Re:The dark side of light: negative frequency photons
by jblow on Saturday August 25, 2012 @02:37AM
(#4431288)
And the point is that it's not about modeling!
What happens is that we invent crazy math that is not supposed to have applicability, then some years go by and it's like, oh my God, quantum mechanics is somehow exactly all about the operation of unit Hermitian matrices... how crazy is that?? etc.
If it were some kind of model that we are able to successively refine, the progress of discovery would look something like a Taylor series, and it would be no surprise that we are eventually able to model phenomena within some tolerance epsilon.
But that is not what is happening! Rather, it's that we discover that some large and sophisticated piece of math, for which we had not thought of any particular applicability, turns out to exactly represent specific advanced physical phenomena. This happens over and over.
What happens is that we invent crazy math that is not supposed to have applicability, then some years go by and it's like, oh my God, quantum mechanics is somehow exactly all about the operation of unit Hermitian matrices... how crazy is that?? etc.
If it were some kind of model that we are able to successively refine, the progress of discovery would look something like a Taylor series, and it would be no surprise that we are eventually able to model phenomena within some tolerance epsilon.
But that is not what is happening! Rather, it's that we discover that some large and sophisticated piece of math, for which we had not thought of any particular applicability, turns out to exactly represent specific advanced physical phenomena. This happens over and over.