Sean Carroll delves into the baffling and beautiful world of quantum mechanics. ...Follow that? Sean M. Carroll says that QM was created as a wonderful theory a century ago. It perfectly predicts experiments. It was created by physicists with a positivist instrumentalist mindset. That is, they focused on the science, and not on the philosophizing.Under the Umbrella of classical physics of 10:03 course you know that in the beginning of the 20th century quantum mechanics came along and changed everything now there's 10:10 a puzzle with quantum mechanics quantum mechanics is so profound that even though we've known about it for a 10:16 hundred years professional physicists still don't agree on what quantum 10:21 mechanics actually says and that's very embarrassing. I don't know to me anyway. I 10:26 think that we should know what our best theory of nature actually says but the weird thing is even though we don't 10:33 exactly know what the theory says, we do know what it predicts so it's pushed 20 10:39 and 21st century physicists into this sort of positivist instrumentalist mindset, where they say don't ask me 10:46 what's really going on. I can just tell you what you're going to observe in your experiment and you know what I I hate 10:52 that attitude this is very much not much not my attitude but it is the attitude we're going to take for this talk. I 10:59 wrote a whole another book called something deeply hidden about the philosophical mysteries of quantum mechanics but today we're going to be 11:05 hard-nosed physicists and ask what the Theory actually predicts.
But Carroll and some other philosophers are unhappy about it, and like weird untestable interpretations. That is all such nonsense, that in teaching QM he has to use that Copenhagen mindset of a century ago.
This is bizarre. It is like a Physics professor saying:
I am going to teach the theory of relativity, as understood by Minkowski, Einstein, and others. It passes all the tests. I am going to teach it even though it does not explain the arrow of time, and I personally think it should. It does not, so the theory is unsatifactory. Since nobody properly explains the arrow of time, I will have to teach it that way.No, that would be ridiculous. No scientist is going to apologize for a scientific theory not answering some vaguely related metaphysical question.
Roger,
ReplyDeleteIf you are going to entertain such 'philosophical' ideas as an 'observer' and the very process of 'measurement' and 'calculation' which are required before you can even be doing science, then you are going to have to acknowledge that time indeed does only move in one direction, and it isn't just a metaphysical question.
Presently, the physics geniuses that claim they really know things can't really say what an observer is, much less what a woman is for fear of losing their jobs...and they are constantly looking for loopholes to side step the very concept of time all over the place... and their precious standard model they like to praise so highly has NO account for gravity. Science has largely become a memorization game, where young people are measured by how many equations they can memorize and regurgitate upon command. Solutions are not going to be found by true believers who don't even know 'what' or 'how' to question or 'where' the gaping holes in their own theories lie.
I agree that time only moves in one direction. There is a logical arrow of time.
ReplyDeleteI say that the standard model accounts for gravity just fine, as long as you are not in some extreme conditions that no one can observe anyway.