I'd be more comfortable if it said "Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics". Writing "Quantum Monism" makes too many assumptions about where the Monism is. What if the Monism is a layer down from the quantum layer? Or 10 layers down? Or a million?
It's also possible that "down" is the wrong word. Or perhaps there are constituent parts to the Monism. Indeed, what is really meant? If the monads are like Church functions in the Lambda calculus, and if they therefore struggle with the problem of incomparability, and they are linked to some comparison function, it is possible they trace an ellipsis in a space created by their interaction of their comparability. So then it would be more like, "steps going around", rather than "layers down".
Hossenfelder's actual argument about beauty has definitely gotten lost somewhere along the way. According to [0], she ends her book with
> The next breakthrough in physics will occur in this century. It will be beautiful.
She's objecting to a very narrow interpretation of "beauty" driving physics, not elegance in general, a distinction this article's author seems unable to see.
Anyone who publicly makes an argument dependent on a distinction between ideas that aren't distinct in the mainstream is going to have an uphill battle at best.
>If your standards are low enough, yes. But I don’t think we should compromise on this idea of post-empirical physics. I think that’s appalling, really appalling… If there was any bit of experimental evidence that was decisive and in favor of the theory, you wouldn’t be hearing these arguments. You wouldn’t. Nobody would care. It’s just a fallback. It’s giving up and declaring victory. I don’t like that at all.
I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima.
Language is a gross reduction of reality and has a hard time expresssing non-local concepts. Our inability to philosophically explain QM and classical physics in a consistant way is a good example of that.
My guess is that there are concepts which require the ability to express perspectives of reality we arent able to grok because they requira a non-local (no now, no me, no it) interpretation. Language cant express non local phenomena from the perspective of non-local and so language cant express “truth” but humans can experience it.
Wittgenstein teaches us that we invented language to solve a particular set of problems. Depending on which book of his you read, language is designed to either:
- talk about the configuration of objects in relation to each other in space and time.
- perform social functions and to describe the actions humans take in the social world.
In either case, I think it is totally clear that you are right and there are just certain sets of concepts that human language is fundamentally unsuited for. I think this is why some mathematical concepts are so abstruse; for example, I know that I can interpret a matrix as a twisty-rotatey-stretchy operation, but it is almost impossible for me to look at a matrix and understand what it is going to do except in the simplest cases. If foundations of QM are non-local (which they appear to be), we might have to take a long time to understand how best to communicate what is going on.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you but non-locality is not just an artifact. It's proven both experimentally and mathematically through Bells Theorem. It's as solid as Einstein's theory of relativity and gravity.
What is interpreted is mostly the consequence of that philosophically (i.e. what does that mean).
Well, that is what I said: non-locality is just an artifact "of certain interpretations / modifications of QM". Bell's theorem doesn't prove non-locality; what it proves is that no (alternative) theory (of mechanics) that's both classical, aka naively realist, and local could reproduce QM's successful predictions (of those experimental results).
Which must lead us to conclude non-locality unless we can come up with a better explanation.
I've seen a few alternatives like electrical universe theory which tries to take the spookiness out of QM but so far no other theory reconsile both clasically and QM and the two are proven to the extent that anything can be proven. Classical physics is not proven more than QM. You could easily reverse your argument starting with QM and saying classical physics doesn't prove locality.
No, it mustn't! The logical negation of the conjunction "classical* and local" is "non-classical or non-local". Electrical universe theory"?! Please stick to standard and generally accepted quantum foundations / interpretation. There's no (non-local) spookiness to be taken out of QM in the first place - except for those who choose to reject the non-classical option. %
* Your last remarks suggest you haven't read those Werner refs and don't know what is meant by the term "classical" as I've used it here - it's a reference to the structure of (general) probability state spaces, not to classical physics per se - and you should substitute "(naively) realist" for "classical" in the above.
% And those familiar with the probability theoretic aspects (see my links in a comment in a different thread here, or Tom Banks's teaser: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/2011/... ), probably won't want to do that. For example, the reason violations of Bell-type inequalities occur in QM is mundane from this perspective: "What on earth did you expect?! You have observables that don't commute! Use the appropriate inequality." https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/0375-9601(87)90075-2
You are the one who seems to be using esoteric interpretations of language to come to a conclusion that you have yet to provide any argument or evidence for.
The problem of interpretation is at the reconciliation phase that's what I care about.
FYI, this belies the distinction between mixed states and pure states. A mixed state can be classical and yield the same posterior distribution of observations as a pure quantum state.
No, it isn’t 100% of either. It’s just not meaningful to use those words in this context. The only thing we know is that the cat will be alive or dead to certain probabilities when the box is opened. We use the wave function to calculate those probabilities, but any statements about the cat’s actual reality before we open the box is pure metaphysic.
Scientific American hasn’t been a science magazine for years. At best it’s a “science communication” magazine, at worst it’s a mix of incompetence and agendas, even if they are often agendas I agree with. It’s not worth the read anymore, and far better alternatives exist.
New Scientist is pretty bad; sort of the weekly world news of science.
I completely agree with you about SciAm. I like quantamagazine myself. Though most science journalism is very, very bad these days. I'm guessing because not much is going on in the sciences; most of the research is pretty bad as well.
Man I wish that I could disagree with you, but... yeah. At least the long overdue “come to Jesus” moment is slowly arriving for theoreticians. Maybe we’ll see another golden age of experimentalism, that would be nice! Slow and solid is after all, better than quick and inconsequential.
My depressing theory is that "actual science" aka the good stuff that moves the needle, can only be done by some small and fixed number of people, and they're being drowned out by not-so-good people who are just running a career algorithm. Aka, if someone bombed the Solvay conference humanity would have been set back by 50 years, but if someone nuked an APS meeting, humanity might not even notice, or worse, immediately start doing better at physics.
A monism, in this context, is a metaphysics with one fundamental substance. In "physicalism" or "materialism", that stuff is "matter". In "panpsychism" or "idealism", it's "consciousness".
Is it not all information regardless? What makes matter different from consciousness? sounds like different terms for the same fundamental thing: stuff that exists.
The matter term comes from the fact the stuff is just stuff that exists
The consciousness term comes from the fact that we can see stuff that exists
But these are both just observational terms of 'stuff that exists', and it seems that anything existing at all is at the core of the issue (as opposed to what exists, in reference to the 'fundamental substance').
The tricky part of philosophy is that sometimes it attempts to overstep the bounds from 'what we can know based on data we can collect' (i.e., 'information') and 'what the fundamental concept/ontology/etc actually is'. The distinction is subtle, but one way to think about it is that you can never know somethings true nature only by investigating it scientifically--this will give you all the 'hows' but none of the 'whys'. Whether or not it is always appropriate to ask 'why' is another matter. I have a shaky and unfounded belief that asking 'why' questions about fundamental physics will not yield interesting results.
In programming we make monisms all the time. Think of Unix's "everything is a file" or Java's "Everything is an object". A monism is nice because it asserts that fundamentally there is some single common denominator underlying all emergent behavior. That being said, physicists are usually happy to do the calulations and get the expected results without needing a fundamental philosophy regarding the workings of the entire universe.
In the context of the article, it appears to be a new name for universal wavefunction, but not in the many worlds sense. FTA: "According to quantum monism, the fundamental layer of reality is not made of particles or strings but the universe itself—understood not as the sum of things making it up but rather as a single, entangled quantum state." Not clear on how this is distinct from de Broglie–Bohm theory, Time-symmetric theories, Consciousness causes collapse, Many-minds interpretation, or Consistent histories. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/ appears to be by the same author.
>As it stands, quantum monism should be considered as a key concept in modern physics: It explains why “beauty,” understood as structure, correlation and symmetry among apparently independent realms of nature, isn’t an "ill-conceived aesthetic ideal” but a consequence of nature descending from a single quantum state.
They can call it monism...but it sounds like they are just describing the spatial dimensions.
0D Point (quantum/singularity/Planck unit), then 1D line, 2D square, 3D cube...as a direct consequence of nature/math it’s got structure, correlation, and symmetry (aka their definition of beauty). Is there any physicist who doesn’t think dimensions are a key concept of physics?
No, spatial dimensions have a very specific meaning. The universe has 3 big special dimensions and 1 temporal dimension (and perhaps 8 or additional "small" dimensions.)
Here monism means another thing, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure that it even mean anything at all. The important thing is if it is possible or not to find any experiment that can refute the existence of monism. (It's easier to be a little less technical and ask for and experiment that confirms the existence of monism.) If no experiment can confirm of refute it, then it is outside the realm of physics and can't do anything to save it.
I believe roughly he's saying that we are a universe experiencing itself that is intrinsically a single quantum state.
It has never made sense to me to separate the observer and the experiment, it's weird to suggest the observer is somehow more classical than the experiment, both are just evolving together in time as a quantum system. The idea of "collapse" makes no sense, there is no observer separate from the experiment, and instead the question of why we experience what we call "collapse" the way we do comes up. Practically, it makes more sense to me.
How can our experience of consciousness be real? What does it mean to be conscious? Can we numerically measure free will? Are those answerable questions under this framework?
Just let's not talk too much like that to the pop-gurus...
The idea that the universe is a single quantum state can be applied to any quantum theory, from a toy universe that only have a few particles and electromagnetism, to the universe with the standard model, and many other variants.
For example some years ago many people believe that it was possible to unify all the forces using the SU(5) group. It was a very nice theory, people like it, sadly experiments disagree. The idea that the universe is a single quantum state can't differentiate between the current standard model and the SU(5) model.
I really hate that the weak force only acts on left handled particles. Experiments disagree with my preferences. The idea that the universe is a single quantum state can't differentiate between the current version and the version where the weak force affect all particles.
So, how can be the idea that the universe is a single quantum state imply that the universe laws are beautiful?
---
Nobody like the collapse and the almost magical properties of the observer (the observer can be a machine, it's not necessary a human). Anyway, it's very useful if you can shut up and do the calculations. I vote that the answer to the problem is something something decoherence. It's still a research topic (not my topic), so we have to wait a few years/decades/centuries to be sure.
---
I think that "conscious" is like "alive". It's not magical. It's just an useful classification of some aggrupation of matter following the laws of physics.
I'm really sensing that the pendulum is swinging fast toward experiment and verification and away from theorizing and interpretation. Dark energy, dark matter and Hawking radiation/Unruh effect are among the testable problems facing theoreticians these days. While I personally share the author's preference for a single unified universe to a multiverse, it seems like proving it true or false might not apply.
"Both monism and many worlds can be avoided, but only when one either changes the formalism of quantum mechanics—typically in ways that are in conflict with Einstein’s theory of special relativity—or if one understands quantum mechanics not as a theory about nature but as a theory about knowledge: a humanities concept rather than science."
Tut-tut. There's nothing "humanities rather than science" about the understanding that QM is 'just' probability theory
applied to mechanics (and interpreted sensibly, as it is in any 'neo-Copenhagen' or 'pragmatist' interpretation). Grandiose and/or bizarre 'psiontology' is easily avoided.
Humanities is distinct from science, to the extent that it's information generated by a specific life-form (humans), and is specific to our specific language and hardware we evolved and implemented.
Studying a great novel, or moral dilemmas, are ultimately about how we process, transmit, and infer information generated by other humans, and shared through extremely high-dimensional, but less structured, contexts, such as language, novels, literature, etc.
To say a physics phenomena is more 'humanities' is a strange statement, and it's hard to understand what they are getting at.
Every week or so there seems to be a new exciting theory/article on HN about the universe etc.
I'm always looking forward to them and read them with passion. There are two types though, the ones that make sense, and the ones I can't grasp. This is the latter :/
FYI, that's not because it went over your head, it's because this article is vague and incoherent. Almost all popular articles on physics are.
If this interests you, I strongly recommend learning the very basics of quantum mechanics. It will involve math, but the math doesn't need to be very complicated. And you will learn how the universe is fundamentally different than you thought, in a way that these popular articles hardly even hint at.
There are many introductions, but I've found the lesswrong one to explain things well, while using as little math as necessary (read: no calculus required):
47 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] threadIt's also possible that "down" is the wrong word. Or perhaps there are constituent parts to the Monism. Indeed, what is really meant? If the monads are like Church functions in the Lambda calculus, and if they therefore struggle with the problem of incomparability, and they are linked to some comparison function, it is possible they trace an ellipsis in a space created by their interaction of their comparability. So then it would be more like, "steps going around", rather than "layers down".
> The next breakthrough in physics will occur in this century. It will be beautiful.
She's objecting to a very narrow interpretation of "beauty" driving physics, not elegance in general, a distinction this article's author seems unable to see.
Anyone who publicly makes an argument dependent on a distinction between ideas that aren't distinct in the mainstream is going to have an uphill battle at best.
[0] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314
>If your standards are low enough, yes. But I don’t think we should compromise on this idea of post-empirical physics. I think that’s appalling, really appalling… If there was any bit of experimental evidence that was decisive and in favor of the theory, you wouldn’t be hearing these arguments. You wouldn’t. Nobody would care. It’s just a fallback. It’s giving up and declaring victory. I don’t like that at all.
I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima.
That and maybe also human cognitive ability limits.
Language is a gross reduction of reality and has a hard time expresssing non-local concepts. Our inability to philosophically explain QM and classical physics in a consistant way is a good example of that.
My guess is that there are concepts which require the ability to express perspectives of reality we arent able to grok because they requira a non-local (no now, no me, no it) interpretation. Language cant express non local phenomena from the perspective of non-local and so language cant express “truth” but humans can experience it.
- talk about the configuration of objects in relation to each other in space and time.
- perform social functions and to describe the actions humans take in the social world.
In either case, I think it is totally clear that you are right and there are just certain sets of concepts that human language is fundamentally unsuited for. I think this is why some mathematical concepts are so abstruse; for example, I know that I can interpret a matrix as a twisty-rotatey-stretchy operation, but it is almost impossible for me to look at a matrix and understand what it is going to do except in the simplest cases. If foundations of QM are non-local (which they appear to be), we might have to take a long time to understand how best to communicate what is going on.
They're not. Non-locality is an artifact of certain interpretations / modifications of QM (where it isn't simply a misconception). See e.g. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424011 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2120 or the QBism intro https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5253 or Ray Streater's old EPR webpage https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kc... or Gell-Mann's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAw-xXCcM8 or...
What is interpreted is mostly the consequence of that philosophically (i.e. what does that mean).
I've seen a few alternatives like electrical universe theory which tries to take the spookiness out of QM but so far no other theory reconsile both clasically and QM and the two are proven to the extent that anything can be proven. Classical physics is not proven more than QM. You could easily reverse your argument starting with QM and saying classical physics doesn't prove locality.
* Your last remarks suggest you haven't read those Werner refs and don't know what is meant by the term "classical" as I've used it here - it's a reference to the structure of (general) probability state spaces, not to classical physics per se - and you should substitute "(naively) realist" for "classical" in the above.
% And those familiar with the probability theoretic aspects (see my links in a comment in a different thread here, or Tom Banks's teaser: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/2011/... ), probably won't want to do that. For example, the reason violations of Bell-type inequalities occur in QM is mundane from this perspective: "What on earth did you expect?! You have observables that don't commute! Use the appropriate inequality." https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/0375-9601(87)90075-2
The problem of interpretation is at the reconciliation phase that's what I care about.
"it is infamous for its weirdness such as Schrödinger’s cat existing in a limbo of being half dead and half alive."
The cat is 100% alive and also 100% dead. However, it has 100% chance of resolving to just one state once you look at it.
To paraphrase the protagonist of A Serious Man: "No one understands the cat. The math... the math is what's important."
Very possibly my favorite Coen bros film.
Are you referring to New Scientist?
I completely agree with you about SciAm. I like quantamagazine myself. Though most science journalism is very, very bad these days. I'm guessing because not much is going on in the sciences; most of the research is pretty bad as well.
The matter term comes from the fact the stuff is just stuff that exists
The consciousness term comes from the fact that we can see stuff that exists
But these are both just observational terms of 'stuff that exists', and it seems that anything existing at all is at the core of the issue (as opposed to what exists, in reference to the 'fundamental substance').
In programming we make monisms all the time. Think of Unix's "everything is a file" or Java's "Everything is an object". A monism is nice because it asserts that fundamentally there is some single common denominator underlying all emergent behavior. That being said, physicists are usually happy to do the calulations and get the expected results without needing a fundamental philosophy regarding the workings of the entire universe.
They can call it monism...but it sounds like they are just describing the spatial dimensions.
0D Point (quantum/singularity/Planck unit), then 1D line, 2D square, 3D cube...as a direct consequence of nature/math it’s got structure, correlation, and symmetry (aka their definition of beauty). Is there any physicist who doesn’t think dimensions are a key concept of physics?
Here monism means another thing, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure that it even mean anything at all. The important thing is if it is possible or not to find any experiment that can refute the existence of monism. (It's easier to be a little less technical and ask for and experiment that confirms the existence of monism.) If no experiment can confirm of refute it, then it is outside the realm of physics and can't do anything to save it.
It has never made sense to me to separate the observer and the experiment, it's weird to suggest the observer is somehow more classical than the experiment, both are just evolving together in time as a quantum system. The idea of "collapse" makes no sense, there is no observer separate from the experiment, and instead the question of why we experience what we call "collapse" the way we do comes up. Practically, it makes more sense to me.
How can our experience of consciousness be real? What does it mean to be conscious? Can we numerically measure free will? Are those answerable questions under this framework?
Just let's not talk too much like that to the pop-gurus...
For example some years ago many people believe that it was possible to unify all the forces using the SU(5) group. It was a very nice theory, people like it, sadly experiments disagree. The idea that the universe is a single quantum state can't differentiate between the current standard model and the SU(5) model.
I really hate that the weak force only acts on left handled particles. Experiments disagree with my preferences. The idea that the universe is a single quantum state can't differentiate between the current version and the version where the weak force affect all particles.
So, how can be the idea that the universe is a single quantum state imply that the universe laws are beautiful?
---
Nobody like the collapse and the almost magical properties of the observer (the observer can be a machine, it's not necessary a human). Anyway, it's very useful if you can shut up and do the calculations. I vote that the answer to the problem is something something decoherence. It's still a research topic (not my topic), so we have to wait a few years/decades/centuries to be sure.
---
I think that "conscious" is like "alive". It's not magical. It's just an useful classification of some aggrupation of matter following the laws of physics.
Tut-tut. There's nothing "humanities rather than science" about the understanding that QM is 'just' probability theory
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0601158 https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/noncommutative-probabilit... https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0002049 https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+probability
applied to mechanics (and interpreted sensibly, as it is in any 'neo-Copenhagen' or 'pragmatist' interpretation). Grandiose and/or bizarre 'psiontology' is easily avoided.
> stupid statement.
Studying a great novel, or moral dilemmas, are ultimately about how we process, transmit, and infer information generated by other humans, and shared through extremely high-dimensional, but less structured, contexts, such as language, novels, literature, etc.
To say a physics phenomena is more 'humanities' is a strange statement, and it's hard to understand what they are getting at.
Is it? According to who?
Perhaps Quantum Monism fits in with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_building_(particle_physi... to replace any given standard model.
I'm always looking forward to them and read them with passion. There are two types though, the ones that make sense, and the ones I can't grasp. This is the latter :/
If this interests you, I strongly recommend learning the very basics of quantum mechanics. It will involve math, but the math doesn't need to be very complicated. And you will learn how the universe is fundamentally different than you thought, in a way that these popular articles hardly even hint at.
There are many introductions, but I've found the lesswrong one to explain things well, while using as little math as necessary (read: no calculus required):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FSwbFpDsca7uXpQ2/quantum-ex...
Feynman's book QED is also an excellent introduction, while requiring only a bit more math:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Lig...