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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 21, 2018 - 09:25pm PT
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Think about it, there must be higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is a wasted time
Look inside your heart, I'll look inside mine
Things look so bad everywhere
In this whole world, what is fair?
We walk blind and we try to see
Falling behind in what could be
Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love
Where's that higher love I keep thinking of?
Worlds are turning and we're just hanging on
Facing our fear and standing out there alone
A yearning, and it's real to me
There must be someone who's feeling for me
Things look so bad everywhere
In this whole world, what is fair?
We walk blind and we try to see
Falling behind in what could be
Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love
Bring me…
Higher Love
Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 21, 2018 - 10:11pm PT
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This, we can clearly understand, is an attempt to say that Wheeler wasn't saying anything at all.
no, I didn't say that, but I actually read the chapter the quote appeared in, did you?
If you want to argue over a sound bite someone extracted from a 700 page treatise on Gravitation and then argue "what Wheeler meant" you're welcome to the argument... I'm not going to argue with you except to point out that maybe you missed something by reading just a sentence.
You have to do the work.
Go for it Largo...
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Mar 22, 2018 - 03:55am PT
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That was interesting enough, paul roehl,
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RussianBot
climber
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Mar 22, 2018 - 09:25am PT
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I wonder if Cambridge Analytica incorporated the knowledge gathered from this thread into electing Trump? Nah I guess they were spending their time working on something else. It’s not like we would use any of their understanding and tactics in doing what we’re doing here. That stuff they figured out about how people’s minds work only works on other people’s minds. Once our minds solve this question we’ll be able to do even more objectively impressive things than elect Trump, humans with our minds being the objectively awesome creatures we are.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 22, 2018 - 01:06pm PT
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John, I did show this thread to my carpool buddies and they all wondered why you, and others, are going to such lengths to avoid a simple question, ranting on and on about how I am attempting to crib obscure facts drawn from QM to support some woo theory cha cha cha, or bombarding the thread with insights drawn from other fields that apparently throw Wheeler to the curb, or simply nonsense like saying he had no idea what he meant.
The inquiry is very simple and direct. From a field that is filled with marvelous, counterintuitive facts, we see one of the leading proponents make a statement. It goes against common sense and intuition but virtually all experts of QM say that's how it goes. My question was simply: What do you make of Wheeler's comment in light of the QM from which it was drawn. I'm not asking about biology or engineering or psychology or music. "Answers" from those fields are not addressing the question.
The second part of the question is that if you disagree with Wheeler's take, what specifically is there in QM (NOT gardening, cognitive science, geology, etc.) that would lead you to believe that there was an objective world "out there" standing separate from an observer/observation/measurement?
What evidence is there to suggest that the believed-in macro world "out there" causes/creates/sources the quantum world. None I have ever heard of. Science is chiefly reductive, as many have said. Reducing reality to smaller and smaller increments is what led to QM in the first instance. Here then are the building blocks of the world - if the science is to be taken literally. By definition, the QM world births the meta world we see. Trying to exploit the yet-unknown explanada between the quantum and meta world as an excuse to avoid answering a simple question is what most amazed my carpool friends, which have been ridiculed previous as means to avoid other simple questions.
All appeals to classical models are obvious dodges to avoid trying to answer the question - of that we may be sure.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Mar 22, 2018 - 01:17pm PT
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Crikey - it's pretty simple. QM doesn't extrapolate out to macro scales that way and unless you can come up an infinite observer then the universe is objectively real and physical without observers driving the show. Again, you're the big adventurer and purveyor of "do the work", so give my simple experiment of inquiry awhirl: anvil, hand, hammer and then come back and tell us that Wheeler isn't overreaching.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 22, 2018 - 02:24pm PT
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what specifically is there in QM (NOT gardening, cognitive science, geology, etc.) that would lead you to believe that there was an objective world "out there" standing separate from an observer/observation/measurement?
JL,
Can a photon be an observer? Can it make an observation or measurement?
Could it observe itself?
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 22, 2018 - 02:37pm PT
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Who here knows enough about QM that could answer that question to your satisfaction?
Could I as cook, climber, husband and friend with only a couple of years of college and no Physics classes answer, after reading how many books on the subject? Do I get a pass if I give Ed a ride to the valley a few dozen times?
How you word something can be as equally effective as not saying anything.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 22, 2018 - 06:50pm PT
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If you carpool with me to the Valley you get a 2hr in personal tutorial on any science topic you ask about... whether I know what I'm talking about or not!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 22, 2018 - 07:11pm PT
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Healyje: . . . - it's pretty simple.
QM and its relationship to the world we see “is pretty simple?” Hilarious.
Other than your personal declarations that “QM doesn't extrapolate out to macro scales that way,” can you provide any recognized axioms, theories, frameworks that explains why it doesn’t?
IMO, Ed's given the best response (from what I can make out) to the question. His response appears to be that the question is currently unimportant. From an instrumental point of view, which is what Ed seems to be explaining to us over and over, the question doesn't really matter practically. That is, an answer to the question has so far not been needed to make important practical predictions of physical systems. The question appears to be simply academic.
This orientation and practice seems to be evident all over academia. What is needed to know about geology (let's say) and literature is nothing. Neither informs the other. Ditto for most fields among each other (but not math and most sciences).
I guess I'm now wondering what practical need there would be to align / connect the two (apparent) worlds of the macro and the quantum. None at all?
As an ex-academic, I can understand the point of view. Hell, my wife gives me one of those looks daily when I talk about some things. All she wants to know is: "what should I do?"
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 22, 2018 - 07:12pm PT
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Wheeler had no idea what he was asking about, that's why he was asking and not telling...
the edition of Gravitation that I have is copyright 1973, so long before any of those questions had modern answers.
In one sense Wheeler is saying that what we know about the universe is human knowledge, and humans are a physical phenomenon, including awareness (read the extended quote from that chapter). So the "universe" as defined by humans certainly depends on humans, and humans, as a part of the universe are participants of making that "universe."
These ideas are made physical by considering the consequence of the anthropic principle, what does it mean, physically, that humans exist.
The idea of a "participator" might be fixed on quantum mechanics, but those physical questions were unresolved during the laying of the foundations, left as a topic under "the measurement problem." As stated the problem is unresolved, but there is a lot of work recently that basically says that the "measurement problem" is ill posed and not a physical question.
The theory work started by JS Bell, and the subsequent experimental investigations have greatly expanded our physical experience of the quantum world, and as we become more familiar the questions start to become more focussed.
You might read the recent ideas concerning the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, and why it was a paradox and the implications of the failure of Bell's test, that is, quantum mechanics is the correct theory. That has interesting philosophical implications (if you are so disposed to philosophical discussion, I am not).
But getting back to Wheeler, that last chapter in Gravitation can be considered a challenge to physicists rather than a statement of firmly held beliefs. And as I said, Wheeler (and his co-authors) were interested in the questions, they had no answers for most of the topics covered therein.
Largo wondered about the "it from bit" idea, in that same chapter we find "Box 44.5 'Pregeometry as the calculus of propositions'"
"Physics as manifestation of logic" or "pregeometry as the calculus of propositions" is as yet [Wheeler (1971a)] not an idea, but an idea for an idea. It is put forward here only to make it a little clearer what is meant to suggest that the order of progress might not be
physics -> pregeometry
but
pregeometry -> physics.
Wheeler, J. A., 1971a, notebook entry, "Pregeometry and the calculus of propositions," 9:10AM, April 10; seminar, Department of Mathematics, Kings College, London, May 10, letter to L. Thomas, "Pregeometry and propositions," June 11, unpublished. [Box 44.5]
I added the emphasis.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 22, 2018 - 07:21pm PT
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Ed: The theory work started by JS Bell, and the subsequent experimental investigations have greatly expanded our physical experience of the quantum world, . . . .
You mean, don’t you, that “subsequent experimental investigations have greatly expanded our understanding of the quantum world, . . . ?
Your sentence, as you wrote it, seems to say that human beings have physical experience of the quantum world. You don’t really mean that, do you?
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Mar 22, 2018 - 07:31pm PT
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Both?
What I've been hearing is that the quantum world doesn't exist without the experience of it
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 22, 2018 - 07:46pm PT
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You don’t really mean that, do you?
yes I do, when Europeans first discovered the "New World" they had all sorts of notions about what it was they had discovered, including the thought they had gotten to India, thus we have all the first people running around and identified as "Indians" to this day.
Most of the European discoverers had never been to India and had never met the people there... so the confusion is understandable.
While I studied quantum mechanics in class, doing calculations and all that, my first experience of quantum mechanics was in the lab, looking at the mixing of Rubidium atomic levels in a magnetic field.
That one experience was worth a lot, in terms of my understanding quantum mechanics.
My point is that we have had a lot more experiences of the quantum world in our laboratories and our experiments and observations. We know better than to assume we'd gotten to India.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 22, 2018 - 08:11pm PT
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That one experience was worth a lot, in terms of my understanding quantum mechanics.
I think this is my point. It's your understanding, not your direct experience of quantum mechanics. I'd venture to say that not one of us have a direct physical experience of quantum mechanics.
I admit that one's intellectual experience still counts as experience, but it's likely fair to make the distinction between what's properly a direct apprehension from sensation to that which is more of an intellectual conceptualization.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 22, 2018 - 08:13pm PT
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no, what I had was an experience, quite distinct from what you call an "intellectual experience" though it was that too.
an odd set of questions coming from you, I must say, if I have understood your line of reasoning over the years. In particular: "...but it's likely fair to make the distinction between what's properly a direct apprehension from sensation to that which is more of an intellectual conceptualization." gives some priority to "direct apprehension from sensation" when we know that that is just as fraught as a "sensation" provide to us from some instrument that is not a part of our bodies.
Do you mean to say that if I wear glasses that I am no longer capable of having a "direct apprehension" of vision?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Mar 23, 2018 - 12:52am PT
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QM and its relationship to the world we see “is pretty simple?” Hilarious.
Other than your personal declarations that “QM doesn't extrapolate out to macro scales that way,” can you provide any recognized axioms, theories, frameworks that explains why it doesn’t?
IMO, Ed's given the best response (from what I can make out) to the question. His response appears to be that the question is currently unimportant. From an instrumental point of view, which is what Ed seems to be explaining to us over and over, the question doesn't really matter practically. That is, an answer to the question has so far not been needed to make important practical predictions of physical systems. The question appears to be simply academic.
In other words, for the average schmo outside a physics lab, it's a pretty simple proposition in that QM is entirely academic, irrelevant, and unimportant to their daily life. Ditto the fact matter is almost entirely empty space or that your body and life may be just one infinite shuffling bundle of Schrodinger's cats. And no matter how complex and brain-twisting QM is as a science and intellectual endeavor, it most assuredly has nothing whatsoever to do with Largo's myriad sitting inquiries or with a mother on a birthing bed.
I guess I'm now wondering what practical need there would be to align/connect the two (apparent) worlds of the macro and the quantum. None at all?
Depends on who you are and what you do. As a working physicist, Ed has to. As a technologist I have to and have connected the two here: Writing a Quantum Program: Creating a Bell State in Q#. But do I give a sh#t about QM when I push back from my Macbook and hit a mostly quiveringly empty rock? Not for a frigging attosecond.
Further, if Wheeler and Largo were right - that nothing is objectively real until you observe it - then it begs the question of what happens to El Cap between objective materializations? And the fact that it's the same El Cap every time you or someone else observes it begs an even bigger question: where is El Cap's 'state' maintained between observer-driven objective manifestations? Because if it isn't maintained somewhere, then why wouldn't it be a different El Cap every time you observed it?
Entertaining intellectual and philosophical conjecture, but nonsense beyond that.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 23, 2018 - 08:14am PT
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In other words, for the average schmo outside a physics lab, it's a pretty simple proposition in that QM is entirely academic, irrelevant, and unimportant to their daily life.
I don't quite think I said that. I think what I said was that the separation between classical and quantum mechanics exists, and that they accurately predict the outcome of experiment and our observations accurately and precisely.
The reconciliation of the two is necessary to explain phenomena that are only now inferred. For instance, in the early universe the gravitational fields might have been so large that the curvature of space time happened on the atomic scale. Were that to have been true, our current theories could not predict the subsequent (or prior) evolution of the physical universe.
This is largely an "academic" question at this time, and will likely remain so as the conditions that require the unification are so extreme that the phenomena will sit far from the other end of whatever telescope we're looking through.
Quantum mechanics is the basis of chemistry, and that is something we use everyday... and the fundamental idea of quantum mechanics is what keeps your DNA stable not only over your lifetime, but for centuries after.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 23, 2018 - 08:29am PT
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The entire material manifestation is always real but temporary.
It is also an imperfect reflection of the absolute ......
(The gross materialists are always bewildered by the/its change)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 23, 2018 - 09:24am PT
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It [the entire material manifestation] is also an imperfect reflection of the absolute
You may have that backwards, Werner.
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