Why the Laws of Physics Don't Actually Exist (newscientist.com) 177
Theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma wrote a thought-provoking essay for New Scientist magazine's Lost in Space-Time newsletter:
I was recently reading an old article by string theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf in Quanta Magazine entitled "There are no laws of physics". You might think it a bit odd for a physicist to argue that there are no laws of physics but I agree with him. In fact, not only do I agree with him, I think that my field is all the better for it. And I hope to convince you of this too.
First things first. What we often call laws of physics are really just consistent mathematical theories that seem to match some parts of nature. This is as true for Newton's laws of motion as it is for Einstein's theories of relativity, Schrödinger's and Dirac's equations in quantum physics or even string theory. So these aren't really laws as such, but instead precise and consistent ways of describing the reality we see. This should be obvious from the fact that these laws are not static; they evolve as our empirical knowledge of the universe improves.
Here's the thing. Despite many scientists viewing their role as uncovering these ultimate laws, I just don't believe they exist.... I know from my 40 years of experience in working on real-life physical phenomena that the whole idea of an ultimate law based on an equation using just the building blocks and fundamental forces is unworkable and essentially a fantasy. We never know precisely which equation describes a particular laboratory situation. Instead, we always have to build models and approximations to describe each phenomenon even when we know that the equation controlling it is ultimately some form of the Schrödinger equation!
Even with quantum mechanics, space and time are variables that have to be "put in by hand," the article argues, "when space and time should come out naturally from any ultimate law of physics. This has remained perhaps the greatest mystery in fundamental physics with no solution in sight...."
"It is difficult to imagine that a thousand years from now physicists will still use quantum mechanics as the fundamental description of nature.... I see no particular reason that our description of how the physical universe seems to work should reach the pinnacle suddenly in the beginning of the 21st century and become stuck forever at quantum mechanics. That would be a truly depressing thought...!"
"Our understanding of the physical world must continue indefinitely, unimpeded by the search for ultimate laws. Laws of physics continuously evolve — they will never be ultimate."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader InfiniteZero for sharing the article!
First things first. What we often call laws of physics are really just consistent mathematical theories that seem to match some parts of nature. This is as true for Newton's laws of motion as it is for Einstein's theories of relativity, Schrödinger's and Dirac's equations in quantum physics or even string theory. So these aren't really laws as such, but instead precise and consistent ways of describing the reality we see. This should be obvious from the fact that these laws are not static; they evolve as our empirical knowledge of the universe improves.
Here's the thing. Despite many scientists viewing their role as uncovering these ultimate laws, I just don't believe they exist.... I know from my 40 years of experience in working on real-life physical phenomena that the whole idea of an ultimate law based on an equation using just the building blocks and fundamental forces is unworkable and essentially a fantasy. We never know precisely which equation describes a particular laboratory situation. Instead, we always have to build models and approximations to describe each phenomenon even when we know that the equation controlling it is ultimately some form of the Schrödinger equation!
Even with quantum mechanics, space and time are variables that have to be "put in by hand," the article argues, "when space and time should come out naturally from any ultimate law of physics. This has remained perhaps the greatest mystery in fundamental physics with no solution in sight...."
"It is difficult to imagine that a thousand years from now physicists will still use quantum mechanics as the fundamental description of nature.... I see no particular reason that our description of how the physical universe seems to work should reach the pinnacle suddenly in the beginning of the 21st century and become stuck forever at quantum mechanics. That would be a truly depressing thought...!"
"Our understanding of the physical world must continue indefinitely, unimpeded by the search for ultimate laws. Laws of physics continuously evolve — they will never be ultimate."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader InfiniteZero for sharing the article!
Philosoply (Score:4, Insightful)
This is philosophy. Playing with semantics, nothing else.
It's like saying "this German law shouldn't be called a law because it's not applicable in France."
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It's like all the hoopla about "magenta doesn't exist!" - it's semantic wankery click-bait.
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Re:Philosoply (Score:4, Funny)
It's like all the hoopla about "magenta doesn't exist!"
BS! Just go to The Landing Strip down by the airport and you can get a dance from her!
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You've actually disappeared.
Re:Philosoply (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, I also have to conclude there's an untrustworthy agenda behind this line of reasoning. The fact we don't yet understand the rules of the universe perfectly doesn't mean there aren't any rules. Even if it turned out that there was some hidden underlying structure to the universe that is completely different doesn't mean that it doesn't also have to follow a set of rules. Even if it turns out the rules can be changed doesn't mean they're imaginary.
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Granted, that is clickbait to whatever extent readers are supposed click based on the reaction, "what? The universe ultimately has no order or consistency!?!"
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Bullshit. This is science theory and it just serves to remind people that mathematical models are approximations, even when they are, clearly by mistake, called "laws". Approximations always only work to predict behaviors when you restrict the system analyzed strongly enough, and even then they can (rarely for the "laws" of Physics) fail.
Re:Philosoply (Score:4, Informative)
And every self respecting scientist should understand that a scientific law is not set in stone but must always stand up to evidence. Take Newton's Laws for example. In that case we still call them laws despite knowing that they only produce solutions with useful accuracy when things are juuust right, and don't get too small, or too massive, or too fast in relation to each other.
It may be confusing for the laymen, where there's also the potential for a scientific "law" to be conflated with societal laws, which you sometimes see in cheap science fiction where "breaking the laws of physics" comes with some kind of "divine punishment" as a repercussion.
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There is a mistake: The terminology is not only for scientists. For scientists, it adds nothing, yet for lay people it adds confusion and often a false sense of these beine actolutes. Hence the naming is a mistake.
Re:Philosoply (Score:4, Interesting)
But then again, terminology in specific fields isn't made to suit the ever changing colloquial use of language.
The problem arises when communication between the different sets of terminology goes "wrong", without an appropriate "translation". Like when people use "it's just a theory" to decry a scientific theory with possibly decades or even centuries of empirical evidence backing it as a random thought, because that's what theory colloquially means to them. It's that a mistake on the side of science?
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Well, yes. I do understand that the "communication with and education the public" angle usually comes later and nobody really thought about it when basic terminology was chosen. "Just a theory" for theories that are "The Theory of XYZ" is a good example.
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However the underlying problem that I see here with adjusting scientific terminology to be more interchangeable with colloquialism is that the latter in itself changes rather arbitrarily over time at a relatively high rate (compared to how it does within specific fields) depending on what people that use the words believe the words mean.
To
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Well, yes and no. You are arguing for a complex multi-person organizational solution. I am arguing for being careful with terminology. Spot the difference.
On the other hand, better Science education, which could address this item competently and effectively as well, would be hugely desirable. This does run into the problem that most people do not care to be rational or actually want to understand things, but rather want their fuzzy feelings about how things are confirmed. As we are currently running into an
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If there was some standardization to language so we could establish a communications protocol that's at least somewhat consistent to a wider degree, I'd agree, it would be a sensible approach. But given how chaotic language is, this would turn into a stupid cat and mouse game with scientists playin
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Then you are not seeing what I am saying.
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This does run into the problem that most people do not care to be rational or actually want to understand things, but rather want their fuzzy feelings about how things are confirmed.
That's what people are taught, and it has mostly worked for most of them. But it's neither the best system to work on, nor is it inherent. If you teach people that they can learn real things and those real things have real benefits, then they will tend to do that.
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I used to think that, but not anymore. These days I am convinced this is an inherent shortcoming of most people, not a created weakness.
Re:Philosoply (Score:4, Insightful)
Hawking was asked about this. From memory his response was that the laws of physics were a model. There may or may not be these sub atomic particles and additional dimensions, they are just part of a model and the physical world may be different. In fact is likely to be different.
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So why not use that model for applications where it produces useful results instead of fretting about whether lengths really actually objectively truly contract?
Because when it comes to these topics I'm often reminded of pseudo deep people wanting to convince me that concepts like qualia [wikipedia.org] are so profound an
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You're confusing laws with axioms.
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This goes in both the direction of people who use science as an absolute and those that think science is "just an opinion".
Though personally I'm not sure how successful such an approach to dumb down scientific terminology to something like the least common denominator could be.
Because it's not like equivocation doesn't happen within colloquial speech that only sticks to its own terminology. People who either don't understand basic logic or want t
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Are you under the impression that "laws" are somehow fixed unchanging things rather than concepts which are created by people and evolve to fit an observed situation (typically modern society)?
Scope (Score:4, Insightful)
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Immanuel Kant's epistemology covered a lot of this ground already. a couple hundred years ago. See what a Liberal Arts background gets you? Because (classically), physics was a branch of philosophy.
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Actually, the problem is people who don't know that the "laws of physics" are just shorthand for saying "this is the state of our understanding of the universe." They're theories - damn useful theories, and where they break down is also useful to extend our state of understanding of the universe.
Seriously, did anyone born in the last century and did even a bit of physics not understand this as an implicit given? This is as dumb as the people who wanted to shut down the patent office "because all inventio
It's models all the way down (Score:2)
> Playing with semantics
Indeed. We have "models" and we use the best-matching model of the moment as our de-facto "laws of nature". That doesn't mean the models are perfect, only they are the best we have right now.
We perhaps may never get to the "bottom-most turtle", just ever better models, for we don't know how many layers/turtles there are, and may not be able to tell how close we are to the bottom even if we reached it, as there could always be a hidden layer of indirection/emulation: nested Matrixe
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It's like saying "this German law shouldn't be called a law because it's not applicable in France."
Or "The theory of gravity is only a theory"
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This is philosophy.
That's not a problem. It's essential to science.
Science is not self-justifying, you know.
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Philosophy is essential to science. Getting the philosophy of science right is critically important to scientific progress. The first few chapters of David Deutsch's "Beginning of Infinity" make this clear, along the explaining why various philosophies of science, have been found wanting and why moving beyond them is essential.
That said, this isn't particularly useful or insightful philosophy. It boils down to "What we call laws are the best available models. Past models have been superseded and revised,
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All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. Ambrose Bierce
Far more profitable to analyze other people's delusions. - Sigmund Freud.
Far far more profitable to monetize other people's delusions - Crypto bros.
Far far far more fun to watch Musk burn Twtter to the ground because he hates the LGBTQ commie pinko freedom-hating anti-nazi animal lovers - the majority.
Yes and no, but mostly no (Score:2)
There's two separate threads in this argument, and they're entangled in an unfortunate way.
The first statement, that mathematics approximates observed reality, rather than being identical with observed reality is true enough to not be worth arguing.
But the second statement, that no ultimate equation can exist is not supported by the first, and is contradicted by the results of the Hamiltonian formulation of classical (and quantum, and relativistic) mechanics. The particular result that popped to mind is the
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You do realize that the Hamiltonian formulation of classical (and quantum, and relativistic) mechanics is mathematics and hence just an approximation? That does mean it cannot be used for proofs regarding that second statement with regards to physical reality. It can be used only for proving properties of the mathematical approximation.
Hence this "ultimate equation" does not actually need to exist at all. Sure, for some _abstracted_ situations, were you ignore some factors to get applicability of the mathe
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How do you even have physics you can't describe with math? Demons? The will of God?
At this time, quantum-gravity is a possibility (until we have it, it is not assured we can use math to describe it). Life seems to be a tricky problem and it is still unclear what is going on in there despite lots of known detail. Free will and consciousness are not even subjects for Physics at this time because Physics has absolutely nothing on them (except for some inane and clearly desperate claims by Physicalists that these do not exist or similar drivel).
The "will of God" is easy though: Standard peop
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Ah, that definition. That would be a demon with consciousness and free will, hence see my last posting above.
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Re: Yes and no, but mostly no (Score:2)
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But the second statement, that no ultimate equation can exist is not supported by the first
A more interesting question might be whether a universe can exist which can't be described by any possible mathematics. My first instinct is, "Surely somebody would be able to come up with some kind of math to describe any possible universe," but my instinct isn't a proof. Perhaps there'd be some way, in some possible universe, to escape the consistency that mathematical laws would require?
(And given the inconsistency between quantum theory and general relativity, maybe someday we'll discover that in fa
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It's an interesting question at the level of armchair philosophy, but it's one that isn't well-posed in terms of any science we can throw at it.
Science is by (our) definition, predicated on *quantifiable* predictions and *quantitative* data (suitably collected) to prove or disprove those predictions.
If "quantitative" is not allowed...well you don't have anything beyond your gut and theories of magic.
If a theory cannot be falsified, it simply isn'r science.
Strings, Angry desert gawds, Flying Spaghetti Monsters. All have an equally probable existence and equally probable non-existence, because we can never prove that they exist, or that they or do not exist.
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There's two separate threads in this argument, and they're entangled in an unfortunate way.
I agree. The fact that any 'law' we 'find' may later be transcended by a more precise one does not mean that:
* There is no final law
* The old law is useless
Indeed, we know that Quantum mechanics is more exact than the laws of Newton. Still the laws of Newton are used every day. We still use the law of Archimedes, which has not changed since its inception more than 2000 years ago.
So, even if quantum mechanics may not be the final word in the description of fundamental behaviour of matter they will most likel
Self-contradiction (Score:2)
We never know precisely which equation describes a particular laboratory situation...we know that the equation controlling it is ultimately some form of the Schrödinger equation!
Seems to be asserting some sort of law.
Yes, obviously? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do realize there are countless idiots that mistake the mathematical model for what drives reality, when in fact it very much is the other way round and the mathematical model is always only an approximation that usually (bit not always) holds under some rather restrictive border conditions. These morons then derive the most fantastical conclusions from the mathematics and claim this is how reality works. Not so. Mathematical models are very useful, but they are always limited. They never model the whole thing. They are never complete. And you can only use them for predictions in a very limited way. For example, you can never predict fundamentally new elements with any reliability, because the model is not calibrated for that. What actually defines physical reality is physical reality, nothing else. This does nicely fit in with all the nil-wits that cannot deal with implications and are limited to correlations though.
It probably was a mistake to call them the "Laws" of Physics, because the term "law" seems to trigger some irrational reflexes in many people.
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It probably was a mistake to call them the "Laws" of Physics, because the term "law" seems to trigger some irrational reflexes in many people.
That's their problem. Science doesn't care abour your feelings. In this case, calling these ideas Laws is perfectly reasonable because there are some hard and fast rules which, as far was we know, exist everywhere in the universe. For example, dropping a hammer and feather on the Moon showed Galileo was correct. In a vacuum, all objects, regardelss of their weight,
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And look, you got confused by these things being called "laws" too. Because they do really not mean what you claim they mean.
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And look, you got confused by these things being called "laws" too. Because they do really not mean what you claim they mean.
"Laws are descriptions [livescience.com] — often mathematical descriptions — of natural phenomena for example, Newton's Law of Gravity or Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment. These laws simply describe the observation. Not how or why they work," Coppinger said.
Which is what I said in a roundabout way. Dropping the hammer and feather on the Moon was a demonstration of a Law. The math was previously worked out. The example was simply showing it in action.
The same could be said of any other Law. The math says a
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It probably was a mistake to call them the "Laws" of Physics, because the term "law" seems to trigger some irrational reflexes in many people.
It wasn't a mistake. It was a requirement of the university system at the time of the scientific revolution. Academia was authority based, so it was necessary to establish Newton as an authority and call his theories laws. In reality, the scientific movement eventually wanted to go somewhere entirely different, but to be acceptable to contemporary academics it needed some immutable authority to make it palatable.
Remember, Newton was a philosopher in his day, trying to prove that mathematics could describe t
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No, this is how one does science. You come up with a model that fits existing data but also has new conclusions. Then do experiments to see if those new conclusions are true to validate that the model is closer to reality than the previous model.
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It probably was a mistake to call them the "Laws" of Physics, because the term "law" seems to trigger some irrational reflexes in many people.
The irrational reflex are those people who don't understand the term "law". They assume a law to be something fixed and fundamental, rather than something developed by humans and changed over time to suit the current social constructs. Law is a perfect term for anyone who actually understands how laws work.
It's a bit like Tesla's autopilot, and idiots thinking that planes fly themselves without any pilots in the cockpit. Functionally the term is perfect.
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No idea. Obviously not a good one. But incompetent scientists are unfortunately a fact of life and it does not stop at Physics.
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No idea. Obviously not a good one. But incompetent scientists are unfortunately a fact of life and it does not stop at Physics.
So there is a bit of a reason why we think this about physicists. We graduate 10x the number of physicists as we need for academia and private sector research. So they go into other fields. Turns out, that the math used by physicists is good for physics and little else. Medical research has a big problem with this as the original statistics they use is based upon the math that physics uses instead of what a statistician or a machine learning researcher would use. Medical research really needs to use t
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Interesting. Is there any systematic research on Physicists having the wrong kind of math for their non-Physics jobs, i.e. got any references? Because I have never heard of this problem, but the claim does make kind of sense.
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Generally by around junior year of undergrad as a physics major, you realize "holy shit, it's just progressively improving models all the way down - and none of these models get to a 'real' understanding of what's going on underneath the hood".
That's the reality. We don't know what quantum measurement or wave function collapse 'is', where the boundary between classical behavior and quantum behavior sits, why general relativity works well but we can't seem to get it to play nice with quantum mechanics - and
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Makes sense to me. After all the models used in Physics are not based on understanding, but they are based on observation and then trying to find math that fits the observations. For classical mechanics that was relatively easy, but it is still all based on observing behavior, not on understanding of how things work on the inside. And that continues for the more modern stuff, because we have absolutely no clue what makes this universe tick at the base-level. Or whether there even is a base level. Or whether
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Well, "working assumptions" would have been better. At least the modern version calls the whole thing the "Standard Model" and drops the claim to truth implicite in the term "(natural) law". But I get that Physicists, just like people from other disciplines, are not immune to using hyperbole and grande claims to recruit others and get money to spend on research.
Laws are useful (Score:2)
Emergence (Score:2)
The author has no idea of the notion of emerging laws. One reason for emergence in the physical world is statistical laws in random (very complex) systems. These statistical laws are absolute since based on mathematics, while the emerging laws approximate since subject to statistical fluctuations.
For example the fluid equations emerge at macroscopic scale for different kinds of suitable molecules subject to chaotic dynamics. The equations are the same for whatever molecules are in use, and can break whe
Seriously? (Score:2)
You mean we won't get a ticket for going faster than the speed of light? So all this time, I've been restricting myself and allowing myself to be put down by gravity for no damn reason!? Damn you, Mr. Walker, my middle school physics teacher.
Multiverse Perspective (Score:3)
There’s a major perspective from the article that’s left out in the summary, namely, the multiverse. Granted it's more in the realm of philosophy than physics, but the laws of physics in our universe may be one insignificant set of laws among an infinite number of sets from all parallel universes. The fundamental constants of physics may just be a random set in the landscape of all probabilities.
Or consider the simulation hypothesis. If somehow we could one day prove that we live in a simulated reality, the ultimate laws of physics – those from the base reality, may be forever beyond our reach.
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There’s a major perspective from the article that’s left out in the summary, namely, the multiverse.
Well of course it did. Have you seen phase 4? Now that Thanos is dead the entire cinematic universe has no direction or goal. They tried shoehorning the multiverse in with Spiderman and Dr Strange, but it really hasn't landed well. The multiverse is a financial dead end.
I don't believe..... (Score:2)
Trump got elected. Or man landed on the moon. Or that I have a gender.
It's amazing what nonsense people come up with when they live in an ivory tower and weren't involved in laying any of the bricks or catching the elephants to harvest the ivory. It's also how much it replays tired old themes, like pretending to re-invent Descartes logic about we could not rely on our senses, and the only possible thing we could be really sure of is the existence of our own thoughts, but those could not *possibly* exist unl
Cool story bro (Score:2)
Fool (Score:2)
So 'laws' are just descriptions? Yes, that is true. The next statement 'so therefore they do not exist' is the opposite. If laws are just descriptions that means they DO exist. If Z exists, then a description of Z exists.
Laws of nature are descriptive (Score:4, Interesting)
They are not prescriptive. They don't dictate what should happen, they describe what will happen.
Personally, I thought that was obvious.
All the do is give us a chance to predict, at least in general, what reaction to expect to a given action. Not really much more. They are a tool to describe the world. They are not complete and they are not entirely foolproof, at least when it comes to things like quantum effects. They are in general right, though, The theory of gravity works. Except in the edge cases of really, really, really big masses and really, really, really tiny distances.
They're good for everyday use, though.
We need a better name (Score:4, Insightful)
For "theories" that are well-accepted, but aren't "laws". Especially if there are no scientific "laws".
I suggest calling them scientific "convictions". A conviction is something we strongly believe in. How do you get a conviction? By proving something beyond a reasonable doubt. Can a conviction be overturned? Of course! But it takes a lot of evidence.
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For "theories" that are well-accepted, but aren't "laws".
We call those "theories", in scientific parlance. If an idea isn't well-accepted, it's called a hypothesis, not a theory.
In common speech, the "hypothesis" and "theory" are near-synonyms, but in scientific English they're quite different. To achieve the status of "theory", a hypothesis needs to be extensively tested and widely accepted.
They Excel at it (Score:2)
Of course, this doesn't let the supercomputer-using scientists off the hook. Ultimately, how much of our current models are wrong due to poor programming practices? Scientists and engineers are horrible programmers, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of subtle errors are in the model
While you all debate the existance of reality... (Score:2)
To engineers, it does not matter if the mathematical equations are real laws or approximations. They are routinely used every day to develop whole industries.
But; feel free to continue to debate. I'm happy to sit on the sidelines and watch the debate.
I am not interested in debating if String theory is right or wrong, but Newtonian mechanics has brought us the industrial revolution. Quantum Mechanics has brought us solid state electronics. Refresh my memory, what new technologies have String Theory brough
Re:While you all debate the existance of reality.. (Score:4, Funny)
Skimpy bikinis?
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Yeah, but theoretical physics eventually leads to engineering. Engineers do care about that, because theoretical physics shows what they will be building in the future.
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The type of physics that leads scientists to issue sophomoric claims like there are no laws of physics (or anything in nature that corresponds to them) has never led to any advances in science or technology. It is stupid talk, like those philosophers of science who will not concede that it is probable that the sun will rise in the morning, or that there is anything to science beyond conjecture and refutation.
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The type of physics that leads scientists to issue sophomoric claims like there are no laws of physics (or anything in nature that corresponds to them) has never led to any advances in science or technology.
Is that something you made up, or have you actually checked if any scientists have made progress in this way? If you're guessing, you could be completely wrong and you're ignorant.
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Tell me you didn't understand what you read about the philosophy of science without telling me...
It is stupid talk, like those philosophers of science who will not concede that it is probable that the sun will rise in the morning
Well done!
Hint: there are no philosophers of science who will not concede that it is probable that the sun will rise in the morning. There are many who'd like to understand how we can know if it is probable that he sun will rise in the morning. What sorts of evidence convince us, and what is the path to being convinced? "How do we know what we know" is perhaps the deepest and most important question anyone c
Likely there a limit to understanding reality (Score:2)
Humans and human tools are made of the very particles we are trying to study. This intrinsically limits the precision of our inquiry and at some point we may be stuck with declarative "this equation seems to add up" understanding rather than an explanation of what the equation means. Code running a VM may discover performance ratio between different instructions but not how they are implemented or if clock it uses to time things is consistent.
Sometimes there is a jailbreak that lets one explore further - ar
Why Slashdot doesn't actually exist (Score:2)
Among the 10^500 Slashdots out there, generated by an infinite set of chimpanzees typing randomly on keyboards, one of them happens to be the Slashdot we all know and love. All one needs to do is to somehow find that particular solution to figure out what the laws of moderator points are for *this* Slashdot. In one of those Slashdots, there is a universe where all *my* posts go to the top, and everybody reads them and thinks they are insightful or funny.
Kind of obvious (Score:2)
Science observes, describes, models, and predicts.
Science does not dictate.
I see (Score:2)
P.S. String theory is a religion.
Just like good and evil don't (Score:2)
Essentially, good and evil are wholly predicated on our experience and the society we mostly interact with, but without those, they are simply concepts with no purpose.
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So you don"t mind getting tortured?
Think its a serious thought provoking question (Score:2)
In the Ptolemaic system, the planets and the sun are thought to move around the earth in circles. Since this as it stands gives predictions which conflict with observations the theory proposed that the observations were the result of several different but still circular motions. The resulting theories did give valid predictions of position which were consistent with observations.
Much later, Copernicus, the planets move around the sun but still in circles with the assumption of multiple different circular
Does "2+2=4" law exist? (Score:2)
IMHO, the problem with the author's approach is that we don't know where to draw the line between laws of nature and mere theories. We know that if we have two apples and add two more, we'll have four apples, and this is a physical observation, explained and supported by the laws of physics. Does this mean that "2+2=4" is just a theory?
Mathematics recognizes the concept of axiomatic systems, where different sets of axioms can lead to different theories (like the non-Euclidean geometry, for example). But som
The laws exist. (Score:2)
But our knowledge of them will always be incomplete.
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That's the question. Whether this statement makes sense. Whether there is anything more than an explanation of the observations. Whether the laws are real relations among entities, or whether the laws are simply explanations of the relations we have observed.
Its analogous to the nominalism/realism debate.
Re: soon as you said string theorist i stopped (Score:3, Insightful)
"Perfectly" (Score:2)
There are mathematical statements that perfectly describe natural phenomena
The problem we've got right now is that there are two sets of mathematical equations (general relativity and quantum theory) that "perfectly" describe nature, and they disagree with each other.
If you're content with "laws that work well enough to get stuff done" that's not going to be a problem for you, but if you're interested in "laws that perfectly describe the universe" then you can't be satisfied with the current laws.
Re: soon as you said string theorist i stopped (Score:2)
Re:soon as you said string theorist i stopped (Score:4, Informative)
its disproven nice try, everything form a conman is just that a conman
False. String Theory, in any of its forms, is not "disproven". The biggest problem with ST is the ability to find any evidence for it. That is not the same as saying it's "disproven".
If you think ST is "disproven", go have a talk with Kip Thorne. I'm sure your research far surpasses his.
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its disproven nice try, everything form a conman is just that a conman
False. String Theory, in any of its forms, is not "disproven". The biggest problem with ST is the ability to find any evidence for it. That is not the same as saying it's "disproven".
If you think ST is "disproven", go have a talk with Kip Thorne. I'm sure your research far surpasses his.
Right. ST is non-falsifiable.
As valid as saying that the Flying Spaghetti monster created the Universe, or some angry Desert gawd.
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...String mumbo jumbo (I will not call it a theory until someone tells me what observation it is trying to explain that is unexplained by the prevailing theories
It is trying to explain what fundamental particle masses are and what the interaction strengths are, and why those particles at those masses, and not other particles at other masses.
The current best theory, the "standard model," is just a heuristic model. It doesn't explain any of these things, it takes them as given.
So far, however, it has not succeeded in doing so. But the fact that it hasn't succeeded doesn't mean that it aren't fundamental questions left to be anwered.
) has never been supported by observation.
So far true: string theory hasn't
Re: soon as you said string theorist i stopped (Score:4, Interesting)
string theory hasn't come up with any testable predictions
That's kinda important. Without it, it would seem to fall on the wrong side of the science/not science line.
I guess we could just say science is whatever scientists decide it is, but it's not exactly satisfying...
Re: (Score:2)
string theory hasn't come up with any testable predictions
That's kinda important. Without it, it would seem to fall on the wrong side of the science/not science line.
Yes, my personal belief is that it's looking like string theory is turning out to be a dead end. I'm just disagreeing with the people who are implying that since it didn't turn out to be useful, it wasn't worth trying in the first place.
It looked promising. Didn't work. OK, still, it was worth a try.
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Yes, my personal belief is that it's looking like string theory is turning out to be a dead end. I'm just disagreeing with the people who are implying that since it didn't turn out to be useful, it wasn't worth trying in the first place.
It looked promising. Didn't work. OK, still, it was worth a try.
I'm rooting for the return of the Phlogiston theory.
Or maybe something with Ganesha involved.
Re: (Score:2)
Let me introduce you to quantum field theory. You're fifty to a hundred years late though.
Re: soon as you said string theorist i stopped (Score:5, Informative)
We make observations, and then from there we work out a theory to explain the observations.
This is not how it works.
We make observations. And then we discover some pattern in the observations, and we try to find a way to describe the pattern. And then we make new observations and check if they fit our pattern description. Or we look at the pattern and extrapolate it, and then we try to check if the extrapolation is confirmed by new observations. Then we try to find out why our extrapolation didn't fit the observation. And then we refine our methods to observe, or we fiddle with the description of the pattern. Or we find new ways to extrapolate. Or, we throw out the pattern and consider it a fluke. Then we look for new patterns. Or other people already looked for other patterns, and they are more successful. And then we try to learn from them.
All we have are patterns we found, and extrapolations of those patterns. For pedagogic reasons, we derive some kind of meaning and narratives from those patterns and their extrapolations, and call them explanations. The article states that none of those patterns we believe to have discovered is valid for eternity. They always might be superseded by better patterns, other extrapolations and new, contradictory observations.
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Re: (Score:2)
String theory is supported by a very (very) large number of observations. It reproduces all the predictions the standard model does.
The problem is that any predictions it makes that the standard model *does not* are very, very difficult to observe.
Re: (Score:3)
its disproven nice try, everything form a conman is just that a conman
String theory is a roundabout way to have the same unproveable and non falsifieble dogma as saying the earth was created in October 4004 B.C.E.
tl;dr a religion.