There are different ways to come to the wrong conclusion and the more naively and publicly you do that, the more people think scientists waste our time with poorly designed experiments.
To be fair, I don't know in this particular case but science "journalism" tends to be the source of most naive information resulting in the public believing scientist are clowns randomly asserting stuff.
I suppose "how to talk to journalists" should be a major skill of scientists, but really: no matter what they say, you know journalists will turn it into "Scientists Now Claim Parallel Universe Full Of Aliens".
Or because nobody listens to the times we research an "obvious" thing and it is anything but! Remember, disease spreading in polluted water wasn't obvious at one point, and physicians washing their hands before doing surgery was so "unobvious" that what was considered obvious at the time was that a physicians hands are of course clean.
"Common sense" isn't merely a myth, but also often is propaganda, that everything we know is obvious and easily understood by a layman from first principles that you can reason through, rather than having to rely on extremely specialized people to do real tests of things we think we "know" to find out what reality is.
Remember that next time someone wants to push "Common Sense" regulation on anything. Humans are explicitly ANTI-rational creatures, and the ONLY defense against that is to verify everything we can against reality's judgement.
At no point could anyone have just "thought about it harder" to get from aristolean physics to Newtonian physics. Rhetoric cannot provide answers or new information, it can only convince.
That's a word that has very different connotations in professional physics research. We understand the process of science pretty well, and are more used to being wrong than most people.
It's used in the very old sense of "perplexing", not "to make someone feel awkward".
Ah, its not a term commonly used in neuroscience literatures...probably because what we don't know far outweighs what we do know that its a given that needs no utterance.
The inability to compatibly resolve the two most important and basic theories (relativity and quantum throry) means we know either gravitation or quantum mechanics, or most likely both, are wrong, or at least incomplete, in the same way Newtonian mechanics was only partially right.
And that's been an embarrassment well-known for the last century. The word has a metaphorical use of the sore spot, that which sticks out, which is ugly, which is confusing or awkward. "This code is embarrassing" doesn't necessarily mean the author should literally feel embarrassment. It's just messy. (Yes, really. It's in the dictionary as a sense of the word.)
characterizing it as an "embarrassment" is silly. Maybe if there was a group of alien civilizations that had all figured it out early on while we didn't then sure.
This feels like calling someone a "moron" and then when they get offended saying "You shouldn't be offended, literally everyone is a moron because nobody is competent in everything".
What is the gain exactly in using language (like "embarrassing") that discourages mistakes and makes people feel worse about being wrong (even if they technically shouldn't). Plenty of better words exist.
Side note, I would definitely feel embarrassed if someone publicly called my code "embarrassing". Even if I shouldn't.
The muon g-2 measurements have nothing to do with floating rocks. This is not a superconductor update.
This is a high energy physics thing about failing to find something beyond the standard model. Just your regularly scheduled "5 sigma physics anomalies that disappear on their own with better measurements" programming.
Right. I mean that measurements conflicted with theory, and the new CMD-3 measurements suggest a better calculation. Assuming CMD-3 is good, there's no significant gap between theory results and collider results
That wasn't the only change. There was an alternate computational scheme that didn't depend on electron-positron experiments that gave results consistent with the Muon g-2 experiment.
It's less about the speed and more about which domains are accessible by Feynman-diagram perturbative techniques. You can't use they kinds of methods Feynman used for QED on a lot of problems in physics related to the strong force. You have to use lattice techniques.
Physics is caught at a strange point in its evolution:
At the moment it is deeply dissatisfying that our theories describe the universe that is accessible to our experiments so well.
Even worse is that some of our predictive theories about the nature of the universe can not be tested. Unlike string-theory that has no predictive power, these theories make predictions on such extreme scales that are just impossible - with our current knowledge and tech - to verify, such as exotic forms of matter like strange matter [1].
I am not sure about that. Observing astronomical events like black hole collisions, for example, which perhaps amplify quantum mechanics effects to phenomena we may be able to observe one day, even from light-years away... may be one way around this...
Or creative ways of using large masses, like planets and even stars, to make measurements of tiny things - similar to how Earth-size telescopes can be approximated by much smaller ones, spread over a large area.
Speaking of, some recent papers who that we can use pulsars to make galaxy scale gravitational measurements. By obseeving changes in pulse frequency and we can track whether a gravitational wave is going through it!
Electroweak theory was confirmed when we had large enough particle accelerators. I remember reading at some point that grand-unified theories that combine electroweak with strong force can be tested by a sufficiently high-energy accelerator, but the estimated size of such an accelerators would be around the orbit of Pluto.
If we could bend gravity enough in the “opposite” direction (eg “negative energy” if such a thing even exists), and we could somehow manipulate magnetic fields enough to get all close and personal to neutron stars without getting sphaghettified and somehow could sample their inner core and see whether they are made of strange matter.. well we’d have an answer.
But this for example is so freakishly absurd that it seems impossible even for scifi.
A type 3 civ, if it exists, could potentially do that; but it’s one thing to extract energy off stars, type 2 and 3 and another thing to manipulate the inner core of neutron stars.
The question is also whether it's meaningful to polish our deeply mathematical models to scales so extreme that we may have troubles in reaching them. Keep in mind that this is just some model of reality, not necessarily how reality truly works.
A true paradigm shift that would have implications in our scales would be much more meaningful.
The dissatisfying part comes probably from the fact that our technology will be limited to more or less what we already have, if there are no experimental breakthroughs that prove theories as inadequate.
Yeah, that would be the case if the theories taken together made sense, and if the Universe wasn't full of unexplained things that should fit what we observe at the experiments.
It's satisfying to (continue to) verify existing theory. If we perform an experiment which may shed light on the gaps and flaws in our current models and it simply confirms them, it's unsatisfying. We know our current models in physics are incomplete. But we are struggling mightily to bridge models in different domains (relativity/quantum mechanics) and to fill in gaps within domains (as here, in quantum mechanics). And if we can't make progress, i.e., if our experiments aren't helping us fix the gaps, it's disappointing.
I think the gaps in theory need to be addressed first. A theory that correctly bridges the gap should also shed light on why the situation today is this way. What if QM and relativity are both correct in the context we view them? What if higher energy isn't what's needed to reconcile them?
Einstein "simply" took the observation that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames, and relativity followed from that. Granted, he had to throw out the idea that time is constant.
So what assumption might we take for granted that needs to be thrown out? Or more specifically what is the core set of things that conflict between QM and relativity? I'm asking for something far more specific that "QM and relativity can't both be right". It's in details that are probably way beyond my understanding.
Not so much, we could unleash an AI on all our physics data and probably get similarly accurate models with similar complexity while being formulated quite differently. People would laugh at the idea that those models "were" reality, but physicists love to pretend that the human generated models "are" reality.
The strangest part of modern physics to me is how inaccessible the concepts are. The terminology and ontology are extremely complex and it seems no one has a grasp of the fundamentals like what actually is a photon and what medium is present in a vacuum that allows things like gravity to propagate?
This is the definition in relativity. They haven't been able to make that idea work in quantum physics, despite it explaining practically everything else, so one theory or the other needs an adjustment.
My hot take is that they haven't quite been able to make it work for quantum physics either, they just got lucky that their makeshift solution works provided things don't couple together too tightly.
Also quantum field theory seems be just plain bad at explaining classical phenomena, which dominate general relativity. To me at least it seems quite difficult to describe a basic electromagnetic from the QFT, other than pointing at the Lagrangian in the path integral and saying something about how contributions outside its extremum will cancel out. Though perhaps I'm simply missing some trick here.
It depends what answer you're looking for! We can tell you how photons behave, how to recognize them, and how to predict what they do. For hard philosophy questions, that's more under sections 100-119 of the Dewey Decimal than something physics aims to answer
>what medium is present in a vacuum that allows things like gravity to propagate
That's a little like asking who is in charge of pushing the sun around the Earth. There's a presupposition in that question, you should first ask why you expect there to be a medium, besides nondescript vacuum
Not to mention that there is vacuum energy, which to me (total layman) would indicate that not only is there a medium, but it also has its own influences on the objects within it (like generating Hawking radiation from black hole horizons).
There's different ways to interpret what people expect there to be by an extra medium on top of the vacuum.
We can observe and describe stuff interacting. The stuff is positioned in space. We can see that some stuff takes up space, and it can move to take up some other space. What we describe interacting is the stuff itself, the space around it is where it is.
Throw an apple through the air, and you can watch it sail through that medium. Remove the air, put it in vacuum, the apple is still able to move around despite the lack of anything meta or extra besides the apple and where the apple is.
The story is similar with light, gravity, other phenomenon. Things have some particular location in space, and that location can evolve with time.
You can still try to define the word, pick something within that description and call it a medium if you like, but it's not fundamentally necessary. And it won't be something "present in a vacuum that allows things like gravity to propagate". Things propagates on their own, their location within space simply evolves.
I think the confusion here is "in space", maybe you can expand on that. Is space itself not the medium? Localization is precisely what prevents backwards causality and is at the basis of relativity, where spacetime is invariant. And from what I understand that's also the source of conflict in the quantum world where that's not necessarily the case, retrocausality is entirely possible, spooky interactions at a distance are entirely possible.
Like the problem of gravity is described by the curvature of spacetime. Does spacetime "exist"? If not it's just a tool, and not an actual observation that maps onto reality. In other words we don't know how gravity actually "works" and interacts or what "spacetime" is, if it is a thing, regardless of how powerful the description is. The description is just a mathematical tool that is very useful, but that's just about it.
"You can still try to define the word, pick something within that description and call it a medium if you like"
Yes... that's how language works. "Spacetime" is mapped onto something. Language is a medium of communication. Spacetime is a medium of interaction/causality. Whether such things "exist" is an epistemic discussion or a discussion for experimentalists. But any medium is just the means by which something occurs or happens. So what is the means by which gravity "happens", or exerts influence on other bodies if not the curvature of "spacetime", which itself hasn't really been established. Does gravity just magically happen?
>I think the confusion here is "in space", maybe you can expand on that. Is space itself not the medium?
I think using that definition is fine! I tried to talk about things positioned in space directly instead of using a notion of medium because that word comes with a lot of imagery, and it can make discussion difficult, it's easy to talk past each other when we start using words that don't have a very well settled definition
I was originally responding to a formulation where the medium is defined as something "present in a vacuum" that allows propagation of things. This is where imprecise language creates trouble, and why I don't like that word. You can say space is the medium, but you can't say space is a thing present in the vacuum that allows propagation. Vacuum is located in space, there's not a very meaningful sense in which space is a medium found within vacuum that helps things propagate, or at least that definition of the word is not very helpful to my understanding of the world
For gravity, I'm okay with calling spacetime the medium, as long as you're careful to not imagine that there's some more ethereal thing within the vacuum that physics doesn't say anything about
>But any medium is just the means by which something occurs or happens
That's fine. That's not an invalid definition. I just think it's important to separate the concept of a physical medium from more philosophical notions that everything happens in a medium, even if that sometimes means defining the word medium as an immaterial concept whose existence makes people question the definition of the word "exist".
In response to the original post, that definition of a medium inside the vacuum is something that doesn't exist. With your definition of space as the medium for gravity, you can make that work, as long as you can communicate what you really mean to other people when using that particular word!
> For gravity, I'm okay with calling spacetime the medium
I thought spacetime was supposed to be identical with the gravitational field. It can't be gravity's "medium" if that medium is itself gravity.
I find this extremely hard to think about; gravity both generates spacetime, and warps it. It's really hard to escape from the earthman's experience of space as a sort of instantaneous volume; we don't really experience time at all, except in the sense that we have a sense of certain events as being not the present (i.e. the past). We know that time exists in some sense; but all we experience of spacetime is the space bit.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a video which may be helpful [0].
She discusses nine levels of what we could call "nothing" as in "there is nothing present in this container". It may be useful since she discusses the various substrates that are still present even in what we might normally think of as a "vacuum"
There is no causality in the fundamental ontology of physics. There are only physical laws (which incidentally are time-reversible), and what they imply logically. Causality is an emergent phenomenon, or an interpretation we apply at a higher level.
This is because physicists have mathematical models, then try to generate conceptual models based on those which is like trying to describe language to someone by describing the architecture and weights of a LLM.
The ideas of dark matter and dark energy seems obviously made-up. If a junior dev came to you with that sort of theory for a weird effect they encountered in a system, you'd tell them to look harder instead of making up new fundamental interactions.
They may turn out to be right, but you have to admit they sound arbitrarily made-up for lack of a better understanding.
Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder names for something we don't understand and don't know what it is. We didn't make them up. We just observe the effects and conclude that there must be something there that is making the universe behave the way it does.
> Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder names for something we don't understand and don't know what it is.
Mostly, but they have a lot of behaviors attached to them at this point due to various measurements and accompanying assumptions. Not to mention that labeling the sets of interactions each exhibit with a single name creates the appearance to the public that they are created by a single source. Dark Matter could be several different things interacting, likewise for Dark Energy.
The names also suggest that Dark Matter is matter, and Dark Energy is energy, while there are still scientists that try to find other ways to explain the data (tweaking gravity etc).
But you have to name them something to talk about them. There probably would have been better names, but physicists are no better at naming than programmers
Maybe the public shouldn't expect to understand something that takes 8 years of rigorous study to work with, just by reading a news article from someone who also doesn't have 8 years of the necessary math study, and was explained by someone who spends all their time working with these concepts mathematically, and might not have a concrete interpretation at all.
My intent was less "we should name things better" and more "using common words a common way is fine, even if they don't reflect the exact semantics of the word at its inception".
> The ideas of dark matter and dark energy seems obviously made-up. If a junior dev came to you with that sort of theory for a weird effect they encountered in a system, you'd tell them to look harder instead of making up new fundamental interactions.
Well, yeah. Dark matter and dark energy are the bug ticket names, so to speak. Thousands of physicists are coming up with ways to "look harder."
"Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are both names for observed effects. They're not specific theories. E.g. MOND is a theory to explain dark matter without needing a new particle or field. It doesn't explain as much as λCDM, but what it does explain it does without new fields. That's aesthetically pleasing to some people.
What else could it possibly be? 90% of particle and high energy and quantum physics just doesn't have a real meaning beyond the extremely rigorous math. This isn't classical physics where you can talk about pendulums to twelve year olds, because physics in those domains simply works in more complicated manners. The tools we needed to develop to query that domain simply require more advanced math.
IMO, this desire to "simplify" something that cannot really be simplified is why so much pop sci around quantum stuff is just nonsense. Even normal words mean entirely different things in the realm of quantum physics. The layman doesn't understand what quantum computing does because the layman doesn't even have a knowledge of calculus, and all the intuition about the behavior of mathematical systems that comes with it, let alone the kind of linear algebra, discrete math, and higher level math like fields.
People need to stop pretending that the most advanced mathematical constructs humankind has conceived, standing on ten thousand years of the smartest minds we have ever birthed, is something that John Q Public can expect to understand.
It's no different than me being unable to discuss influences on Picaso's work because I have never taken an art history class. Sure, I could parrot some dumbed down thought someone else feeds me, but I emphatically do not have the context and surrounding knowledge to extract any meaning from that.
That's partly because we're doing it using a brain evolved to hunt prey, track herds or understand seasons, not the subatomic world.
The way to deal with that is to use mathematics. Once you yield to its power and give up trying to "understand" particle physics, things are a lot simpler (for certain values of "simple" ofc!)
Actually, the terminology and ontology are astonishingly simple. Electromagnetic waves are ripples in the electromagnetic field, which is a collection of 4 real numbers attached to every point in space and time (the four components of the "4-vector potential"). Gravity waves are ripples in the metric tensor field, which is a collection of 10 real numbers attached to every point in space and time (the independent components of a symmetric 4x4 matrix). The laws of gravity and electromagnetism are a differential equation satisfied by these components governing how they fluctuate from place to place and time to time.
Photons are merely quantized ripples in the electromagnetic field (according to quantum mechanics, the momentum and energy in these ripples come in discrete chunks).
It's instructive to wonder what could possibly be a simpler ontology. Perhaps one imagines a "medium" like that of sound, consisting of little atoms of some sort spread throughout spacetime. But then immediately this would beg way more questions: what are the atoms themselves made out of? When neighboring "atoms" are displaced why and how do they affect a given "atom" in order to propagate disturbances? What other properties might these atoms have and what would such a word as "properties" even mean since they are supposed to be the elemental constituents of light/gravity itself?
According to modern physics, none of this: just 4 + 10 = 14 numbers, no substructure whatsoever.
(Of course, there are other fields too, like matter fields and gluon fields and one a necessary part of the whole story is a declaration of what these numbers look like according to different observers, but these features are just elaborations on the basic picture of a collection of numbers attached to events.)
It feels dissatisfying because most of those theories are overfitting of models with tons of free parameters to all available experimental data, and when new experimental data appears a new free parameter is introduced to the model. The actually useful theories, that reduce the number of free parameters are yet to be discovered.
Parameter estimation on its own isn't real science. Hypothesis should be statements about reality, like that a given material is a superconductor.
With enough lawyering, one can argue that statements around whether model #53sa7r describes a phenomenon accurately qualify as hypothesis. But the success or failure of such hypothesis rarely make for interesting papers to anyone but statisticians.
And they don't often contribute to the human ability to reason about reality, build new things or predict the future. Like econometric models that never forecast with accuracy >10 years in advance.
This exactly. Or at least it seems this way to me, as a non expert with some knowledge. Add another particle, or term, or whatever to make it match. Feels very inelegant. I like your description of overfit, which hadn’t occurred to me before, ironically though I spend a lot of time with ML.
When teaching ML I talk about adding loops to the Ptolemaic planets-orbit-the-Earth-model - and how it actually worked pretty well because they spent a lot of time adding loops to the orbits to make it fit. It was overfit.
As far as I understand the Standard Model is not just corrected for inaccuracies, it has also been used to make a number of predictions. This means there is some value in it and it's not pure overfitting.
> Overfitting is an undesirable machine learning behavior that occurs when the machine learning model gives accurate predictions for training data but not for new data.
However, most of the particles introduced in physics have been done with concrete predictions. For instance, when the top/bottom quarks were first proposed (1973-1975) the theoretical paper also included a bunch of predictions. In the following years all of the predictions turns out to be true.
Trust me, everyone wishes the Standard Model was simpler and was more "fundamental", but no one has figured out how to make it work. I'm not quite sure how "overfitting" fits here.
Adding, physical theories are predictive. The theory is constructed first and is more constrained than what it aims to predict. It’s not machine learning where you learn a model from data, we build the model and then verify its predictions.
We is used colloquially. I am not a physicist. I am a mathematician working as an SDE.
I think it's sort of remarkable how _few_ free parameters there are to describe, like, _all of existence_. How many are there, a few dozen? It's pretty incredible if you think about it.
Is that really the case though? If we rank phenomena along the energy scale the accuracy of the description starts fraying at the low energy ends.
Tangible ambiguities and loose ends are mostly evident in cosmology,eg in the form of this or that "dark stuff" but it is conceivable there are other very subtle phenomena hidding in plain sight (e.g., accessible with desktop experiments)
It feels a bit like contemporary physics has caught up to the concerns of 18/19th century philosophers.
Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and others, while disagreeing with each other in major ways, all agree on one big concern: We're fundamentally limited in our knowledge about "things in themselves" outside of our consciousness and the perceptions we receive.
Naively we think "oh, looks there's a flower!" but for these philosophers a big question was: how much can we really know about the actual thing that is the flower, beyond the (potentially suspect) information that our mind receives through the senses and our mental models (include the concept of 'flower').
In a very practical way I think we might be bumping into these limits. Which isn't surprising since what was driving these questions for those philosophers was concerns about the foundations of the then rapidly emerging scientific fields.
I am not sure philosophers have so much identified limits to our knowledge, as perhaps "thing in itself" is a vague and contentless concept that we struggle to let go of.
That isn't naive at all. Oh look, there really is a flower.
The set of sceptical propositions, say S, which make this "naive" are far more naive than the truth of there being a flower.
That era of philosophy had yet to learn that philosophical propositions are themselves subject to scepticism, and when balanced against the ordinary, are far far more doubtful.
What falls away, as naive, under scepticism is scepticism itself.
I probably fall in the middle. We can only make statements about what's more or less probable by getting insight into what exists beyond our perception, but by definition we can't perceive what's beyond our perception so we have no data to determine which is more or less likely. Either position is one of faith, not logic. For that matter, trusting that logic is sound is itself a position of faith.
Hofstadter in GEB refers to positions like these as "axioms": statements that are impossible to formally prove within a particular system but from which we can derive statements that follow from those axioms through rules (the most fundamental of which are themselves axioms, like the statement in geometry that two points make a line) governing symbolic manipulation within a particular system. I like the concept and find it useful for wrangling logic and philosophy although I also note that it is itself subject to accepting certain axioms.
Our perception is the perception of what's beyond it -- the world is the direct cause of our experiences which present that world.
" but by definition we can't perceive what's beyond our perception "
This is one of those sceptical propositions I'm talking about. All these sceptical claims which follow "by definition" follow only by the definitions of sceptics -- definitions held (with no sense of self-awareness) with certainty.
How I would define "perception" would make such a claim incoherent or trivially false.
The light which hits a camera from a tree does not travel via some daemon. And a camera so-positioned can indeed photograph its own mechanism.
We have for at least half a century being using perception, without trouble, to perceive the mechanism of our own perception (visual cortex, retina, lenses, etc.).
All these alleged impossibilities begin from the premise that we are not within, part of, and directly causally engaged with, the world.
This is the most outrageous of all 'philosophical' propositions, the most naive, the most absurd --- and yet lies as the undoubted presumption of nearly all scepticism.
So much of knowledge in everything is just something some guy asserted in a book a few hundred years ago. Most of every field is just a guy saying "I think this because (argument based on rhetoric)", and a hundred years later we still just take that at face value. The only exception is physics, where people realized many hundred years ago that you should probably check these assertions against reality. Aristotle's claim that heavy things fall faster than light things was gospel for a thousand years, despite pretty much anyone being able to do a version of his thought experiment to conclusively disprove it, but nobody did, because it was thought you could just rationally argue your way to an accurate understanding of the world. Physics finally started pushing back against that in like the 1600s, and chemistry did a little too, though mostly by accident, but even psychology, born basically in the 20th century, was still based on whatever rhetorical arguments you put in your book, with that only changing, slowly, nowadays.
The idea that we should discount science based on rhetoric vs science based on evidence still isn't a popular one in the lay community. People hate being told that there are things they may never understand, because the human brain is just a really good monkey.
There is no evidence in rhetoric, and a more convincing argument should not be considered a more realistic one.
I'm not even sure what "really is a flower" even means.
Surely you'll at least agree that the concept of "flower" is a mental object that we use to classify a set of related sense perceptions.
If you're going to call skepticism "naive" then you have to at least outline what you mean by "a flower" in relation to the experience of observing one. I think you'll find the number of propositions required is not small.
> That era of philosophy had yet to learn that philosophical propositions are themselves subject to scepticism
Hume's fundamental point was that even causality cannot be meaningfully verified as real so skepticism about philosophy itself was already alive and well at that point.
Hume's starting premise is that we can only talk about ideas in our heads. Hume was wrong; outrageously so.
> that even causality cannot be meaningfully verified as real
So much for how awfully limited Hume's philosophy is. If your premises are insufficient to evidence ordinary propositions; so much for your premises. The toy model here is the deficiency, not the world.
> then you have to at least outline what you mean by "a flower"
I do not. Philosophy answers to reality, not the converse. When I pick up a flower, there is a flower. Our ability to put that into words may, or may not, be limited. The power of our philosophical cognition here is irrelevant.
That I am holding a flower invalidates all systems of philosophical propositions which assign that proposition 'False'. Scepticism does not falsify reality, rather, it is the converse.
That there are systems of propositions which succeed in accounting for the truth of ordinary such claims makes scepticism doubly absurd.
There is a world. It is the cause of my perceptions. My perceptions are caused by the world they present. I learn to perceive the structure of the world because the world has that structure. And so on.
I don't understand why you're even making this statement, no philosophical skeptic would disagree with this. Skepticism has always attacked our understanding of reality, not reality itself.
If anything it is the idealists, like Leibniz that argue that "reality is only in our minds", verging on solipsism. You seem to be misunderstanding Hume who more so points out that the only thing we can really "know" is our inner experience of reality, which is a bit closer to what you're arguing.
And the idea that there's an "inner experience" which is the object of our knowledge is the premise of idealism.
The objects of our knowledge are the world, directly.
When I open my eyes and see a flower, I see a flower. I don't see my seeing of a flower; nor do I see my inner experience of a flower --- where indeed, is the eye which sees inner experiences? And which eye sees that one?
This premise is the dogma of scepticism. Weighed against everything else it comes out vastly improbable.
When I see a flower, the object of my seeing (and my knowing) is the flower. My knowledge consists in having the experience of the flower, as caused by the flower. Without much scientific knowledge I do not know, indeed, that I am having an experience of a flower.
This talk of "having experiences" is a post-theoretical description of an event which is much more primitive. A dog which sees a flower knows there's a flower in front of it. It knows basically nothing about what kind of experience its having.
The dog succeeds in being oriented to the world as it is; the dog succeeds in knowing. As do we.
Neither of us are oriented towards ourselves. We are not peering inside our heads. Such muddles are the religion of scepticism.
Then you must have a fundamentally different qualitative experience of consciousness than I do.
The flower I am holding right now, it is real to me because I can observe myself experiencing it, however the flower you are holding I cannot experience because I am not observing your experience of observing the flower.
It is quite remarkable that you can experience that flower that I am holding and say that it's real while I cannot do the same for the flower you are holding.
> "A dog which sees a flower knows there's a flower"
I certainly don't know enough about the state of my dogs mind to know that my dog is seeing a flower, as opposed to say, merely experiencing clustered sensations in the same location as I am seeing a flower. I've looked at a flower and seen my dog eat it, so I have a suspicion that he recognizes something there, but only because my beliefs about how his actions might correlate with seeing something.
I also have friends who have seen a purple flower in the exact space I am looking where I cannot see a purple flower. What is the explanation for this?
> it is real to me because I can observe myself experiencing it
There is no such thing as "real to me". You are observing a flower. Seeing that flower means having a visual perception caused by that flower. That visual perception presents your knowledge (indeed, is) your knowledge that there is a flower.
When I look at you holding a flower I see the flower and I see you holding it. There's no mystery here. The objects of my seeing are things in the world. There is no 'private world'.
> I certainly don't know enough about the state of my dogs mind
What you 'know enough' to say is irrelevant. The proposition that the dog is seeing a flower is true regardless of what you do, or do not know. Knowledge models reality --- reality doesn't model knowledge. The proposition is true; your theory of knowledge should be revised to account for it.
> I also have friends who have seen a purple flower
The presentation of knowledge we call a visual perception, uses the mechanism of presentation we call 'my visual system' (which includes what I have learned to see). Just as a mountain is presented by different cameras, with different lenses, in different perspectives.
Insofar as I make linguistic utterances based on this presentation I'm engaged in theorising about the causal origins of my perception. Here mistakes are possible, but quite uncommon. If we think the stick is bent, we need only take it out of water to realise that the prior visual perception was caused by the refraction of light.
In this manner we learn what the causal origins of our perceptions are; and hence, rarely make mistakes.
Visual systems may be better at recognising some features of the world than others -- some cameras have zoom lenses. Likewise some may be broken. How your visual system presents your knowledge via seeing is arbitrary (water color, pastel, chalk...). Its built only to ensure that you can reliably infer its causal origin (ie., properties of the world).
But this theorising is irrevelant to what's going on. The propositions, "i know there is a flower", "there is a flower", "i am seeing a flower directly" etc. are all true. Our ability to give a linguistic account of the causal origin of this knowledge is fallible, but reality isnt.
From the discussion over at PhysicsForums[1], it seems the data-driven method that resulted in the value in tension is likely fine, but some experimental the data they used as input to their calculations was most likely not fine, as mentioned at the end of the blog post.
An indicator of this is show in the plot from the Fermilab presentation here[2], where they replaced the previous low-energy e+e- data (from LEP?) with that from CMD-3 and got a result which agrees very well with the lattice calculations.
The presentation also contains a nice intro to the whole Muon g-2 thing btw.
What if the laws of physics are "parameterized" by stuff that includes location.
Our corner of the universe has particular physics, but other places have other physics.
That's why far off galaxies are moving too fast, and why there seems to be not enough matter and energy to explain distant gravitational effects.
There could be multiple layers of parameterization before "what we know as physics" falls out. The stuff behind what we know as physics? We don't even have words for those meta-forces and meta-meta-forces, (maybe like, derivatives of derivatives).
And what if it's not just a "linear scale" where other places have the same forces, but with different "strengths", but other places in our universe have a completely different set of forces and laws.
What if aliens just found a way to "bring a bubble of their own physics" into our little corner? That's why it seems so inexplicable to us, because it's literally alien physics.
Reminds me a bit of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought concept where our galaxy is divided into various zones which supports different levels of technological and cognitive capability. All sophisticated tech fails at the core, FTL is impossible in the Slow Zone (where Earth is) but works in the Beyond, and past that is the Transcend where god-like superintelligences live.
love those books, a similar concept was explored in the book "terminal world" by Alistair Reynolds. it goes into a bit more detail about why certain technologies fail in different zones.
Interesting, because this is similar to a Chinese cultivation novels, or what is known as xianxia genre, trope. Usually, characters live in different “realms” and they have to train/fight/be lucky to “reach a higher realm” where the rules are different (usually means the pressure/danger/ambient-absorbable-energy is higher).
That gave me a good laugh, thank you. I'm more of the mind that it's not a simulation, it's an "artificial historical re-creation".
In other words, the outside universe has moved on 200 billion years from the point of history that our "diorama" re-creates.
Earth is one of hundreds of "ancient cores" that proved significant in the eventual development of a cosmic civilization, and in honor of our legacy, we are semi-faithfully (plenty of creative license!) re-created in an artificial bubble complete with its own legacy physics (because of course physics evolves over time as well!).
So we're one of many "attractions" in a vast "theme park" that is mostly used for historical scholarship, sightseeing and alien tourism. Yay!
Disclaimer: I am not presenting myself as some sort of misunderstood astrophysics savant, but just wanting to engage in curious discussion to get even anywhere close to scratching the surface to understanding.
I wonder if this is the case at the “bounds” of the universe or why there are so many inverse or at least non-linear relationships between various forces. My thought is that you can’t get outside the universe, because space becomes warped in the sense that a short distance is extraordinarily “long”.
>My thought is that you can’t get outside the universe, because space becomes warped in the sense that a short distance is extraordinarily “long”.
The problem with any discussion about these kinds of things is that there is zero information actually being exchanged. Our brains have several assumptions built in, like a concept of time. "Going outside the universe" is not something that can rigorously be discussed because "outside" probably isn't even something defineable """outside""" our """universe""". Hell, even the concept of "defining" something is entirely a starting assumption.
It's like asking "what happened before the big bang?", well, "happened" is not something that even can be defined "before" the big bang. None of our definitions of ANYTHING can EVER make sense outside of our reality, or one that is nearly identical to it. Even "reality" is a definition that presupposes itself.
Essentially, it's a malformed question, like "What time is blue?", there's no way to turn such a question into a meaningful evaluation.
This boils down to reasons why language in different disciplines is so inaccessible to laypeople. If you don’t have standard terms of reference, you will get ambiguity and confusion.
> What if the laws of physics are "parameterized" by stuff that includes location.
They are. One parameter, for instance, is the strength of the electromagnetic field at your location. Another is the sum force of gravity acting on you. Another parameter is your current acceleration.
The point being: that doesn't help you actually explain anything. Okay, great, that's why far off galaxies are moving too fast; they have different parameters that are making them do that. Can we actually figure out what that parameter is? Let's come up with a name for it so we can actually discuss the same thing. Let's call it, oh, I don't know, "dark energy".
Sure, the speed of light, or the permittivity of vacuum, could totally be different somewhere else. We have no evidence for that and it doesn't really help us explain anything, but if it did, then great: we figure out how that new parameter behaves and varies, which will inevitably involve something else that is constant, and then that constant becomes part of our new theory. And then someone on Hacker News comes along and says "why are we just assuming that that constant is the same everywhere? Maybe other corners of the universe have different physics! Checkmate physicists!"
It reminds me of the creationists who endlessly argue about "missing links" in evolution despite us filling in Earth's evolutionary history more and more every year. There's no insight here, you're just moving the goalposts around.
> We don't even have words for those meta-forces and meta-meta-forces, (maybe like, derivatives of derivatives).
It's called "jounce", actually. Or some people prefer "snap", followed by "crackle" and "pop", of course.
> What if aliens just found a way to "bring a bubble of their own physics" into our little corner? That's why it seems so inexplicable to us, because it's literally alien physics.
Hallucinogens may beget good music, but not very good physics.
FWIW I shall post here, for the mutual benefit of the audience, the relevant entry from the beloved & trusted website, etymonline.com:
> embarrassment (n.)
> 1670s, "state of being impeded, obstructed, or entangled" (of affairs, etc.), from embarrass + -ment, or from French embarrassement, from embarrasser.
> As "a mental state of unease," from 1774. Meaning "thing which embarrasses" is from 1729. Earlier words expressing much the same idea include baishment "embarrassment, confusion" (late 14c.); baishednesse (mid-15c.).
It is natural in a language that words are being used in older alongside with newer connotations. "He was embarrassed by the embarassment of riches on display" is maybe awkwardly worded but possible nonetheless.
The headline seems to differ from the rest. They seem to suggest that the preprint paper is entirely accurate and that our previous calculation method was incorrect.
Am I interpreting this correctly? Is this just a bad and missleading headline?
Two things changed... The experiment which focuses the g-2. And also the way the calculation for g-2 is derived from theory... But the underlying theory did not change just the method of calculation and perhaps some of the experimental inputs. So taking the experiment alone it would appear that there was a large gap between theory and experiment aka new physics. But, with the latest round of calculation it seems there is much less discrepancy.
It's curious timing that I have stumbled on this story (spun both ways), a Sean Carroll 4hr rebuttal that there is a problem of physics caused by not opening up to new ideas two weeks ago, and Sabine Hossenfelder on YouTube with an episode this week pouring cold water on 'new physics'. I very loosely keep tabs on a thin sliver of popsci so seems like some wider coordinated theorist - experimentalist friction given my sample size. Maybe it's 5 year budget allocation time and I never noticed before but just seems odd.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 1588 ms ] threadBeing wrong is just as much part of science as being right. ...all part of the process.
I suppose "how to talk to journalists" should be a major skill of scientists, but really: no matter what they say, you know journalists will turn it into "Scientists Now Claim Parallel Universe Full Of Aliens".
"Common sense" isn't merely a myth, but also often is propaganda, that everything we know is obvious and easily understood by a layman from first principles that you can reason through, rather than having to rely on extremely specialized people to do real tests of things we think we "know" to find out what reality is.
Remember that next time someone wants to push "Common Sense" regulation on anything. Humans are explicitly ANTI-rational creatures, and the ONLY defense against that is to verify everything we can against reality's judgement.
At no point could anyone have just "thought about it harder" to get from aristolean physics to Newtonian physics. Rhetoric cannot provide answers or new information, it can only convince.
It's used in the very old sense of "perplexing", not "to make someone feel awkward".
1b, not 1a: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/embarrass
And that's been an embarrassment well-known for the last century. The word has a metaphorical use of the sore spot, that which sticks out, which is ugly, which is confusing or awkward. "This code is embarrassing" doesn't necessarily mean the author should literally feel embarrassment. It's just messy. (Yes, really. It's in the dictionary as a sense of the word.)
What is the gain exactly in using language (like "embarrassing") that discourages mistakes and makes people feel worse about being wrong (even if they technically shouldn't). Plenty of better words exist.
Side note, I would definitely feel embarrassed if someone publicly called my code "embarrassing". Even if I shouldn't.
This is a high energy physics thing about failing to find something beyond the standard model. Just your regularly scheduled "5 sigma physics anomalies that disappear on their own with better measurements" programming.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/11/scientists-f...
That is the significant step change here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter
Or creative ways of using large masses, like planets and even stars, to make measurements of tiny things - similar to how Earth-size telescopes can be approximated by much smaller ones, spread over a large area.
But this for example is so freakishly absurd that it seems impossible even for scifi.
A type 3 civ, if it exists, could potentially do that; but it’s one thing to extract energy off stars, type 2 and 3 and another thing to manipulate the inner core of neutron stars.
A true paradigm shift that would have implications in our scales would be much more meaningful.
That should be very satisfying.
Einstein "simply" took the observation that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames, and relativity followed from that. Granted, he had to throw out the idea that time is constant.
So what assumption might we take for granted that needs to be thrown out? Or more specifically what is the core set of things that conflict between QM and relativity? I'm asking for something far more specific that "QM and relativity can't both be right". It's in details that are probably way beyond my understanding.
Also quantum field theory seems be just plain bad at explaining classical phenomena, which dominate general relativity. To me at least it seems quite difficult to describe a basic electromagnetic from the QFT, other than pointing at the Lagrangian in the path integral and saying something about how contributions outside its extremum will cancel out. Though perhaps I'm simply missing some trick here.
It depends what answer you're looking for! We can tell you how photons behave, how to recognize them, and how to predict what they do. For hard philosophy questions, that's more under sections 100-119 of the Dewey Decimal than something physics aims to answer
>what medium is present in a vacuum that allows things like gravity to propagate
That's a little like asking who is in charge of pushing the sun around the Earth. There's a presupposition in that question, you should first ask why you expect there to be a medium, besides nondescript vacuum
We can observe and describe stuff interacting. The stuff is positioned in space. We can see that some stuff takes up space, and it can move to take up some other space. What we describe interacting is the stuff itself, the space around it is where it is.
Throw an apple through the air, and you can watch it sail through that medium. Remove the air, put it in vacuum, the apple is still able to move around despite the lack of anything meta or extra besides the apple and where the apple is.
The story is similar with light, gravity, other phenomenon. Things have some particular location in space, and that location can evolve with time.
You can still try to define the word, pick something within that description and call it a medium if you like, but it's not fundamentally necessary. And it won't be something "present in a vacuum that allows things like gravity to propagate". Things propagates on their own, their location within space simply evolves.
Like the problem of gravity is described by the curvature of spacetime. Does spacetime "exist"? If not it's just a tool, and not an actual observation that maps onto reality. In other words we don't know how gravity actually "works" and interacts or what "spacetime" is, if it is a thing, regardless of how powerful the description is. The description is just a mathematical tool that is very useful, but that's just about it.
"You can still try to define the word, pick something within that description and call it a medium if you like"
Yes... that's how language works. "Spacetime" is mapped onto something. Language is a medium of communication. Spacetime is a medium of interaction/causality. Whether such things "exist" is an epistemic discussion or a discussion for experimentalists. But any medium is just the means by which something occurs or happens. So what is the means by which gravity "happens", or exerts influence on other bodies if not the curvature of "spacetime", which itself hasn't really been established. Does gravity just magically happen?
I think using that definition is fine! I tried to talk about things positioned in space directly instead of using a notion of medium because that word comes with a lot of imagery, and it can make discussion difficult, it's easy to talk past each other when we start using words that don't have a very well settled definition
I was originally responding to a formulation where the medium is defined as something "present in a vacuum" that allows propagation of things. This is where imprecise language creates trouble, and why I don't like that word. You can say space is the medium, but you can't say space is a thing present in the vacuum that allows propagation. Vacuum is located in space, there's not a very meaningful sense in which space is a medium found within vacuum that helps things propagate, or at least that definition of the word is not very helpful to my understanding of the world
For gravity, I'm okay with calling spacetime the medium, as long as you're careful to not imagine that there's some more ethereal thing within the vacuum that physics doesn't say anything about
>But any medium is just the means by which something occurs or happens
That's fine. That's not an invalid definition. I just think it's important to separate the concept of a physical medium from more philosophical notions that everything happens in a medium, even if that sometimes means defining the word medium as an immaterial concept whose existence makes people question the definition of the word "exist".
In response to the original post, that definition of a medium inside the vacuum is something that doesn't exist. With your definition of space as the medium for gravity, you can make that work, as long as you can communicate what you really mean to other people when using that particular word!
I thought spacetime was supposed to be identical with the gravitational field. It can't be gravity's "medium" if that medium is itself gravity.
I find this extremely hard to think about; gravity both generates spacetime, and warps it. It's really hard to escape from the earthman's experience of space as a sort of instantaneous volume; we don't really experience time at all, except in the sense that we have a sense of certain events as being not the present (i.e. the past). We know that time exists in some sense; but all we experience of spacetime is the space bit.
but then, according to the Uncertainty principle, it has a less particular momentum..
She discusses nine levels of what we could call "nothing" as in "there is nothing present in this container". It may be useful since she discusses the various substrates that are still present even in what we might normally think of as a "vacuum"
[0]: What is "Nothing"? https://youtu.be/PhfqdBk8qxk
They may turn out to be right, but you have to admit they sound arbitrarily made-up for lack of a better understanding.
Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder names for something we don't understand and don't know what it is. We didn't make them up. We just observe the effects and conclude that there must be something there that is making the universe behave the way it does.
Mostly, but they have a lot of behaviors attached to them at this point due to various measurements and accompanying assumptions. Not to mention that labeling the sets of interactions each exhibit with a single name creates the appearance to the public that they are created by a single source. Dark Matter could be several different things interacting, likewise for Dark Energy.
But you have to name them something to talk about them. There probably would have been better names, but physicists are no better at naming than programmers
Well, yeah. Dark matter and dark energy are the bug ticket names, so to speak. Thousands of physicists are coming up with ways to "look harder."
Hope I cleared that all up. Don't ask any follow up questions.
IMO, this desire to "simplify" something that cannot really be simplified is why so much pop sci around quantum stuff is just nonsense. Even normal words mean entirely different things in the realm of quantum physics. The layman doesn't understand what quantum computing does because the layman doesn't even have a knowledge of calculus, and all the intuition about the behavior of mathematical systems that comes with it, let alone the kind of linear algebra, discrete math, and higher level math like fields.
People need to stop pretending that the most advanced mathematical constructs humankind has conceived, standing on ten thousand years of the smartest minds we have ever birthed, is something that John Q Public can expect to understand.
It's no different than me being unable to discuss influences on Picaso's work because I have never taken an art history class. Sure, I could parrot some dumbed down thought someone else feeds me, but I emphatically do not have the context and surrounding knowledge to extract any meaning from that.
The way to deal with that is to use mathematics. Once you yield to its power and give up trying to "understand" particle physics, things are a lot simpler (for certain values of "simple" ofc!)
Photons are merely quantized ripples in the electromagnetic field (according to quantum mechanics, the momentum and energy in these ripples come in discrete chunks).
It's instructive to wonder what could possibly be a simpler ontology. Perhaps one imagines a "medium" like that of sound, consisting of little atoms of some sort spread throughout spacetime. But then immediately this would beg way more questions: what are the atoms themselves made out of? When neighboring "atoms" are displaced why and how do they affect a given "atom" in order to propagate disturbances? What other properties might these atoms have and what would such a word as "properties" even mean since they are supposed to be the elemental constituents of light/gravity itself?
According to modern physics, none of this: just 4 + 10 = 14 numbers, no substructure whatsoever.
(Of course, there are other fields too, like matter fields and gluon fields and one a necessary part of the whole story is a declaration of what these numbers look like according to different observers, but these features are just elaborations on the basic picture of a collection of numbers attached to events.)
With enough lawyering, one can argue that statements around whether model #53sa7r describes a phenomenon accurately qualify as hypothesis. But the success or failure of such hypothesis rarely make for interesting papers to anyone but statisticians.
And they don't often contribute to the human ability to reason about reality, build new things or predict the future. Like econometric models that never forecast with accuracy >10 years in advance.
When teaching ML I talk about adding loops to the Ptolemaic planets-orbit-the-Earth-model - and how it actually worked pretty well because they spent a lot of time adding loops to the orbits to make it fit. It was overfit.
> Overfitting is an undesirable machine learning behavior that occurs when the machine learning model gives accurate predictions for training data but not for new data.
However, most of the particles introduced in physics have been done with concrete predictions. For instance, when the top/bottom quarks were first proposed (1973-1975) the theoretical paper also included a bunch of predictions. In the following years all of the predictions turns out to be true.
Trust me, everyone wishes the Standard Model was simpler and was more "fundamental", but no one has figured out how to make it work. I'm not quite sure how "overfitting" fits here.
We is used colloquially. I am not a physicist. I am a mathematician working as an SDE.
Tangible ambiguities and loose ends are mostly evident in cosmology,eg in the form of this or that "dark stuff" but it is conceivable there are other very subtle phenomena hidding in plain sight (e.g., accessible with desktop experiments)
Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and others, while disagreeing with each other in major ways, all agree on one big concern: We're fundamentally limited in our knowledge about "things in themselves" outside of our consciousness and the perceptions we receive.
Naively we think "oh, looks there's a flower!" but for these philosophers a big question was: how much can we really know about the actual thing that is the flower, beyond the (potentially suspect) information that our mind receives through the senses and our mental models (include the concept of 'flower').
In a very practical way I think we might be bumping into these limits. Which isn't surprising since what was driving these questions for those philosophers was concerns about the foundations of the then rapidly emerging scientific fields.
The set of sceptical propositions, say S, which make this "naive" are far more naive than the truth of there being a flower.
That era of philosophy had yet to learn that philosophical propositions are themselves subject to scepticism, and when balanced against the ordinary, are far far more doubtful.
What falls away, as naive, under scepticism is scepticism itself.
Hofstadter in GEB refers to positions like these as "axioms": statements that are impossible to formally prove within a particular system but from which we can derive statements that follow from those axioms through rules (the most fundamental of which are themselves axioms, like the statement in geometry that two points make a line) governing symbolic manipulation within a particular system. I like the concept and find it useful for wrangling logic and philosophy although I also note that it is itself subject to accepting certain axioms.
" but by definition we can't perceive what's beyond our perception "
This is one of those sceptical propositions I'm talking about. All these sceptical claims which follow "by definition" follow only by the definitions of sceptics -- definitions held (with no sense of self-awareness) with certainty.
How I would define "perception" would make such a claim incoherent or trivially false.
The light which hits a camera from a tree does not travel via some daemon. And a camera so-positioned can indeed photograph its own mechanism.
We have for at least half a century being using perception, without trouble, to perceive the mechanism of our own perception (visual cortex, retina, lenses, etc.).
All these alleged impossibilities begin from the premise that we are not within, part of, and directly causally engaged with, the world.
This is the most outrageous of all 'philosophical' propositions, the most naive, the most absurd --- and yet lies as the undoubted presumption of nearly all scepticism.
The idea that we should discount science based on rhetoric vs science based on evidence still isn't a popular one in the lay community. People hate being told that there are things they may never understand, because the human brain is just a really good monkey.
There is no evidence in rhetoric, and a more convincing argument should not be considered a more realistic one.
Surely you'll at least agree that the concept of "flower" is a mental object that we use to classify a set of related sense perceptions.
If you're going to call skepticism "naive" then you have to at least outline what you mean by "a flower" in relation to the experience of observing one. I think you'll find the number of propositions required is not small.
> That era of philosophy had yet to learn that philosophical propositions are themselves subject to scepticism
Hume's fundamental point was that even causality cannot be meaningfully verified as real so skepticism about philosophy itself was already alive and well at that point.
> that even causality cannot be meaningfully verified as real
So much for how awfully limited Hume's philosophy is. If your premises are insufficient to evidence ordinary propositions; so much for your premises. The toy model here is the deficiency, not the world.
> then you have to at least outline what you mean by "a flower"
I do not. Philosophy answers to reality, not the converse. When I pick up a flower, there is a flower. Our ability to put that into words may, or may not, be limited. The power of our philosophical cognition here is irrelevant.
That I am holding a flower invalidates all systems of philosophical propositions which assign that proposition 'False'. Scepticism does not falsify reality, rather, it is the converse.
That there are systems of propositions which succeed in accounting for the truth of ordinary such claims makes scepticism doubly absurd.
There is a world. It is the cause of my perceptions. My perceptions are caused by the world they present. I learn to perceive the structure of the world because the world has that structure. And so on.
I don't understand why you're even making this statement, no philosophical skeptic would disagree with this. Skepticism has always attacked our understanding of reality, not reality itself.
If anything it is the idealists, like Leibniz that argue that "reality is only in our minds", verging on solipsism. You seem to be misunderstanding Hume who more so points out that the only thing we can really "know" is our inner experience of reality, which is a bit closer to what you're arguing.
And the idea that there's an "inner experience" which is the object of our knowledge is the premise of idealism.
The objects of our knowledge are the world, directly.
When I open my eyes and see a flower, I see a flower. I don't see my seeing of a flower; nor do I see my inner experience of a flower --- where indeed, is the eye which sees inner experiences? And which eye sees that one?
This premise is the dogma of scepticism. Weighed against everything else it comes out vastly improbable.
When I see a flower, the object of my seeing (and my knowing) is the flower. My knowledge consists in having the experience of the flower, as caused by the flower. Without much scientific knowledge I do not know, indeed, that I am having an experience of a flower.
This talk of "having experiences" is a post-theoretical description of an event which is much more primitive. A dog which sees a flower knows there's a flower in front of it. It knows basically nothing about what kind of experience its having.
The dog succeeds in being oriented to the world as it is; the dog succeeds in knowing. As do we.
Neither of us are oriented towards ourselves. We are not peering inside our heads. Such muddles are the religion of scepticism.
Then you must have a fundamentally different qualitative experience of consciousness than I do.
The flower I am holding right now, it is real to me because I can observe myself experiencing it, however the flower you are holding I cannot experience because I am not observing your experience of observing the flower.
It is quite remarkable that you can experience that flower that I am holding and say that it's real while I cannot do the same for the flower you are holding.
> "A dog which sees a flower knows there's a flower"
I certainly don't know enough about the state of my dogs mind to know that my dog is seeing a flower, as opposed to say, merely experiencing clustered sensations in the same location as I am seeing a flower. I've looked at a flower and seen my dog eat it, so I have a suspicion that he recognizes something there, but only because my beliefs about how his actions might correlate with seeing something.
I also have friends who have seen a purple flower in the exact space I am looking where I cannot see a purple flower. What is the explanation for this?
There is no such thing as "real to me". You are observing a flower. Seeing that flower means having a visual perception caused by that flower. That visual perception presents your knowledge (indeed, is) your knowledge that there is a flower.
When I look at you holding a flower I see the flower and I see you holding it. There's no mystery here. The objects of my seeing are things in the world. There is no 'private world'.
> I certainly don't know enough about the state of my dogs mind
What you 'know enough' to say is irrelevant. The proposition that the dog is seeing a flower is true regardless of what you do, or do not know. Knowledge models reality --- reality doesn't model knowledge. The proposition is true; your theory of knowledge should be revised to account for it.
> I also have friends who have seen a purple flower
The presentation of knowledge we call a visual perception, uses the mechanism of presentation we call 'my visual system' (which includes what I have learned to see). Just as a mountain is presented by different cameras, with different lenses, in different perspectives.
Insofar as I make linguistic utterances based on this presentation I'm engaged in theorising about the causal origins of my perception. Here mistakes are possible, but quite uncommon. If we think the stick is bent, we need only take it out of water to realise that the prior visual perception was caused by the refraction of light.
In this manner we learn what the causal origins of our perceptions are; and hence, rarely make mistakes.
Visual systems may be better at recognising some features of the world than others -- some cameras have zoom lenses. Likewise some may be broken. How your visual system presents your knowledge via seeing is arbitrary (water color, pastel, chalk...). Its built only to ensure that you can reliably infer its causal origin (ie., properties of the world).
But this theorising is irrevelant to what's going on. The propositions, "i know there is a flower", "there is a flower", "i am seeing a flower directly" etc. are all true. Our ability to give a linguistic account of the causal origin of this knowledge is fallible, but reality isnt.
An indicator of this is show in the plot from the Fermilab presentation here[2], where they replaced the previous low-energy e+e- data (from LEP?) with that from CMD-3 and got a result which agrees very well with the lattice calculations.
The presentation also contains a nice intro to the whole Muon g-2 thing btw.
[1]: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/when-will-fermilab-rel...
[2]: https://youtu.be/iMB1znns4lQ?t=3231
Our corner of the universe has particular physics, but other places have other physics.
That's why far off galaxies are moving too fast, and why there seems to be not enough matter and energy to explain distant gravitational effects.
There could be multiple layers of parameterization before "what we know as physics" falls out. The stuff behind what we know as physics? We don't even have words for those meta-forces and meta-meta-forces, (maybe like, derivatives of derivatives).
And what if it's not just a "linear scale" where other places have the same forces, but with different "strengths", but other places in our universe have a completely different set of forces and laws.
What if aliens just found a way to "bring a bubble of their own physics" into our little corner? That's why it seems so inexplicable to us, because it's literally alien physics.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/are-the-laws-of-physic...
In other words, the outside universe has moved on 200 billion years from the point of history that our "diorama" re-creates.
Earth is one of hundreds of "ancient cores" that proved significant in the eventual development of a cosmic civilization, and in honor of our legacy, we are semi-faithfully (plenty of creative license!) re-created in an artificial bubble complete with its own legacy physics (because of course physics evolves over time as well!).
So we're one of many "attractions" in a vast "theme park" that is mostly used for historical scholarship, sightseeing and alien tourism. Yay!
And how can we really know what's going on out there from so far away?
Why did we need to invent the 'darknesses', and reschedule the big bang, if it's really just the same as here, and we understand it so well?
I wonder if this is the case at the “bounds” of the universe or why there are so many inverse or at least non-linear relationships between various forces. My thought is that you can’t get outside the universe, because space becomes warped in the sense that a short distance is extraordinarily “long”.
The problem with any discussion about these kinds of things is that there is zero information actually being exchanged. Our brains have several assumptions built in, like a concept of time. "Going outside the universe" is not something that can rigorously be discussed because "outside" probably isn't even something defineable """outside""" our """universe""". Hell, even the concept of "defining" something is entirely a starting assumption.
It's like asking "what happened before the big bang?", well, "happened" is not something that even can be defined "before" the big bang. None of our definitions of ANYTHING can EVER make sense outside of our reality, or one that is nearly identical to it. Even "reality" is a definition that presupposes itself.
Essentially, it's a malformed question, like "What time is blue?", there's no way to turn such a question into a meaningful evaluation.
They are. One parameter, for instance, is the strength of the electromagnetic field at your location. Another is the sum force of gravity acting on you. Another parameter is your current acceleration.
The point being: that doesn't help you actually explain anything. Okay, great, that's why far off galaxies are moving too fast; they have different parameters that are making them do that. Can we actually figure out what that parameter is? Let's come up with a name for it so we can actually discuss the same thing. Let's call it, oh, I don't know, "dark energy".
Sure, the speed of light, or the permittivity of vacuum, could totally be different somewhere else. We have no evidence for that and it doesn't really help us explain anything, but if it did, then great: we figure out how that new parameter behaves and varies, which will inevitably involve something else that is constant, and then that constant becomes part of our new theory. And then someone on Hacker News comes along and says "why are we just assuming that that constant is the same everywhere? Maybe other corners of the universe have different physics! Checkmate physicists!"
It reminds me of the creationists who endlessly argue about "missing links" in evolution despite us filling in Earth's evolutionary history more and more every year. There's no insight here, you're just moving the goalposts around.
> We don't even have words for those meta-forces and meta-meta-forces, (maybe like, derivatives of derivatives).
It's called "jounce", actually. Or some people prefer "snap", followed by "crackle" and "pop", of course.
> What if aliens just found a way to "bring a bubble of their own physics" into our little corner? That's why it seems so inexplicable to us, because it's literally alien physics.
Hallucinogens may beget good music, but not very good physics.
> embarrassment (n.)
> 1670s, "state of being impeded, obstructed, or entangled" (of affairs, etc.), from embarrass + -ment, or from French embarrassement, from embarrasser.
> As "a mental state of unease," from 1774. Meaning "thing which embarrasses" is from 1729. Earlier words expressing much the same idea include baishment "embarrassment, confusion" (late 14c.); baishednesse (mid-15c.).
It is natural in a language that words are being used in older alongside with newer connotations. "He was embarrassed by the embarassment of riches on display" is maybe awkwardly worded but possible nonetheless.
The headline seems to differ from the rest. They seem to suggest that the preprint paper is entirely accurate and that our previous calculation method was incorrect.
Am I interpreting this correctly? Is this just a bad and missleading headline?
(Other one, still on HN front page as of while I write this https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/11/scientists-f...)
> “They are different experiments, measuring different things, and there may or may not be a connection,” he said.