The latest installment of “Better All The Time” is up at The Speculist. It’s all pretty good (I found sensation in a bionic arm without sensors fascinating), but I liked this:
Hey, did you notice? The world didn’t end! We get so used to the world not ending that sometimes we take it for granted. But in honor of our not being sucked into a giant black hole or blasted back in time to when our entire universe was nothing but diffuse particles, the Times Online has compiled a list of 30 other time the world didn’t end.
If you like that sort of list, keep this in mind: those thirty days are just a tiny, tiny subset of the total number of days in which the world has not ended. In fact, we are (and I hope I don’t jinx it or anything by pointing this out) batting a perfect 1000 on that score.
Yeah, every day, they tell us the world won’t end, and it doesn’t until one day it does. Which sucks. And there’s no one around to say “I told you so.”
Not to be a wet blanket, 🙂 but there’s another way to interpret evidence that the world didn’t end.
In the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, all the various outcomes of are equally “real”, we just happen to only be able to see a minute fraction of the quantum mechanical state (and other versions of us, on other “branches”, see their own tiny fractions.)
So perhaps the world is constantly being subjected to events with high probability of ending things. We don’t see those becuase we, as observers, are only going to be in those very small fragments of the wave function where we continue to exist.
But: should this concern us?
As the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” points out, there are those who believe that if the world ever does end, it will immediately be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. But most hold the more conservative belief that this has already happened.
Paul, you seem to be assuming you will always be in the branch that continues to exist.
I never liked the many-worlds interpretation for a number of reasons. This new view seems to offer a much better explanation.
Since physics is symmetrical under time inversion, the probability of the Universe vanishing is the same as it coming suddenly into existence. So we might very well be living in a Universe that popped into existence 4 nanoseconds ago, and will vanish in another 2 seco
NO CONNECTION
This new view seems to offer a much better explanation.
Really? The books on the philosophy of QM I’ve read set down the Schrodinger eq as the first principle and works out from there. This is very convenient for the philosophers since if you ask “Why wave particle duality?” they simply point to the equation and everybody goes home, if not wiser at least richer. This “information theory” approach appears to deal with the eigenvalues and sounds to me like the matrix formalism of the same old S eq approach to the problem. “Why wave particle duality?” “Who cares, it’s all information!” AKA ignor those hidden variables behind the screen.
So if “better” means “it all works out if you don’t think about it” then I’d have to agree.
It’s a black swan situation – all the statistics you want to collect about white swans under the assumption that all swans are white won’t help you predict anything about black ones if none have ever been observed. So all the days that the universe continues to exist don’t have any predictive value for the day when it may not. Some stuff really is unpredictable.
“K wrote:
This new view seems to offer a much better explanation.
Really? The books on the philosophy of QM I’ve read set down the Schrodinger eq as the first principle and works out from there.”
The best thing to do with any book that purports to be about the philosophy of Quantum Mechanics is to throw it away. Quantum Mechanics is not a philosphophy. It is a set rules for calculating physical observables. We have Neils Bohr to thank for turning it into a buch of mystic mumbo-jumbo.
And we have Heisenberg to thank for setting definite limits on the reach of Science. Nothing about *true* science is philosophical; it is a formulation of human reasoning that allows us in some cases to make successful predictions of future events based on our observation of past events. Scientific “proof” is little more than demonstrable success at making predictions. A very powerful tool, indeed, but one that can never tell us about thing we cannot observe, and thus, cannot speak to a wide range of human issues.
Incidentally, the CERN folks never got past the step of calibrating the aim of the two beams, which they did one at a time. If you’re worried about what will happen when they fire both beams — in opposite directions — for the purpose of creating a mini-big bang, then keep worrying. They haven’t done that yet. ;~)
notanexpert wrote:
“Nothing about *true* science is philosophical; it is a formulation of human reasoning that allows us in some cases to make successful predictions of future events based on our observation of past events. Scientific “proof” is little more than demonstrable success at making predictions.”
Everything about *true* science is philosophical; it is a formulation of human reasoning that allows us in some cases to make successful predictions of future events based on our assumptions of the continued validity of observations of past events. Scientific “proof” does not exist beyond the demonstrable success of falsifiability.
*removes “Philosophy Nazi” hat and apologizes* ^_^
“Habitat Hermit wrote:
Everything about *true* science is philosophical; it is a formulation of human reasoning that allows us in some cases to make successful predictions of future events based on our assumptions of the continued validity of observations of past events.”
I find it interesting that there is a small army of philosphers of science (typically found in philosophy departments, occasionally in physics) who spend their whole professional lives thinking and writing about the philosophy of science, while the group one would naturally think of as their customers – the scientists – for the greater part don’t give a tinkers damn about them or their work.
“notanexpert wrote:
Incidentally, the CERN folks never got past the step of calibrating the aim of the two beams, which they did one at a time. If you’re worried about what will happen when they fire both beams — in opposite directions — for the purpose of creating a mini-big bang, then keep worrying. They haven’t done that yet.”
The fools. The mad fools. They crossed the streams! They should have listened to Egon Spengler.
Martin wrote:
“…while the group one would naturally think of as their customers – the scientists – for the greater part don’t give a tinkers damn about them or their work.”
Well they use it all the time and are pretty much required to have studied it in some general form in all developed countries that I know of (sometimes before entering university, sometimes at the start of their university educations, sometimes both, and always in more depth as it applies to practical work in their discipline).
I’m not the least surprised they don’t think about it though or identify the connections as what they are. The practical implications of it all should fast become routine (alas sadly that increasingly isn’t the case) and of course they can’t spend their time testing the validity of the concepts all the time any more than they can spend their time trying to test the validity of science in other disciplines outside their own. I would guess all of them have better uses for their spare time ^_^
And of course there’s the old joke/truth about how all scientists want to be at the root of all of it (and anyone but physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science haven’t got the slightest chance at making their case for it no matter how much they wish for it).
But hey if you’re saying you know an awful lot of scientists that don’t support the scientific method then that’s obviously both bad and saddening. It certainly would explain the increase in “science as religion” that is eating away at scientific credibility.
Someone didn’t just jot some principles down with everybody simply agreeing without trying to test them. That would be dogma not science. The scientific method attempts to be as self-referential/self-recursive as possible (although philosophy of science isn’t quite there yet on all the details and of course plenty of arguing is still to be had).