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Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by andrewflnr on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @05:05PM (#19314689)
Hossenfelder's actual argument about beauty has definitely gotten lost somewhere along the way. According to [0], she ends her book with

> The next breakthrough in physics will occur in this century. It will be beautiful.

She's objecting to a very narrow interpretation of "beauty" driving physics, not elegance in general, a distinction this article's author seems unable to see.

Anyone who publicly makes an argument dependent on a distinction between ideas that aren't distinct in the mainstream is going to have an uphill battle at best.

[0] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by fouc on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @05:38PM (#19314932)
Good read.

>If your standards are low enough, yes. But I don’t think we should compromise on this idea of post-empirical physics. I think that’s appalling, really appalling… If there was any bit of experimental evidence that was decisive and in favor of the theory, you wouldn’t be hearing these arguments. You wouldn’t. Nobody would care. It’s just a fallback. It’s giving up and declaring victory. I don’t like that at all.

I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima.

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by 77pt77 on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @06:34PM (#19315223)
> I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima.

That and maybe also human cognitive ability limits.

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by ThomPete on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @06:51PM (#19315310)
Wisdom lies in paradox as the Taoist say.

Language is a gross reduction of reality and has a hard time expresssing non-local concepts. Our inability to philosophically explain QM and classical physics in a consistant way is a good example of that.

My guess is that there are concepts which require the ability to express perspectives of reality we arent able to grok because they requira a non-local (no now, no me, no it) interpretation. Language cant express non local phenomena from the perspective of non-local and so language cant express “truth” but humans can experience it.

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by zwkrt on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @07:04PM (#19315366)
Wittgenstein teaches us that we invented language to solve a particular set of problems. Depending on which book of his you read, language is designed to either:

- talk about the configuration of objects in relation to each other in space and time.

- perform social functions and to describe the actions humans take in the social world.

In either case, I think it is totally clear that you are right and there are just certain sets of concepts that human language is fundamentally unsuited for. I think this is why some mathematical concepts are so abstruse; for example, I know that I can interpret a matrix as a twisty-rotatey-stretchy operation, but it is almost impossible for me to look at a matrix and understand what it is going to do except in the simplest cases. If foundations of QM are non-local (which they appear to be), we might have to take a long time to understand how best to communicate what is going on.

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by phayes on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @12:11AM (#19316535)
> If foundations of QM are non-local

They're not. Non-locality is an artifact of certain interpretations / modifications of QM (where it isn't simply a misconception). See e.g. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424011 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2120 or the QBism intro https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5253 or Ray Streater's old EPR webpage https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kc... or Gell-Mann's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAw-xXCcM8 or...

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by ThomPete on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @05:07AM (#19317733)
Maybe I am misunderstanding you but non-locality is not just an artifact. It's proven both experimentally and mathematically through Bells Theorem. It's as solid as Einstein's theory of relativity and gravity.

What is interpreted is mostly the consequence of that philosophically (i.e. what does that mean).

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by phayes on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @07:21AM (#19318323)
Well, that is what I said: non-locality is just an artifact "of certain interpretations / modifications of QM". Bell's theorem doesn't prove non-locality; what it proves is that no (alternative) theory (of mechanics) that's both classical, aka naively realist, and local could reproduce QM's successful predictions (of those experimental results).
Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by ThomPete on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @08:54AM (#19318865)
Which must lead us to conclude non-locality unless we can come up with a better explanation.

I've seen a few alternatives like electrical universe theory which tries to take the spookiness out of QM but so far no other theory reconsile both clasically and QM and the two are proven to the extent that anything can be proven. Classical physics is not proven more than QM. You could easily reverse your argument starting with QM and saying classical physics doesn't prove locality.

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by phayes on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @11:05AM (#19319915)
No, it mustn't! The logical negation of the conjunction "classical* and local" is "non-classical or non-local". Electrical universe theory"?! Please stick to standard and generally accepted quantum foundations / interpretation. There's no (non-local) spookiness to be taken out of QM in the first place - except for those who choose to reject the non-classical option. %

* Your last remarks suggest you haven't read those Werner refs and don't know what is meant by the term "classical" as I've used it here - it's a reference to the structure of (general) probability state spaces, not to classical physics per se - and you should substitute "(naively) realist" for "classical" in the above.

% And those familiar with the probability theoretic aspects (see my links in a comment in a different thread here, or Tom Banks's teaser: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/2011/... ), probably won't want to do that. For example, the reason violations of Bell-type inequalities occur in QM is mundane from this perspective: "What on earth did you expect?! You have observables that don't commute! Use the appropriate inequality." https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/0375-9601(87)90075-2

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by ThomPete on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @10:36PM (#19325348)
You are the one who seems to be using esoteric interpretations of language to come to a conclusion that you have yet to provide any argument or evidence for.

The problem of interpretation is at the reconciliation phase that's what I care about.

Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by zwkrt on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @11:22AM (#19320059)
Thanks for the links, they helped clarify my thoughts.
Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by turdnagel on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @07:17PM (#19315422)
Can you explain in further detail (or share a link to) what you mean by "non-local" here?
Re:Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics by Iv on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @12:07AM (#19316523)
I will be excited when AIs will be unleashed on these problems.