshot; it is not standing still while time is the only thing that moves. We invented this tool called 'time' in order to measure all the movements and processes of the cosmos.
As a layman computer scientist, what bothers me about theoretical physicists is that they often seem to judge their models and interpretations by their _mathematical_ simplicity and elegance. But what they often seem to forget is that the universe manages to 'compute itself'. This makes me believe we should judge our models by how *computationally* complex they are - not how *mathematically* complex. From this perspective, a cellular automaton universe makes way more sense to me than e.g. many worlds and string theory. But then again I'm a total layman on the subject ;)
How many Logic Gates do you need to judge a Fourier Transformation?? How Many Logic gates do you need to judge the word 'Judge' ?? Soon or Later, The Apes must to recognize that The Thing on Itself cannot be compressed into symbolic representations ... The Map is not The Territory ... Ok, The map informs about The Territory ... But That Information is a dynamic process in The Interpreters ... a Post-factual layer of abstraction ... not, The Thing on Itself ... Logic gates are - basically - the cells for a Computer Language ... and The Computer language is basically Hardware Instructions ... How to distribute electric currents in a designed Chip ... How many Logic gates do you need to reproduce the smells from an Orange ?? The Map is not The Territory ... Reality is not a Simulation inside a Hyperphysical Computer ... Reality exist ... then, The Apes merge ... Then, The Apes evolve and learn to use symbols ... Then, The symbols deploy memory in the Apes ... Then, The Apes begin to believe that Reality is a memory ... Not, Memory is just an Environmental Dynamic ... The best explanation for reality is a reality on itself ... Explanations are always post-factual ... Texmark's mathematical Universe is more Map as territory Mythology The same with Stephen Wolfram 'Cellular Automatons' .... All that Mythology tends to come in Apes that think too much for what They 'See' ... but Vision is just a sense and an environmental dynamic ... A Post-factual layer of abstraction is just that ... an abstraction ... ... and The abstraction cannot be the source for the factual condition where the abstraction comes ... ... Basically, The Games of language becomes valuable for the apes when/where those games are interpreted by the apes as Patterns 'In Time' ... Maybe, Science is just an Apes Proto-Engineering Discipline ... and not A 'Goddes' of Truth ... As Scientists displaced 'Philosophers', Engineers will displace Scientists ... or more precise, Engineers will send Scientists to The Philosophy department ... ROFL
8:14 - It bothers me when experts discount fringe ideas like the simulation hypotheses (he refers to it as the Matrix) because “there’s no way to get to that”. What if it is in fact true, even though there’s no way to ever prove it? Are we doomed to continue following convoluted mathematical abstractions like string theory? It may help us arrive at correct predictions, but this doesn’t prove that it’s an accurate model of reality itself. For example, the early geocentric model of the universe had convoluted ways of predicting the motions of planets and stars - it worked to an extent, but it didn’t portray actual reality. We can’t just rule out ideas because the evidence lies beyond our reach
I couldn’t agree more, interpretation of the maths is just as important as the predictive accuracy of the maths. At the heart of fundamental physics is the quest to understand exactly what fundamental reality is, and such an explanation requires a physical explanation and not merely a mathematical model. (I also buy into the pilot-wave interpretation, it never seemed plausible to me that every single quantum interaction splits the universe in two) This is heady stuff, but I think that the nihilism that often results from buying into nonsensical interpretations of maths that trickle down into the public consciousness needs to be properly addressed. Physical interpretations of mathematical models eventually have moral consequences; many young people today (like fans of rick and morty) think that moral nihilism is the only justifiable position. The problem is that this belief is built on a misinterpretation that has never been verified. Your actions matter. And science can prove it!!
came for quantum mechanics, stayed for the strange river man
yeah....his "explanation" feels quite indeterminate.
It's like he's there but not there at the same time.
LMAO
Is he naked? Lol
Is it me or is there a caveman in the background that just discovered a river?
... and at 5:20 he's taking a leak as well.
The canoe people starts hunting him at 8:15
Yeah a naked cave man! Where the fuck were they filming this??
Very distracting. And he forgot his loin cloth.
No he is part of the quantum theory, he is there and not there at the same time 🤪🤪🤪🤪😂😂😂😂
I was very upset when I realized that in my physics degree they had taught me the Copenhagen propaganda as though it was fact. My discomfort with the material brought me to research deeper and then I realized there are so many other interpretations and that the Copenhagen interpretation was only accepted by 30% of the world's physicists (the majority at the time) pilot wave is surpassing Copenhagen currently for the majority of acceptance. But what troubles me the most is that they don't seem to care about finding out what is actually going on, so they have effectively become quantum engineers rather than quantum physicists. We need a little dose of philosophy to slap us back to the process of discovery.
Schroedinger's Streaker making his quantum appearance.
Chilling in the forest, skinny dipping in a river, waxing poetic about theoretical physics. What a life. 😎
Tim Maudlin is so refreshing to listen to. He is such a clear and incisive thinker on these matters, and he has the degree in Physics to back it up.
This is one of the two or three places right now where a field of science desperately needs philosophers like this to analyze the conceptual foundations. I mean, seriously, why would anyone say out of one side of their mouth "quantum mechanics is extremely well verified by scientists in laboratories" and then out of the other side of their mouth say "the best interpretation of that data entails that there are no laboratories or people". It's just cognitive dissonance, and John Bell saw that. Tim Maudlin sees it too and I hope people will listen.
"It would be nice if every student who learned Quantum Mechanics at least got a three page accurate description of the situation, right? If you really want to understand the foundations then you have have classes in foundations. ..Physicists have this idea that because they have a physics PhD they must know all these answers. But then you have to ask well, where did you learn it? It wasn't in your textbooks. You never learned foundations. You never took a course in it. You never read a chapter about it. You never read a book about it. Why do you think you know about it?"
Very refreshing to hear his take on Bohr. Exactly what I've always thought but couldn't quite articulate.
What a great background for this interview. Even the bird's chirping added to the overall production value. Also, the interviewer's questions and follow up questions were as good as the answers received from this clearly learned and passionate academic.
A problem is that physicists start to believe that the mathematics is more real than reality itself and extrapolate backwards to come up with nonsensical ideas about time.
Well yes...everything is an assumption built upon assumptions...I like to think about whether numbers actually aren't a mistake, will they still be around 10000 years from now or will we have more advanced ways of thinking about the universe? It seems likely that they will be around, because they probably have been here for 100,000 years or more but...it isn't a given.
Yeah, like that goofy fuck Albert Something who said that time is inseparably bound up with space, and that a pair of black holes might, in principle, make the kind of signal first measured almost a hundred years later by the LIGO experiment. It's a good thing there aren't more physicists like that guy.
Can you elaborate? What example are you considering?
Mathematics is a set of theories. Those theories can be used to explain probability, statistics, how numbers relate, geometry and so on.
Then physicists can use these theories in their tries to predict how nature works. The mathematics is just a tool
Im sorry, that was me in the background, I was testing the quantum wave theory.
This interview is amazing. This is the emperor without clothes. Great!
Tim, I couldn't agree more. I think that any unified theory will have to be constructed around a proper conceptual model of how nature works.
The "problem with quantum mechanics" has bothered me since my undergraduate days at Berkeley. While taking the fourth course in the undergraduate physics series there, around 1970, I was disappointed to discover that the physics professors and grad students, for whom I otherwise had enormous admiration, did not seem to understand quantum mechanics. I began to suppose that Berkeley was simply not up to speed in this particular subject. Then I spoke with a friend who had been at Cal Tech and had heard Feynman's point of view -- that nobody understands quantum mechanics. I said, "Well, someone must!" and he reiterated the Feynman line. I did not go on with physics as a career, but I have never stopped trying to understand the meaning of QM as a physical theory.
Ralph Dratman Good luck
Quantum mechanic would not be so perplexing if we took consciesness as a fundamental property of nature. But that goes against our Materialist world view which states that consciesness derives from matter, rather then the other way around.
When Feynman said "nobody understands quantum mechanics", what he really meant was "nobody has a fully intuitive classical like picture of what is going on in quantum systems". There is merit to the possibility that there may really be no classically intuitive physical picture of quantum mechanics, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't still devote resources to studying the foundations of quantum mechanics,.
Thanks for sharing, did spent time on it too. End up brushing up my maths as a hobby, hoping to shed light on it.
I am currently a physics undergrad and will eventually do a Ph.D. and I agree with you that QM is quite complex and a bit hard to grasp only because it does not go with what we think is "normal". Till now I have an issue with the quantum interpretation of spin. I have seen many definitions and asked many great professors. I never found their answer satisfactory. Yet, these definitions work in the realms of our real world. So you can either go with the flow or decide to solve the missing puzzle yourself. In my case, I will go with the flow until I have enough knowledge to tackle things by myself. After that, I vowed that I will solve the missing puzzle in the logic of QM (at least for my understanding)
I think the key to figuring out an actual quantum theory is achieving a better understanding of what time and gravity really are. What I've been thinking about is time is seemingly regarded as a single thing, yes distorted by gravity, but none the less it is still seen as a single universal thing. What if this isn't the case? What if all matter has it's own separate time. That time isn't a property of space it's a property of matter. On a macro scale gravity unifies time making it seem as though it were a property of space. On the quantum scale where matter has very little or no mass gravity is not unifying this material's time with the macro world. In stead very low mass material mostly runs on it's own time and only occasionally has it's time synced to the macro world when it interacts with it.
When we observe these low mass particles our interaction syncs them to our shared time and so to us they appear to behave like, well, particles. If we don't observe them then they're flying on their own clock and to us they can now seem like a wave of possibility because where they are and where they are going and how time is unfolding for them is disconnected from our gravity unified time.
Same goes for quantum entanglement. Entangled particles connection is they are sharing the same time that is separate from our time. All the spooky action at a distance is because we perceive the particles as interacting instantly, but the interaction is really occurring in a separate time that is unfolding differently than our time. This explains even weird crap like quantum erasure where is appears entangled particles communicate retroactively to behave like a particle or a wave. When we choose to observe the experiment the interaction syncs the particles to our time, but until that happened from the particles point of view neither had yet impacted a detector. When the observation syncs them to our time from the particles point of view they are hitting the detectors at the same time.
..Or maybe I'm totally wrong :)
Well said - Philosophers, physicists and mathematicians need to talk to each other. This is how we get people who are experts in all 3 fields. This is how we get progress and understanding.
A very refreshing attitude. As a layperson I have an intense interest in the boundry area between physics and philosophy so I end up looking for informative lectures and videos on UA-cam. I haven't found very many that don't exploit "quantum wierdness" as if that's what people want to hear.
Tim looks like a member of the velvet underground.
Not one of the velvet but close.
He looks like Andy Warhol
Yup.
Mo Tucker?
Just like Velvet Underground. Only 100 people havd read his books. But every single one of them became an influential physicist
One of the best / funniest UA-cam comments I've ever read..
I thought he was the guy from the Goo Goo Dolls
“Once you start doubting, just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman
I would never let a physicist near my cats.
nor a philiospher near a nuclear reactor
Your too late. They're already thinking about your cats, and know they're hypotheticaly dead and alive. Just don't let any Russian physiologist around dogs🐶. They don't preform thought experiments on them.
It was very funny 😃
Well, there is no denying it . This is the most maudlin explanation of Quantum Theory out there today.
kagney13 well that does it, I’m officially devoid of all emotion.
An unfortunate last name to have.. Bahaha
This is the single best explanation of quantum mechanics I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen a lot.
Very interesting. I would love to hear Tim in discussion with Sean Carroll on this topic.
The aspirin analogy is awesome and a great way to explain what's missing from current quantum theory. Another would be gravity. Newton's law of gravity told us how to calculate, but it didn't explain what was going on. Einstein's ToGR tells us what the physical underpinnings of the calculable phenomenon are. And, as a bonus, it made for more accurate predictions, especially in more extreme cases. Hopefully a true theory of Quantum Mechanics (as opposed to the mathematical recipes) will provide similar improvements to Quantum calculations. Great video - thanks!
@Plasma Matter natural fusion happens aswell.
Without the involvement of humans.
As a physicist, I can say that what the philosopher says at 16:00 is exactly correct. Very reasonable person especially his view on "power". We could not get a job about the foundation of QM simply because it looked hopeless as a question leading to no job.
This week, a philosopher explaining Quantum Theory to us. Next week, my plumber explaining astrophysics.
As sad as it is, philosophers tend to have a better grasp on qm than most physicists.
as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/tim-maudlin.html
Excellent Tim Maudlin!
Great interview. Efforts to silence debate seems to be the norm now, not just in physics but other sciences too and in social topics as well. When someone questions the established thought it feels empowering.
Lambda that’s covered in John’s second letter, ‘2nd John’- where we see report of a loose canon in the church, but despite the bad example set by him there is a hint that they should neither eject nor exorcise him. Mormons would do both, tho.
This turned out to be worth my time 👍
This 'silencing' hasn't occurred in my experience, but our university actually has a quantum foundations department, so we may be the exception.
except when it's about tesla, flat earth or electric universe.
No, a scientific theory does NOT tell you what things ARE. They never have. One of the big complaints about Newton's theory of gravity when he published it was that it didn't explain what gravity IS. This is the ancient view of theory, not the modern scientific view.
Yes, having some kind of intuitive model - an "interpretation" of the theory - is often useful as an aid to understanding the theory, but such interpretations are not scientific and are not predictive. With classical physics, the interpretations tend to be obvious, as we can imagine pool balls colliding with each other exchanging momentum and energy: we can mentally replace pool balls colliding with with gas molecules or vehicles colliding with each other, and it's all pretty much the same idea, even if the real life math is more difficult than the idealized pool balls. The problem with quantum mechanics is that there is no intuitive analogy that works.
What is unclear to this professor of philosophy (not physics), is that this problem with quantum mechanics exists for all scientific theories. It exists for gravity, as I pointed out above, and for electricity (what is a "field" really?), and for thermodynamics (no, smashing a coffee cup on the floor doesn't explain "entropy"), and so on. No, we just have mathematical models that make predictions about what we will measure in any specific case. The only difference is that quantum mechanics doesn't have a "just so story" for quantum mechanics that satisfies our curiosity.
This is why Feynman had contempt for philosophers of this sort. They mistake the cartoonish "just so stories" that are used to popularize science as being the truly meaningful parts of the theory. They aren't. They're just "cartoon physics", qualitative explanations of what the math says that don't actually explain anything about the physical world, but are emotionally satisfying because they PRETEND to explain the physical world.
Scientific theories -describe- the world and how to make predictions about it. They don't explain the world in any sort of ontological way.
Shut up with your bullshit
Spot on.
That was all very tidy. None of it can be proven, but, I understood it! 😂
I think Philosophy is more important than ever in Physics, to help keep it on track, given the difficult and unintuitive nature of the high hung fruit.
This argument resonates a bit with me.
What I have read of Quantum Mechanics strikes me as sort of incomplete; it's all about the *limits* of things, what we *can* know and *can't* know, working backwards from there.
I feel like it's like overlaying a picture and tracing its contours, then simply labelling the various blobs as "person", "tree", "car" etc - without bothering to fill in the colors or the shadows.
The image is "correct", yes, but there are certain dimensions of it that are missing.
Someone had to tell it at last.
This is the real problem with QM in general. To put it in terms of a philological analogy: QM has a lot of syntax but very little semantics.
FINALLY !!!!!! FINALLY !!!!!! FINALLY !!!!!! FINALLY !!!!!! FINALLY !!!!!!
BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO
A thousand million thank yous, Tim !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Very nice interview, thank-you very much. I always appreciate the philosophical approach of Maudlin as opposed to the technical approach of physical science. Maudlin shows very well how philosophy remains very confused about the nature of physical reality even after 100 years of the very successful predictions of quantum science. Philosophy is really a discipline that asks questions without answers, then answers them, and then argues endlessly with other philosophers about the nature of physical reality. I like philosophy but I do not ever expect any answers to questions that have no answers.
Why are we here? Why are we here right now? Why is it us and not someone else that is right here right now? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of quantum mechanics? Why is the universe the way that it is?
These are all questions that have no answers, but are nevertheless useful to ask and discuss because that is what consciousness does. Consciousness is asking questions without answers and then continuing to find meaning in the endless discourse that follows. This is basically because we cannot always know the limits of what we can know even though we know there are limits to what we can know. We do need to keep asking and answering unanswerable questions in order to find the horizon of answers that we did not expect.
Topi up politics in England in a few days and I have 9913&
Tim goes wrong at @4:25. He dives into this mistake at @7:00. Bell's inequality falsifies local-realism. In lay terms, this means that (particularly defined) "locality" and (particularly defined) "reality" cannot co-exist. By saying "There has to be some non-locality.", Tim accepts "realism" uncritically. He confirms this when discussing the manifest image. But with critical examination, we cannot (yet) disregard either of those mutually exclusive options. In my understanding of the field, "locality" actually has the more compelling scientific credentials.
However, Tim is right about the character of Einstein. Albert was not at ease with considering "realism" falsifiable. And neither is Tim, apparently. General relativity provides the most compelling model incorporating "locality", to date. This must have been poignant for Albert. During his life, Bell inequalities were not yet experimentally tested. They are now. Therefore, while praising the poetic philosophy of Einstein, Tim rejects the crowning work that General relativity is.
That struck me as odd also. His comments on the "manifest image" suggest that he is committed to what Putnam used to criticize under the label "metaphysical realism". Maudlin also seems to speak of time, being either real or illusory, as if Kant never existed. His appeal to the primacy of the manifest image (although correct in a sense) is thus quite unfair even to Sellars who himself had a finer appreciation of Kant.
What he's talking about is the field of "ontology" which is the study of reality. The other two major branches of philosophy are epistemology (how we know what we know) and ethics (i.e. morality).
Sounds like the continuity of Gaston Bachelard warnings on QM teaching : This is one of the rarest and one of the most accurate talks I ever heard on QM, despite the fact I'm physicist. The only other author I know up to now who developed similar arguments was Richard Feynman. And obviously, most of the tools he developed were greedly used by his community, but all of the similar points he developed were quickly forgotten...
He’s onto something very critical.
Great interview!
Finally someone is telling what I was thinking for years.... And I was always said that I don't understand it because I see quantum mechanics too clearly. Pilot wave team here!
The real problem is not with Quantum theory but with Tim Maudlin not being able to understand it or even science in general. Scientific theories, in general, do not claim knowledge of absolute ontological truths, instead they are systematizations of empirical truths that allow to make falsifiable predictions. So if you look at quantum physics from that point of view, it is an incredible successful theory, despite of its known limitations. So though we know that the existing quantum theory is not the final truth, it is still a _scientific_ theory.
None of that seems to matter to Time Maudlin as he starts his attack on quantum physics with a ridiculous statement:
1:04 "tell me what exists in the physical world: Are there particles? Are there fields? Is there space-time? And tell me about those things and then specify some laws about how they behave that tell me how they behave through time."
If only Tim Maudlin bothered to open any textbook about QFT, he would find the answer to these questions. For instance, elementary particles are just excitations of the underlying quantum fields. There are also mathematical equations that describe how they interact, so it is not a secret how they behave if you can read the language of mathematics.
Moreover, Tim Maudlin seems to be unaware that different interpretations give different answers when it comes to the question of locality or wave-function collapse: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#Comparison
He's fine with it, but the problem is people being stifled who want to dig down to a deeper understanding of QM.
He gave the aspirin analogy, that people knew very well what it did, but had no idea why it did it. By reaching a deeper understanding of the "why", you can come to a lot of realizations that weren't discernible through the equations alone.
Woof Thank you finally a fellow physicist. I was getting furious hearing his comments and this comment section as well.
Key points:
- We know HOW but we don't know WHY. This goes for most of physics and its constants.
- There might be some non-locality but again, we do not know why.
- There are, as a matter of fact, many higher dimensions, that we will never ever get to see, measure or be part of because we cannot.
- Time is not an illusion, its just something we live in and cannot avoid.
- THERE ARE NO parallel universes, there most likely are multiverses - two very different concepts.
My philosophical interpretation is: we know how quantum mechanics work, and we will harness it to our advantage in terms of using it to create objects that improve our daily lives. We do not know why it works and my prediction is that it links to a higher dimension which we will never get access to, thus giving it the illusion that its random, and thus we think life is non-deterministic.
However since we will never ever get to contact or measure higher dimensions, this means that we will never know what causes this randomness which could be a non-random phenomenon, so it could be deterministic, but we will never know so in fact it is non-deterministic to us.
I personally think that life is deterministic, there is no randomness at our level of dimensions at least, and a being living in a higher dimensions will laugh at us thinking that we have a choice in what happens.
To quote a movie phrase: “I think a man cannot know his destiny. He can only do what he can, until his destiny is revealed.”
This means that the world gives us the illusion it is non-deterministic, but since we have no clue why there is randomness it actually becomes deterministic at our level of dimensions.
Yes i agree for the most part but i also know that we can...and do contact what u call higher dimensions. Just because some have not, they believe this is true for all. The problem science has is this-to realize any higher dimension, the "material" dimension that we currently occupy is transcended. We move from a material orientation to an energetic one. But science etc. wants to take things from this material level (measurement, statistical prediction, physics etc, etc....even our sense of self) and apply them on the higher one (energy) which is absolutely impossible. Our sense of "time" does not exist in the quantum so neither does our sense of "self"-they are inextricably linked. Trying to understand or use a higher dimension will always fail when using the tools of a lower/different one. This is the same as "A problem cannot be solved by the same type of thinking that created it". True quantum behavior is non-linear, non-personal, non-human centered.... whereas our current understanding is linear and totally human oriented.
Not just you, every normal person in the world wants to know. Only those who want to shut us up so they can have us just admire their mathematical prowess don't want to find out. They'd hate if we knew physically what is happening, then they'd have no more authority. We all want to know, but we'll live with the mathematical explanation if we have to, still hoping it will expose a deeper layer of meaning.
Everyone wants to know, but maybe knowing is not as simple as you or the professor wants it to be. Maybe knowing includes statistical knowledge, probability knowledge.
Thinking that nature can be reduced to some easy to get for any human explanation is most likely wrong and can most likely never happen.
Trying to simplify also often means certain parts of the thing getting simplified gets lost.
I like what this guy is saying. Mathematics can tell what will happen but not why. Perhaps we lack the cognitive ability to grasp the foundations. We naturally try to relate everything we understand about the quantum realm back to the macro world we are familiar with. But maybe there is a point where foundational realities are completely unrelatable.
Physical: N/Kg = m/s^2, Electrical: W/N = Ohmm/Wb = m/FV = m/AOhmF = m/s, Magnetic: H/(Nm^2/C^2) = m/FH = m/s^2, Gravitational: H/(Nm^2/Kg^2) = Kg^2/(Nm^2/H) = Kg^2/A^2m.
The problem with people is that they try to compare behaviour of an elementary particle to behaviour of large objects. It’s as if you try to compare the life of a single person, to a lifestyle of a large family. Single person has more freedom and can do things independently of others. In a family , every member has impact, people co- depend and they behave in regard to each other. Not the best analogy but this is how I understand it.
When I was single, I could go out any time, come back any time. Stay all day in bed if I wanted, change my job , suddenly move to a different area, I didn’t depend on anyone .
When I got a family, I couldn’t go out without planing, bcz kids depending on me, I couldn’t change my job, I had to think about how it’s going to affect my income bcz I pay for school and in general have more experience, I can’t just change my location I think of areas where good schools are and so on. So as every member of my family, we interact and that restricts what we can and cannot do.
This is the simple way of putting it
J.S. Bell posits a hidden variable, λ(t). The problem is that timekeeping, t, varies from location to location. There is no universal cosmic clock, t, that keeps the same time everywhere and everywhen in the cosmos. In the step where Bell cancels out the hidden variable, λ(t), he commits an error. Because twin particles separated in space age at distinct rates, they do not remain in perfect phase-lock synchrony. Instead of perfectly canceling to zero, there should be some kind of residual "beat frequency" that survives to the bottom line in Bell's Inequality. Indeed, in quantum computers, qubits are found to decohere in a matter of nanoseconds.
a serendipitous poetic moment. we are all essentially paddling blissfully in a river! regardless! isn't that what Tim is saying?
I would recommend to Tim Maudlin and his audience to look up the Buddhist teachings on emptiness. Particularly Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Riponche's teachings on the phenomena. I think Tim is on to something here. Something that Buddhist Scholars/Masters have resolved through a practice of training the mind to obtain (for lack of a better word) a direct realization of all phenomena.
We need a physical theory in quantum mechanics that predicts how reality works because mathematics won't tell you what caused that prediction though it predicts something very accurate. Mathematics shows you the effect but not the cause. That's why we need a physical theory.
The answer is actually simple. Einstein and Schrodinger were right. There is no such thing as particles in reality. Particles are simply our interpretation of a measurement. We assign mass, location, momentum and spin to measurements of things that are not actually particles. Hence the need to apply the Born equation. The Born equation is simply to particalize the measurement results for us humans who want to interpret the results as the measurement of a particle with a location, momentum, spin etc. The phenomenon (which is actually a wave) has none of these properties in the way us humans interpret it. The cat is dead if the geiger counter detected the phenomenon (that us humans are interpreting as detection of a particle) and not dead if not. There is no collapsing of a wave function or multiverses. It is just our incorrect interpretation of our measurements as particulate when they are actually just waves. Everything is waves, interacting with other waves. There is no locality as there is no particle. Hence the ability for entanglement at an apparent distance; as the waves can interact over a field not across two point locations between two non-existent particles with two non-existent locations.
There’s a naked guy wading behind him 😳
Maybe he’s got his feet entangled...
Give a medieval person a car, and they will easily learn to operate it and make predictions about it. Ask that medieval person what the car is or how it functions in fundamental ways, and that is where we are at with quantum physics.
16:52 -> so true!
My application for PhD funding in the foundations of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) recently got rejected. Now I am turning to Solid State to get funding.
I am really looking forward to meeting Tim at Saig this July :)
Sascha Lill SL, why not try kickstarter? Put together some of your ideas and create some visualizations etc. This is so,ethimg I certainly would suppoert.
I hate Solid State so much. In my university, 90% of the physics department is doing Solid State and they made it a required course for all students.
If you can observe yourself then you're just observing perception and belief, an infinite universe can't really observe itself but it can create itself by the belief that it can observe itself from an experience. You can't add 1 to an infinite universe, time is radial so time never ends but it can only recreate itself infinitely, time can never change. This universe is like a movie that replays itself over and over and never changes because that's the only way you could be real for yourself, it's the belief that you can create an experience to observe yourself that brings about your existence, 3 dimensions only exist if a point creates the perception of time which is a square within a square, pi and square are the physics of the universe, we are the energy of perception and belief.
Thumb nail had me like ,
Wtf does bon jovi know ?
I want to say thank you to Tim Maudlin for presenting rather complex thoughts and ideas in a very clear and concise form. His approach is totally rational and I wish it gains attention and recognition from a much wider audience.
As a fan of science with some understanding of the concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity (but not at all, the math), I just wish I could find a a rigorous, scientific and mathematical analysis of the ideas of Nassim Haramein as conceptually those ideas seem to be rather compelling . But they are also, certainly, mind-blowing which may be why most of the searches I've undertaken to see if his ideas have been seriously considered turn-up either ad hominem attacks or simple dismissal with little if any reasoning as to the basis for the dismissal notwithstanding the detailed science and math which Haramein offers to support his theories.
I didn't know garbage could be mind blowing.
I found the Theory of Everything. To make the mental leap from Newton to quantum mechanics, we need to give up the preconception determinism: stop complaining that the theory cannot predict WHAT is going to happen. So to get from quantum theory to Theory of Everything, we need to make another conceptual leap and cleanse our mind of another preconception: give up the notion that a theory needs to have any predictive value at all: stop complaining, that the theory is completely useless. So my theory, as stated, goes:
I don't know what is going to happen at all.
Waiting for the Nobel Prize now.
You see physicists? Your almost unattainable Holy Grail was so easy to solve. All you needed to do was to cleanse your mind of harmful preconceptions.
Refreshing interview on the subject. This horse has been beat to death over and over and this guy shares some refreshing perspective and critique of conventional stance on the subject. I really enjoyed this one.
Spooky action at a distance in the background at 2:40.
All of the problems found on phisics today may be solved with the aseptense that light multiplies by 10 in such a way light gets back fast. there must to be comunication but fast - They assume a particle may be in one place but wherever too - the solution is clear if light goes by 10 near to infinity fast imagen a band that goes fast and comes fast and that particle is moved forward and contrary now see it when it stops on one side and when stops on the other: no more spookie thing
the info "Professor of Philosopher at NYU" :P
The objective collapse theory is in fact at odds with the notion of... who am I kidding, go to the medium shot so I can see what the forest man is doing.
This is all very well but how exactly does he explain the the double split experiment?
Congratulations excellent questions, marvelous answers. At last a professor of philosophy who sounds more like physicist than most Quantum specialists.
Epictetus the philosopher said: it is very difficult to learn something you think you already know. This is a huge problem to the Quantum theory physicists and academics.
Significance of Certainty
Coordination of Connectivity > Connected Coordination > Actualization
To become removed from Chronological time and then to be able to visualize time as non linear so as to bridge connections between specific points of demarcation that create new stable loops without triggering collapses while also understanding the greater cycle of renewal that enables: Α+Ω | Α=Ω | 1=0 | 1+0 | 2020 = Κ:Κ
The greatest fear of the usurpers of power is the loss of that power.
If persons are limited to the calculations of the finite of what is conceivable/obtainable; their ability to conceive of and then to obtain infinity (that which is infinite, limitless) is directly prevented by their calculated precision.
Very interesting and he's absolutely right. Thanks for sharing.
Very good! A worthy endeavor.
When the Copenhagen Interpretation has the final nail put in its coffin, physicists will look back on this 100+ year period with embarrassment.
Although even with delusions of grandeur, QM/QP has produced a lot of benefit and useful work (ie: "shut up and calculate"). But yes, from a theoretical perspective, its still a delusion.
No one looks back at Newtons Laws in embarrassment. Science knows that theories can be wrong and they can either be used to build upon on another theory or it can be discarded entirely. Hence why we keep verifying through experiments because we are not afraid to prove its wrong. Dumb comment.
Scientific Theories have well defined attributes and limitations, requirements.
You can announce a theory on anything at all.
The theory or laws of Thermodynamics is a completely different animal to the subjective theory of say painting.
Quantum Mechanics is peculiar however in the sense that it is a stochastic based theory - non-deterministic in nature.
It spews out probabilities and invariably involves counter intuitive concepts - but nevertheless, it has no known counter examples in observation or experimentation that refute its main contentions etc.
This does not mean that a deterministic theory will not eventuate in the future that will be able to describe the same "quantum effects" defined today.
I bet string theory turns out to be just something that everyone works on because that way they can funding
The work of Bell showed that any deterministic model must be both nonlocal. More recent work however has managed to separate nonlocality from no ftl signalling, and so in a strange way it can be argued that it doesn't violate relativity. However that then begs the question, if it is possible for causal influences to propagate faster than light, why does nature seem to conspire in such a way as to prevent these causal influences from allowing us to send signals.
Great interview -- it seems QM has become an odd mix of applied math and a religious furor demanding that the statistics and formula be accepted as literal reality...
Because it is dumbass.
Agree. These theories are just fairy stories written to match the evidence, and changed whenever the evidence seems to change. Which is okay, but it isn't truth.
Quantum Mechanics yields results that are 100% congruent with physical reality. Therefore it can be accepted as literal reality. What's your problem with it? It's called theory and experiment, and you don't need religious furor to trust it.
I don't think so. He seems to totally ignore the paradigm changing efforts of the experimentalists and his interviewer seems pretty clueless.
There is a problem not being talked about in this interview. That is 'what we can see'. We don't really have the capacity to observe at the sub atomic level. We see after effects of high energy events.. but we can't just look at normal stuff and observe with any real accuracy. This means we are lacking the capacity to 'fill in the blanks' regarding the foundations of QM.
If what he says is true, that there is resistance to this type of investigation, it means our knowledge won't be complete until we break the logjam.
QM equations predict a lot.. so we are reaping huge benefits.. but until we undergo yet another revolution in the capacity to observe, we'll be stuck (this process is part of the history of science.. where a revolution in observation power = a revolution in understanding).
It is always with a bit of irony that I read about those who deny scientific principles in favor of some hypothesis that just so happens to sit within their own realm of understanding.
Theists are often adamant about rejecting Evolution or the Big Bang, and forget (or never realize) that it was a priest who originally developed the hypothesis that the Universe might have arisen like an egg, from some beginning, and that when people learned of this, the whole idea was dubbed the "Big Bang" as a joke!
When the hypothesis turned out to have merit, even the Pope was quite happy to think that our Universe most likely had a beginning event, and when people continued to doubt this as an absurdity, he even queried the priest about mandating that people now believe this "Big Bang" as church doctrine!
And yet today, most fundamentalists and many theists fight the idea of this "Big Bang Theory" as scientific intrusion into their religious dogma.
The same holds true for Quantum Mechanics: I see philosophers who debate that something they cannot comprehend should not be taught and learned as science, when the tools such as the computers being used to document their thoughts and allow an audience to consume their stories contain billions of transistors, none of which would work if it were not for the phenomena of Quantum Mechanics and the electron-tunneling that takes place at every P-N junction within every transistor.
Yes, there is a lot that science does not know. In fact, the Mechanism of Action for numerous widely-used drugs is still unknown even today, in this twenty-first century! And yes, up until the early 1970s, this even included aspirin, and today it still includes many drugs.
But just because some portion of why or how something works is still unknown, it does not mean that it cannot be quantified to indeed have certain behaviors and properties, just as the theory which attempts to understand the beginning of our Universe, or the equations that accurately describe current flow through chips of silicon. - j q t -
And now you sound like a scientific theist, why do you believe in anything beyond existence, why would you need anything more then the belief that you can observe yourself so that you can recreate the experience that created you. Without perception and belief of existence you couldn't exist, duality is our energy, without finite time you wouldn't be infinite. If something has a beginning it must have an end, time is radial, we could only be real for ourselves if time never changes, the universe will always recreate itself by believing it's observing itself, energy can be no less or no more then its infinite self, you can't add 1 to infinity, the universe can never change but it created itself by the belief in time but time can only exist if time is set as finite radial. I have written this message right now infinitely or it wouldn't be real for me and I wouldn't have my thoughts, the universe is just like a movie that replays itself infinitely.
Never knew Bon Jovi was a professor
really good interview!
It is so obvious that "time" does not exist. What exists is change ... in all sorts of phenomenon. But there is no separate existent that is "time". To claim there is ... is just pure assertion with zero evidence of any kind whatsoever. To anyone who claims "time" exists, I say *SHOW ME SOME.* Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will.
Breath of fresh air.
At this point, having tools to think about our world is so much more valuable to me than having a more efficient phone.
theotormon you can also overpay for technology to access free content.
Haha, yes it was rather maudlin 😆
The new book by Lee Smolin "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution" is about the very same problem.
Maudlin seriously misrepresents not only the Copenhagen interpretation, but the thinking of the many extraordinary physicists who accepted it. It is by no means some sort of "dogma" foisted on the world by Bohr's charismatic personality, but is in fact the most radical forward looking step not only in science but philosophy itself. What it says, basically, is what should have been evident even to the ancient Greeks but was not: that there is a limit to inquiry, either scientific or metaphysical, beyond which it is no longer possible to go. Bohr said it all when he wrote: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract
quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." And, as he demonstrated, and has been confirmed in experiment after experiment, any attempt to "go beyond" his "Copenhagen interpretation" is a step backward, demonstrating a lack of understanding of what is at stake. We need simply to accept that quantum physics is complete in the sense that no over-reaching theory that encompasses everything is possible, both in practical terms and in principle.
I strongly disagree with the idea that QM is not a physical theory. All physicists worth their salt have gone through many late nights worrying about and slowly (over years) clarifying their understanding of the foundations of QM. The “shut up and calculate” story is just that: a story. Professors only use this phrase when they need to end a long classroom debate on interpretation so that progress can be made. They do not expect students to stop paying attention to the foundations and good students never do.
_ How does time differ from an other measurement concept: such as inches, mm, km, grams, etc.?
_ Time appears to be in the same conceptual category as all other measurement concepts. It relates to our psychological INTERPRETATION of the memory of events that happened in what we call "the past", and the ideas, hopes and desires that we project into the future, which does not factually exist.
_ Thus we invent mathematical systems and conceptual procedures/theories to make us feel that we have some sort of comfort with understanding the world we experience - which in the final analysis is subjective. Even the so-called objective is in the end analyzed and interpreted subjectively.
_ Thus Einstein may have actually come to realize towards the end of his life that time actually IS an illusion.
There is an big difference in time/space and time how we experience it in our minds.
They often get mixed up.
There’s a big difference between the “manifest world” being an Illusion, versus it being Emergent. And I may be wrong, but I don’t think many modern theoretical quantum physicists still accept the former (if they even ever really did?).
I think people get confused about “ time is not real” because they don’t have abstract imagination.
Time itself is not a physical property, it just represents the changes which occurs and the changes in comparison to everything around.
If things don’t change time looses its meaning. While other 3 dimensions still exist.
If you freeze everything , stop every particle from vibration , then time stops. Bcz time is just a representation of how particles interact within the system.
Imagine you run a marathon and there are people standing cheering on the left and right and you encouraged to give hi5 to as many as possible. In order to do that you need to run as slo as possible, by other words you change your location less often. Giving hi5 represents particles interacting with environment .
Now if you choose to run really fast you’ll not be able to give hi5 to many people bcz you change your location so often your hand reaches only 1 out of 20 people . This represents how time dialation works . If you don’t interact with environment much( with other particles) you get hardly any changes in you. So time slow down for you bcz the particles you are made off don’t interact with environment .
If you go to a planet where gravity is very strong, you’ll get squashed, your particles get pushed together , again making it difficult for any changes to occurring. So again time slows for you in comparison with other people who live on another planet with different gravity.
The cat in a box is a thought experiment, really not the best example to represent the idea.
The idea is you need to make a measurement in order to know what particles are doing. The act of measure is what makes impact. It only works on elementary particles and not on large objects.
Uncertainty principle can be explained that in order to know where particle is you need to stop it( measurement ), once it’s stopped it has zero velocity. Now you know location but you don’t know how fast it was going. If you know how fast particle is going then you don’t know location bcz it changes all the time .
Regarding how Bohr pushed the Copenhagen Interpretation...Exactly!
He asks some very apparent questions that came to my mind almost immediatly after I learned about this almost shamanistic mysticism of quantum mechanics for the first time. I wonder why this isn't a topic all the time.
Saying that there is space and there is time is misunderstanding what Einstein meant by space-time. They are deeply entwined and cannot be separated. Space-time is just a consequence of how causality behaves and propagates through the different quantum fields, with a limit on its speed.
Gerard 't Hooft is saying the same thing. Quantum mechanics fetishizes mathematics and experimental results, ignoring the fact that QM bears no relationship to the world we experience. It’s as if someone tells you that you’re a multibillionaire but won’t let you see any of the money.
This was or is refreshingly honest and humble. Especially the discussion around celebrity science high jacking the more serious work underpinning the latest theories hypothesis. Very enjoyable. Thank you.
*has been
Bon Jovi is a lot deeper than I had expected.
Very engaging interviewee and interviewer ... am subscribing.
Why is there a naked man in the background taking a bath in the river? I find it a wee bit distracting.
Time is real only in the sense that 'meters' and 'kilos' are real.
We did not invent clocks to measure time, but to measure movement.
The universe is not a snapshot; it is not standing still while time is the only thing that moves. We invented
this tool called 'time' in order to measure all the movements and processes of the cosmos.
Very interresting! Thanks!
So what's the deal with the naked man in the river at the start of the video?
The naked guy swimming in the background is a great touch.
As a layman computer scientist, what bothers me about theoretical physicists is that they often seem to judge their models and interpretations by their _mathematical_ simplicity and elegance. But what they often seem to forget is that the universe manages to 'compute itself'. This makes me believe we should judge our models by how *computationally* complex they are - not how *mathematically* complex.
From this perspective, a cellular automaton universe makes way more sense to me than e.g. many worlds and string theory.
But then again I'm a total layman on the subject ;)
How many Logic Gates do you need to judge a Fourier Transformation??
How Many Logic gates do you need to judge the word 'Judge' ??
Soon or Later, The Apes must to recognize that The Thing on Itself cannot be compressed into symbolic representations ...
The Map is not The Territory ...
Ok, The map informs about The Territory ...
But That Information is a dynamic process in The Interpreters ... a Post-factual layer of abstraction ... not, The Thing on Itself ...
Logic gates are - basically - the cells for a Computer Language ... and The Computer language is basically Hardware Instructions ... How to distribute electric currents in a designed Chip ...
How many Logic gates do you need to reproduce the smells from an Orange ??
The Map is not The Territory ...
Reality is not a Simulation inside a Hyperphysical Computer ...
Reality exist ...
then, The Apes merge ...
Then, The Apes evolve and learn to use symbols ...
Then, The symbols deploy memory in the Apes ...
Then, The Apes begin to believe that Reality is a memory ...
Not, Memory is just an Environmental Dynamic ...
The best explanation for reality is a reality on itself ...
Explanations are always post-factual ...
Texmark's mathematical Universe is more Map as territory Mythology
The same with Stephen Wolfram 'Cellular Automatons' ....
All that Mythology tends to come in Apes that think too much for what They 'See' ... but Vision is just a sense and an environmental dynamic ...
A Post-factual layer of abstraction is just that ... an abstraction ...
... and The abstraction cannot be the source for the factual condition where the abstraction comes ...
... Basically, The Games of language becomes valuable for the apes when/where those games are interpreted by the apes as Patterns 'In Time' ...
Maybe, Science is just an Apes Proto-Engineering Discipline ... and not A 'Goddes' of Truth ...
As Scientists displaced 'Philosophers', Engineers will displace Scientists ... or more precise, Engineers will send Scientists to The Philosophy department ...
ROFL
We really need a physical theory!
8:14 - It bothers me when experts discount fringe ideas like the simulation hypotheses (he refers to it as the Matrix) because “there’s no way to get to that”. What if it is in fact true, even though there’s no way to ever prove it? Are we doomed to continue following convoluted mathematical abstractions like string theory? It may help us arrive at correct predictions, but this doesn’t prove that it’s an accurate model of reality itself. For example, the early geocentric model of the universe had convoluted ways of predicting the motions of planets and stars - it worked to an extent, but it didn’t portray actual reality. We can’t just rule out ideas because the evidence lies beyond our reach
Wait? Quicksilver became a philosopher?
yeah...this lookalike joke is still fresh on youtube, I was going to say Jon Bon Jovi
I couldn’t agree more, interpretation of the maths is just as important as the predictive accuracy of the maths. At the heart of fundamental physics is the quest to understand exactly what fundamental reality is, and such an explanation requires a physical explanation and not merely a mathematical model.
(I also buy into the pilot-wave interpretation, it never seemed plausible to me that every single quantum interaction splits the universe in two)
This is heady stuff, but I think that the nihilism that often results from buying into nonsensical interpretations of maths that trickle down into the public consciousness needs to be properly addressed. Physical interpretations of mathematical models eventually have moral consequences; many young people today (like fans of rick and morty) think that moral nihilism is the only justifiable position. The problem is that this belief is built on a misinterpretation that has never been verified. Your actions matter. And science can prove it!!
If you pay very close attention, in the first 2 minutes, you'll find Tim Maudlin discussing modern interpretations of quantum mechanics.
This guy is living on a prayer
well observed, not badly put...you could have taken the absurdity a bit further
He gives love a bad name, bad name
Praying has no proof of efficacy
He's half way there. imo
Bertrand, I think Bartholomew is saying he looks like Jon Bon Jovi.