Here's the link to the new thread for any and all interested.
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Demystifying Quantum Physics
- Thread starter Mr Spinkles
- Start date
godnotgod
Thou art That
Heh..heh..heh...Ironic that mystics, who, according to physicists, know nothing about QM and should stay away, are practically in perfect agreement with each other about how it relates to consciousness, get the finger-wagging from the scientists, who claim only they are the ones who understand it, yet are the ones who find themselves in disagreement over what it is. That's what happens when you try to box in Reality.
Again, the ancient texts are correct:
"The tao that can be tao'd is not the true Tao"
And now we return to our regularly scheduled broadcast....
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PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
And where's your transistor?
That's what happens when you try to box in Reality.
Again, the ancient texts are correct:
"The tao that can be tao'd is not the true Tao"
And now we return to our regularly scheduled broadcast....
And where's your transistor?
"You're a transistor, lightening resistor, conducting to the mother star, that's what you are..." 311
Mr Spinkles
Mr
Wrong on all counts. As you know, contrary to your insinuations my criticism is directed only at those mystics who abuse QM, like Chopra. Furthermore, zaybu is entitled to his personal opinions, but they are at odds with what most physicists say in most standard, recognized textbooks and journal articles. There is limited room for different conceptual interpretations of QM, and at best, zaybu is advocating one of these minority possible interpretations; but i.m.o. he's not even doing that, he's just wrong. At any rate, one anonymous guy posting on an internet debate forum is not as credible a representative of the best science as, say, a physicist publishing an article in the journal Nature. And Legion and I have cited many such articles--they speak for themselves. Tangentially, if zaybu were right and physics experiments did not provide evidence for nonlocality, then Chopra would be even MORE wrong than I made him out to be.godnotgod said:
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zaybu
Active Member
Since when does science operate on an appeal to authority? I know scholars always do that, but in science, that's a no-no. You can quote Einstein, but that won't support your claim. Einstein was right on many things, but he was also wrong on many other things. And you'll find that this is true from Newton, and way back, to Edward Witten. In science, you present your theory, your observations, etc. and they should stand on their own. After all, in 1905, Einstein was a nobody working as a clerk.
Are we talking about the Chopra? Does he post here?
More seriously, the whole question of spookiness/nonlocality is a matter of interpretation. Thankfully a good number of physicists didn't bother with that and went on to develop what is now one of the greatest intellectual achievements, the Standard Model. And now after the Higgs at the LHC, people will concentrate on what's beyond SM.
Nuff with spookiness.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Mr Spinkles
Mr
It doesn't. To be precise, I'm not doing science, I'm posting my opinion on an internet forum. I notice that you did not hesitate to invoke your own authority and credentials when it suited you.
Please understand, my objective is not to actually prove or disprove anything here about physics. That would be impossible in this format. Furthermore, I have no interest in debating with every armchair physicist out there who thinks he knows better, or even every physics PhD with his own unique take on things. (There are 1,000 awarded in physics each year!) My limited objective in this thread is to present quantum physics as it is understood by most physicists, in a simple manner accessible to most people. The motivation behind this was to clear up some misconceptions about quantum physics in another thread, featuring Deepak Chopra.
You claimed my description of the results of Bell-type experiments as demonstrating quantum nonlocality is "totally wrong". But according to most physicists, it is correct. So for the third time, I ask: are you presenting your own personal take on things, or are you claiming to represent the understanding of most physicists? The evidence Legion and I have provided (quotes from books, articles) suggests it is the former. If you can present material from mainstream physics sources (PNAS, Nature) which says nonlocality is "totally wrong" then please do so.
I agree with you there.zaybu said:
Since it began. When alchemy and chemistry were still kind of the same thing, Newton mentioned seeing further because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
This is actually related to the thread, because it is one defense used when "science" (or scholarship in genera) is misused. It's the "I can claim what I want and when told that real specialists disagree I can hide behind a misuse of a classic argumentation fallacy", and I see it a lot (although mostly in religious debates).
Words like sophistry and rhetoric are used negatively to describe bad arguments or a poorly made point. Which, ironically, is almost exactly the opposite of what they meant since before English existed: the study, use, and discipline of argumentation. But logical fallacies remain logical fallacies and poor arguments remain poor arguments.
First, all of science is built upon "appeals" to authority. I don't have to develop a formal definition of limits or develop laws of motion, because others did. The books you linked to earlier are filled with citations, because the authors are relying on those considered to be authorities and having published work that is considered to be authoritative.
The argument from authority developed for a particular reason and continues to mean a particular type of misuse in debate or argumentation. It is an appeal to an authority whose field of experise is irrelevant (historically, this would usually mean a royal or religious figure, such as a king or pope). Even if one simply cites a single scientist whose speciality is in QM, they may not make a good argument but they are not "appealing to authority" in the way that the classical fallacy means.
To argue that an appeal to the physics community on an issue that concerns physics is a fallacious appeal to authority is to make all of science irrelevant and meaningless (and scholarship in general). Can consensus be wrong? Sure. Does that make every argument equal? Of course not. That's why if you have a medical issue you don't go to an automobile repair shop, and if you want to re-do the all your interior electrics or plumbing or both, you don't call an astrophysicist.
Merely by referring to things like entanglement and quantum physics itself, you've relied on "arguments from authority", as you've never performed experiments with quantum systems or used technology required to conduct experiments like Aspect and those that followed.
Every argument you've made about physics, every point, every statement comes from a direct or indirect use of arguments made from authority. It's just that now such authority has become inconvenient.
Since when did scientists stop being scholars?
By itself, no not really. It would be better than what you have done, which is to lie about your expertise, but it wouldn't be much of an argument.
However, nobody other than you has relied on something as flimsy as simply quoting Einstein. You make claims about what Aspect and others did and what it showed, and I've provided what they actually said, both about what they did and how it related to Einstein and Bell. Scholars, whether scientists or not, progress because they don't have to continually reproduce what others did already. Bell used EPR, Aspect used Bell and EPR, and so on, because that's called progress. It means you don't have to own a hadron collidor or imagining equipment that costs millions, because institutions that can afford such things have "authorities" who can use this equipment thanks to their "authority" (although its more often called expertise or something similar), and can send their worked to be reviewed for publication by other "authorities", who can then determine if it should be a part of "authoritative literature" and thus available to authorities everywhere.
If we couldn't "appeal" to the right authority, everybody would still be going over Newton's equations and experiments.
I've said this, as have others, again and again and again. Einstein was wrong to think QM was incomplete, but by trying to show it was, he and others provided the background for Bell's inequalities and then for Aspect and the first experimental evidence.
And you'll find that this is true from Newton, and way back, to Edward Witten. In science, you present your theory, your observations, etc. and they should stand on their own. After all, in 1905, Einstein was a nobody working as a clerk.
Yeah, and evolution is just a theory.
This is now more rehash of your bogus claims and is now off topic. I started a thread for you to demonstrate your experise and how it justifies such statements. If you seriously wish to continue this kind of argument I'll do so there, but here I stop when the issue is no longer about the misuse of the "argument from authority" fallacy.
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Mr Spinkles
Mr
I blame you. And as I said it first, according to authority it must be your fault.Oh jeez, lol.
In all seriousness, however, the sciences do not rely on authority in the way that the fallacy "appeal to authority" refers. When I taught high school kids this for things like college test prep or tutoring, somehow they got the distinction between appeal to authority and "appealing" to (i.e., citing or referencing) specialist knowledge and technical literature. And as we both pointed out, using references to a body of literature and/or specialists is only suddenly an "appeal to authority" when it becomes convenient to argue one's way out of having no support.
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godnotgod
Thou art That
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
Sheesh, I turn my back for a day and this thread goes truly weird, LOL. Then, as if to confirm it, Chopra gets yet another wink and yet another link - as if what he says is truly meaningful. *sigh*
zaybu
Active Member
Citing or referencing is about stating the results of other works, which would be pointless to reproduce.
Appeal to authority is to say, "Einstein said so, it must be right."
Hope this helps.
zaybu
Active Member
Thanks.
zaybu
Active Member
Fine. I've been already posting there. Hope to see you there.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Some of us have our eyes open; others choose to keep them closed, allowing their social programming to dictate what is meaningful and what is not.
The Science Delusion, here:
Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK - YouTube
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PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
That's not an appeal to authority in the sense the fallacy is named after.
When one appeals to authority, one argues that "This highly reliable person has said this thing, so [because they have been reliable in the past] the thing is more likely to be true." Of course, this can be countered by other factors, e.g. "This other equally or more reliable person says the opposite." An invalid appeal to authority is doing this without having established somewhere [either explicitly or as background knowledge] that the person making the claim is very reliable.
(Technically, this works in reverse - if one could find a person who reliably says false things, one could argue "They say that the thing is true, and therefore it is probably false!"
)Science shouldn't/doesn't do that, except as an approximation. (i.e. in principle, all of science should be reproducible for someone so inclined with arbitrary resources.) The arguments of Newton and his predecessors are not likely to be correct because the people involved are reliable. Instead, it's the other way around: the people are reliable because they've made these correct arguments. The arguments themselves are likely to be correct because they are logically valid arguments from repeatedly observed data - which means that the name(s) attached to the papers are irrelevant.
Newton can stand on the shoulders of giants not because the giants are any person in particular, or because they are famous scientists, but because the giants left a scaffold of good experiment backed by correct logic behind them.
Imagine, in some alternate universe version of this forum, you have quoted David Hilbert's opinion that the Entscheidungsproblem can be solved in all cases. This is a pretty good appeal to authority, since Hilbert is a well-known expert mathematician and logician, and therefore quite likely to be right.
Also imagine that there is a lot of anachronism going on,
p) and a young grad student called Alan happens to see your post. He argues that, no, Hilbert is wrong, and details the deductive logic he has used to arrive at that conclusion; perhaps he even does it in the form of a poem.In terms of authority, it is quite clear that David massively outclasses Alan - you only have his word that Alan even has a degree in maths! However, that doesn't make a difference: you cannot use David's authority to dismiss Alan's argument, because Alan's argument does not stem from his authority as a mathematician - it stems from deductive logic.
Consider why we think of David as an expert in the first place: his arguments are generally logically sound. However, Alan has just (apparently) demonstrated that logic disagrees with David, so we can't very well consider David correct because he is an expert when the basis of his expertise doesn't back him up!
The only valid way to dismiss Alan's argument is to show that his logic is unsound in some way. If one cannot do that, (either because one doesn't begin to understand the logic, or it actually is sound) then what else is there to do but concede the point?
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Here is the rub. I agree with your statement here and I am trying to follow this thread the best I can. However I have not seen how some of the explanations of QM are disagreeing with Chopra and this thread sorta perpetuates mysticism aspects of QM. I disagree with Chopra and believe there to be logical explanations yet the interpretations of QM seem to have mysticism written all over it. What am I missing here?
Mr Spinkles
Mr
Did you read this post? In it, I tried to emphasize the following:
(1) Nonlocality in QM is something which "can occur in certain experimentally-constructed situations which are not necessarily typical in Nature". Just like in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (see the OP) when you start dealing with large objects QM effects quickly go away and things become very "local". You could throw two baseballs around at the park for practically eternity, and they will never become entangled or exhibit any significant observable nonlocal effects. That is why when physicists are able to carefully prepare entangled particles and carefully separate them and carefully measure them in a particular way, they get Nobel prizes for it. But Chopra et al. like to suggest, misleadingly, that nonlocality is something which occurs all the time in Nature, at all size scales, and has significant effects at the level of entire human brains and our daily experience. Goswami thinks if two people meditate together in a room, they become telepathically "entangled" and can subsequently affect each other's minds from a great distance.
(2) Nonlocality as a concept was its biggest and strongest in classical "clockwork" physics before Einstein, and became much weaker and smaller as demonstrated in QM; but Chopra et al. want to turn all this on its head. They think if something is "quantum" then that is a license to extrapolate anything they please from it. Furthermore, they want to (incorrectly) imply that nonlocality as a concept was incompatible with pre-Einstein classical physics, which they view as the peak of reductionism/materialism.
(3) Intuition, contrary to the assertions of Godnotgod, plays a mixed role in physics. Sometimes the correct answer is intuitive, other times the correct answer is counter-intuitive. But the correct answers ALWAYS must be logical and must agree with experiment. Logic and evidence thus play a more decisive role than intuitive guessing.
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